With his puffy face and his clothes that look like they came from bad thrift stores, the Englishman Ossie Clark no longer has anything of the flamboyant fashion designer who was nicknamed in the 1970s “The King of King’s Road”, and who partied with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull in London’s hottest clubs. We are in 1996, he is 54 years old and seems more and more lost. Some faithful lend him a little money or invite him to dinner. They also warn him about his new companion, a handsome Italian with dark eyes.
Ossie Clark met him while walking his dog, Pippin, through the aisles of Holland Park, London. Since then, he has had it under his skin. At 28, Diego Cogolato looks like a bohemian vagrant, who lives off odd jobs and spends his money on various drugs. Between them, the romance has lasted for eighteen months, with violent separations and equally passionate reunions.
At the beginning of August 1996, Ossie Clark decided to cut ties with Diego, whose depressive and violent episodes frightened him. The creator will not have time to detach himself from this toxic love. On August 7, in the early hours of the morning, the 999, emergency number of the London police, received a call from Diego Cogolato, panicked, short of breath: “I stabbed him! I didn’t want to, but it happened. »
The revolution of the “Swinging Sixties”
A few hours earlier, the Italian poured a torrent of violence on the fashion designer, in the living room of the social housing where he now lives. Thirty-seven stab wounds to the abdomen, his skull shattered by an earthen flowerpot and a thick piece of wood. “Diego Cogolato suffered from depression which he treated with amphetamines and Prozac, prescribed by his psychiatrist”, says today Margaret Barnes, who was his lawyer, now retired and author of detective novels. The combination of the products had devastating effects, turning the young Italian into a psychotic, according to the latter: “When he turned himself in to the police, he said he thought Ossie Clark was Satan and he was the Messiah. The order to kill would have come to him from God. As for the relentless violence, he justified it by explaining that he was afraid that Clark would be reincarnated. » In her closing argument, Margaret Barnes added that Cogolato regretted her action and that he loved ” sincerely “ Ossie Clark. She pleaded temporary dementia and she was heard. His client, sentenced to six years in prison, was released in 2003. “I never heard from him again. »
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