On August 4, 1989, he shot and killed his parents, Giuseppe and Marta, aged 53 and 50, and his younger brother Nicola, twenty-three, in their home in Parma, but managed to keep the massacre hidden for years. Everyone thought that the family had gone to the Caribbean, the "paradise of the disappeared".
Only in November 1998, nine years later, Ferdinando Carretta was tracked down in London, where he worked as a pony express and was discovered during a document check. At first he assured that he knew nothing about his parents, then he unexpectedly confessed in front of the cameras of "Who has seen it?" of having exterminated the family members, explaining the murders in detail, and told of having transported the bodies to a landfill on the outskirts of Parma, in Viarolo, but the bodies were never found and neither was the weapon used for the triple homicide.
Carretta died yesterday at the age of 61 in Forlì, where he spent nine years on experimental leave in a community, also working as an employee in a social cooperative - after having served another seven and a half years in the judicial psychiatric hospital of Castiglione delle Stiviere (Mantova ) - and where he had bought an apartment with the inheritance money: he had been acquitted of the charges in February 1999 because he was considered totally incapable of understanding at the time of the events, and in May 2015 the supervisory magistrate of Bologna had accepted, albeit with some prescriptions, the request for freedom advanced by his lawyer, Cesare Menotto Zauli. According to the judge, his social dangerousness was particularly attenuated.
«I certainly regretted what I did - explained Carretta in an interview -. I ruined not only my life but that of my parents, brother and relatives. People have nothing to fear from me, because what I'm looking to is to lead a quiet life, to work, lead a very normal life».
In December 2010 he managed to sell the house of the massacre (a 120 m2 apartment on the first floor of a building in via Rimini) for about 200,000 euros, after an agreement with his aunts on the division of the inheritance.
"He has served his sentence, I only hope that now he is a serene and balanced person", commented his aunt Paola Carretta, "but the bodies have not been discovered and I cannot give myself a logical explanation".
The Carrettas were seen by their neighbors for the last time on 4 August 34 years ago: a few days later Ferdinando changed two checks at the bank - from his father and brother, with apocryphal signatures - for six million. The previous February he had instead purchased a 6.35 pistol. In November 1989, the family's camper was found parked in Milan, in via Aretusa, and the prosecutor on duty went to the scene Antonio Di Pietro, who did not believe in fleeing and ordered a search for the bodies in landfills. Uselessly.
"In that summer of '89 I was a completely crazy person," Carretta said in the TV scoop-interview. “I wish this had never happened, what I did I never should have done. People have to judge, I will always accept any consequence.
(Unioneonline/L)