The 74-year-old Giuseppe Santoleri, who had been ill for some time, had asked to be transferred to an alternative facility to prison but his requests had not been accepted and he was now waiting for a new decision from the judges of the Surveillance Court. “He had announced that he would not wait for the hearing on July 18” revealed the lawyer.
“Giuseppe Santoleri was killed by the Italian State, by the lengthy proceedings and by the negligence and inadequacy of the prison institution”, this is how the lawyer of the man, definitively convicted for the murder of his ex-wife Renata Rapposelli, reacted to the news that the 74-year-old he took his own life in prison. Santoleri committed suicide in the Castrogno prison in Teramo where he was serving an 18-year prison sentence for complicity in voluntary homicide.
The 74-year-old, who has been ill for some time, he had asked to be transferred to an alternative facility to prison but his requests had not been accepted and he was now waiting for a new decision from the judges of the Surveillance Court. He had to wait until July, after yet another postponement of the hearing, but Santoleri couldn’t resist and took his own life in prison. From initial information, he strangled himself with the help of the structure that surrounded his bed in the ‘protected’ area of the Teramo prison in Castrogno.
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“I feel very heartbroken and disappointed, as a woman and as a lawyer, all my attempts to help Giuseppe proved useless” declared his lawyer Federica Di Nicola who had presented a new request for his release for transfer to a facility in the province of Chieti. Here the lawyer hoped that he could be treated but “Giuseppe didn’t have the strength to wait”.
The 74-year-old appears to have already been in a very bad psychophysical state. “My client mi had announced that he would not wait for the hearing on 18 July, but I had tried to comfort and reassure him, promising him that it would be the last postponement” said the lawyer, recalling that she had presented a request for him on January 18th at the Surveillance Court of L’Aquila but there had been three postponements.
“His health conditions appeared to be incompatible with prison detention but the Surveillance Court, regardless of Santoleri’s precarious health conditions, ordered three postponements of hearing, April 1st, June 6th and July 18th” the lawyer reconstructed. Now the Teramo Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the suicide in his cell and ordered an autopsy.
Giuseppe Santoleri he was sentenced at first instance in 2020 to 24 years in prison, a sentence later reduced to 18 years. According to the judges, the man, together with his son Simone, had killed and then hidden the body of his ex-wife, the painter Renata Rapposelli. The crime took place in 2017 in the Santoleri house in Abruzzo, in Giulianova (Teramo), but the body of the 64-year-old woman was found in the Marche region, in the Chienti river in Tolentino.
