It was scheduled for October and the deadlines were respected. The psychiatric report ordered for Alessandro Impagnatiello was filed with a clear diagnosis: the man, accused of killing his partner Giulia Tramontano, was capable of understanding and wanting.
The murder of the twenty-nine year old from Senago, in the Milan area, has long shocked public opinion due to the atrocity to which the girl was subjected, seven months pregnant and murdered with 37 stab wounds on May 27 last year. The body was found four days later, hidden in the cavity of a wall near a garage.
The diagnosis on the state of Impagnatiello’s mental health was signed by the forensic psychiatrist Pietro Ciliberti together with the medical examiner Gabriele Rocca.
The defense of the man, a former barman, claims that he was suffering from a “paranoid” personality disorder.
But the prosecution’s experts write in the documents that, for the 31-year-old, “there are no elements to believe that at the time of the crime the psychiatric requirements for considering partial or total mental defect were applied”.
Sentencing expected in November
Now, therefore, the time of waiting opens and will stop no earlier than November 4th, the date on which the sentence is expected to be pronounced: these are the times dictated by the Court of Assizes of Milan to find out whether Alessandro Impagnatiello was therefore or not “capable of understanding and wanting”.
The hearing will be preceded by the discussion of the expert report, set for October 21st. In addition to the child he was expecting from Giulia, the man already has a 6-year-old son from a previous relationship.
The man was also in a parallel relationship
Specifically, Impagnatiello is accused of voluntary homicide aggravated by premeditation, cruelty, futile motives and killing the partner, non-consensual termination of pregnancy and concealment of a corpse. The risk, for him, is that of a life sentence.
“I wanted to believe I was crazy, but I don’t think I was”, the man said in the interrogation before the judges of the Court of Assizes of Milan (Bertoja-Fioretta). “I was a vessel completely saturated with lies and falsehoods”, he added, defended by the lawyers Giulia Geradini and Samanta Barbaglia.
Impagnatiello, it was soon discovered, was leading a parallel life, also carrying on a relationship with another young woman, who on the day Giulia was killed had met, a few hours earlier, with the victim.
The war of expertise
The prosecutor Alessia Menegazzo and the forensic psychiatrist consultant Ilaria Rossetti have always supported the full capacity of understanding and will of the accused, as have Giulia’s family members, with the lawyer Giovanni Cacciapuoti, who appointed the psychiatrists Salvatore De Feo and Diana Galletta .
The psychiatrist Raniero Rossetti, however, who had signed the defense consultancy, had underlined how the former barman felt like a “chess player who had to keep all the movements of the chessboard under control”, through lies and deceptions to the two women. “He aimed to suppress the fetus, which represented a variable in his chessboard. What he couldn’t control was the unborn child”, wrote the defenders’ consultant.
The lover’s story to the magistrates: “We hugged each other out of female solidarity”
The murderer’s lover, an Italian-English girl, aged 23 at the time, told investigators in June 2023: “Giulia told me that Alessandro would never see her son and that she was only interested in the child and her health (…) she certainly didn’t want to see Alessandro anymore. She would still have returned to Senago, after our meeting, to talk” with him and “to leave him”.
And then he continued to tell the story of what happened. “We chatted calmly. We were together for about an hour, after which she left. Our meeting was truly cordial, so much so that as soon as we saw each other we hugged each other out of female solidaritybecause we were both victims of a liar”. At the end of their meeting he said he had “proposed that if she needed it she could come to my house to sleep. She said not to worry, thanking me.”
And then she returned to the moment when Impagnatiello wanted to return to her, after having committed the crime. “Alessandro started asking me to see us. (..) His requests were so pressing – he added – that a colleague accompanied me home because they were also worried”.
