Femicide victim's family awaits killer's sentence, and change in Italy

A verdict is expected on Tuesday in a murder case that gripped Italy and sparked a heated debate on the issue of violence against women.

Prosecutors have asked that Filippo Turetta, 22, be sentenced to life in jail for stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend Giulia Cecchettin last November.

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 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 baited 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 Cecchettin 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.”

In November, at the launch of a foundation established by Gino Cecchettin in memory of Giulia, Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara argued that the patriarchy no longer existed in Italy and said the rise in sexual violence was instead “linked to the marginalisation and perversion that stems from illegal immigration”.

The comments sparked outrage. “Giulia was killed by a respectable, white Italian man,” Elena Cecchettin hit back. “My father has done something to prevent violence. What is the government doing?”

Since his daughter’s death, Gino Cecchettin has thrown himself headfirst into a battle to teach teenagers how to handle emotions and relationships, touring schools to tell pupils his daughter's story.

He also hopes that sharing Giulia's own voice and words could help others - like one voice message she sent friends in which she sounds both exasperated by Mr Turetta’s insistence and riddled with guilt about his suicidal thoughts. “I wish I could disappear,” she says. “But I’m worried he could hurt himself.”

Elisa Ercoli of Differenza Donna, a charity that fights gender-based violence, told the BBC the messages had a tangible impact, with her organisation getting a high number of calls from parents who recognised similar behaviours in their daughters. "We think bruises are the problem but underhand psychological violence is the issue in many situations," she said.

A government department has also said that the national anti-violence helpline experienced a surge in calls after Ms Cecchettin’s murder, and that the number of calls is now 57% higher than last year.

But NGOs and opposition politicians are all demanding that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government take concrete steps to prevent and punish violence against women, such as “affectivity lessons” in schools.

“What the Cecchettin family is doing is a grain of sand compared to what the government would have the power to achieve,” said Francesca Ghio, a leftwing councillor in Genoa who recently publicly revealed she was raped when she was 12 - she said the decision to speak out was inspired by the “strength” of the Cecchettin family.

“They are turning their pain into love and action. We can’t just stand by.”

As the 10-week trial approached its end, Mr Cecchettin said he felt calm.

Remembering his "perfect daughter" who is now a household name, Mr Cecchettin said he thought there would be a "before" and an "after" Giulia's murder.

But while Italy has gained a symbol, his loss is incalculable. "I realised I can’t rewind life and time," he said, "and I realised that nobody can ever give me Giulia back.”