Catamaran crime: the killer escaped!

Morning of June 28, 1988: off the coast of Marzocca di Senigallia (Ancona), during a trawling session, crew members of a fishing boat make a gruesome discovery, recovering the body of a woman. The body was ballasted with a 17-pound anchor, and the face was completely disfigured from the long stay in the water and, as would be discovered later, also from the numerous blows inflicted with a machete. The woman is identified. She is Annarita Curina, 34, a skipper by profession and owner of a 10-meter sailing catamaran, the Arx.

TO THE BALEARICS
International investigations and searches are triggered: it turns out that on the morning of June 10 Annarita had taken to the sea together with a man, an Italian and a Dutch girl. The three had left for the Balearic Islands: not just for a vacation, but to have the opportunity, once they arrived in the Spanish archipelago, to rent the boat as a charter.

HANDCUFFS FOR ‘STRANGE’ SAILOR
The boat, which had since been renamed Fly 2, was found on July 19 in the Tunisian port of Ghar el Melh. On July 21, Tunisian authorities arrest Filippo De Cristofaro, 34, divorced, a daughter, a strange guy who lives by his wits and possesses a real passion for sailing boats, and two Dutchmen: the very young Diane Beyer (17), who with De Cristofaro, leaving her parents behind, has already fled once to New Caledonia and Pieter Groenendijk, 27, who would later turn out to be unrelated to the crime.

THE IMPROBABLE HARANGUE OF THE KILLERS
At first, Philip and Diane try to baste their own version-quite improbable-of what happened at sea: a brawl between the two women who were fighting over De Cristofaro that ended in tragedy. Then they both collapse. And they confess. It was Filippo De Cristofaro who killed Annarita Curina, with the girl’s complicity. She allegedly wounded the woman-previously stunned with Valium dissolved in coffee-in the side with a knife while she was resting below deck. But he finished her off with a machete that was on board. Both then threw the body into the sea, after ballasting it so that it would never be found again.

MOTIVE: A SICK DREAM
The motive for the crime is futile and obvious in its horror: to seize Annarita’s catamaran and sail around the world together. A dream of many, but ill-attempted to achieve. Beyer was sentenced by the Juvenile Court to six years and six months in prison on December 17, 1988. Instead, De Cristofaro got 30 years in the first instance, a sentence that was changed to life in prison on appeal and in the Supreme Court on June 5, 1991.

THE KILLER IS ON THE LOOSE
Why did we tell you this story? Because De Cristofaro ran away. For the second time. On July 6, 2007, during a furlough from Opera prison, Goofy (as his friends call him) escaped. They fish him out in Utrecht, the very city where his great love Diana (who has since married and had three children) lives, a month later. Seven years pass. De Cristofaro manages to get an Easter furlough in 2014. Three days out of prison in Porto Azzurro, Elba, to be spent in a community in Portoferraio. And he still disappears. Since then, no one has seen him. If you hear from him, if this face reminds you of anyone, contact the authorities.

INTERVIEW WITH THE KILLER

In 1994, Franca Leosini conceived the series “Storie Maledette,” in which the Neapolitan journalist and anchorwoman traveled to Italian prisons to interview inmates involved more notorious crime stories. Filippo De Cristofaro was featured in the very pilot episode of the series, titled “Arx, the Catamaran of Death.” We reproduce below the full interview, in which the sailor, after a six-year silence, decides to tell his (shaky) version of events. (Ghego Saggini)