Ex-boyfriend sentenced to life in prison in femicide case that gripped Italy

A judge in Italy has sentenced a 23-year-old man to life in prison for the stabbing murder of his former girlfriend, a heinous act of femicide that has put violence against women in the spotlight in this country.

Filippo Turetta who admitted to murdering Giulia Cecchettin, 22, in November 2023 a week before she was due to graduate from the University of Padua, was found guilty Tuesday with extenuating factors in a court in Venice of murder, illegal possession of weapons, kidnapping and concealment of a corpse. He was also ordered to pay financial damages to the victim’s family in addition to covering their legal fees.

In the Italian criminal justice system, verdicts and sentencing are generally ruled on by either a panel of judges or judges and lay jurors at the same time.

After he murdered her, he said he stuffed her body into garbage bags and dumped her in a ravine and went on the run. He was arrested in Germany 10 days after Cecchettin disappeared.

Turetta, who was present in court, was emotionless, staring at the desk in front of him and flanked by his lawyers when the verdict was read. Cecchettin’s father Gino, who was also in the courtroom, did not look at the killer of his daughter. Cecchettin’s mother died from an illness in 2022. After the verdict, Gino Ceccettin said after the verdict that he felt strange. “I’m no more relieved or sad than I was before the verdict,” he said. “As a father, nothing has changed.”

The chief prosecutor Andrea Petroni asked for a life sentence, which is no more than 30 years in Italy, based on aggravating circumstances including how Turetta had procured knives, tape, a shovel, black garbage bags, ropes and a wet sock to stifle Cecchettin’s screams. He kept the items in his car for several days before he lured his former girlfriend into his car on a false promise that he would stop stalking her and that they could just be friends, he told the court.

Turetta testified in his 10-week trial, where he admitted to killing her and hiding her body. He admitted writing a plan that included a list of what he needed to do it, and he hypothesized how he would carry out the murder but insisted he didn’t intend to do so. “I was angry, I had many thoughts, I felt resentment that we had argued again, that it was a terrible period, that I wanted to get back together and so … I don’t know,” he testified.

“In a way it made me feel good to write this list to vent, to hypothesize this list that calmed me, to think that things could change. It was as if I didn’t have to define it yet, but I had thrown it down.”

Debate on violence

Turetta’s lawyer Giovanni Caruso argued that his client should not be given an “inhumane and degrading” life sentence. “He is not Pablo Escobar,” Caruso told the court, referring to the notorious Colombian drugs lord who was killed in 1993.

The court also heard a list Cecchettin wrote entitled “15 reasons I should leave Filippo” that her family found. Among them, “He complained when I put fewer hearts than usual [in messages]” and “He has strange ideas about taking justice into one’s own hands for betrayals, torture, stuff like that.” She also wrote, “He needs to know everything, even what you say about him to your friends and the psychologist.”

The case has stirred the debate on violence against women, as well as what is largely seen as a failure to prevent the scourge. One woman is killed by a boyfriend, husband or ex-partner every three days in Italy, according to government statistics. More than 106 women were killed in the year since Cecchetin’s murder. The youngest was a 13-year-old girl allegedly pushed off a balcony by her 15-year-old boyfriend in early November. Giulia Cecchettin was the 105th victim of 2023.

Cecchetin’s sister Elena and father have launched a campaign to combat violence called the Giulia Cecchettin Foundation and blamed the government under Giorgia Meloni for failing to do enough beyond producing a brochure to outline the signs of an abusive relationship. Members of Meloni’s government have insisted that the patriarchy is no longer a problem in Italy. “Giulia was killed by a respectable, white Italian man,” Elena Cecchetin wrote on social media, adding, “What is the government doing to prevent violence?”