"Tell me, dad." Jessica Hellies is at her partner's house in Cagliari. They are watching the final stages of the Italy-Spain match on TV and her cell phone rings: "What have you done?!". He hangs up and looks at his partner with tears in his eyes: "Dad killed mom."

A few minutes and the two are in via Podgora 5, on the ground floor. They enter the apartment: Luciano Hellies, 77 years old, is standing, his gaze lost, near the body riddled with stab wounds in the back of his former wife (they were separated at home and she had a new partner), Ignazia Tumatis , aged 59. All around, lots of blood. " He laughed in my face ," she says to her dismayed daughter, "he laughed in my face."

It's 11pm on Thursday: Jessica, who is 37 years old, immediately calls the single number for one-one-two emergencies. The police cars arrive within minutes together with their manager, Massimo Imbimbo, while the woman calls her three sisters to break the tragic news.

There is little to reconstruct, in this almost certainly violent crime, the result of an argument which, after all, was not at all unexpected with the exception of its outcome: there were about ten stab wounds and Luciano Hellies, a retired former porter, with an immaculate past, he doesn't run away, he doesn't try to hide, he doesn't deny.

When the police officers load him into the police car (hearing to validate the arrest perhaps today) and some residents in via Podgora shout "murderer" at him, Hellies seems unperturbed.

Luigi Almiento

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