A plastic surgeon who donned full camouflage gear before breaking into a colleague’s £1m home in the middle of the night and knifing him was convicted today of attempted murder.
Jonathan Peter Brooks, 61, attacked ‘hated’ colleague and fellow plastic surgeon Graeme Perks after he took part in long-running disciplinary proceedings at the NHS Trust they both worked for.
Desperate to ‘get him out of the way’, jurors heard Brooks cycled a mile from his family home armed with a crowbar, knife and a jerry can full of a highly-flammable petrol mixture, which he spread around the lower staircase after smashing through Mr Perks’ conservatory.
But the father-of-four used the knife on Mr Perks after the victim heard a loud bang and ran naked downstairs to confront the intruder.
Jurors deliberated for more than 12 hours before finding Brooks guilty of all the charges against him.
can now reveal the ‘narcissistic’ medic had continually attempted to derail legal proceedings since the January 2021 attack, causing the trial to be scheduled nine times before Brooks was eventually brought to justice.
Ahead of the trial which began last month, Brooks sacked his latest legal team in February, then went on hunger strike and failed to attend proceedings at Leicester Crown Court. During the trial, Brooks claimed it would be ‘inhumane’ to force him to attend court in his current condition.
He now faces a potential life term when Mr Justice Pepperall sentences him.
Brooks – who is now virtually bed bound – had previously vowed to a psychiatrist that he would starve himself to death if he was convicted.
The surgeon, who goes by his middle name, had enjoyed stints working in New Zealand and , but moved back to the UK so his children could benefit from a British education, neighbours said.
The family rented a red-brick home in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, before moving to the minster town of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, in 2008, after Brooks took a position in the burns unit at City Hospital, Nottingham.
But residents told it was not long before the initially ‘pleasant’ Brooks began locking horns with neighbours over building works or boundary issues.
One resident, who asked not to be named, said the consultant took exception to their Rowan tree which was growing beside the boundary between the two properties.
‘Peter got agitated about the possibility of (berries) falling into his garden and poisoning his children if they ate them. He told us he was going around the neighbours asking them to remove anything that was a threat.
‘He asked us to cut the tree down, so to keep the peace, we did.’
Next on Brooks’ hit list was an 80-year-old walnut tree at the end of the neighbour’s driveway.
‘Peter thought it might fall on his property. A tree surgeon had inspected it and said it was just growing at a slight angle, but I had it trimmed.
‘Then one day we came home from a shopping trip and found Peter instructing two tree surgeons beside the walnut tree. He had told them to cut it down.’
He said of Brooks’ ‘extraordinary’ attack on Mr Perks: ‘Everyone around here thinks it’s really sad. It’s truly strange – I didn’t think he would be capable of such a thing. But he’s destroyed his comfortable life and nearly killed another man.’
Another resident recalled ‘a man on the edge’ who, shortly before the attack on Mr Perks, was driven to a frenzy by the neighbours’ building works.
‘Peter was upset about some water coming off the work going on his land. He came over and hammered on our door. It was so hard he nearly came through.
‘He was a very strange man.
‘He very rarely used to speak to anyone. If you went out of your gate he’d turn his back. And the next time he’d say, ‘hello’. He was very odd.’
Brooks had a collection of vintage and modern motorcycles which he would rev on his driveway or ride up and down the street, and was said to have become embroiled in a dispute with another neighbour over three inches of land on the boundary between their two homes.
But by 2015, Brooks had his sights firmly set on his colleagues. ‘Excluded’ from the wards that July after Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust said colleagues were unable to work with him, Brooks went to a tribunal.
He claimed Mr Perks, his line manager as head of the department of plastic, reconstructive and burns surgery, had negotiated a ‘job plan’ which left him working at the hospital just ‘60 per cent of the time’, which Brooks alleged allowed Mr Perks to ‘maximise his private sector income’.
He added: ‘My impression that resources were being diverted from burns work to breast work under Mr Perks’ tenure. That was leaving the burns service short of resources.’
The plastic surgeon claimed a ‘lack of adequate medical cover’ left him concerned about patient safety, and said he had been effectively suspended for whistleblowing, but ultimately lost his case, and with it a claim for £500,000 compensation.
During his trial Ms Ayling said Brooks’ decision to ‘take the law into his own hands’ came just three days after the final part of the disciplinary process against the defendant began.
The disciplinary hearing took place online as the country was in the middle of the third national coronavirus lockdown at the time and Brooks had tried to get this ‘final hearing’ postponed a day before the alleged attack, a request which was refused.
Ms Ayling told the jury: ‘One possible outcome of the hearing might have been his dismissal from the Nottingham University NHS Trust.
‘Statements from Graeme Perks formed part of the evidence in those proceedings.’
She said that Brooks was clearly ‘frustrated’ by the disciplinary proceedings and ‘made a conscious decision to take the law into his own hands.’
Ms Ayling told the jury: ‘His intention was, say the Crown, to break into Mr Perks house, set fire to it and if necessary, stab Mr Perks. In short, he intended to kill Mr Perks by either or both those means. The use of fire, or the use of a knife.’
The court, sitting in Loughborough, heard that a police sniffer dog indicated fuel had been splashed up the first five steps on the staircase of the home in Halam, Nottinghamshire, where Mr Perks, then 65, his wife Beverley and son Henry, 29, were sleeping.
‘The only exit point for those sleeping upstairs would have been the stairs’, the prosecutor said. ‘A fire raging downstairs and on the stairs would also have spread. The purpose must have been to kill those in the property and to make sure, stop them escaping down the staircase.’
Mr Perks was stabbed through the abdomen and was taken to hospital after being discovered by his wife and son, a Royal Engineer Commando who was home on leave. The court heard Mr Perks was left with his ‘guts sticking out’ and only survived thanks to the ‘quick action and amazing surgical skill’.
A doctor who operated on the stab victim at Nottingham’s Queens Medical Centre and told the court the injury would have been fatal in 95 per cent of cases.
Brooks was arrested later that morning after being discovered asleep and bleeding from the hand on a bench in a communal garden in Southwell.
When interviewed under caution he gave no comment answers to every question.
An earlier trial was halted in the summer of 2022 when Brooks developed medical complications from previous radiotherapy treatment, and Brooks sacked his legal team just days before the start of last month’s trial.
In a ruling ahead of the trial, Mr Justice Pepperall said Brooks’ defence case ‘appears to accept having taken petrol, a crowbar, matches, a lighter and a knife to Mr Perks’ home’. The judge added: ‘He admits breaking into the house and dousing petrol around the ground floor. He admits stabbing Mr Perks’.
The ruling also documented that Brooks case was that his mental health was ‘on the edge’ after years of deterioration. It added: ‘He blames the sustained and deliberate use of disciplinary processes to drive him out of his NHS Trust or to make him insane so that he could be dismissed.’
A psychiatrist who examined Brooks last year in the build-up to the trial found he ‘showed features of a disordered personality with predominant narcissistic and dissocial traits along with paranoia.’
Broooks, of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, one of attempted arson with intent to endanger life and one count of possession of a bladed article.