Italian police believe that the body of man found by walkers in a remote spot in the Abruzzo region a year ago had been left there by his sons who continued to pocket his pension.
The body of Bruno Delnegro, who died of natural causes, was found by two Canadian walkers last July in a cave about 215 miles (350km) from his home in Trani, in the southern Puglia region.
Delnegro, 81, is believed to have died days earlier, Italian media reported. Instead of reporting the death, his sons Benito, Domenico and Salvatore and the girlfriend of one of the men are alleged to have placed the body in a sleeping bag and transported it across two regional borders to the remote Abruzzo hamlet of Castrovalva with the aim of leaving it there while they claimed his €3,000-a-month pension.
The three sons and the girlfriend are under investigation for alleged offences including fraud against the pension authority and unlawful use of an ATM card.
Police were initially unable to establish the identity of the deceased and so it was decided in April that he would be buried in a grave marked “subject unknown”. The only clue was a femoral prosthesis implant found during the autopsy, which finally gave police a breakthrough.
Once Delnegro’s identity was known, they homed in on his sons after a car owned by one of them, believed to have been used to transport the body, was spotted on surveillance camera in the area of Castrovalva around the date of his death.
Delnegro, who had worked for the local health authority in Trani, is reported to have been bedridden for some time. Police believe his sons were motivated by his considerable pension, which together with his savings had given them €60,000 over the past year.
Macabre though the case is, the story is not so unusual in Italy. In May this year it was discovered that a man in Verona had kept his mother’s dead body at home for five years while he claimed her pension. A similar discovery was made in a town in Puglia in March: in that case, a son had managed to conceal his father’s body at home for 10 years.
In California last week, a man pleaded guilty to hiding his mother’s death for three decades, enabling him to claim more than $800,000 in benefits intended for her.
