The fortune, the death of an Italian countess and claims of foul play

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The Independent
By Peter Popham in Rome
30 December 2004


As the night rain fell on the veranda of the luxury villa, the Italian countess, clad only in a white robe to hide her faded beauty, stepped on to the wall guarding the cliff's edge. Her head swimming from a cocktail of whisky and sleeping pills and suffering from famously "weak nerves", she plunged to her death.

It sounds like the opening of a bad novel. But it has now been claimed that the accepted truth about the death of Countess Francesca Vacca Agusta in 2001 may indeed by a fiction. The brother of the fashion model-turned wealthy countess has now called for the case to be reopened, claiming that his sister didn't jump, she was pushed.

The gruesome mystery gripped Italy for months after the widow of the aristocratic helicopter tycoon Count Corradino Agusta, fell 80 metres to her death from the veranda of her villa in the millionaire's playground of Portofino, on Italy's north-west coast.

The inquiry at the time was told there were only three people in the house. Her lover, a Mexican called Tirso "Tito" Chazaro, her maid, Susanna Torretta, and a Polish domestic. The Countess supposedly fled from the house onto the veranda in a drunken rage, mounted a small wall at the edge of the veranda and, slipping on wet leaves, toppled over the edge.

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