He confesses before the carabinieri and the prosecutor’s office: “I killed Elena”. With a series of stab wounds in the neck and back. Then this 23-year-old mother took the little body, put it in black bags and buried it in the ground near her house. Martina Patti collapsed after a whole night of interrogation. But she did not explain the insane act or the exact dynamics of the murder. Appears “absent and distant“says the investigator after listening to the woman admitting to murdering the child after taking her yesterday at the kindergarten in Tremestieri Etneo and having simulated her kidnapping by an armed commando. The young mother therefore admits her sins and says she acted alone, a version confirmed by the investigators who speak of a “horrendous crime committed in a solitary manner” but which have not yet closed the investigation. But the motive is silent. “It remained vague – explain the carabinieri – as if realized what she did. It is as if he had said: ‘I did it but I don’t know why’ “. The woman’s lawyer, the lawyer Gabriele Celesti, speaks of” a dramatic interrogation “of a” destroyed and very tried woman who did something that not even she thought she could do “, acting as if “someone had taken over” her, proving to be “anything but cold and calculating”. “I will make my client meet with a renowned psychiatrist – adds the criminal lawyer – to check his conditions and then we will decide on the report. I must acknowledge great fairness to the carabinieri and the prosecutor”.
For the investigators, however, there is one hypothesis: jealousy. Against the current partner of ex-partner Alessandro Del Pozzo, 24 years old. And jealousy for the affection Elena showed towards her father’s new partner. “She did not tolerate even her own daughter becoming fond of it” say the investigators. The investigations brought to light a “sad family picture”: behind the “apparently serene” management of the child, there were tensions and quarrels. An anger that would be brooding inside Martina to the point of leading her to premeditate the crime with a plan studied in detail. The ‘spark’ may have been Elena’s evening with her paternal grandparents and the child’s happiness in dating the woman who could have become her ‘stepmother’. In fact, the evening before being killed, the little girl sleeps with her grandparents. The next morning her aunt accompanies her to kindergarten and her mother picks her up at 1.30pm and she returns home to Mascalucia. Then Martina Patti goes out with the car again, to create a diversion and returns to the house. It is in that lapse of time that the crime would have been committed, between the house and the abandoned land six hundred meters away where the mother buries the little body that was hidden in five black plastic bags and half buried, with a shovel and a pickaxe that they kept in the garden.
Then he triggers the mise-en-scène: he informs Elena’s parents and father of the false kidnapping by telephone, returns home and immediately afterwards, accompanied by her mother and father, goes to the carabinieri to report the incident. You associate the kidnapping with some of the threats that in 2021 the ex-partner had found in front of the gate of the house for a robbery for which Del Pozzo was arrested in 2020 and then acquitted for not having committed the crime. A version that does not convince the investigators, who however verify it and which in fact is denied by the vision of images taken by security cameras in the affected area: there is no ‘armed’ commando who kidnapped the child at the time and place indicated by Martina. So, under pressure for hours by the investigators, the woman confesses: it was me, I killed her.
The weapon is said to be a kitchen knife, but this was not found. An initial examination carried out by the coroner “revealed stab wounds to the cervical and intrascapular region” says the prosecutor, who ordered an autopsy to establish with certainty how the child died. In the field where Elena’s little body was found, her paternal grandparents arrived, upset and in tears. “You couldn’t imagine what happened – says the grandfather, Giovanni Dal Pozzo – it all seems so strange, absurd. Elena’s mother was a very closed girl, but I can’t explain the reason for what happened. But now whoever did it must pay, even those who eventually helped her “. The paternal aunt, Martina Vanessa Del Pozzo, explicitly accuses her sister-in-law: “Martina Patti wanted to frame my brother”. Out of jealousy according to the carabinieri of the provincial command of Catania. And of the Etna District Prosecutor who, having received the confession, signs a detention order for premeditated multiple-aggravated murder and concealment of a corpse. For Martina also triggers the crime of false information to the prosecutor: she for having invented the non-existent kidnapping and hiding that she had killed Elena.
Child killed in Catania, the victim’s father in shock
–
–
