In recent days, Filippo Turetta spoke for the first time during the trial in which he is accused of the femicide of Giulia Cecchettin. After many months, in which we only saw him in photos, here he is in the flesh before our eyes. Apparently a boy like many others, to the point that many find it hard to believe that he could have been guilty of such a heinous crime.
There are also those who go so far as to deny reality, inventing an absurd conspiracy according to which Turetta doesn’t really exist, or is just a weapon of mass distraction, or even the vehicle of political propaganda. None of this: Filippo Turetta is a boy like many others, and this is rationally difficult to accept, because it scares us.
Turetta’s discomfort
Of course, his psychosocial discomfort has taken on such a drift that it has led him to take an extreme action, but the origin of that evil is much more common than one might think. He clarifies this himself in the approximately 80-page memorial filed with the court and already published online. In this long writing, Turetta reveals all the details of the crime, but he does more: he tells his story, from the very first years of his life, and what emerges is a profound void. A relational void, an emotional void, a passionate void.
A consuming void
In fact, Turetta portrays himself as a dull person, devoid of charisma, incapable of establishing social relationships and even devoid of any interest. In a psychological picture of this type, it is easy to hypothesize that Turetta developed a morbid emotional dependence towards one of the few people who found him interesting, namely Giulia Cecchettin. “Everything I did I did because it concerned her in some way,” writes Turetta in a passage of the memoir.
Emotional dependence
He demanded every attention from her, so much so that he even held her responsible for his own university failures (“Without your help I can’t do it”, he wrote in reference to a failed exam. And again: “If we don’t graduate together, life is over for both”). In the time he didn’t spend with Giulia Cecchettin, Turetta went back to being that void from which he was trying to escape. He drove around aimlessly, stopping from time to time in some car park, and then setting off again in his wanderings.
The illusion of romance
And if you think that all this is romantic, you probably also have a toxic interpretation of romantic relationships, completely transfigured and disfigured by a socio-cultural imagination that sometimes ends up justifying even the most extreme acts of jealousy. Unfortunately, Giulia, the moment she realized the danger she was running, was no longer able to move away from Turetta. He first became her stalker and later her executioner.
Humanizing a killer
Attention, a disclaimer is urgently needed here: humanising a killer, investigating his history and psychological functioning, has not the slightest aim of justifying him or diminishing his responsibilities, but on the contrary, it has the aim of making us understand that we are not talking about a “monster” or an “alien”, but rather a human being like many others, and this is why it is right to talk about it and reflect on it collectively. As regards the punishment, I personally believe that any sentence that does not include life imprisonment is incorrect, also because we will never have any objective proof that a person who has committed such a premeditated crime can change and stop being a danger to the community.
