A verdict is expected on Tuesday in a murder case that gripped Italy and sparked a heated debate on the issue of violence against women.
Prosecutors have asked that Filippo Turetta, 22, be sentenced to life in jail for stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend Giulia Cecchettin last November.
Over the last year a huge amount of detail about the killing has emerged, forming a picture of an increasingly anguished young woman harassed by her possessive ex-boyfriend who refused to accept the end of their relationship.
The case, which captivated Italians, has thrust the concepts of femicide, patriarchy and male violence into the headlines.
On 11 November 2023 Mr Turetta picked up his ex-girlfriend Ms Cecchettin, a 22-year-old biomedical engineering student from the Venice province, to take her shopping for an outfit for her upcoming graduation.
Later that evening, he stabbed her more than 70 times, and left the student’s body at the bottom of a ditch, wrapped in plastic bags.
Then, he disappeared. For a week, Italians followed the search for the couple with baited breath. The discovery of Ms Cecchettin’s body on 18 November was met with an unprecedented outpouring of grief. The next day, Mr Turetta was arrested in Germany. He readily admitted to killing Ms Cecchettin and was extradited to Italy.
To raise awareness of the signs of controlling relationships, Ms Cecchettin’s family recently shared a list she wrote a few months before her death, titled “15 reasons I had to break up with him”.
In it, Ms Cecchettin said Mr Turetta insisted she had a “duty” to help him study, complained if she sent him fewer emoji hearts than usual, didn’t want her to go out with friends and needed her to text him all the time.
“They were the typical signs of possessiveness,” Giulia’s father Gino Cecchettin told the BBC. “He would deny her her own space, or demand to always be included. He always needed to know everything she said to her friends or even her therapist.”
“We realised later that she thought she was the cause of his pain, that she felt responsible for it,” he said.
In an 80-page statement written from jail in childlike handwriting, Mr Turetta said since Ms Cecchettin broke up with him he spent every day hoping to get back with her. “I didn’t feel like I could accept any other outcome,” he wrote.
In his police interrogation Mr Turetta confirmed that, on the night he killed her, Ms Cecchettin had just told him he was too dependent and needy.
“I shouted that it wasn’t fair, that I needed her,” Mr Turetta said, adding that he killed her after getting “very angry” when she tried to get out of the car.
“I was selfish and it’s only now I realise it,” he wrote. “I didn’t think about how incredibly unfair that was to her and to the promising and wonderful life she had ahead of her.”
Source link
