“I could not have allowed them to go to Colombia, Mailyn and the baby would have run very serious risks there. The only way to stop him was to kill him.”
It was Monsalvo, whom Venier said helped her in the killing, who alerted the authorities to what had happened.
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Venier was killed on July 25, and on July 31, unable to keep the secret any longer, Monsalvo told emergency services that her boyfriend had been murdered by his mother and they could find his remains in a barrel in the garage.
The women allegedly gave Alessandro a glass of lemonade into which they had slipped a tranquilliser. It made him groggy but it didn’t knock him out.
Next, Venier allegedly injected her son with two doses of insulin, which she says she obtained from the hospital where she worked. An insulin overdose, if untreated, leads to coma, irreversible brain damage and death.
Despite the injection, Venier was still alive. The women allegedly finished him off first by smothering him with a pillow and then strangling him with a pair of his own bootlaces, according to his mother’s testimony.
‘In Western countries, only 10 per cent of people who kill are female.’
British criminologist David Wilson
“I took care of the dismemberment myself,” she told police. “I used a hacksaw and a sheet to hold the blood. I dissected him into three pieces.”
She wrapped up the hunks of body, shoved them into a plastic barrel and covered them in lime.
She was hoping that her son would not be missed – that the town would assume he had followed his plan to move to South America and had left behind his girlfriend and daughter.
But she had not foreseen that her daughter-in-law, already in a fragile mental state because of post-natal depression, would break down and decide to confess all.
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Venier, who is now in custody, is accused of murder and concealing a body. Monsalvo is suspected of instigation to murder.
“My client has made a full confession to the prosecutor,” Giovanni De Nardo, Venier’s lawyer, told Italy’s national news agency, Ansa.
“She was lucid and aware during her confession, explaining in detail exactly what prompted her to act, her motives.” He has requested that his client undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
British criminologist David Wilson said it was a very singular case.
“In Western countries, only 10 per cent of people who kill are female. This case is a filicide, meaning a parent who kills a child, which is unusual. Among those cases, it is mostly parents killing young children. Killing a grown-up child is even more unusual,” he said
The gruesome way in which the body had been disposed of was striking, Wilson said.
“The insulin, the tranquilliser – that is very typical of how women commit murder,” he said. “But to chop up the body, that is a further stage and very unusual. It usually happens with someone who has medical training because it is actually very difficult to cut up a body. Her training as a nurse would also have given her the psychological robustness to do it.”
Both women are now in custody, and Monsalvo’s baby is being looked after by social services in Gemona.
“She is in a state of great difficulty,” said Monsalvo’s lawyer, Federica Tosel. “She has been very confused and not able to face up to what happened. ”
On Tuesday, judges, lawyers and forensic experts will meet to determine when to carry out a post-mortem examination. There is no indication yet of a trial date.
The Telegraph, London
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