Confessed mom’s Elena Del Pozzo, the four-year-old girl who disappeared on Monday in Catania and was found dead today. The child had not been kidnapped like Martina Patti, 23, she had told her. It was she who had the body found in a field 200 meters from their home.
“We didn’t think such a thing was possible. A kidnapping was unthinkable. One could not imagine what happened. It all seems so strange, absurd to me. 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 », said Giovanni Del Pozzo, the paternal grandfather, at the place of the discovery.
The woman had said that, upon leaving the kindergarten, the little girl had been kidnapped “by a gang of three hooded men”. The investigators had immediately doubted this version (no confirmation from the area cameras and no trace in the forensic findings), not her relatives. “We believed the story of the hooded men,” said Rosaria Testa, her paternal grandmother. “We had no reason not to believe. Elena was a wonderful child ».
Martina Patti was separated from Elena’s father who had left Sicily for Germany and would have a new partner. The man was previously arrested, but later acquitted for a robbery. His relatives accuse the woman of having wanted to blame him for the disappearance of the child. The mayor of Mascalucia, Vincenzo Magra, said: “A little innocent soul has died.”
From 2000 to 2018, according to data from a EURES report, 85 children with less than one year of life were killed by one of their parents, an average of 4 a year. In the same period, parents killed 473 children. The victims between the ages of one and 5 were 93 (19.7%), those from 6 to 13 years 87 (18.4%), those from 14 to 17 years 26 (5.5%) and those over 18 180 (38.1%). Again according to the same report, more mothers kill their children, particularly at an early age: 89.4% of the murders of children under the age of one were committed by mothers, 48.4% in the killing of children. 1-5 years and less and less going up.
In Italy there are news cases that have become very well known. Veronica Panariello, convicted definitively for the murder of her son, never admitted to having killed Loris by strangling him with clamps in November 2014 in Santa Croce di Camerina when she was 8 years old. Perhaps the best known case is that of Annamaria Franzoni. She too has never admitted killing her son Samuele, found dead at the age of 3 with head injuries in his parents’ bed in Cogne in January 2002. She served 11 years and is now free.
Source: Vanity Fair
