murder charge

Trial

Widow denies murder charge

Vanuatu’s most violent murder case to date has come up for hearing before the country’s supreme court.

The first day of hearing was October 9, 11 months since an Italian builder’s brutally clubbed body was found in the tray of his pick-up on the outskirts of Port Villa.

Standing trial is Francesco Picchi’s widow Luciana, 29. She pleaded not guilty to the charge of premeditated and inten tional murder when she appeared before the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Charles

Vaudin d’lmecourt.

Last November 28, Francesco Picchi was found dead at the bottom of a slope, slumped in the rear tray of his pick-up truck. His skull and back were badly dam aged and there were signs of strangulation.

At the time, Public Prosecutor John Baxter-Wright said the killing was the most violent murder of an expatriate in the island state’s history.

Baxter-Wright, in his opening submis sions, accused Picchi of the premeditated homicide of her husband.

For this, he said, she was helped by two

local accomplices George Tui and Perry

Jimmy, who confessed last April after being arrested by police in an unrelated case. They have since been remanded in

custody.

The prosecution, which heavily relies on the two accomplices’ statements, brought some 50 exhibits before the court, including photographs of the crime scene and of the body in the mortuary, blood stained-clothes, newspapers, a car mat, a car jack and samples of human hair.

Revealing his version of the facts, Baxter-Wright said the murder had been

planned many months ago. Picchi first started an affair with George Tui, who was employed in her husband’s building com pany. She then convinced him, in exchange for money, to help her kill her husband, with the help of another accom

plice, Jimmy.

In preparation for the crime, traditional wooden clubs (known in Vanuatu as nal nals and used for killing pigs) and wigs were bought by a housemaid.

On the night of November 28, 1994,

Baxter-Wright alleged, Picchi told her hus band she was going to play “a magic trick” on him. He then allowed her to blindfold him and tie his hands behind him to a chair.

Tui and Jimmy, who were waiting out side, came in and “set about a fatal and brutal attack” on the builder, Baxter-

Wright said, adding that both accomplices

said the young woman joined in the mur derous attack by covering her husband’s head in a plastic bag and strangling him with a rope.

Meanwhile, the housemaid was ordered to take the Picchi’s small crying child away to another room of the same house.

The prosecutor said after Picchi was killed, his body was taken to the bathroom to be washed. Bloodstained walls and floors were carefully wiped too, he said.

Luciana Picchi, throughout the prose cution’s expose, remained calm and was sometimes seen smiling.

The court which visited the crime scene on the first day of trial is expected to start the summing-up in two weeks’ time and deliver judgement. ■

The funeral of Francesco Picchi.