Noisy Neighbors Get What’s Coming to Them
Couple who murdered neighbours shock Italy
· Three women and boy, 2, die in noise dispute
· Slaughter ‘had been planned for months’
Tom Kington in Rome
Saturday January 13, 2007
The Guardian
Italians were aghast yesterday when it emerged that a grisly murder that has gripped the country was perpetrated by an unremarkable middle-aged couple, who confessed to slaughtering four neighbours over a noise dispute.
Olindo Romano and his wife Rosa Bazzi seemed to share the sense of national shock when they were interviewed on TV before Christmas about the murder of their upstairs neighbours.
They echoed the suspicion of many Italians that their neighbour, Raffaella Castagna, 30, her two-year-old son, her mother, and a third woman had their throats cut on December 11 by Castagna’s drug-dealing Tunisian husband.
But now, in a twist that has gripped Italy and monopolised front pages, the couple have confessed to the crime after blood traces were found in their car, telling magistrates that they were angry about the noise made by Castagna and husband, Azouz Marzouk.
“We just could not stand them anymore,” Bazzi, a petite housemaid obsessed with cleanliness, told investigators as she confessed to killing the two-year-old with a knife. “He was always screaming, my head was exploding,” she said, according to media reports.
In a well-prepared murder, apparently planned over months by Bazzi, the pair rang Castagna’s doorbell at 8pm, wearing gloves and armed with knives. Castagna was stabbed in the face by Romano, 43, as she opened the door. In all, she was stabbed 12 times.
Romano then stabbed Castagna’s mother, Paola Galli, while Bazzi moved to silence two-year-old Youssef. In her full and detailed confession she told investigators that she cut the boy’s throat.
The couple’s well-laid plans then went awry. As they set fire to the apartment to destroy the evidence a neighbour, Valeria Cherubini, arrived in the hall outside the front door, where she was also stabbed to death.
Coming to her aid, Cherubini’s husband, Mario Frigerio, was stabbed and left for dead, but survived and was able to describe some of the mayhem to police.
But the key evidence that trapped the couple was the trace of Mr Frigerio’s blood, left in Romano’s car as he and his wife drove rapidly from the scene of the crime to a nearby McDonald’s, to get a receipt they hoped would provide an alibi.
According to investigators who had bugged their home after the murders, Romano and Bazzi were heard to say to each other: “See how peaceful it is now? We can finally sleep well.”
Prosecutors in the nearby town of Como said that they would seek to try the couple for premeditated murder, while the couple’s lawyer said a psychiatric examination would be carried out.
Bazzi, 43, was unable to have children, which Italian media have suggested as a possible cause of her anger with the sound of the child’s crying.
Earlier this week, before their arrest, Bazzi and Romano were seen on TV shooing reporters away when suspicions mounted against them, insisting they “had nothing to do with it”.
Italian politicians and newspapers initially suspected Castagna’s husband after it was discovered that he had just been released from prison for drug dealing. The nature of the murders also led to theories of a drug-related vendetta.
A media uproar about lax immigration and crime subsided when Mr Marzouk was found to be in Tunisia on December 11. Yesterday he demanded a public apology from politicians belonging to the rightwing Northern League and National Alliance parties.
“They called me a monster on the front pages, and now no one is prepared to apologise,” he said, adding that he did not share the forgiveness expressed by Castagna’s father, Carlo. “He did not see the state of the bodies,” he said.
Romano and Bazzi are now being held in isolation in Como jail after other prisoners threatened to kill them.
Castagna and Youssef are due to buried in Tunisia today.
ed says:
Dolphin ‘dying of broken heart’ after keeper is stabbed to death
By Peter Popham in Rome
The Independent
20 February 2007
A rare grampus dolphin, rescued 18 months ago after it swam into an Italian port, seems to be dying of a broken heart after the woman who reared it like her own child was murdered.
Tamara Monti, 37, the creature’s keeper, was stabbed to death two weeks ago by the man who lived in the flat above her.
Police found an unemployed man, Alessandro Doto, 35, standing in the street outside the block where they lived, frozen like a dummy with a blood-spattered knife in his hand.
He told them Ms Monti’s two dogs barked all day and it drove him mad.
The issue had been simmering between them for months. Ms Monti and her partner had found a new place to live with their cat and dogs and were due to move the next day.
Ms Monti was from the Lake Como region, hundreds of miles north-west of Riccione, a resort on the Adriatic coast just south of Rimini, but Riccione had taken her to its heart. The town was in mourning on hearing of her death. But no one missed her like Mary G.
The grampus dolphin was a calf in June 2005 when she and her mother blundered into the port of Ancona, south of Riccione, and ran aground. They were rescued and brought to hospital, but Mary G’s mother died three days later. After two months the dolphin had recovered sufficiently to be brought to Oltremare Park in Riccione, a seaside theme park, where she was given a pool of sea water and the constant attendance of experts. They bottle-fed her a mixture of herring, vitamins and mineral salts, rocked her like a baby and gave her swimming lessons. But only one of the keepers talked to her as if she were her own child, and that was Ms Monti.
As Mary G grew, she became the park’s big attraction. Her fame spread through Italy, via websites, television programmes and blogs. Visitors flocked to Riccione to see her.
“We wanted to return her to the open sea,” said Sauro Pari, head of the organisation that runs the park, “but international experts advised against it. They told us she would not survive.”
Instead the grampus dolphin with the comical rounded forehead and cartoon-like grin, and her surrogate mother, remained together – for life, or so it appeared.
But now Mary G is dying. The word began to spread within days of Ms Monti’s murder, through the blogs and websites devoted to her. One message read: “Since Tamara’s death, Mary is unwell. Let’s help her.” She would either refuse her diet of milk and squid, or eat it then spew it out.
Mary G’s weight plummeted from 210kg to 160kg in a couple of weeks. As happened 18 months ago, she is being attended by specialist vets, but has so far failed to respond to treatment.
At the theme park, dolphin experts are going out of their way to deny any firm connection between the keeper’s murder and the dolphin’s sickness. They say there is a simple explanation for her rejection of food: an intestinal parasite which she could have acquired at any time.
“From a strictly scientific point of view we absolutely cannot assert that the two facts are connected,” Mr Pari said. “But there is no doubt that her grief for the death of Tamara is great. We are very worried about what will become of her.”
February 20th, 2007 at 11:14 am