“From time to time my parents would ask me if there was something wrong because they saw me silent, but I would say that everything was fine.” The speaker is Riccardo, the 17-year-old who killed his father, mother and 12-year-old brother in their home in Paderno Dugnano, in the Milan area, on the night of Saturday 31 August to Sunday 1 September. The statements made to the preliminary investigation judge, contained in the documents of the order validating the preventive detention in prison, speak of a boy prey to his nightmares, who was hiding there – it is not clear for how long or with what clarity – the murderous plan. For some years, it emerges, Riccardo had begun to “feel like a stranger” and to have developed “the idea of living longer than normal people, also to know the future of humanity”. Yet, he himself admits, even his last summer holidays, with family and friends, were “serene”. So much so that the first weekend after my return, after a party evening in the house, everything happened quickly.
Flashback to a tragedy
So what happened that night, at the end of August? The 17-year-old tells it like this: “It was the night of the party that I thought of doing it, I hadn't yet come up with this plan, but I still thought of using the knife because it was the only weapon I had at home.” That night, as we know, the family had celebrated the father's birthday. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, Riccardo turned into a killer. “When they fell asleep, I went downstairs, took a black t-shirt and divided it in two to hold the knife, because I intended to clean the knife so that the others would blame him.” Then the 17-year-old went back upstairs, heading to the room of his first intended victim, his 12-year-old brother. Stabbed dozens of times in his sleep. It was then that the parents woke up with a start, shocked by the child's screams. But, Riccardo now claims before the magistrates, they did not immediately rush to the room of the massacre. It was he who arrived first in theirs. It is not known whether he planned to move on to the second phase of his plan. The fact is, he says, that the parents woke up, “they turned on the light and I was in front of them with the knife in my hand”. At that point, “they told me to stay calm, they talked to me, asking me what had happened and why I had the weapon in my hand. Then they entered the room with me and there I attacked them.” After finally stabbing the three members of her immediate family, Riccardo says she closed her eyes, “perhaps out of pity”.
“I wanted to erase my whole life from before”
The motive for the massacre remains shrouded in the troubled thoughts that the boy carried inside him. And which gradually emerge during the interrogations. “I really wanted to erase my whole life from before,” he said today. However, “if I had thought about it more, I would never have done it, because it is an absurd thing,” he added shortly after with a cry of remorse. The 17-year-old is also said to have shared similar thoughts with his maternal grandfather, who in recent days listened to his outbursts despite the atrocities committed. Speaking to prosecutors, the man said he had intercepted the young man's intention to “separate from his parents.” The grandfather spoke to Riccardo at the Beccaria juvenile prison. When he asked his nephew why he had also attacked his 12-year-old brother, the boy replied: “I couldn't have abandoned him.”
The thought of wars and isolation
Where does Riccardo's malaise come from? It's hard to say, but it has certainly been going on for some time, even if it has perhaps never been explored in depth. “I've been feeling bad since this summer, but already in previous years I felt detached from others. Maybe the debt in mathematics had an influence,” says Riccardo. “I perceived others as less intelligent – the boy continues – and often I didn't feel comfortable with certain reasoning or I believed that they were busy and worried about useless things.” The documents also reveal that the boy had initially thought of solving his malaise by leaving home, even speculating on a departure for Ukraine. But then he changed his mind. In an interview with experts, the 17-year-old said that he often thought about wars and was moved by this simple thought, while “I haven't seen this in my friends and family.”
Social competition and that crushed unease inside
In the reports, attached to the documents, of the psychologists who are dealing with his case, it is emphasized that the boy speaks of a “climate of competition” that existed in the family, but also in sport and more generally in society, a “relational climate perceived as critical and competitive”. A malaise always hidden, repressed however. In the family, Riccardo would have said during conversations: “if there was an excuse to discuss, I tried not to do it”: he does not remember any episode of conflict with the members of his family. The thought of wars and the sorrows of the world, yes, shook him. During the summer, he read books on the Second World War, he told the psychologists again and thought, even when he heard the members of his family complain about “material things, that others suffered greater suffering”. Documents, those of the precautionary police custody, which seem overall to confirm that the triple murder was premeditated.
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