Nicole Virzi is accused of the most heinous child killing. Now, as the glamorous PhD student faces the death penalty, read her shocking ‘confession’ about the twisted compulsion she couldn’t control

On June 16, 2024, PhD student Nicole Virzi had sat in an interview room at Pittsburgh police headquarters for more than 12 hours when her account of the previous evening she’d spent babysitting her best friend’s newborn twins dramatically changed.

Having steadfastly denied ever doing anything to harm the six-week-old babies, Leon and Ari Katz, insisting she didn’t know how Leon could have sustained multiple and fatal skull fractures while his parents took his brother to hospital with mysterious injuries, she abruptly asked if she could speak to the lead investigator one more time – according to prosecutors.

As Detective Janine Triolo sat down opposite the clinical psychology student, then aged 29, and evening set in, Virzi told her in a conversation recorded by police: ‘Um, I’m going to tell you the truth. The biggest part of that truth is that I did not want him to die.’

At times sounding nervous but at others remarkably calm, the sweet-faced Californian went on: ‘From a very, very young age, I don’t know what it is, but I always had this urge – almost like a compulsion I can’t control – to hurt kids.’

The demise of little Leon came about when, just weeks away from receiving her doctorate in behavioral medicine from the University of California at San Diego, Virzi took a short vacation to fly across the country to visit her close friend and her young family at their home in the affluent Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside.

However, instead of spending time with the boys’ mother, Savannah Roberts, she ‘kind of grew angry because I was being put to nanny work’, she told the investigators in the video-recorded statement, which prosecutors played in court at a hearing last November.

‘So, when I was alone with (Leon) I shook him a couple times – hard. And I dropped him a couple times – hard.’

Virzi said she ‘heard some kind of crack’ and also turned the infant upside down on the bathroom tile floor.

She also told detectives in the video-recorded statement: ‘Something just came over me I couldn’t control. I’m telling you this because I can’t keep lying about it.’

That same day, she was charged with criminal homicide, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children – offenses that relate not only to the death of Leon but the injuries she allegedly inflicted on his twin brother. Denied bail, she has remained in jail ever since she was charged. She has pled not guilty to all of the offenses.

If she doesn’t change her not-guilty plea – as her lawyers have hinted might happen – on October 1 Virzi will go on trial on charges for which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Asked in June about the possibility of a plea deal, her defense attorney Bill Difenderfer said that ‘negotiations are ongoing.’

Nobody has been executed in Pennsylvania since 1999 and the current Democrat governor, Josh Shapiro, refuses to sign death warrants but the District Attorney’s office said it felt justified in still demanding capital punishment for Virzi given the circumstances of her alleged crimes.

There had been aggravating factors in this case, said prosecutors, which included the victim’s young age and evidence that he had been tortured.

Inevitably, the video-recorded police interviews with the accused on that day in June two years ago will be crucial in the trial.

Defense lawyers have already tried to suppress them. Virzi now insists she did not kill the baby and her attorneys have claimed she was unconstitutionally coerced into making an ‘involuntary’ confession after being subjected to an overly-long and oppressive detention. They told the judge ‘investigators utilized nearly every trick in the book to manipulate Ms Virzi into making a statement.’

According to Virzi, she was shackled to the floor, refused a phone call and forced to urinate in front of two police escorts.

However, her judge, in Allegheny County’s Court of Common Pleas, Jill Rangos, ruled the jury should be shown the evidence and reportedly pointed out that Virzi had met a defense attorney and spoken with her parents before making the statements. ‘The vast majority of time she was in that [interview] room, she did not appear to be in any distress,’ said the judge at a hearing in February. She ruled that Virzi’s statement was ‘knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily made.’

This deeply disturbing story started when Virzi, who had grown up in the affluent New Jersey suburb of Upper Saddle River as the daughter of a successful New York cardiologist, arrived to stay with her friend Roberts and Roberts’s husband, Ethan Katz, in mid-June 2024.

The two women had been friends since 2021 when they worked together as research coordinators in the graduate psychology department at Philadelphia’s Drexel University.

Virzi’s PhD research focused on how ‘depression, stress, negative affect and trauma’ in vulnerable groups impacts physical health and behavior, like heart disease and exercise, her university biography said at the time.

During Virzi’s stay, Roberts repeatedly asked Virzi to watch over her little boys.

According to court papers, Virzi – who taught spinning classes while studying for her doctorate – visited their apartment on the afternoon of June 15 and, as Roberts was having a nap, she offered to change Ari’s diaper.

She told police she noticed there was blood in the child’s nappy and his genitals were swollen, photographing the injuries on her phone and sending the pictures to Ethan Katz. There were also small scratches on his face, which Virzi said he received when he flailed his arms as he was being placed in his car seat. Prosecutors argue that Virzi was responsible for Ari’s injuries.

The parents, who denied causing the injuries themselves, said they had never previously seen them on the baby who had never had any medical emergencies. At around 6.30pm that day, they rushed Ari to hospital, leaving Virzi alone in their home with Leon.

She would later tell police that Leon had been in a baby bouncer seat and, having failed to strap him in, she then dozed off.

Virzi claimed that when she woke up, she went into the kitchen to get him a bottle of milk when he suddenly began to scream.

She returned to find the baby lying on the floor with a bump on the left side of his head having fallen out of his chair. She called 911 at around 11.15pm and later rang the Katzes from the hospital.

Leon was pronounced dead a few hours later after suffering what doctors said was blunt force trauma. An autopsy confirmed he had a severe skull fracture and a brain that was bleeding in several places.

According to the criminal complaint against Virzi, a doctor and child abuse specialist later told investigators the injuries to both twins were ‘consistent with having been sustained as a result of child abuse, as these are inflicted injuries that are not natural and not accidental.’

At around 6am the following morning, Pittsburgh police arrived at the local Airbnb where Virzi had been staying and, after ascertaining she had no ‘plausible explanation’ for his wounds, persuaded her to come with them for questioning, according to the criminal complaint. She agreed to hand over her phone and purse but was not arrested or handcuffed.

At police headquarters, detectives said they twice read her Miranda rights to her, saying she had the right to remain silent, but she kept talking.

Detectives told her that Leon’s serious injuries were inconsistent with falling from a seat that was only 12 inches off the floor, but for hours she stuck to her story.

Later, say prosecutors, she changed her mind. According to the interview recording, some of which was played at a court hearing a year ago, she also told Detective Janine Triolo: ‘I did not want [Leon] to die. That was not my goal. I just wanted him to feel a little pain.’

She went on to say she’d been just three or four when she first felt she wanted to hurt children.

Virzi claimed she was seven when she locked a two-year-old child in a bathroom and pinched her until she cried. When she was in high school, she said she put a hot mug on a baby’s arm and pinched the infant.

‘This is the first time this happened as an adult,’ Virzi said of the alleged attack on the twins. ‘There’s some weird drive in me that wants to see kids in pain.’

In her statement, Virzi also told the police she had suffered from anxiety, depression and an eating disorder. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore,’ she told them. ‘I know the best thing is for me to go away – or maybe worse.’

A few weeks after Leon’s death, Virzi’s attorney, David Shrager, stressed that his client had no criminal history and was devastated by Leon’s death while insisting her innocence.

He described her as a ‘loving person’ who ‘would never harm anyone’s children.

‘If there was something that she would want to convey, it would just be the absolutely horrible pain that she’s feeling,’ he said. ‘These were her close friends.’

Although her lawyers are expected to once again argue in court that the damning statement she made to police was coerced and shouldn’t be relied on, some who know Virzi have told the Daily Mail that it tallied with some things they knew about her – especially what they described as her ‘bottled-up rage’ and ‘underlying anger.’

Elin Lantz Lesser, who was a graduate student at Drexel with Virzi and Roberts, said she felt she needed to ‘mind my p’s and q’s around her a little bit, like I don’t want to get on her bad side.’

Lesser remembered a co-worker once getting some ‘very biting text messages’ from Virzi regarding a work issue.

Another former psychology major, who knew Virzi from her studies at a different university, said she, too, was wary of her.

‘There always seemed to be some underlying anger,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘Some colleagues that I’ve spoken to have had similar thoughts about it, that there was this bottled-up rage or something that never came out but you felt it was right there, even though she was friendly.’

She went on: ‘She had this rigidity, like she would never be even a minute late for a meeting or class. In a way, because of that, I think I’d almost trust her to babysit more than anyone because she was so controlled and she followed rules to the letter.’

However, Cindy Miller-Perrin, a clinical child psychologist and professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, where Virzi was an undergraduate and tried her hand at student journalism, said she had been ‘an incredible student’ who ‘was very high-achieving.’ The latter, she conceded, was linked with certain personality traits.

Prosecutors say Virzi still has the support of her family although her parents split up in around 2019. She has one sibling, Alysha, who appears to live with their father in Upper Saddle River.

Neither Virzi’s family nor the Katz’s have commented on the case. The latter have described the accused as a ‘trusted family friend’ and little Leon as ‘a happy, smiley, goofy baby boy.’ Like the woman accused of killing her son, Savannah Roberts also went on to become a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, in her case at the University of Pittsburgh.

Virzi provided a few insights into her personality in her student journalism articles. In one, she described how she hated the conviviality of new student orientation at Pepperdine and felt ‘suffocated’ by it.

‘Upon realizing that I was very different from many of my peers, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that something was terribly wrong with me,’ she wrote. ‘But now, I draw a different conclusion: I am an introvert. And contrary to popular belief that doesn’t mean I’m antisocial or shy or have no friends – it simply means that I draw my energy from internal sources instead of external ones. And that’s not a bad thing at all.’

People, she added, ‘tend to gravitate towards introverts when looking to create lasting friendships.’

Whether Savannah Roberts made a terrible mistake when she was drawn to create what she perhaps hoped would be such a lasting friendship with Virzi is set to be examined in a Pittsburgh courtroom.