Over the past year, a vast amount of details about the murder have emerged, painting an increasingly tormented picture of a young woman hounded by her possessive ex-boyfriend, who refused to accept the end of their relationship.
The case, which captivated Italians, brought the concepts of femicide, patriarchy and male violence into the headlines.
November 11, 2023 Mr. Touretta picked up his university classmate and ex-girlfriend, Ms. Cechetin, a 22-year-old biomedical engineering student from the province of Venice, to take her shopping for an outfit for her upcoming prom.
Later that evening, he stabbed her more than 70 times and left the student’s body at the bottom of a ditch, wrapped in plastic bags.
Then he disappeared. During the week, the Italians followed the search for the couple with bated breath. The discovery of Ms. Chechetin’s body on November 18 caused an unprecedented outpouring of grief. Mr. Tourette was arrested in Germany the next day. He readily confessed to murdering Ms Cheketin and was extradited to Italy.
To raise awareness of the signs of a controlling relationship, Ms. Cechetin’s family recently shared a list she wrote months before her death called “15 Reasons I Had to Break Up With Him.”
In it, Ms Cechetin said Mr Tourette insisted she was “obliged” to help him with his studies, complained when she sent him fewer emoji hearts than usual, didn’t want her to go out with friends and that she constantly wrote him messages.
“They were typical signs of possessiveness,” Julia’s father Gino told the BBC. “He would deny her her own space or demand that she be turned on at all times. He always needed to know everything she told her friends or even her therapist.’
“Later we realized that she thought she was the cause of his pain, that she felt responsible for it,” he said.
In an 80-page statement written from prison in a child’s handwriting, Mr Touretta said that since Ms Cechetin broke up with him, he had spent every day hoping to get back with her. “I did not feel that I could accept any other outcome,” he wrote.
In his police interview, Mr Touretta confirmed that on the night he killed her, Ms Cechetin had just told him he was too dependent and needy.
“I was screaming that it wasn’t fair, that I needed her,” Mr Touretta said, adding that he killed her after he got “very angry” as she tried to get out of the car.
“I was selfish, and I just realized it now,” he wrote. “I didn’t think about how incredibly unfair it was to her and to the promising and wonderful life she had ahead of her.”
