What drove an Italian mother to murder her son

Telegraph

3 days ago

It's a country where men are doted on by their adoring mothers, who cook and clean for them until they are finally ready to leave home.
There is even a word for it: mammoni – mummy's boys, pampered princes who don't fly the nest until well into their thirties.
So the nation was shocked when it emerged that a 61-year-old hospital nurse had murdered her grown-up son, cut him into pieces with a hacksaw, covered the remains in lime and crammed them into a bin.
Lorena Venier confessed to the crime in her first hearing with prosecutors, telling them she had done 'a monstrous thing'.
Neighbours in Gemona del Friuli, in the region of Friuli-Venezia-Guili in north-eastern Italy, said that news of the killing was shocking and baffling.
'She's a very affable woman and we had good relations with her,' said Alberto Guillan, a former soldier. 'We never heard any arguments coming from the house. The whole thing is inexplicable.'
Ms Venier told police her son Alessandro, 35, had drug and alcohol problems and had become increasingly abusive to her and to his Colombian partner Mailyn Castro Monsalvo, 30, the mother of his six-month-old daughter.
He was unemployed and refused to lift a finger around the house he and Ms Monsalvo shared with his mother, Ms Venier claims. And when he started talking about moving to Colombia, she feared that he might do his partner and child harm.
'Mailyn is the daughter that I never had,' Ms Venier, who raised her son alone after his Egyptian father abandoned them when he was young, told magistrates at a hearing on Aug 2.
'Mailyn was being beaten up, insulted and threatened many times with death. My son downplayed the post-natal depression she was suffering from. Alessandro was violent, Mailyn's life was in danger.
'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 Ms Monsalvo, who Ms Venier said helped her in the killing, who alerted the authorities to what had happened.
Mr Venier was killed on July 25, and on July 31, unable to keep the secret any longer, Ms 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, Ms 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, it leads to coma, irreversible brain damage and death.
Despite the injection, Mr 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.
'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, but 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.
Ms Venier, who is now in custody, accused of murder and concealing a body. Ms Monsalvo is suspected of instigation to murder.
'My client has made a full confession to the prosecutor,' Giovanni De Nardo, Ms 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.'
David Wilson, a prominent British criminologist, says it is 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.'
The gruesome way in which the body was disposed of is striking, added Prof Wilson.
'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 Ms Monsalvo's baby is being looked after by social services back in Gemona.
'She is in a state of great difficulty,' said Ms 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 the post-mortem examination. There is no indication yet of a trial date.