Annarita Morelli’s Femicide: GPS, Audio Recordings, Domenico Ossoli Exercising “Total Control” Over Her

This was understood from the first words of the three children collected by the investigators: “I would rather kill her, but I won’t give her a divorce.” Domenico Ossoli74 years old, who killed his wife on August 6, Annarita Morelli72 – who had asked for separation and obtained, at the first hearing, maintenance of 300 euros per month – has completed the fifty-first femicide of 2024 in Italy. He had decided and so he did: he shot her in the chest with the 7.65 caliber Beretta pistol for which he had a regular hunting license, and then he entered a tobacconist’s saying: “I killed my wife.”

Ossoli, as explained by the prosecutor of Tivoli Francesco Menditto, “exercised an obsessive control” over his wife, applying various methods of control over her movements and also installing a GPS in the red Panda that the woman was using without her knowledge. It was thanks to GPS that the man was able to track down his wife, who was on her way to Fonte Nuova (near Rome), to see the veterinarian Cristina Bottiglione where Annarita Morelli, who has a feline colony, has been taking her cats for years. After parking and entering the doctor’s office to pick up a prescription, she found her husband in the passenger seat of the car – who had left early in the morning from Norcia, where he lived after his wife kicked him out of the house. The man pulled out his gun and killed her. The tobacconist who took her confession immediately called an ambulance and 118, but there was nothing more that could be done for the woman.

Ossoli, who did not resist, was arrested and taken to the police station. In the arrest warrant, the public prosecutor Roberto Bulgarini Nomi emphasized the man’s “evident intent to commit murder”, apparently to counter his statements during questioning that he “only” wanted to shoot her in the legs, don’t kill her. The PM cited «the evident incompatibility of what was found by the coroner regarding the non-intent to kill»: according to the findings on the victim’s body, the man had shot his wife «“point blank”, at the height of the left deltoidclose to left shoulder Therefore.

In the following hours the Carabinieri searched the house in Norcia of the murderer, who in the meantime is imprisoned in the Rebibbia prison, and found new evidence against him for the charges of voluntary homicide aggravated by premeditation. In particular, they found a series of audio recordings stored on various USB sticks, including several conversations with the victim, which testify to the man’s desire to control his wife.