The investigating judge of Taranto Francesco Maccagnano has the arrest of Salvatore Dettori has been validated, the 46-year-old former petty officer of the Navy, who confessed to having killed his mother, Silvana La Rocca, a 73-year-old former teacher with several stab wounds last Thursdayin the courtyard of the house where the victim lived, in Marina di Leporano (Taranto). The man confirmed the version given to the police and to the investigating prosecutor Salvatore Colella, also adding other details on the motive.
The investigations revealed the existence of conflicting relationships between the 73-year-old (originally from Saracena, in the province of Cosenza) and her first-born son, determined in particular by her precarious economic situation. He had also taken out a mortgage to buy a house in Pulsano, but was no longer able to pay the installments and had accumulated a significant debt. The 46-year-old spoke about his mother’s refusal to host him at home and the management of the house, divided by inheritance between the victim and the two children (the other lives in France). But he also provided conflicting statements, some considered unlikely, such as that of having killed his mother because she forced him, “influenced by other people”, to eat “human flesh”i.e. the remains of the body of his father, Cataldo Dettori, a former specialized Ilva worker, who died in 2002 in an accident at work in the steel plant.
The 46-year-old, obsessed with the idea that there were “vampires” around, claimed to have first hit his mother on the back of the head and, subsequently, having failed to kill her immediately, to have inflicted several stab wounds on her throat, abdomen and finally to the sternum “to take her heart”, remaining to watch over her “until the moment of her last breath”.
