The High Court has confirmed the first instance guilty verdict for a 78-year-old Italian and is certain: He was the murderer who brutally beat an elderly woman in a villa in Küsnacht in July 1997 and left her tied up to die.
The case of the 78-year-old was dealt with in the Higher Court in Zurich.
“I’m being accused of a murder that I didn’t commit,” is how the interpreter translates the statements of the accused 78-year-old Italian. The prosecutor was corrupt and ripped him off. The Pöschwies penal institution is not a prison, but Auschwitz. He does not deny that he is a criminal for society because of his life. However, he did not kill the woman who was found dead in a Küsnacht villa five days before her 87th birthday in July 1997. He was her secret gigolo, and he claims: “I brought light and warmth into her life.”
In November 2021, the Miles District Court sentenced him to 13 years in prison for murder; this as an additional sentence to a 7-year judgment by the Bernese Oberland Regional Court in June 2018 for multiple aggravated robbery, deprivation of liberty, hostage-taking and sexual assault. The man had left his DNA in an attack on a jewelry family in Thun in September 2016, during which he also forced the underage daughter to perform oral sex.
It was an accidental find: the same DNA was found at the crime scene in Küsnacht in 1997. According to the indictment, the suspect is said to have broken into the millionaire’s villa to steal money and valuables. He met the resident of the house and hit her several times in the head and body. The woman’s body was found in the laundry room with her arms tied behind her back. The woman is said to have lived for another one to two hours and died of acute heart failure as a result of a severe pulmonary fat embolism.
Traces of DNA on the bondage material
The accused sticks to it: he had an intense sexual, sadomasochistic relationship with the elderly woman on call for nine months. He visited her once or twice a month and always received 12,000 to 18,000 francs for it. He earned a total of 300,000 francs. This explains his DNA traces on the bondage material in the laundry room.
His defense attorney pleads for acquittal. On the one hand, her client is not the perpetrator. On the other hand, it’s not murder. Deliberate killing was already time-barred. The perpetrator did not want to kill the woman. He called the first aid anonymously and ordered them to the address. The call was proof that he had no will to kill. He was not to blame for the fact that the medical team left without having done anything.
The public prosecutor waives an independent appeal and applies for confirmation of the lower court’s verdict. He finds the accused’s striking, arrogant callousness difficult to bear and it upsets him, he said. The accused’s gigolo story was simply “disgraceful”.
Judge badly insulted
When the presiding judge announced the confirmation of the lower court’s verdict, the accused shouted: “You need a psychiatrist, you’re completely crazy, you have to be locked up.” The judge explained that the Supreme Court did not want to deny that an 86-year-old woman could still have a sex life, but that it ruled out night-long wildest sexual practices as described by the accused. The 78-year-old is the perpetrator, the court appreciates in his favor that he had called the ambulance.
Nevertheless, it was a possible intentional murder. One cannot assume that he wanted the woman’s death directly. But if you leave a victim injured and tied up in this way, you accept this. The unscrupulousness of a murder is fulfilled in two respects: in the motive and in the way the deed was carried out. The accused left the helpless old lady completely cold and tied up in the most brutal way, only to get away with it himself, which he managed to do for almost 20 years.
Judgment SB210653 of 05/09/2022, not yet final.