He had never accepted the return of his ex-wife to the walls of his home, more than ten years after the separation. He had also threatened her: "Sooner or later I'll drown you", he told her, and if what emerges from the first phase of the investigation conducted into the case of the woman found dead last September 27 in a swimming pool in Erba, in the Comasco area, is true, her husband Carmine Civitillo, 76, was as good as his word. It would have been him, in fact, who suffocated her and then pushed her into the swimming pool with the wheelchair in which she had been forced for two years, perhaps wanting to simulate a suicide or an accident. For this he was arrested in Benevento, where he had returned a few weeks ago.
She, Patrizia Monteleone, 64 years old, had been forced into that wheelchair since 2024, after having survived a stroke with terrible effects. For a period he had lived in some rooms of the family business, in the Canturino area, before the company went into liquidation, when the couple's three children - Diana, Michael and Eleonora - were faced with the problem of finding different accommodation for their mother. They had desperately searched for her everywhere, first in the city, in Como, then here and there in the Province, finally even in Rome and Lazio. Nothing to be done, they had never found a house, so that in the end the only solution had been to bring mum and dad together under the same roof, certainly a temporary solution, to resolve which the boys had never stopped working without results.
There is more than one clue against the father, a former entrepreneur, starting from the threats, reiterated in the context of a climate of enormous tension that had flared up since the day of his ex-wife's return. To the Rai cameras of "La vita in diretta", which had hooked him up a few days after the discovery of the body, Civitillo had reiterated the same version already provided to the police, claiming that he had left home early in the morning and that he had only returned that Sunday around midday, finding her body already in the water, and for this reason that he had immediately contacted his son: "Come here immediately, your mother is here... Make your own arrangements". Then he clarified: "I don't care about them at all (referring to both his ex-wife and their three children, ed.). What if I was on good terms with her? No, I repeat, I've been divorced for ten years." It was immediately clear that something was wrong. When Michael had pulled his mother's lifeless body out of the water, the pram was at the edge of the pool, soaking wet. If she had fallen into the water, as everything suggested, then who had recovered her? Adding to the initial suspicions were the testimonies of some neighbors who had heard cries for help that same morning, and then the images of a surveillance camera that had filmed his car as he returned well before midday, perhaps even before 11 in the morning, never to leave again. The rest was done by the autopsy and some targeted interceptions. The medical examiner ascertained that Patrizia died of suffocation, and that only afterwards was she thrown into the water.
On the mouth, the corpse still bore clear signs of mechanical action, small lacerations and wounds with an unmistakable meaning. And then the logic: in the conditions in which she found herself, relegated to that chair, she would never have been able to move around the house independently, much less reach the garden and the swimming pool on her own. In a series of phone calls with one of his Chinese clients in recent days, Carmine Civitillo reportedly referred several times to the possibility of an escape. And this is perhaps also the reason that led the Prosecutor's Office to speed up the process and request the arrest.
