Murder in Verona, Fernanda Paoletti died: a Palermo man convicted
He killed the lover strangling her with a rope and stage a suicide, only because she wanted to live their relationship in the light and in a more stable way. For Pietro Di Salvo, a 75-year-old from Palermo, who got rid of the woman, Fernanda Paoletti, 77, on 4 June 2018 in Verona, now the sentence for murder has become final: he will have to serve 14 years in prison, as they had been inflicted with the abbreviation by the gup of Verona and then confirmed by the Court of Appeal of Venice.
The seventh section of the Supreme Court, chaired by Enrico Giuseppe Sandrini, in fact declared inadmissible the appeal of the accused, who had already been granted the generic extenuating circumstances and who asked to obtain a further penalty discount. Di Salvo will also have to save € 3,000 at the Cassa delle Finende.
Di Salvo, married and father of two children, had entered into a clandestine relationship with Fernanda Paoletti (in the picture). Everything would go smoothly until the woman, in May 2018, presented the accused with a choice: she wanted to live that relationship with serenity and not in secret. A request didn’t have anything to comply with.
Thus, as he himself had later confessed, on 4 June 2018, he had met the victim as always in his home in Verona. When Fernanda Paoletti had resumed the discussion on their relationship and would have also insulted him, Di Salvo had decided to kill her, to get rid of the problem forever. He had strangled her with a green rope and then tied her to a radiator, to make her believe she was suicide. Finally he walked away, taking away the victim’s cell phone as well.
To discover the woman’s body was the son, with whom that same day he had an appointment. She didn’t show up and when he passed under her house she noticed that the car was there. This had made him suspicious. And then the mother did not answer the phone and, above all, did not open the door. The son had then asked one of the keys to the apartment and, together with her, he was finding, now lifeless, tied by the neck with a green cord to a radiator.
The flying squad had immediately ruled out the hypothesis of a suicide: the rope had been in a point too low for death and a problem the victim had his victims in the arms to tie a knot in that position. Instead, it was thought of a murder and a clumsy attempt to disguise it. The house was then in order and did not appear to be anything, so the hypothesis of a robbery that ended badly was also ruled out.
A friend of Fernanda Paoletti had finally told the police that the woman had a secret relationship with a married man, Di Salvo, and that the two used to meet on Monday morning. Traces of DNA were then found compatible with those of the accused on the rope.
initially the man had denied everything, starting with the relationship with the victim, but then he had confessed. He was sentenced from the first instance to 14 years, with the granting of generic extenuating circumstances. But before the Supreme Court he argued that precisely because of the mitigation he had the right to an even lower sentence. Hypothesis that the judges rejected, also because Di Salvo “went to the appointment with the victim equipped with a rope with which he had strangled her, took advantage of the trust of the woman who presented herself to him in conditions of weak defense, then acted coldly and simulated suicide by also stealing the cell phone that allowed them to reconstruct their previous relationship “, as stated in the sentence.