Rome court sentences Mark Samson to life for murdering his ex-girlfriend

The verdict

The Third Assize Court of Rome sentenced Mark Antony Samson, 24, to life imprisonment on Tuesday, 27 October 2026, after three hours of deliberation. The judges found him guilty of voluntary homicide and concealment of a corpse, and accepted the aggravating circumstances of premeditation, trivial motives and the affective relationship with the victim, as prosecutors had asked. Prosecutors had requested the same life sentence. The ruling is a first-instance judgment, so it can still be challenged. Samson, an Italo-Filipino architecture graduate, had confessed to killing his former girlfriend, a 22-year-old statistics student at La Sapienza University who came from Terni in Umbria.

The prosecution and the defence

Prosecutor Maria Perna used her closing replies to restate the prosecution's account. She told the court that Samson never repented and never told the full truth, and that he kept lying to avoid admitting premeditation. Perna summed up the prosecution's position in one line:

“This was not a crime of passion.”

The defence, led by lawyers Paolo Foti and Alessandro Pillitu, had asked the court to exclude the aggravating circumstances and grant generic mitigating circumstances. They argued the killing was a crime of passion born of anger and tension, and pointed to Samson's cooperation with investigators after his confession. The university where the victim studied has joined the proceedings as a civil party.

How the killing unfolded

According to the prosecution, after a row Samson took a kitchen knife and stabbed the young woman three times in the neck in the family flat in via Homs, in Rome's Africano quarter, on 25 March 2025. He then put the body in a suitcase, carried it to his car and left it in a wooded ravine along provincial road 45B between Capranica Prenestina and Guadagnolo. Samson's own account to police in April 2025 differs on timing: he said she had come to the flat on the evening of 25 March to return some clothes, stayed the night instead of taking a night bus home, and that he killed her the next morning. He described the relationship as having ended some weeks earlier after a few months of ups and downs. The defendant's mother has already received a two-year sentence, under a plea deal, for helping her son dispose of the body and clean the flat of blood.

Arrest and trial

Samson was arrested after his confession, with the detention order validated in April 2025, and was first held at Regina Coeli prison. He was later held at Rebibbia prison while the case moved toward trial. The first hearing of the trial took place on 12 November 2025. The verdict followed months of hearings and closing arguments in which the prosecution pressed its premeditation case.