24 years after the crime, a 78-year-old man has to answer in front of the court in Meilen ZH today. In the summer of 1997 he is said to have murdered an elderly woman in her villa in Küsnacht on Zurich’s Gold Coast.
After the dead person was discovered in the villa, the investigators were able to secure DNA traces of a man at the crime scene. For years, however, they could not assign them to anyone. Otherwise the search for the perpetrator was unsuccessful. In 2001, the Zurich public prosecutor suspended the proceedings.
The turning point came more than 19 years after the killing offense in Küsnacht: In November 2016, the Bern law enforcement authorities informed their Zurich colleagues that after a brutal robbery on a jewelery shop in Thun BE a DNA trace had been secured that matched that from Küsnacht.
Delivered from Spain
Now there was movement in the case again. The suspect was arrested in Spain. In June 2017, the Spanish authorities extradited the Italian to Switzerland. A year later he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in the canton of Bern, among other things for multiple robberies, deprivation of liberty, hostage-taking and sexual assault. He is therefore already in jail.
Now the case from Küsnacht in Meilen is going to court. To make this possible, the Spanish authorities had to subsequently approve the extradition separately for the murder allegation.
According to the indictment, the man broke into the wealthy woman’s villa to steal money and valuables. Surprisingly, however, he met the owner in the house, who could have celebrated her 87th birthday a few days later.
Brutal death
The man hit the woman, handcuffed her and left her on the floor with broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and other injuries. According to the prosecution, it took an hour or two for the woman to die. She died of acute heart failure.
The prosecutor calls for a murder conviction. The accused killed the victim “in the sense of an elimination of witnesses” because she surprised him at his break-in. He had acted extremely brutally against the “obviously very old” woman. The public prosecutor is demanding eleven years’ imprisonment as an additional sentence to the seven years from the canton of Bern.
The hearing is scheduled to last two days. (SDA)