It’s not uncommon to have a disagreement with a friend every once in a while. After all, those are some of the key moments that enable you to learn from each other. But on Sunday, an argument during a chess match didn’t lead to a friendly agreement to disagree, and instead lead to the bludgeoning of a Dublin landlord, with reports that the man’s Italian tenant tried to eat his heart and his lung.

Saverio Bellante, 34, was charged with the murder of his landlord Tom O’Gorman, 39, on Monday after police arrived at the home late on Sunday night. They found O’Gorman’s head and chest riddled with knife wounds to the point that they were fully open. Post-mortem examinations and those coming from Irish police, the Gardai, also suggest that O’Gorman was bludgeoned with a dumbbell before suffering the stab wounds, and that Bellante said that he had eaten the heart. Although an examination found the heart intact, one of the lungs was missing, and it’s presumed that Bellante had actually eaten that, The Huffington Post reported.

“It’s one of the most horrific acts of violence committed against an innocent person in Irish history,” a source told The Sun, according to the Daily Mail. Bellante called police to the house around 2 a.m. on Monday morning, and reportedly found him covered in blood upon arrival. The scene was so gruesome — so much so that some of the details won’t be released — that the two officers who found the body will be sent for trauma counseling. Bellante told detectives that he was guilty at a Garda station on Monday, and will likely go through medical and psychiatric evaluations before he appears in court on Friday.

saverio bellante
Upon hearing that he was being charged for the murder of O'Gorman, Saverio Bellante said that he was guilty. Facebook

There are many factors that could have caused Bellante’s murderous outburst. For one, he had been working at a pharmaceutical company for two years before the attack — the medical evaluation will determine if there were drugs involved, although authorities believe they weren’t. He could have also been anxious about the current political climate in Italy, which he wrote about in his last Facebook post, leading him to have an outburst on par with intermittent explosive disorder — the disorder, anxiety, and depression are interrelated. The disorder is characterized by impulsive, aggressive, and violent outbursts. Only for a moment, a person’s anger becomes uncontrollable, and they later feel remorse for their actions, according to Mayo Clinic. But still, there might be a completely different reason Bellante killed O’Gorman.

Bellante had been renting a room for the past few months in O’Gorman’s house. O’Gorman was a researcher with the Catholic lobby group the Iona Institute, where he wrote papers against same-sex marriage and abortion rights in Ireland, a mostly Catholic nation. O’Gorman previously worked as a journalist for the Catholic newspaper The Voice Today. “He was a gentleman, the poor man, that’s a terrible way he’s gone — no one should go like this, whatever happened,” said Curate Father Denis O’Connor, of the Eucharist at Our Lady Mother of the Church where O’Gorman was a Minister, according to the Daily Mail.