“Benno has always been full of good intentions and then there’s this beast in him that makes him go like this. Let’s see if you can calmly, for his own good, put him in a therapeutic community.” Her voice is that of Laura Perselli, in a voice message that she had sent in July 2020 to a friend of hers. The woman was heard as a witness in the Court of Assizes in the trial of Benno Neumair, the 31-year-old from Bolzano who killed her parents, Laura and Peter on January 4, 2021.
In the classroom they were made to listen to the voice messages that Laura Perselli she had sent to her friend explaining that Benno had been admitted to psychiatry in Germany after staging a mock assault against him. In her voice messages, Laura shared all of her concern for the mental health condition of her son. “I’m afraid to live with a boy like that. We hid the knives in the house,” added Laura.
During the hearing, two testimonies from the German-language middle school in Bolzano were also heard, where Benno worked as a substitute teacher of mathematics. A school principal recalled various facts from which it emerges that Benno was an unreliable teacher, also in terms of punctuality. The second witness, a support teacher, said instead that she was subjected to verbal assault by Benno during a lesson.