The script always seems to be the same. The traces are lost for hours, for days, then corpses reappear: the women victims of feminicide have in common the brutality of their death, of course, but also and above all the belief of their hitman that he could have escaped it. Digging a grave for them, pretending they disappeared into the void.
And yet it isn’t like that. Or that’s not always the case. The man who kills a woman, his ex, his wife, his girlfriend, believes he can get away with it by inventing the excuse of “cwho knows where she went”, then collapses in front of a pile of nonsense and the – a lot – blood shed by that woman.
This is the case of Giulia Cecchettin, Ilaria Sula, Giulia Tramontano, just to name the most well-known names, and – in these hours – of Federica Torzullothe woman whose body was pulled from the ground of a canebrake behind her husband’s company.
Federica is the third victim of femicide in a few days: on 28 December Aurora Livoli was raped and killed in Milan, while another attempted femicide took place on 13 January in the Monza area, where a man stabbed his wife in front of their two-year-old son. On January 6, however, a 33-year-old of Nigerian origin died in hospital. There is no end to the worst.
When killing isn’t enough
In a drainage canal at the end of a forgotten countryside, torn to pieces in a suitcase, underground, in the crevices of walls like the worst mafiosi, in landfills like goods that are no longer needed, in abandoned farmhouses. Whoever is killed by her partner is killed twice. His outraged, vilified, tortured body, which “if you are mine, you must be mine down to the last bit of your flesh”.
And so not only the animalistic act of extinguishing a life, often after years of abuse and violence, but also the final act of hiding the body, as in the worst Camorra sagas. Calculating murderers with clouded minds convinced that without a discovery there is no body that can provide evidence.
But let’s give it time. That corpse, yet another case of femicide dictated by the will of others, will come out sooner or later, together with all the stories of hatred that it brought with it, together with the years spent receiving slaps and humiliations, not having the courage to speak and report.
“You don’t want me anymore and I destroy you, I camouflage your body in the midst of brushwood and weeds and I stand there motionless, looking worried about your departureOh, people, the human mind is capable of such conjectures, oh if it is capable, just to remain unpunished.
All this tells us only one thing: those who kill and then hide a body are not acting in chaos. There is clarity, it follows a plan, there is the conscious choice to think about oneself first than anything else. The suppression of a corpse is a continuation of the murder, it is an integral part of it. The objective is to escape from one’s responsibilities, the attempt to erase the evidence, to make the victim invisible in order to continue living as if nothing had happened. When you get to this point it means that the emotional distance was already there for a while, the sense of guilt silenced, the empathy eliminated. It is the signal of a mind that closes itself in its own interest, that organizes itself, concentrates, protects itself.
That woman to be killed was no longer a person for some time, but a problem to be eliminated, and hiding her body is an act of pure selfishness by those who do not feel pain, in the idea that by erasing the image of the victim from their mind, they also eliminate the memory and hopes of others.
But it is a fragile, illusory road. Because, in most cases, it is not remorse that guides the hand, but the fear of paying. It’s the choice to try to save yourself, once again, at the expense of everything else.
