The interrogation of Alessandro Impagnatiello, on trial for the multi-aggravated murder of his girlfriend Giulia Tramontano, killed with 37 stab wounds in their home in Senago when the girl was seven months pregnant, resumes in the courtroom in Milan. The former barman is questioned by his defender, the lawyer Samanta Barbaglia, who asked him why in December 2023 he had confessed to Tramontano the betrayal with his Armani Caffè colleague, and then retracted. «Being so superficial as to confess the parallel relationship to my pregnant partner was yet another symptom that my head was going crazy – explains Impagnatiello – I’m not saying I’m crazy, I hoped to believe it, I wanted to believe I was crazy . I don’t think I’m crazy.” Faced with that confession, Impagnatiello remembers his girlfriend’s reaction: «she was negative, she was shaken that evening». And then he added: «I was a saturated vessel completely full of lies and lies and I wasn’t used to doing it continuously, it was as if that vessel had to be emptied of something. I admitted the betrayal to Giulia to empty myself of something that was eating me inside.”
The painting of the couple at home
Impagnatiello then talks about the large photo of the couple, taken a few weeks before the crime in Spain during a holiday. That photo, he explains to the lawyer Barbaglia who assists him with Giulia Gerardini, was hanging on a wall of their house in Senago: «That painting was a gift, because we particularly liked the photo, it represented a beautiful moment for me, the moment of find my way again with Giulia. I saw Giulia again.” And then he continues: «Even though in recent months I have realized that I have caused Giulia a lot of suffering that I didn’t see. I didn’t give her the attention and care I wanted to give her. But in that moment I found Giulia again. I gave her this painting, a fairly large photo of us that symbolized a beautiful and important moment for us.”
The lies to the other girl too
During that holiday in Spain, Impagnatiello claims to have never had contact with the girl with whom he had a parallel relationship: «No. I told her I was going with friends. Yet another lie. I told her I didn’t want to hear it. In fact, the first days of the holiday she wrote to me but I didn’t answer her. I had forgotten about her in those days. I didn’t look for her, I didn’t write to her, I didn’t reply to her. I managed to distance myself from her on that occasion. Then unfortunately we returned to Milan and I relapsed.” And at that point he saw her again. When Impagnatiello retraces the moments of his past life, before meeting Tramontano, and talking about his family, he burst into tears.
What doesn’t add up in the story in the courtroom: the prosecutor’s accusation
Compared to what Impagnatiello told in the courtroom, according to prosecutor Alessia Menegazzo there is no shortage of discrepancies and substantial lies. For example on the holiday in Spain, in Ibiza. Impagnatiello claims to have never heard from the other girl with whom he had a parallel relationship. From the data of the telephone records, however, something else would appear: «Are you sure about what he said? – the prosecutor asks him – Because the forensic copies tell different things. In three days we find another 500 exchanges of photos and messages.” He can only admit: “Yes, it’s true, she wrote to me, she was looking for me, I was slow in replying to her, I had distanced myself very much from her.” For example, she would have sent the girl a photo of him at the seaside: “It was a response to the ten, twenty messages she sent me, it was a tiny thing compared to our standards.”
The results of the autopsy on Giulia Tramontano
Furthermore, from the autopsy examination, unlike what he stated at the last hearing, i.e. that when he stabbed Giulia she was crouching in front of a piece of furniture in the living room looking for a plaster due to a small wound, there was no cut on her hand: «No, he says, she had cut her finger, but not seriously”, he replied to the prosecutor. Among the other inconsistencies highlighted by the Prosecutor’s Office, also that regarding “a peaceful discussion” between him and Giulia, shortly before the murder. Version given at the last hearing by the man and which clashes with the “screams of a woman” heard by a neighbor summoned as a witness.
The 37 stab wounds discovered by the news
In the first interrogations, Impagnatiello had said that he had only stabbed his girlfriend three times. The autopsy revealed that there were 37. A number that the former barman says he only realized from TV: «When I learned in prison from a television report that I had stabbed her 37 times, something that What I automatically did was mime the hand gesture 37 times. Not that there is a correct number, but it is a frightening, suffocating figure.” Why Impagnatiello lied during the interrogation, he doesn’t know either: «I can’t tell you because I said three. I could have said any number.”
«I would like to find a possibility of redemption – continues Impagnatiello – to try to give back the crumbs even if I know that nothing will change. In prison the educators told me that I can no longer go back but I can look forward, it is certainly easy to say but difficult to do. I know I can’t go back, if I could do anything to go back these months I would. I’m still working a lot on myself. I carry on my existence mechanically more than my life.”
«For me today is as if it were the last hearing on May 27th. May 27th is a very important, symbolic date.” The reference is to the day of the murder which occurred in 2023 in the couple’s home. «I don’t know what my future will be, my existence. I only know that the purpose of my life today, my new life, is to do something, anything” even if “it won’t make me go back” or get “Giulia and the baby back. I would do anything to make up for it” and added that the murder is part of a “single slice of my past so distant from what I was. It was as if I had a person in front of me who had my name and my body.”
