Mom Says She Murdered and Dismembered Her Son -- With Help From His Wife: Authorities

Claiming she and her daughter-in-law were both victims of physical abuse, the woman allegedly told authorities that they planned his murder for months.

A mother has reportedly confessed to the murder of her son, followed by dismembering him and attempting to hide his body. She further said that his wife helped her after the fact, and was involved in the planning.

According to multiple news outlets in Italy, including L'Union Sarda and the news agency ANSA (Agenzie Nazionale Stampa Associata), 61-year-old Lorena Venier made the admission after her daughter-in-law Mailyn Castro Monsalvo, 30, called police on July 25 to confess.

After authorities were alerted, they arrived at the house that Alessandro Venier, 30 (pictured above), had shared with his mother, wife, and infant daughter. His body was found dismembered in a garbage bin in the family's basement, according to police.

"I took care of Alessandro's 'dismemberment' myself," his mother told the judge in court after their arrests, according to the English version of ANSA. The outlet notes that Lorena is a nurse by profession.

Death of Alessandro

According to Lorena, they had originally intended to dispose of the body in the mountains, but Mansalvo couldn't go through with it, eventually calling the police and confessing to murder. According to ANSA, her mother-in-law insisted that Monsalvo's only involvement in the death of her husband was in moving his remains.

Venier said at the hearing that she and her daughter-in-law had made the decision to kill her son "by putting him to sleep," per L'Union Sarda. She reportedly said, "We knocked him out with a sleeping pill around 5:30 PM, but he didn't die until around 11 PM because we couldn't finish it."

She said that she'd "emptied an entire blister pack of medicine into the lemonade, but it wasn't enough." She then added two insulin injections, per the outlet, that she said she'd gotten from work about five years prior, "because at the time I'd decided to use them to kill myself."

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"Once the insulin had taken effect, we tried to suffocate him with a pillow," she continued, per L'Union Sarda, but Alessandro allegedly kept fighting back, "even though he was weak." Ultimately, The Daily Mail reports that his death finally came after he was allegedly strangled with his own bootlaces.

The subsequent dismemberment of his body was not part of the initial plan, according to Venier in court. "I did it myself, when we realized the body wouldn't fit in the bin where it was supposed to decompose, waiting to scatter the remains in the mountains," she explained to the judge.

"At that point, I used a hacksaw to cut him into three pieces, and Mailyn took him to the garage and covered him in lime," she continued.

She went on to explain in more detail, "I used a hacksaw and a sheet to hold the blood and I dissected him into three pieces. There were no blood splatters, that's why the Carabinieri police found everything in order."

Motive & Planning

In court, Venier said that the murder of her son came at the request of his wife. "Mailyn had been asking me to kill my son Alessandro for months, ever since the day their daughter was born in January," she said, adding, "Mailyn was violently beaten, insulted, and repeatedly threatened with death."

She said that her son "downplayed her postpartum depression," adding that she felt "Mailyn's life was in danger ... and when I decided to report it, he punched me in the back."

According to Venier, her son allegedly told Monsalvo during one of their frequent arguments, "I'll take you to Colombia and drown you in the river, because no one's looking for you there." She described her son as unemployed with drug and alcohol problems, refusing to find work or help around the house, per The Daily Mail.

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Even as the alleged violence and threats escalated, according to Venier, she and Monsalvo did not reach out to police for fear of retaliation. Instead, she said they spent the six months after her granddaughter's birth in January developing a plan to take care of him themselves.

She further pointed out that Alessandro needed to leave the country "before a conviction for serious bodily harm in an extra-family context was enforced," per the news outlet. Venier said that the women planned to take advantage of this to more easily explain his sudden disappearance.

Alessandro had purportedly already told his friends that he would be moving his family permanently to Colombia, so Venier said in court that they upped the timeline of their own murder plan to coincide with his plans. She said that she thought of Monsalvo as "the daughter I never had" and worried about the harm that might come if she and the baby moved to Colombia with her son.

"I could not have allowed them to go to Colombia, Mailyn and the baby would have run very serious risks there," she told the court, per The Daily Mail. "The only way to stop him was to kill him."

Venier and Monsalvo were even looking ahead to a brighter future with Alessandro out of the picture, according to L'Union Sarda.

"Once Alessandro was killed and things had calmed down, Maylin would return to Colombia, to her family, with the baby," she told the court, per the outlet. "I would fly to visit them as soon as I retired."

The plan was so thorough, it even included what would be said to the baby when she got older, with Venier telling the judge, per L'Union Sarda, "We would have said only good things about her father. We would have portrayed him in a good light, keeping the truth of the violence we suffered hidden forever."

Monsalvo had yet to speak out publicly about the alleged murder of her husband, with the newspaper noting that she is being held in a lower-security prison for mothers on the Venetian island of Giudecca.

Venier has been charged with murder and concealing a body, per The Daily Mail, while Monsalvo is being investigated for instigation to murder.

If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages; Calls are confidential and toll-free.