Novi Ligure murder

Last updated January 28, 2025

The Novi Ligure murder was a double murder that took place on the evening of 21 February 2001 in Novi Ligure, Piedmont, Italy.

Incident

Susanna Cassini, a 41-year-old accountant, and her 11-year-old son Gianluca were both stabbed (in total 97 times) in their home while the husband and father, Francesco De Nardo, a 45-year-old manager at the Pernigotti chocolate factory, was playing football with some friends.^[1] Had he been home at the time, Francesco would also have died, as the teenage killers had planned to murder him as well.^[2]

The daughter of the family, 16-year-old Erika De Nardo, originally claimed that the murder was committed by foreign workers in an attempted robbery. Because of her claims, a young Albanian man was detained for a short time. However, the accounts of the incident given by Erika and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Mauro "Omar" Favaro, were full of contradictions. The investigators found that no door or window in the house showed signs of having been forced open and that no valuables had been taken from the house. Neighbours also reported that the De Nardo family's two guard dogs had not barked that evening and that no unusual noise and/or movement had been heard outside the house. In addition, the weapons belonged to the family, as two knives were part of the kitchen set; it therefore seemed unlikely that a robbery could be the motive for such ferocity: this made Erika's version of events lose consistency.

The suspicions therefore fell on the young De Nardo and soon on Omar, who became a suspect following the testimony given by a passer-by who, on the evening of the crime, had seen him walking with bloodied trousers. In the evening hours of 22 February, De Nardo and Omar were summoned, officially as persons informed about the facts, and left alone for some time in an antichamber, where hidden bugs and cameras were installed. Their conversation made their guilt clear.

Both were subsequently tried for the murders and convicted. They were sentenced to 16 and 14 years in prison.^[3]

Initial response

In response to the claim of the daughter that immigrants had murdered her brother and mother, newspapers demanded a crackdown on illegal immigrants, and the Northern League (Lega Nord) held anti-immigrant demonstrations.

Following early media reports on the murders, members of the public created a website in support of the daughter. The website was later shut down by the Italian justice ministry.

Aftermath

Italian politicians reflected uncomfortably on the anti-immigrant frenzy the case had generated. Piero Fassino, then Minister of Justice, declared: "I believe that someone should beg the pardon of immigrants. The degree of incivility we have seen in this country in the last 48 hours should make us all reflect."

Francesco De Nardo still resides in the house where his wife and son were killed and made weekly phone calls to his daughter in prison. Susanna Cassini's mother stated that she has forgiven her granddaughter and hopes to see her again and help her as much as possible.

The daughter was released from prison in December 2011. Her accomplice was released in October 2010.

Related Research Articles

The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army was a small, American militant far-left organization active between 1973 and 1975; it claimed to be a vanguard movement. The FBI and wider American law enforcement considered the SLA to be the first terrorist organization to rise from the American left. Six members died in a May 1974 shootout with police in Los Angeles. The three surviving fugitives recruited new members, but nearly all of them were apprehended in 1975 and prosecuted.

The Moors murders were a series of child killings committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in and around Manchester, England, between July 1963 and October 1965. The victims were five children—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—aged between 10 and 17, at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The bodies of two of the victims were discovered in 1965, in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. Bennett's body is also thought to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.

The Bridgewater Four are four men who were tried and found guilty of killing 13-year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, who was shot in the head at close range near Stourbridge, England, in 1978. In February 1997, after almost two decades of imprisonment, their convictions were overturned and the three surviving defendants were released; the fourth defendant had died in prison two years into his sentence. Bridgewater's murder remains unsolved.

Matricide is the act of killing one's own mother.

Joseph Theodore Leslie "Squizzy" Taylor was an Australian gangster from Melbourne. He appeared repeatedly and sometimes prominently in Melbourne news media because of suspicions, formal accusations and some convictions related to a 1919 gang war, to his absconding from bail and hiding from the police in 1921–22, and to his involvement in a robbery where a bank manager was murdered in 1923.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Harris</span> SLA member (born 1947)

Emily Harris was, along with her husband William Harris, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an American left-wing terrorist group involved in murder, kidnapping, and bank robberies. In the 1970s, she was convicted of kidnapping Patty Hearst.

Marlene Lehnberg was a South African woman who was more commonly known as The Scissor Murderess. She was 18 years old in 1974 when she hired Marthinus Choegoe to stab Susanna Magdalena van der Linde, the wife of Lehnberg's 47-year-old lover Christiaan van der Linde, to death with a pair of scissors. At age 19, she was then the youngest woman to be convicted of murder in South Africa. Both Lehnberg and Marthinus Choegoe were condemned to death. However, both sentences were reduced to prison terms. Lehnberg served 11 years of a 20-year sentence in Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town. Choegoe's sentence was reduced to 15 years.

Leonard Melvin Shockley was a juvenile executed in the United States on April 10, 1959, for a murder committed when he was under the age of 18. Shockley, a black male, was executed in Maryland in a gas chamber for the murder of shopkeeper Sarah Hearne on January 16, 1958. Shockley was involved in the robbery of a small shop in Dorchester County, Maryland. He was accompanied by his older brother, 23-year-old Harold Edward Shockley. Hearne was found stabbed several times in the back and breast, and her throat had been cut. The young culprits were identified by an eyewitness. Leonard was 17 years of age at the time of his execution, making him the last instance of a person being executed while still a juvenile in America. His brother received life in prison and was eventually released.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dnepropetrovsk maniacs</span> Ukrainian serial killers

The Dnepropetrovsk maniacs are Ukrainian serial killers responsible for a string of murders in Dnepropetrovsk in June and July 2007. The case gained worldwide notoriety after the killers made video recordings of some of the murders, with one of the videos leaking to the Internet. Two 19‑year-olds, Viktor Sayenko, and Igor Suprunyuk, were arrested and charged with 21 murders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monster of Florence</span> Serial killer in Italy – 1968 to 1985

The Monster of Florence is the name commonly used by the Italian media for a non-definitively identified serial killer active within the Metropolitan City of Florence between 1968 and 1985. The Monster murdered sixteen victims, usually young couples secluded in search of intimacy, in wooded areas during new moons. Several connected persons have been convicted for involvement in the murders, yet the exact sequence of events, the identity of the main actor and the motives remain unclear.

Prima Linea was an Italian Marxist–Leninist terrorist group, active in the country from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.

Several honor killings have been documented in the United States. As of 2012, there is no central agency that collects data across all jurisdictions in regards to honor violence in the United States. There is reluctance among some organizations to label events as honor killings to avoid stigmatizing Muslim and Arab cultures.

The Rizzuto crime family is an Italian-Canadian organized crime family based in Montreal, Quebec, whose activity covers most of southern Quebec and Ontario. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States considers the family a faction of the Bonanno crime family of New York City, while Canadian and most other international law enforcement agencies recognize it as an independent family. The Rizzuto family is sometimes referred to as the Sixth Family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Meredith Kercher</span> 2007 murder in Perugia, Italy

Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher was a British student on exchange from the University of Leeds who was murdered at the age of 21 in Perugia, Italy. Kercher was found dead on the floor of her room. By the time the bloodstained fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, an Ivorian migrant, police had charged Kercher's American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The subsequent prosecutions of Knox and Sollecito received international publicity, with forensic experts and jurists taking a critical view of the evidence supporting the initial guilty verdicts.

The Omar Raddad Affair was a highly publicised criminal trial in Mougins, France. After the murder of wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal in 1991, her gardener Omar Raddad, an illiterate immigrant from Morocco, was arrested. Raddad was convicted in 1994 and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He has maintained his innocence, and received a partial pardon from French President Jacques Chirac in 1996 at the request of Moroccan King Hassan II, which reduced his sentence to four years and eight months. He was released from prison in 1998, and in 2021 received permission to reopen the case after the discovery of new DNA evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murders of Vincenzo Solano and Mercedes Ibáñez</span> 2015 double-murder in Italy

On 30 August 2015, married couple Vincenzo Solano and Mercedes Ibáñez were found killed at their house in Palagonia, Sicily. An 18-year-old Ivorian illegal immigrant was arrested on suspicion of their murder; the authorities stated that they suspected that accomplices, likely to be Italian nationals, remained at large. The identity of the perpetrator as an asylum seeker added to the debate on immigration to Italy. The perpetrator, then-18-year old Mamadou Kamara was sentenced to life in prison.

The Gage Park stabbings refers to the murders of six members of the Martinez family in 2016 in the Gage Park neighborhood of Chicago in the US.

Susanna Maria Feldmann was a 14-year-old German girl who was raped and killed on the night of 22 May 2018 in Wiesbaden. Ali Bashar Ahmad Zebari, a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Iraqi Kurdistan, confessed to the murder and was found guilty in July 2019 at a trial in Landgericht Wiesbaden.

The Circeo massacre was a rape and murder case that occurred in the Italian town of San Felice Circeo, in the Province of Latina in the Lazio region, between September 29 and 30, 1975. The case involved three men who kidnapped and raped two young women, one of whom died.

Bartolomeo Gagliano, known as The Valentine's Day Monster, was an Italian serial killer who murdered two transvestite prostitutes after escaping from prison, where he was serving time for a murder conviction.

References

↑ Public bewildered by 'normal' family murderers The Irish Times Retrieved 30 September 2020.
↑ Murder wrongfoots the Italian nation The Guardian Retrieved 30 September 2020.
↑ Teen suffocates mum News24 Retrieved 30 September 2020.