Crime of Olgiata, free Manuel Winston Reyes who killed the countess

Who knows what Pietro Mattei would have said. Who knows, if he had still been alive, how the husband of Countess Alberica Filo della Torre would have reacted to the news that the murderer of his wife, the Filipino butler Manuel Winston Reyes, after only ten years in prison, has already returned free. The Roman businessman, who after the murder of his wife took place on July 10, 1991 in their villa in Olgiata, he dedicated twenty years of his life to chasing the manager, certainly he would not fail to make his contempt felt.

His son Manfredi, who was nine years old at the time of the crime, took care of protesting for him: “The battle of my father’s life was defrauded in an indecent way,” he said. But who was Alberica Filo della Torre? Who Pietro Mattei? And what happened to Olgiata?

A brave aristocratic girl
Beautiful, noble, rich and courageous. Alberica Filo della Torre was born in Rome on April 2, 1949. His mother, Anna del Pezzo di Caianello, is a duchess. His father, Ettore della Torre di Santa Susanna, a heroic rear admiral who distinguished himself during the war by fighting aboard Italian submarines. After her studies in boarding school, at the age of eighteen Alberica enters society and life is all fun: shopping in the most fashionable boutiques in Rome, white weeks on the Terminillo, her first love.

A failed marriage
He is a true prince, Alfonso de Liguoro, fascinating but a little penniless. Her father doesn’t like it, but Alberica doesn’t hear reasons. The marriage, celebrated in winter in the maternal villa of Olgiata, the same where the crime will later take place, soon goes to pieces. Disappointed, after the cancellation of the wedding to the Sacra Rota, Alberica does not rest. She isolates herself, refuses invitations to parties, closes in on herself. To distract her, her parents persuade her to go on a long journey: Monte Carlo, London, New York. On returning to Rome, however, nothing has changed: Alberica feels that her life is over. Again he lets himself go to sadness. But the turning point is around the corner.

The love of life
The turning point has a name: Pietro Mattei. He is a building contractor, a solid man, a hard worker, one who has built his fortune with his own hands. It is not part of the Alberica environment. But one evening, at a party she didn’t want to go to, someone introduces them. A look, a smile and for both it is love at first sight. In no time at all they get married. And the July 10, 1981. Then, life is wonderful: two beautiful children, Manfredi and Domitilla, the travels, the splendid parties in the Olgiata villa, which Alberica has restored personally taking care of all the details. But the tragedy is around the corner.

The crime on a feast day
It happens on the morning of July 10, 1991. At Olgiata there is a coming and going of workers: preparations are underway for the party that Alberica and Pietro intend to give for their ten years of marriage. The pool is already full of water lilies. At 7.30 a maid brings breakfast to the Countess. An hour later the lady goes downstairs, then goes back to her room. Around 9.15 am a maid and her daughter Domitilla knock on the door of her room. But it is closed from the inside and no one answers. Between 10 and 10.15 they try again in vain. Worried, the maid searches for the second key, opens the door and finds the lady lying on the ground, dead, her head wrapped in a bloody sheet.

The alarm goes off, the carabinieri arrive. Upon first examination, it appears that someone stunned the countess by hitting her with a hoof and then strangled her. The killer stole the jewelry. For the investigators, he is someone the victim knew well, a person who knew how to move around the mansion. But it is an intuition that leaves the time it finds, because the magistrates immediately decide that the crime is passionate. The first to end up in the viewfinder is Pietro Mattei. “Where was he when his wife was killed?” They ask him. And since the businessman was at work, and neither he nor the countess had a lover, this lead leads nowhere.

A thriller that lasted twenty years
The suspicions then focus on a neighbor, a young man with mental problems who, however, has nothing to do with the crime. Then on a Filipino servant, Manuel Winston, whom the lady fired shortly before she died. The man’s phone is brought under control. But the hypothesis that the classic “butler” might have killed the noblewoman seems too simple and nobody listens to the recordings of the phone calls: Winston’s name is soon discarded. The investigation wraps itself up, while the tabloid headlines of the newspapers multiply. In the autumn, the magistrates no longer know which fish to take and suspend the investigation.

Mattei protests: “I want to know who killed my wife.” For years his requests will fall on deaf ears. In the middle, an incredible series of wrong leads: links, later revealed to be non-existent, of the couple with the secret services; vain searches for overseas checking accounts and even the hypothesis of an alleged Chinese lover of the victim. Too bad the truth was just around the corner.

The killer was the “butler”
In the confusion of the investigations, only one fixed point: Pietro Mattei’s determination in wanting to find who killed his wife, the woman he loved more than his life, the mother of his two children. At any cost, regardless of expense. In 2007 the entrepreneur returns to the attack: “I want to know who did it”. And since new investigative techniques have been developed in the meantime, he asks that the killer’s DNA be searched on all the finds seized at the time of the crime in the villa.

The analyzes at the beginning do not give results: the prosecutor tries to dismiss the case. Mattei opposes. He is right to do so, because finally on the sheet found on the countess’s body a DNA is identified. It belongs to Manuel Winston, the former servant whom the investigators had excluded for no reason from the list of suspects in the early days of the investigation. A magistrate recovers the tapes of the interception of telephone calls made by Winston immediately after the crime and that nobody, incredibly, had ever listened to. There is one where the Filipino negotiates the sale of the stolen jewels from the countess with a fence. It is the ultimate proof. With bitterness, Mattei comments: “The mystery could be solved immediately”.

“It was me, forgive me”
Meanwhile, twenty years have passed since the tragedy. Meanwhile Winston got married and named his daughter Alberica, like his victim. Arrested, on 1 April 2011 he confesses: “I have lived with this weight for a long time, forgive me.” Processually, the story ends in a short time: the robbery is declared prescribed, the former butler is tried for murder with the abbreviated rite. On 9 October 2012 he was definitively sentenced to 16 years in prison, thanks also to the generic extenuating circumstances granted because at the time of the crime he was cleansed.

Ten years later, thanks to a pardon and early release, he is already out of prison. Pietro Mattei can no longer protest: he died last year in January. His son Manfredi is saddened and disappointed: «In Italy», he says, «the search for justice falls on those who, like my father, have broad shoulders to be able to face the courts. Injustice, on the other hand, is democratic ».