Murderous Mothers Fifth Part
Anna Maria Franzoni
Like it happened in other parts of the world and particularly in the United States, in Italy cases of murderous mothers followed one another with a growing frequency, nearly montly , giving the phenomenon the feature of a real epidemic which didn’t neglect any social class.
Yet the category of murderous mother shouldn’t have completely affirmed, if there hadn’t been the case of Cogne.
Murderous Mothers
On the wave of her immediate emotions, Anna Maria Franzoni, the mother accused of having killed Samuel, her son of three years of age with a blunt instrument, had left herself do a particularly vulgar gesture: the middle finger up to mean” fuck off….”, towards telecameras and photographers [1] who, on the first day of the inquiry, were waiting for her outside the barracks of Cogne.
After overcoming the impact Franzoni becomes, progressively, the perfect protagonist of what more than a tragedy we prefer considering a soap opera or an Italian style thriller. Like all Italian Style thrillers the inquiry is, at present, at a deadlock and it isn’t so unlikely no responsability may be ascertained in the future. Just because it wasn’t possible to ascertain the truth in a short time, the thriller of Cogne, that is a mother charged with her son’s murder, could, for long time, keep media attention alive with interviews, poisons, calumnies, mutual charges, experts’ opinions, criminologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, journalists, writers, priests, actresses, idlers, people not better identified.
As to comments on the case of Cogne we point out:
“Munchausen syndrome[2] might have an important role in the crime of Cogne”. The investigating magistrate of Aosta who was involved in the case.
Munchausen
- ” High compatibility of the offender profile with the figure of Mrs Anna Maria Franzoni in the homicide of Cogne”. Massimo Picozzi, a Psychiatrist, the adviser of the Public Prosecutor’s office of Aosta.
- ” God forgives any crime, but compassion comes after truth”.Don Claudio Roda, the parish priest of Monteacuto Vallese( Bologna), Anna Maria Franzoni’s birthplace.
- ” All these suggestions are the ones which drive towards the recognition of a depressive pathology, probably inserted in a fragile dependent personality”. Massimo Picozzi, always with regard to Anna Maria Franzoni.
- ” There are evidences how Mrs Franzoni wore underwear which wasn’t so clean at the moment of the crime: it isn’t so important in itself, but can have a certain importance for a global evaluation of a young woman who takes care of her look outwardly; this may mean some problems about living and relating, where, apparently, a person behaves in a correct way ( a diet just begun ), but more deeply it isn’t like that”. Massimo Picozzi.
- ” Those contradictions aren’t lies, they are memories she hasn’t got. She confabulates, invents. She does what children do, included repeating: I didn’t do so. But it isn’t enough, the phrase she said to her husband, when Samuel was still breathing:-Let’s have another child and then let’s go away- is appalling when it is said by a mother. Mrs Lorenzi, as she were a child again, behaved as a child who broke her doll and asks for a new one. The same attitude she has now in the jail when she asks to be sent home or her fits of anger because the investigating magistrate contests her assertions. Not to try to follow Samuel on the helicopter and consider him dead when he was still breathing as it were a problem already solved or a broken toy”. George Palermo, Director of the Department of Forensic Psychiatry and Professor of Criminology at the Medical College in Winsconsin. I saw her during a TV interview and I listened to her – Professor Palermo tells – The feeble voice, the way to talk, she seemed to regress more and more to the childish condition; more than suffering she appeared frightened by what had happened and was happening to her. That repeating: – I didn’t do so – like a singsong, a rigmarole to exorcise evil. The evil they are doing to her, and not the one somebody did to poor Samuel. I’m convinced – George Palermo answers the question whether Franzoni can ever remember – there is a way to reach her in that kind of little house where, metaphorically, she has hidden herself. And I’m sure the woman can remember.
Anna Maria Franzoni
[1] Curiously Erica De Nardo, on the morning after the homicide of her mother and brother, had done the same gesture.
[2] Munchausen syndrome was described for the first time in 1951 by R. Asher and his team and it’s characterized by ” a more or less conscious simulation of diseases,coercion to lies, going to and fro from a hospital to another; it may show itself with abdominal, neurologic, hemorrhagic and also dermatologic symptoms or with temperature; the troubles the patients reveal are feigned”. Lies excluded, it’s evident that Munchausen syndrome has nothing to do with the crime of Cogne.
Munchausen syndrome
Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci
To be continued in:
6) Murderous mothers Sixth Part
See also:
1) Murderous Mothers First Part
2) Murderous Mothers Second Part
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