A convicted killer told a court Tuesday his victim deserved to die because he was a child molester.
"He was a pedophile by his own admission," Paolo Grassi, 30, told a hearing in the murder trial of his alleged accomplice, Gianluca Civardi.
"He deserved to die...because he hurt people".
Grassi has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty in July of strangling and stabbing retired esthetics professor Adriano Manesco, 77, to death in his home in Milan in August last year.
Grassi said he and a friend met Manesco in 2012, and accepted an invitation to drink coffee in his apartment. Here, the elderly retired professor allegedly asked both younger men to take off their clothes.
Grassi told the court he began planning the murder in 2014 along with Civardi, who had never met the intended victim.
"Civardi told me he wanted to know what it was like to kill someone before he died," he said.
He added that they planned to steal the professor's savings and move to Thailand or Brazil "because we didn't find our lives fulfilling any more".
"Civardi started to strangle Manesco in the living room, while I searched his computer for his credit card numbers," said Grassi, a former employee at a boarding school.
"I pulled the curtains so no one could see us. I wasn't feeling well and I tried not to look at the blood".
Afterwards they abraded Manesco's fingertips to prevent his identification, dismembered his body and put it in a suitcase they had brought to the professor's flat for that purpose.
Then they left it in a dumpster at Lodi station.
They were arrested in Piacenza just hours after the murder, after they were seen getting rid of the clothes they had been wearing during the crime.
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