When a man says: she is mine and nobody else’s

Fourteen stab wounds that proved fatal. Santa Scorese was just 23 years old when on March 16, 1991, in Palo del Colle, in the province of Bari, she was killed by Giuseppe, a young man with mental disorders who had been obsessed with her for some years.

Since 1988 he had persecuted her with threats, intimidation, and harassment; he stalked her. “you are mine and nobody else’s, and not even God”s” he wrote to her in a note. Santa sought protection, and reported him repeatedly, but at that time Italian laws did not offer adequate tools to counter such phenomena. Stalking as a crime was only included in the Italian penal code (Article 612 bis) in 2009. The police and authorities played down the seriousness of the situation, believing that it was a “passing disorder” and that the man did not represent a real threat, even though he had gone as far as an attempted rape, which the girl had barely managed to escape from.

In the family, Santa’s father was a policeman, who protected her, and someone always tried to accompany her when she went out. Despite these precautions, in the late evening of Friday, March 15, 1991, her persecutor waited at her doorstep for her to return from a Catholic Action meeting, and viciously beat her. Santa’s father was on the balcony, waiting for his daughter to return.

A tragedy foretold. No one had stopped Joseph; they thought of him only as sick but not evil. After Santa’s death, Giuseppe ended up locked up in the judicial psychiatric hospital in Aversa (Caserta) where he remained for 10 years.

Santa, a student of Pedagogy, was a sweet girl, religious, and socially committed, ready to make her own contribution to improve the world around her. She was very active in her Catholic community and dreamed of becoming a missionary.

She is in the process of beatification, nomen omen; currently the Church considers her to be a Servant of God, due to her demonstrated heroism

About her story in 2019, director Alessandro Piva made the documentary film Santa Subito, which won the Audience Award at the Rome Film Festival.