Bologna, former Virtus doctor arrested for murdering his wife: “Driven by the morbid desire to be with a lover”

Bologna, 12 April 2023 – That “irrepressiblemorbid desire for his mistress” led him to kill. Although he knew that in all likelihood he would be “unmasked, earning himself a life sentence”, because he had already stumbled upon a similar suspicion – that of having poisoned his wife with benzodiazepines – for two years but the fear of condemnation would have been less than the desire, which, together with the economic motive, would have been the push that would have activated the hand of Giampaolo Amato64, accused of murdering his wife Isabella Linsalata62, on October 31, 2021. Only last week, however, was the precautionary measure in prison ordered against the doctor, well known in the city, after a year and a half of investigations by the Carabinieri investigative unit coordinated by the prosecutor.

Second the reconstructions of the investigators, in the 141 pages of the ordinance signed by the investigating judge Claudio Paris, the motive would have been twofold: of a “sentimental type”, but “without excluding economic pressures”.

The doctor was in fact torn between two “very painful decisions: the desire not to make his family suffer and the desire to live freely in his relationship with his young lover”, thirty years his junior. Lover that she is not investigated and who later left him. But that desire, “in his mind had an overwhelming impact”, although he was unable to leave his wife who had always known about the clandestine affair, having already discovered it in July 2018, when it had only started for a month.

The lover was pressuring on the one hand why he left the family, and months before his wife’s death he reassured her: “Don’t worry darling, I want you. Despite the pressure… You’ll see”. Pressures that his wife also put on him, because he didn’t want them to break up and had agreed to continue living together, in the same building, although she was upstairs and he was downstairs. Thus, the man could not make up his mind, reconstructed the judge, and remained in a situation of “ambiguity”. In the context of which he underwent “pressures, frustrations, humiliations, which make him a cornered man, unhappy and dangerous”. A humiliation was for example the loudspeaker call that his wife forced him to make with his loverin front of other relatives, and that she recorded as he left her and told her that “their story (between him and his wife, ed) could not end”.

Or again when the lover showed up at the couple’s house and argued with their thirty-year-old daughter of the two doctors. A situation that would have “thwarted that aura of respect, the result of narcissism”, which the suspect wanted for himself, reads the ordinance. And then, “this state of affairs would have been resolved if he had ceased to stand in the way of the only obstacle to her love story with her lover, that is, his marriage”. It would have been resolved “in an all in all painless way – the investigating judge reconstructs in his conclusions – for the image that he wants to preserve of himself, if this marriage had ceased due to force majeure for nothing attributable to him and third to his failures as a husband and his potentially leaked or guessed desire to leave his wife for another”.

So eccoalready in May 2019 – but perhaps even earlier, since the first fainting and fainting of his wife are noticed by those around her between February and March of that year -, the attempt to “attempt on the life” of Isabellawith the bottle of wine filled with benzodiazepinesas revealed by the subsequent work of the Ris of the carabinieri.

Another detail was found by the investigators. The desire expressed by Amato to cremate his wife after her death. A desire that his wife never seemed to have manifested before. “You told me our son – the suspect would have revealed during one of the two interrogations that you released during the investigation – that after her mother’s death, Isabella would have liked to be lost in a meadow and not in the family tomb “. A choice which, however, was ultimately rejected by the rest of the family, and which in fact allowed the second autopsy and other investigations to be carried out after her death, decisive in establishing the causes.

AmatoAnyway, pleads innocent. He reports that his wife, who had been suffering from depression for some time, was already taking medicines and anxiolytics; moreover, being a doctor himself, he could have access to the substances he wanted. And sometimes she, in fact, “used drugs to stay calm”. The hypothesis would therefore be that of a self-inflicted gesture. Not only that: intercepted during the investigation while he was also talking to his lover (from whom he was in fact left shortly after his wife’s death, perhaps precisely because of the terrible suspicion on the part of the woman of a gesture by her lover, when she was invited to be heard during the current investigation), the man never refers to extreme or violent actions against his deceased wife or to anything else that suggests a sort of confession. But for the investigating judge, the hypothesis of a suicide is to be rejected: and even in the last period, according to relatives, Lsalad would have been “radiant” because “unlike the stormy past, their relationship had calmed down to the point of convincing her or make her strongly hope that they were going to get back together”. It wasn’t like that.