“The murder was motivated by an irresistible desire for revenge, one of the most unreasonable, yet imperative, feelings.” This is how the Bologna Assize Court justified the life sentence of Giovanni Padovani, in the trial for the murder of Alessandra Matteuzzi. The 57-year-old man was killed on August 23, 2022 under his home during an attack of unprecedented violence, using hammers, kicks, fists, and even the use of an iron bench. The judges recognized the aggravating circumstances of premeditation, frivolous motives, emotional bond and criminal harassment. “It is inappropriate,” we now read in the reasons for the sentence, “to attribute the murder to unhealthy jealousy towards the accused, which, on the contrary, constituted the motive for the crime of acts of persecution”. There is no doubt, according to the judges, that the man premeditated the murder: both in its preparation and in its consequences. No “impulse movement”, we read, but a “mature” decision and “progressively anchored in the intentions of the assassin” since June and July of the same year, which was “even announced in the confidences made to the third parties and to the mother in the cell phone notes, then implemented according to a predetermined plan, including the choice of the weapon to use and the place to strike. Until the attack itself, “driven by an irresistible force, generated by a feeling of resentment and a feeling of frustration, to return to Bologna to assassinate him.”
Psychiatric expertise
Another step is fundamental in determining the sentence, namely the psychological evaluation of the accused. According to the judges, he had planned the murder with extreme lucidity, and any attempt, during the trial, to hide his true intentions was a “set-up”. During interrogation in the courtroom, Padovani was found capable of understanding and will through a psychiatric evaluation. “The behavioral oddities of the accused,” writes the Court, “sometimes even crudely underlined, often followed by conscious and responsible positions, particularly in the decisive moments of the trial, the results of the tests, with erroneous answers even to the most questions banal and finally the affirmation of a late appearance of psychotic symptoms, provide clues which only seem to combine with each other in the perspective of an intentional staging on the part of the accused. examined, the former footballer would also have simulated psychotic symptoms in certain cases. A staging, according to the Court, reiterated during the spontaneous declarations of February 12, when the sentence was pronounced and the young man of 28 said: “I have heard the word life imprisonment, if you believe that everything that was done in the past The months preceding the crime are normal things and not abnormal on the part of a person who, from anyway, suffered from troubles and suffers from troubles. If you think that what happened, that a man killing a woman with such ferocity is normal, you need to put your hands in your hair and pull it really hard.”
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