Franco Pettineo, 52, the man who last night strangled and killed his partner Sabrina Baldini Paleni, 56, found dead yesterday morning in a house in Chignolo Po, in the province of Pavia, confessed.
The man then fled and was tracked down by the Carabinieri in Pandino in the Cremona area. The Cremona Public Prosecutor's Office, headed by Silvio Bonfigli, with the PM Andrea Figoni will today request the validation of the arrest for homicide aggravated by personal relationship. The hearing before the investigating judge is scheduled for Monday.
The daughter of Sabrina Baldini Paleni, the 56-year-old woman found murdered, had heard her on the phone the night before. In the morning she had tried again but her mother, who worked as a social health worker in a nursing home in Lodi, did not answer.
For this reason, alarmed, she ran to via Mariotto in Lambrinia, on the outskirts of the town. When she arrived in front of the house she noticed a strong smell of gas, which in fact turned out to be open. In addition to the carabinieri, the firefighters intervened on site. The door showed no signs of forced entry. Sabrina was in the house, dead. The house appeared tidy with no signs of a struggle or a violent argument before the murder. On the woman's body there was no blood but evident signs of strangulation. The carabinieri of Pavia, once they had been certain, with the coroner, that the woman had been killed, started looking for her partner, whom she had met after the end of her marriage and with whom she lived, the 52-year-old Franco Pettineo, a driver by profession, who was not at home and on whom suspicions focused. The man wandered for several kilometers, perhaps all night, and was found a few hours after the discovery of Sabrina's body aboard his black Dacia in Pandino, in the Cremona area. Here the carabinieri stopped him and he did not resist and did not utter a word, allowing himself to be taken to the barracks.
In the barracks in Pandino the man, who later turned out to be the brother of the victim's husband, from whom she had separated, was interrogated at length by the prosecutors of Pavia and Cremona, Valeria Biscottini and Andrea Figoni. Then the confession.
