A mother fought for seven long years to finally get justice for the murder of her 23-year-old son by a drug-addled Swiss aristocrat during a skiing trip to Switzerland.
Alex Morgan[/B], who had attended the prestigious Gordonstoun School in Scotland, had been the victim of the most brutal attack by his Swiss playboy friend, the son of a wealthy aristocrat, Bennett von Verdes, whose connected family owns an art gallery in Zurich. On his way to a ski trip, where he was to meet his mother, on 30 December 2014, Alex had accepted an invitation to spend a night in the Von Vertes family chalet, in the expensive Zurich suburb of Cushnacht, on the so-called Gold Coast of the eastern shore of Lake Zurich with its magnificent houses and millionaire celebrities such as Tina Turner.
After an evening that began at a friendly house with a game of chess and continued with drug and wine consumption[/B], they returned to the chalet and there, in the living room overlooking Lake Zurich, sometime in the early hours of the morning von Vertes, full of cocaine and ketamine, attacked his friend senselessly and uncontrollably. von Vertes, a six-foot-four kickboxer, hurled Alex onto a coffee table, glass shattering. He used pieces of glass to stab him and then grabbed a candlestick over 3 feet long and attacked him. The attack was such that Alex's skull was shattered and his facial bones were broken. Afterwards, von Vertes took a shower and then called the police saying, chillingly, "my finger is bleeding and my friend is dead."
Story of Swiss bureaucratic madness
Four years later his mother, Katia Faber, received an email from the prosecutor's office in Switzerland asking if she wanted his personal effects back. She was confused. The bag Alex had prepared for his fateful ski trip had already been returned to her; his watch, passport and wallet had already been returned to her in plastic cases with police numbers on them. Katia, who had worked as a solicitor in criminal courts in London before Alex was born ("and thank God for that," she says today), asked which items they meant. A list duly arrived; once she saw it she was even more confused, she says: "I couldn't believe what I was reading. It listed all of Alex's clothes jeans, shirt, underwear and specified that they were all bloody. At the bottom it said 'a candle'. I looked at the list over and over again: "Is it possible; am I seeing right?" .
This was unthinkable. She had been sent a list of Alex's personal effects, which included one of the weapons of his murder!
Alex, who was smaller than his friend, whom he had met at university in London - he had a fractured skull, his body had wounds from being hit with broken glass and he had been hit with a heavy candlestick. His injuries were so horrific that he needed a sealed coffin, which could not be opened. What killed him, however, was that the killer put a candle in his mouth that blocked his airway. "And yes, that was the candle they asked me if I wanted. Apparently, because it was found on him, it was thought to be one of his belongings," his mother says. "This is the absolute horror. And nothing can prepare you for it."
There have been "countless" times over the past seven and a half years when Katya wondered if she was living a horror movie. Two weeks after Alex's funeral she received a bill from the company that had removed her son's body from the chalet. "I thought the state was responsible for these things, but apparently not. They sent an itemised bill - to me, if possible - with a charge for the plastic sheeting they had used to wrap Alex's body."
The handed-down sentence and the overturn
Katia was in court, again, this week, in Switzerland, in what she hopes is the "final" attempt to secure justice for her son.She has been in and out of courtrooms since the first trial in 2017, in which von Vertes was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison after being found guilty of manslaughter with intent.
On appeal, however, in 2019, his sentence was reduced after his lawyers successfully argued that his drug consumption had made him unaware of what he was doing. He was given a three-year prison sentence, although he was released because of the time he had already served on condition that he enter a drug rehabilitation facility.
Katia downloaded a brochure about the rehabilitation clinic from the internet. She wanted to know how he would serve his "sentence". As she said: "It looks like a spa, a lovely old building with covered corridors and a beautiful garden. I also discovered that a few times a week he attended art history lectures in Bern."
She was stunned when the von Vertes family offered her 47,000 Swiss francs to cover funeral expenses and as "emotional compensation" for her son's death. "The murderer's aristocratic family told me it was unfortunate that Alex died, but in reality it was nobody's fault. It was ridiculous. What does that mean? Anyone who has consumed too many drugs or alcohol and committed a crime should not be held accountable?"
The prosecution - at its own insistence - appealed and last Tuesday, after a marathon battle, victory was now theirs. The original sentence was reimposed, with von Vertes found guilty. He can still serve the rest of his sentence in the rehabilitation unit, "but that's not the most important part." The important part is that I can call him a murderer," Katia insists."
The lawyer-detective mother and the expensive Swiss courts
The most surprising aspect of this tragic story is the role Katia herself played in the fight for justice for her son's murder. Not only did she push the prosecution lawyers to pursue the courts , but she hired her own legal team.
She became a detective herself, examining every piece of evidence she could find without looking at Alex's photographs. She even sat in the audience when the witnesses were testifying. His lawyers - he had three top lawyers - brought in everyone who had ever met him as witnesses. Every night, Katia studied the case file. Once she asked that her son's socks be sent for forensic examination. Why? As she says: "Because Von Vertes was saying that they were fighting, that this was a fight that got out of hand, and he said that Alex, after hitting him, got up again. I said there would have been shards of glass in his socks if that had happened. They didn't find any shards."
Not only did her legal training come into play, but so did the money. Although not in the cream of the wealthy like the von Vertes family, Katia and her family are clearly wealthy. Alex's father is a stockbroker in London (the couple are divorced, although he also attended the trial). Katia, who has two other children, not only has a house in Switzerland, but also a farm in Spain. She splits her time in two.
And yes, she incurred legal fees which were more than a lot. She says she sold an apartment to fund her legal battle and confirms we're talking hundreds of thousands of pounds. "The money is not important. You would give your last penny to fight for your children. I would give my kidney, but what about other people who don't have the means? I'm 100% convinced that if I didn't have knowledge of the law and the financial means, we wouldn't have a conviction." There is also a simple reason why justice has proved so difficult, Katia says, and that, again, is money. "One of the things I found most disturbing in all of this was to rail against the extreme wealth and sense of superiority that the Von Vertes family had. I'm convinced that, they thought, we were going to give up. I don't know if they thought Alex was just a ventriloquist's pet who didn't matter to anyone. But they underestimated the strength of a mother who lost her son. And there's no way they knew I was a lawyer. The combination made me a thorn in their side."
Katia is certainly a remarkable woman. The lawyer in her is meticulous, she thinks like a forensic scientist, she is able to remember dates and details. She worked for a time as a BBC journalist and has written about the grief of losing her child. The other her is the farmer in her (she grows lemons and avocados), she is practical and loves life in the countryside.
Above all a grieving mother
But it is the part of the mother in her that screams loudly. Alex was her eldest son. She remembers everything from the first time she felt him move when she was pregnant, to his first steps and "how much he loved Power Rangers, how scared of water, how good a skier he was. "Alex was smart, complex, dyslexic, witty, funny and stubborn, just like me," she recalls."
The news of Alex's death was brought to Katya by a police officer sent by Interpol. "There were two of them. I knew when I saw there was a female officer. They always send a woman. She was so young. I shouted. You're going crazy." Katia's first instinct was to run to her child. "I just wanted to go to him. I remember saying, 'Oh my God, he's going to get cold, he's getting cold. I have to get him out of there." I know it's absurd, but you can't just turn off that part of yourself, the part that's always telling your child: "Where's your coat?" . She wanted to stroke his hair, hug and kiss him, but because of the extent of his injuries she never saw him again, sure he wouldn't want to be remembered that way. She wrote the obituary, cried with his friends, who brought white roses and drew the headstone. Her other two children, both younger than Alex, gave her a reason to go on.
Yet, she says, she has a sympathy for von Vertes' mother, who was also in court every day. "One time I actually went to her. I hugged her. She said, 'We both lost our sons to drugs,' but at that point I left. She hasn't lost her son to drugs. She can see her son and hug him and make plans for the future. While my son is in the cemetery."
The lawyer in her heart knows that the von Vertes family cannot be held responsible for what their son did. However, the mother inside is struggling with this. Surely they must also see, she argues, that their son must pay for what he did. "He could do whatever he wanted in his life. He had all the cars he wanted, all the drugs he wanted, and that allowed him to acquire a behavior that led to destruction. It was not their disaster, but it was ours."
Source: protothema.gr
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