A woman accused of spousal murder is preparing to plead self-defense and hopes for leniency, citing the influence and domestic violence inflicted by her husband, at the trial which opens Wednesday in Lyon before the assizes.
Rose Filippazzo, 50, says she wanted to put an end to an accumulation of physical and moral suffering by killing her husband with a bullet to the head while he slept on September 16, 2018 in Thurins (Rhône).
According to her version, her case would be comparable to that of Jacqueline Sauvage, sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment by the Loiret Assize Court for having killed her husband in 2012, violent with her for forty-seven years, with three bullets in the back, before being granted a presidential pardon in 2016.
Two procedures for the violence of her ex-husband
The accused is also defended by Janine Bonaggiunta, a specialist in the criminal defense of women victims of abuse, who was the lawyer for Jacqueline Sauvage, Valérie Bacot (convicted of having killed a stepfather who had raped her , married, beaten and prostituted) and Alexandra Lange (acquitted in 2012 of the murder of her husband who was stabbed in the throat while trying to strangle her).
“We can make the comparison, this woman suffered for a long time, she lived under total control,” said Janine Bonaggiunta.
Like Jacqueline Sauvage, Rose Filippazzo, widow Zirafa, explains her gesture for having been the victim of repeated violence and marital rape. Two proceedings report violence committed in 2017 by her husband, a mason described as jealous and possessive by witnesses, who admitted to slapping his wife after discovering adultery.
According to other testimonies, the wife could also have been violent. All say that the two spouses, married very young and parents of two daughters, could not get out of permanent tensions. The psychiatrists describe, in the excerpts of their expertise included in the indictment order, “the creation of a situation of influence of his couple”. For them, this context justifies an “alteration of his discernment” and therefore an attenuation of his criminal responsibility.
The thesis of a financial motive
A few days after the murder, Rose Filippazzo had sought to recover life insurance that her husband had contracted the previous year, without knowing that the latter had changed the name of the beneficiary. For the investigators, the widow’s eagerness to open a safe, make withdrawals and recover the donation undermines the thesis of self-defense, in favor of a financial motive.
The accused shared her life between the marital home and a lodge where she found her lover. In a telephone conversation between the two, intercepted by the gendarmes, the latter describes his mistress as “hyperpotent venom”. The trial before the Assizes of the Rhône must last until Friday.