Ferdinando Carretta, why he killed his family and how long he was in prison

The Carretta case is one of the most disturbing in the history of Italian crime reporting.
Ferdinando Carretta on 4 August 1989, in what he confessed to be a "moment of madness", grabbed his firearm and shot and killed first his father Giuseppe, then his mother Marta and finally his brother Nicola.
And with extreme clarity he took days to clean up the crime scene and ensure that all traces of himself and his family were lost.
A case of crime that shocked the whole of Italy and immediately attracted media attention.
After years of misdirection and after the British police reported Carretta's presence in England to the Italian authorities, the murderer returned to Italy and confessed his crimes during a television interview with Chi l'ha visto.
A confession that shocked public opinion, especially knowing the family dynamics and the crime.
The true crime documentary will take care of reconstructing the facts and will be broadcast this evening at 9.20pm, 9 November 2023, on Rai 2, for the third episode of Crimes in the Family.
But what happened to Carretta, how long was he in prison and why did he murder his family? It is advisable to clear up any doubts.
Below is everything you need to know about the Carretta case.
read also What happened to Veronica Panarello, where she is today and when she leaves prison Who is Ferdinando Carretta and what did he do: why did he kill his family? Ferdinando Carretta, born in 1962, was just 27 years old when he killed his father Giuseppe, 53 years old, his mother Marta Chezzi (50 years old) and his brother Nicola, just 23 years old, as witnesses of the incident, in their house in via Rimini, in Parma, on 4 August 1989, the day his family was supposed to leave for holidays in a camper.
Due to Nicola's heroin addiction, the parents had focused their attention on their younger son, leaving Ferdinand in the background.
This factor may have contributed – but we cannot be sure – to the tense climate in the family.
In fact, according to the reconstruction of friends and family, the spouses seemed excessively strict and family arguments – even for trivial reasons – were quite frequent and particularly violent.
In this climate of tension, Ferdinando Carretta would have developed the idea of exterminating his family and shortly before carrying out the triple murder, he would have purchased a Walther 6.35 semi-automatic in an armory in Reggio Emilia as he held a regular firearms licence.
for military service.
After killing his family, Carretta disappeared without a trace.
read also Elisa Claps, what happened: the story of how she was killed, why and when her body was found The report of the family's disappearance came a month after the terrible event.
It was Marta's sister, Adriana Chezzi, who alerted the police, reporting the family's failure to return from holidays.
The case captured media attention and for a long time the press hypothesized a leak linked to slush funds that Giuseppe would have collected in the South on behalf of the company he worked for.
The discovery of the family's camper on 19 November 1989 in Milan, thanks to the report of a viewer of Who has seen it, meant that the investigation was entrusted to the public prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro who rejected the hypothesis of voluntary disappearance.
But only after 9 years came the turning point of the case.
In London, thanks to a fortunate routine check, the Metropolitan Police officer who collected Ferdinand's details, the name sounding familiar to him, alerted Scotland Yard, who informed Interpol, who in turn alerted the Italian authorities.
And if at first Carretta, then 40 years old, declared that he knew nothing about his family "escaped to the Caribbean", it was always Ferdinando himself who confessed to the murder, once he returned to Italy, during a television interview with Chi l 'he saw.
The motive for the massacre, however, has never been fully clarified.
it has been hypothesized that the motive was the family inheritance, others have attributed the murderous gesture to mental health problems, still others that Ferdinand had felt left aside by his parents.
But according to Ferdinand's confession it was a homicidal fit.
read also Danilo Restivo, what happened to him and where he is today: this is how much Ferdinando Carretta still has to serve: the investigations and the video of the confession to Who has seen it The truth came out, therefore, only 9 years after the murder of the family to Carretta's confession on TV during the Chi l'ha visto interview.
Ferdinando Carretta confessed to the murder with extreme lucidity: I took that gun, that firearm and shot my parents and my brother.
The bodies remained in the apartment and then I tried as best I could to eliminate every trace, blood, shell casings […] so as not to leave a trace.
[…]This was an act of madness, an act of complete madness.
These are the words that shocked Italy.
Only from that moment was it possible to know the dynamics of the murder.
Ferdinando said he waited for the other tenants to come out, then went to the bathroom and said to himself: "Either they die, or I die." Immediately after he killed his father with five shots to the chest, his mother rushed to hear the noise and killed him with a single shot.
Finally he would wait for his brother Nicola to return, to eliminate him too.
After hiding the bodies in the bathroom, he would then clean up the house.
He then remained here for a few days together with the corpses, before wrapping them in three plastic sheets and abandoning them in an illegal landfill in Via Rolo: the bodies will never be found.
He then staged the family's escape, collecting a bank check for five million lire by forging his father's signature and doing the same with his brother's account.
He left for New York and then settled in the United Kingdom.
Carretta repeated the confession before a magistrate and confessed that he had dreamed of his father every night all those years.
What happened to Ferdinando Carretta and how long was he in prison? Arrested and tried, Ferdinando Carretta was found guilty of triple murder on 15 April 1999 by the Court of Aassise of Parma, but considered him incapable of understanding at the time of the crime, he was therefore locked up in the judicial psychiatric hospital of Castiglione delle Stiviere.
In February 2004 Carretta obtained semi-liberty and on 21 June 2006 he left the hospital to enter a recovery community in Forlì, following a license granted by the magistrate.
A decision opposed by his aunt Adriana Chezzi, who had undertaken a legal fight for the inheritance.
Inheritance that Ferdinand obtained on October 15, 2008, together with the house of the massacre which he put up for sale.
Having left the community on 11 June 2009 and on 9 May 2015 Carretta obtained his freedom and settled in Forlì.
And it was in his home that he was found dead on June 1, 2023, at the age of 61, following a long illness.