Alberto Arrighi, 40, allegedly murdered Giacomo Brambilla in the back of his gun shop in the town of Como in northern Italy during an argument over a 100,000 euro debt.
He then reportedly cut off his victim's head and tried to incinerate it in a pizza oven at a pizzeria owned by his father-in-law.
That night he loaded the headless body into his car and drove 150 kilometres away from Como, dumping the corpse in a river near the town of Domodossola, in the Piedmont region, near the border with Switzerland.
The alarm was raised by the victim's girlfriend when he failed to return home from his meeting with Arrighi on Monday.
She called the police who went to the gun shop and found blood stains on the floor and evidence that there had been an attempt to clean it off with bleach.
Arrighi, who was arrested, was reportedly struggling to pay back money he had borrowed from Mr Brambilla, a businessman who owned several petrol stations in the Como area.
"The whole thing was an act of momentary madness, the result of some sort of financial dispute between the two men," said a lawyer acting for Arrighi.
Corriere della Sera said the crime was a "tale of blood and money" reminiscent of an Edgar Allan Poe horror story.
The Italian language video of a television news report makes something clear that I thought was ambiguous in the Telegraph report. It was the killer who owned the gun shop, not the victim. It's referred to as "famous" or "historical," they say "una storica armeria." They also say the debt was 200,000 euros.
What's your opinion? What do you think he used to behead Brambilla? If he'd been to Las Vegas recently he might have picked up one of these nifty items. But as other have mentioned, just about anything will do if you're determined enough. But why do you think he did it? If it's to disguise the identity of the victim, you have to take the hands too, don't you?
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" If it's to disguise the identity of the victim, you have to take the hands too, don't you?"
ReplyDeleteDoes the Italian government maintain a database of everybody's fingerprints?
knowing the extent of the mafia clans in Italy, I am sure it will reported that the killing was mafia related.
ReplyDeleteTo answer Kaveman's question, the only finger prints the Italian government keep track of are immigrants and foriegners living in the country.
Given today's record keeping and forensic sciences it is probably possible to determine the identity of someone by a host of things other than fingerprints. If the victim was not a transient or orphan chances are that medical records, including x-rays are available. The important thing is that someone knows that the person is missing and that the body is found in some reasonable period of time before soft tissue and even skeletal remains are scattered.
ReplyDeleteMikeb:
Do you know anything about how or why the debt was incurred? Was it anything to do with weapons illegalities?
democommie, I just read a report of the court appearance which gave a reconstruction of the crime. It seems these two guys were involved in a lot more than a couple gas stations and a gun shop. They'd had business between them in cash and checks that amounted to hundreds of thousands of euros. The dead guy, according to the killer, threatened to foreclose on a house that the shooter's wife and daughters lived in. When he said he didn't give a shit about them Arrighi lost it, shot him twice, bashed his face in several times with the but of his gun, drew the .45 that Brambilla carried with him and used it to deliver the coup de grace, a shot to the forehead.
ReplyDeleteIn the States he'd be looking at like for sure. In Italy, well we'll see.