Carabinieri arrest ex-husband suspected of killing woman found dead in Erba pool

The arrest

Carabinieri from the provincial command in Como executed a custody order in prison against Carmine Civitillo, 76, on the evening of Saturday, 31 October. He is the former husband of a 64-year-old woman whose body was found on Sunday, 27 September, in the swimming pool of his house in Buccinigo, a hamlet of Erba in the province of Como. Civitillo was detained in the province of Benevento, where he is originally from and where he had moved a few days earlier. He is under investigation for aggravated voluntary homicide, an investigative status that is not a conviction.

What investigators say happened

The Como prosecutor's office says the investigation established that the woman died of suffocation before she was thrown into the water. Investigators believe Civitillo pressed hard on her mouth, then pushed her wheelchair to the pool and left her there to die, in what they suspect was an attempt to make the death look like an accident. La Stampa reports that the autopsy found a series of lacerations around the mouth. Reports stress that she could not move on her own, either inside the house or in the garden.

The account he gave

Civitillo raised the alarm that Sunday, telling the carabinieri he had left early for Lecco, returned late in the morning, and found the wheelchair beside the pool and his former wife in the water. The carabinieri were suspicious from the start. The woman had hemiparesis and would hardly have been able to push a wheelchair herself, least of all across a grass strip where the wheels would sink. Days later, Rai's 'La vita in diretta' caught him on camera saying he had told his son to come because his mother was there, and to 'sort it out yourselves'. He also said he was not interested in his ex-wife or their three children, and that he had been divorced for ten years.

Background and how the case was built

After a stroke two years earlier left her unable to get around, the woman had moved back into the house of her ex-husband and their daughter. The daughter had searched for other housing without success and agreed to host her until an alternative arrangement could be found. Investigators built the case on phone intercepts, the questioning of people with knowledge of the events, technical and scientific checks, and the autopsy. Their version is that the woman was not able to move unaided, which they say makes the account of an accidental fall in the pool hard to sustain.