Sharon Verzeni, Sangare and the murder on a whim: the killer’s answers

Moussa Sangare killed Sharon Verzeni after choosing “the most vulnerable target”. He committed the murder, between July 29 and 30, “in a casual, capricious manner.” And he did it in a “totally sound” state of mind. It is the investigating judge of the Bergamo court, Raffaella Mascarino, who outlines in her 39-page order the picture of the murder committed by the 30-year-old man who stabbed the 33-year-old barmaid in Terno d’Isola and who is now in prison.

Sangare wandered for over half an hour through the villages of the Bergamo area before choosing “the most vulnerable target” after a series of stops: first he threatened two kids, then he targeted a person with a computer on board a car in the parking lot of the cemetery in Chignolo d’Isola, then he targeted another man he called “a bald guy”. Then he focused on a man who was smoking a cigarette, then he performed a throat-slitting test on a statue of a woman in Terno d’Isola and finally he saw and chose to hit Sharon Verzeni, the only woman he met on his way.

The self-confessed murderer was looking for the “right target, finally identified in the poor
Sharon Verzeni”, a “lone woman”, whom he describes “as if intent on looking at the stars”. The victim was killed “in the total absence of any understandable motivation, in a completely casual, absolutely gratuitous, not to say even capricious manner”. Sangare “had planned as a pastime to throw knives at a rudimentary cardboard silhouette, with a cushion on the top on which a human face was drawn” and according to the Gp he was “assailed by the desire to really experience strong emotions, capable of unleashing in his soul that rush of adrenaline that he tried to describe, followed by a state of well-being and relaxation”.

For the investigating judge, the killer was in a “fully intact” mental state.

It is legitimate to question the man’s mental state, but – the investigating judge highlights – “the lucidity shown in adopting a whole series of measures both in the moments preceding the crime, such as having wandered around until he met the most vulnerable target, and in the moments immediately following it”, when he speeds by bicycle, chooses secondary roads, loses the cap he was wearing and goes back to get it, and “also the measures taken in the following days”, when he hides the knife and clothes, changes his hairstyle and modifies the bicycle, “highlight a fully intact mental state“.

A not insignificant detail: Sangare “was taken to the psychiatric ward immediately after entering prison and no trace of psychiatric pathology, either remote or recent, was detected”.

The interrogation

Nor do the words uttered by Sangare during the interrogation in the Bergamo prison, from which he will be transferred for security reasons given the climate of tension in the penitentiary institution, go unnoticed. “Unfortunately it happened, a month has passed, cry I can’t cryyou can’t get down otherwise you won’t get up again”, he said answering questions and underlining that in what he did “there was also a comfort zone”.

The man didn’t even get rid of the knife once and for all: “I didn’t throw it in the river because I thought I might still find it there,” he replied to the investigating judge who asked him why he buried it on the banks of the Adda, while he threw the other three into the river. “I wanted to keep it to remember what I had done, as a memento.”