Five murders. Different stories, one question

A 32-year-old nurse from Bussolengo died in June 2024 following a series of unexplained hypoglycaemic episodes. This week, her husband, Nadir Rossi – also a nurse – was arrested on charges of premeditated murder. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, he administered insulin to his wife without any medical necessity, first at home and then whilst she was in hospital. The alleged motive is financial: following her death, he is said to have collected a life insurance payout of 100,000 euros. Rossi is presumed innocent. This is a peculiar case because the theory is that professional expertise, intended for healing, was used to engineer a death that appeared to be natural.

Aged 74, he lived in a care home in the Reggio Emilia area and suffered from severe dysphagia: he was unable to eat solid food. He died in June after swallowing a cream-filled doughnut. This week, his cousin and guardian, Elico Fantuzzi, aged 76, was placed under house arrest on charges of premeditated murder. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, he deliberately left the pastry within the man’s reach, distracting the care home staff, with the aim of coming into possession of an inheritance worth around 300,000 euros. Fantuzzi denies the charges and maintains that he merely acted carelessly. It is an almost paradoxical story: the trial will have to determine whether the most ordinary of gestures – offering a pastry – was consciously transformed into a means of killing.

For thirty-nine years, his death – he was 48 years old when he was found in 1987 on a road in the Lomellina area – was considered a suicide. The new forensic report, released this week, suggests instead that the man may have been attacked before ending up on the road: injuries consistent with blows inflicted by a third party and possible signs of self-defence were identified on the body. Two individuals are under investigation, but no one has been held responsible. It is perhaps the most intriguing cold case of the week: it shows how forensic science can reopen a case almost forty years after a death that appeared to have been explained, and transform an old suicide case into a potential murder investigation.

A 31-year-old Albanian painter living in the Cesena area went missing on 7 October. Three weeks later, his body was recovered from a well in Longiano. Daniele Sartini, aged 29, confessed to the murder and was arrested. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Maxhallaku had gone to Sartini’s home to collect a debt of around one thousand to one thousand five hundred euros relating to cocaine; during the argument, Sartini allegedly took a gun belonging to his father and fired it, before hiding the body and setting the car alight. The suspect claims he felt threatened.

A 65-year-old man, regarded by investigators as one of the founders of the Afeltra-Di Martino clan, was killed on 30 October in Pimonte, in the Lattari Mountains. The key question concerns the context: just two months earlier, Raffaele Afeltra, another long-standing member of the same organisation, had been murdered, and Di Martino had already survived an ambush in 2018. The Carabinieri are therefore investigating whether the two murders form part of a new realignment of criminal power dynamics in the area.