Filippo Turetta, the 22-year-old Italian student who admitted to stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend Giulia Cecchettin last year, has been sentenced to life in jail.
The murder case gripped Italy and sparked a heated debate on the issue of violence against women.
Speaking to reporters after the sentence was read out in a Venice court, Giulia’s father Gino Cecchettin said: “Nobody is giving me Giulia back so I am neither more relieved nor more sad than I was yesterday or than I will be tomorrow.”
He added that the battle against gender violence was one “we’ll have to fight together as a society… we look ahead and hope another dad won’t find himself at my place”.
Over the last year a huge amount of detail about the killing has emerged, forming a picture of an increasingly anguished young woman harassed by her possessive ex-boyfriend who refused to accept the end of their relationship.
The case, which captivated Italians, has thrust the concepts of femicide, patriarchy and male violence into the headlines.
On 11 November 2023 Mr Turetta picked up his fellow university student and ex-girlfriend Ms Cecchettin, a 22-year-old biomedical engineering student from the Venice province, to take her shopping for an outfit for her upcoming graduation.
Later that evening, he stabbed her more than 70 times, and left the student’s body at the bottom of a ditch, wrapped in plastic bags.
Then, he disappeared. For a week, Italians followed the search for the couple with bated breath. The discovery of Ms Cecchettin’s body on 18 November was met with an unprecedented outpouring of grief. The next day, Mr Turetta was arrested in Germany. He readily admitted to killing Ms Cecchettin and was extradited to Italy.
To raise awareness of the signs of controlling relationships, Ms Cecchettin’s family recently shared a list she wrote a few months before her death, titled “15 reasons I had to break up with him”.
In it, Ms Cecchettin said Mr Turetta insisted she had a “duty” to help him study, complained if she sent him fewer emoji hearts than usual, didn’t want her to go out with friends and needed her to text him all the time.
“They were the typical signs of possessiveness,” Giulia’s father Gino told the BBC. “He would deny her her own space, or demand to always be included. He always needed to know everything she said to her friends or even her therapist.”
“We realised later that she thought she was the cause of his pain, that she felt responsible for it,” he said.
In an 80-page statement written from jail in childlike handwriting, Mr Turetta said since Ms Cecchettin broke up with him he spent every day hoping to get back with her. “I didn’t feel like I could accept any other outcome,” he wrote.
In his police interrogation Mr Turetta confirmed that, on the night he killed her, Ms Cecchettin had just told him he was too dependent and needy.
“I shouted that it wasn’t fair, that I needed her,” Mr Turetta said, adding that he killed her after getting “very angry” when she tried to get out of the car.
“I was selfish and it’s only now I realise it,” he wrote. “I didn’t think about how incredibly unfair that was to her and to the promising and wonderful life she had ahead of her.”
Mr Turetta’s lawyer Giovanni Caruso has argued that his client should be spared an “inhuman and degrading” life sentence and pushed back against allegations that the killing had been premeditated.
“He is not Pablo Escobar,” Mr Caruso said – a line of defence Giulia’s father told the BBC made him feel “violated all over again”.
Stories of femicide routinely top the news agenda in Italy, but Giulia Cecchettin’s story attracted an unusual amount of attention from the start. The week-long search for the young couple gripped people; the revelation that Ms Cecchettin had been killed just days before her graduation moved them. More than 10,000 attended her funeral.
But it was the tearful and furious interview given by Giulia’s sister Elena, in which she said that Filippo Turetta was not a “monster” but “the healthy son of a patriarchal society” which sparked a heated debate on male violence and gender roles in modern Italy.
Elena’s words reverberated. Suddenly, the patriarchy – a concept thought by many as arcane or irrelevant – was discussed widely.
“If you’re a man you’re part of a system that teaches you that you are worth more than women,” Mr Cecchettin told the BBC.
“It means that if you’re in a relationship everything needs to go through you… and so a patriarch can’t be told: ‘I don’t love you anymore’, because it goes against his sense of ownership.”
