A 17-year-old boy obsessively listened to the same two lines of a Beatles track before massacring his brother and parents on his father’s 51st birthday.
The boy, named only as Riccardo, brutally slaughtered his father, Fabio Chiarioni, his mother, Daniela Albano, 49, and 12-year-old brother Lorenzo with a 20cm kitchen knife in Paderno Dugnano, near Milan, Italy, on Sunday.
Riccardo chillingly told police that he slew his family to ‘live more freely’ after obsessively listening to The Long and Winding Road by the Beatles in the days leading up to killings, local media reports.
He said he listened to the lines ‘Many times I’ve been alone / And many times I’ve cried’ on repeat.
During the shocking attack, the teen first struck his brother while he slept and Lorenzo’s screams woke up their parents, who rushed into his bedroom.
The worried father, who did not know his eldest was the attacker, screamed at him for help, only to then slain by his own flesh and blood.
‘I stabbed dad while he was yelling at me to call for help’, the teen confessed, as reported by Italian outlet Il Difforme.
He added: ‘I thought one stab would be enough to kill, then I realised it wasn’t like that.’
The boy stabbed his father in the neck several times to kill him fast as he said he did not want his family ‘to suffer’.
The boy also told investigators: ‘There is no real reason why I killed them. I felt like a foreign body in my family. Oppressed. I thought that by killing them all I would free myself from this discomfort’.
Riccardo also said that he thought about going to Ukraine to fight against Russia.
According to local reports, the young boy had initially told authorities the fabricated story that he had witnessed his father, killing his mother, and brother – before taking a knife and stabbing his father.
The 17-year-old explained to investigators that he entered his brother’s room on the second floor of the family home to find Chiarioni sitting on a chair with the knife next to him.
He told officers the body of his mother was on the ground by his father’s feet, and his brother was lying dead in his bed before he launched his attack on his father.
But the police were left unconvinced at the story as the boy had no signs of struggle on his body and the truth emerged during a second interrogation.
The teen revealed to investigators that he had felt ‘discomfort’ within his family, and that these emotions had erupted just a few hours after the family celebrated Chiarioni’s 51st birthday.
He also said he had been thinking about carrying out the killings ‘for a while,’ reports Il Messaggero.
The boy explained how at around 2am on Sunday morning, he grabbed a large kitchen knife and lunged first at his little brother, plunging the weapon into him at least ten times.
He then made his brutal attack on his parents who were also in his brother’s room, but the young brother was found to have the most stab wounds.
The teen called authorities immediately after the savage killings, telling Italian emergency services that he had knifed his father to death.
L’unione Sarda reported the boy had told authorities: ‘I killed my dad, come,’ following the attack.
When officers arrived outside the family home, they found the 17-year-old on the pavement in his underwear and with his bare back covered in blood.
He was reportedly still holding the blood-soaked knife in his hand until the authorities arrived, where he then dropped it to the ground.
Officers then found the parents and brother dead in their nightwear in the brother’s room.
Speaking to investigators during his confession, he said: ‘I realised it a minute later. I understood that it was not by killing them that I would be freed.’
According to a report by Ansa, the boy has now been arrested for his killing spree after being questioned all of Sunday by investigators headed by Milan juvenile prosecutor Sabrina Ditaranto.
Judicial sources said they yet to understand the motive behind the triple homicide.
‘It will be necessary to wait for a long time before explaining such an atrocious gesture’, they said.
Ditaranto said during a press conference Sunday: ‘The boy understood that he had done something irreversible, he expressed his own discomfort, not related to the family.
‘From a judicial point of view we do not have a technically valid motive. From a sociological and psychological point of view obviously the investigations are open’.
Family friends and the mayor of Paderno Dugnano, Anna Varisco, expressed shock at the news of the devastating killings.
‘They were a normal, serene family, not followed by social services and described by everyone as not having problems’, Varisco told the outlet.
Neighbors described the family as quiet, well-off, hard-working people, reports Il Messaggero.
‘They were a fantastic, happy family. It’s impossible, I don’t know what could have happened,’ said the father of a classmate of the 17-year-old.
‘He went to school with my daughter, elementary and middle school, we vacationed together, I saw the father a month ago for the last time.
‘We spent good days together in the past.’