An “egocentric” mother who murdered her eight-year-old son in cold blood, after the lad allegedly found out she was having an affair with his grandfather, has been jailed for 30 years in Italy.
Veronica Panarello throttled her son Loris Stival with electrical cables and abandoned his body in a remote gully in Santa Croce, Sicily.
Panarello had tried to pretend her son had been abducted, telling police she had taken him to school and that he had disappeared by the time she came to collect him in the afternoon.
Police began to suspect the boy’s mother, judge Andrea Reale was told, when CCTV footage at the school did not back up her story. She was found guilty of the boy’s murder and of concealing a body.
Prosecutors branded her an ‘egocentric, manipulative liar.’ When Panarello confessed that her son had been killed, she blamed her husband’s father Andrea Stival.
She told an earlier hearing that he had helped to plot and then carried out the murder because Loris had caught them having sex. Stival is being investigated as an accessory to murder, reports Italian media.