Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
Rome’s Assize Court has sentenced the American citizen Francis Kaufmann to life imprisonment with three years’ daytime solitary confinement for murdering his partner Anastasia Trofimova and their daughter Andromeda. The bodies of the victims were found dead on 7 June last year inside Villa Pamphili in Rome, after which the man fled to Greece before being traced.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office charged him with double murder aggravated by futile and abject motives, diminished capacity of the victim to defend herself, the affective relationship and descent, as well as concealment of a corpse.
The trial proceedings and the psychiatric assessment
The judicial proceedings had been temporarily suspended in May when the Court ordered a pharmacological treatment programme for the defendant. After a little over a month, his psychophysical condition was deemed compatible with imprisonment and the trial resumed. In October, the judges also rejected the defence’s final request for a new expert assessment of his capacity to understand and to act.
During the prosecution’s closing speech, the public prosecutor painted a clear picture of the defendant: “Kaufmann is cold, lucid, manipulative, a pathological narcissist, but he is not incapable of understanding and acting. He has a strong and pronounced personality but he is an impostor.” The prosecution also highlighted how the man had managed to deceive even the officers who had previously detained him when he was found drunk in the street with the child, adding that if the checks had been more thorough, the little girl would probably still be alive today.
