“I wanted to believe I was crazy, but I don’t think I am.” Yet Alessandro Impagnatiello, on trial for the murder of his girlfriend Giulia Tramontano, seven months pregnant, will be subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. This was established by the Assize Court of Milan, chaired by Antonella Bertoja, at the end of today’s hearing, after the testimony of the defense consultants and those of the civil party. The former claim that the former barman is suffering from a “paranoid personality disorder”the latter are of the opposite opinion.
Giulia’s mother, Loredana Femiano, was not in the courtroom. In the evening, you entrusted it to Tg1 a letter. “Every trial hearing for me is a darker day than the others: I hear about her, about her baby, about how much she wanted it, about how much she was a lioness to face everything alone” are her words. In the morning, a post on Instagram: “Now it’s time for justice to be done and justice in this case is an exemplary punishment.”
The psychiatric assessment will have to evaluate the existence of the personological disorder
The assessment ordered by the judges will have to evaluate the existence of the personality disorder in the 31-year-old, as the defense consultancy carried out by the lawyers Samanta Barbaglia and Giulia Geradini would have ascertained. If it is also found by the expert appointed by the court on June 27th could lead to recognition of a generic mitigating circumstance. It is more unlikely that a partial or total mental defect will be recognized which affects the possible capacity of understanding and will at the time of the crime.
The judges’ choice comes ‘point blank’: a few seconds before closing the hearing which began with the interrogation of the accused and ended with the family consultants of victim -the psychiatrists Diana Galletta and Salvatore De Feo – who they claimed that “There is no trace of disorder” in the former barman’s personality. None of the consultants (defense and civil party) explored the issue of the capacity of understanding and will at the time of the facts, which instead will have to be established by the expert opinion.
“There is a tendency to psychiatrize behaviors, especially when a crime is heinous. Among non-pathological human experiences there are also reactions linked to emotions, passions, revenge, envy that have nothing to do with it” with mental health. It is “the banality of evil”, claimed the psychiatrist Galletta.
Opposite position to that of the defense consultants.
The unmasking by the two women with whom he had as many parallel relationships, he provoked Alessandro Impagnatiello “a real psychotraumaan extremely powerful narcissistic wound. He found himself exposed compared to this whole plan that he had worked on”, he said in the classroom psychiatrist Raniero Rossetto, in charge of defense consultancy on the former barman on trial, of which he ascertained “important structural pathological nuclei (narcissistic, obsessive, paranoid)”.
“In the unmasking suffered by the two women, Giulia becomes the cause of all her ills – added the expert – I think he after the revelation has lost contact with reality, he went home and murdered Giulia with 37 stab wounds.”
“A chess player in lucid delirium”
“In the first interview he represented the image of the chessboard to me – said the defense consultant -. He felt like the chess player he had to keep under control all the movements of the board and the he did with lies“. Compared “to all this and above all to the unmasking, he has lost a bit of his sense of reality. I’m not talking about ability or inability to understand and want, because we are not in the expert field. But this happened. It is the so-called ‘lucid delirium’: even those who are delirious can be lucid“.
Even the administration of poison to the victim “can certainly be part of a lucid criminal plan”. 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.
According to the psychiatrist, Impagnatiello, however, would not have “planned to eliminate Giulia” and his “criminal plan” would not have included “a post-murder defense”. With the poison, which however the accused never spoke about with the consultants, “he aimed to suppress the fetus, which represented a variable in his chessboard, not so much for economic reasons but for reasons of his mental state. The thing that at a certain point she couldn’t control it was actually the unborn child“.
The psychologist Silvana Branciforti, who administered the counseling tests to him, spoke of “a paranoid personality disorder” and with “an obsessive part”.
For his part, the accused claimed to have completely lost contact with reality.
“Me I felt like I was running away from that monster that had just come out in me”, replied Alessia Menegazzo to the prosecutor who asked him why, from the following minutes and on Sunday, he had simulated that Tramontano was still alive by sending messages from his cell phone. “I was trying to find an escape route but it wasn’t there,” the 31-year-old replied. The movements I made in the following days, including Giulia’s body, were disorganized and confusing, without logic. I was looking for an escape route that I knew wouldn’t exist except for a day, two days, a week.”
