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- [00:00]
Katie Strick
You're listening to an episode of a Wondery exclusive series. To continue listening, join Wonder plus and enjoy ad free listening to over 50,000 episodes, early access to your favorite podcasts and more. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This episode contains adult themes and descriptions of drug use and violence. The killing of a young man is a horror that can re through an entire community.
- [00:35]
Sasha Bafiani
I was shocked. I read it as everyone here did, because of all the details and all the, you know, the gruesome stuff, the candle, the blood, the fighting. It was the talk of the town.
- [00:50]
Katie Strick
But behind every tragic murder headline is another, deeper story, one that should not get lost in the telling and retelling of a senseless killing. Offenders often come from dysfunctional families, difficult environments. But in this case, it seemed like the opposite. Here was that the evil thing broke into the nearly perfect world. Because it's in these deeper, more complex stories that we learn who we are and what we're up against.
- [01:22]
Katya Faber
I had thought that having been a criminal law barrister, I would know how to go through the labyrinth of what lay ahead. But I was wrong. Because there is the world of difference between being a lawyer who is representing a client and fighting for justice for your own child.
- [01:49]
Katie Strick
This story starts with a woman called Katya. What are your hopes for the future?
- [01:54]
Katya Faber
Looking forward, my hopes and dreams. Katie, my goodness.
- [01:59]
Katie Strick
Well, over the last year, Katya Faber and I have spent dozens of hours together on the phone between Zurich, the Swiss city where she lives when she's not on her avocado farm in Spain, and London, where I work as a journalist.
- [02:12]
Katya Faber
I think, you know, I know it sounds a little bit crass, but I think it's about the journey, to be honest. I mean, clearly I want to have a fulfilling life and I want the people that I love to be happy and to find things that motivate them and fill them with joy. But I know that life isn't like that. And I know that they're going to go through terrible times as well, because that's how it is.
- [02:38]
Katie Strick
Katya is warm. She has an undeniable charisma, but also a down to earth, straight talking honesty. If you look her up, you'll see she comes from a pretty glitzy world. She's the daughter of a glamorous Spanish ballerina and the granddaughter of a famous Spanish conductor. But to me, she's Katya, a mother, a farmer, a fierce campaigner. She is an elegant and discerning sort of woman who looks younger than her 60 years. But beneath her smile and her sun kissed skin, her face tells another story. The story of her son, Alex Morgan, and the life shattering series of events that led to his killing by a man he considered a friend one night in December 2014. It's a series of events that have gripped me over the 12 months since I first reached out to Katya for a story I was writing in the London Standard. Because the fallout from that night in 2014 is still ongoing. And now Katya is finally ready to tell the world about it. All of it. How has the last week been for you, Katya, since we last spoke?
- [03:56]
Katya Faber
Well, it's been mixed to be honest. It's just been raining non stop in Zurich. I mean, just terrible. It's raining everywhere in Central Europe at the moment.
- [04:04]
Katie Strick
Katya and I first connected at the beginning of January 2020, four weeks after her son's killer had been released from jail. Months before what would have been Alex's 33rd birthday. And just a year since, the story of her son's gruesome death had taken another extraordinary twist. Like many journalists across the world, I was intrigued when the details of Alex's killing became public. This was a killing of a London socialite by a child of the super rich. Murder on the Gold Coast. Newspapers called it a young man in his prime killed in a drug fueled rage. Christine Brand, a court reporter who spent years covering all of the ensuing trials and retrials, still has a list of those early headlines. It's called the Gold Coast Killer and the Bloody Crime from Kisnacht and Murder in the Luxury Villa. Things like this. A nearly normal playboy as you've probably picked up already by now. It wasn't just the savagery of Alex's death that triggered the salacious headlines and captured the public's attention. It was the world it took place in. A world of aristocrats and art dealers, winters in St. Moritz and summers on the Cote d'azur. A world of exceptional, unimaginable privilege. That world, and the remarkable twists the ensuing legal battle ended up taking were unlike any story I had come across over my journalistic career. But they were also strangely, underreported. Many of the disturbing details had not been published in the very country the killing took place in. Switzerland, as a result of strict privacy laws. As a British journalist free from those Swiss legal constraints, it became obvious to me that this story was bigger than a simple newspaper article in the Standard. This was a story that needed to be told in full. Names, details and all its various voices included. And I wanted Katya to help me tell it. What I didn't know back then was quite what a journey this story would take me on over the coming weeks and months. What I did know was that Katya was no ordinary victim.
- [06:17]
Katya Faber
I was coming at it from I have to protect Alex. I have to, you know, clear his name.
- [06:23]
Katie Strick
And I was right on that part.
- [06:25]
Katya Faber
And if what was required of me was to protect him in death from what was being said about him and to get justice for him, well, then that was what I was going to do.
- [06:40]
Katie Strick
Katya is unlike other grieving parents I've interviewed over the last decade. For starters, she's a former criminal barrister and journalist, which helps when you're making a podcast about an international justice system and a case that sparked a media frenzy across the world. She also just so happens to be one of the most brave, open hearted, emotionally intelligent people I've been fortunate enough to get to know.
- [07:05]
Katya Faber
And when people turn up, I hold space for them. That's basically what I do.
- [07:11]
Katie Strick
Which also helps when you're exploring some of the issues she and I have had to delve into over the last 12 months. The final visit she made to her son at his flat in Marylebone, for example. The dream she had the night before she learned of her son's death. The shocking charges she has had to incur over the ensuing several year legal battle. All this while the man who took her son's life brazenly boasts about being on the run. Here's the thing about this particular case. The killer has a name. Bennett Von Vertes, a six five, blond haired, blue eyed, gallery owning child of an art dealer from Zurich. Privilege personified, if you ask most people who've met him. And yet strict privacy laws mean that his name and many of the details surrounding his conviction are geo blocked in Switzerland, the very country in which he was eventually convicted and may still be living in today. What we're going to tell you over the next six episodes is a story about drugs, privilege, power and justice. Or the lack thereof, depending on who you speak to. It's a story about the shield money can give you and how it can warp and distort the lives of those with a lot of it. But there's another side to this story too. This is also a tale of love, forgiveness, determination and one mother's fight for healing in the face of unbearable horror.
- [08:41]
Katya Faber
I was somehow trying to swim to shore, but there was no shore. And you just continue swimming and you just keep going because what else are you meant to do?
- [08:55]
Katie Strick
I'M Katie Strick and you're listening to Killer Privilege from the London Standard and message heard. Episode 1 Did you hear about Alex?
- [09:13]
Katya Faber
He was living in central London. Just off the Marylebone Road is 2014.
- [09:18]
Katie Strick
Where I'll start this story. And Alex Morgan, a handsome former public schoolboy and Regents University graduate, is living in a flat in Marylebone in the northwest of the UK's capital.
- [09:30]
Katya Faber
And it was quite an open plan and he'd bought this huge sofa and I remember thinking, where are you going to go with this sofa? If you ever have to move, it'll never fit anywhere else. But he didn't really think far ahead. I think that's typical of young people anyway, but certainly of Alex.
- [09:49]
Katie Strick
It's a studenty bachelor pad kind of place. You know the type, leather sofas, a hole in the wall where there should have been a microwave, walls that probably need another lick of paint.
- [10:00]
Katya Faber
And yeah, it was perfect for him, to be honest. He, you know, he was working and he'd finished his studies and he, he was happy there. That's the impression I got, that he was very happy in his flat.
- [10:11]
Katie Strick
Alex splits his time between London and Zurich, where his mother Katya has been living ever since she separated from her ex husband Benedict, Alex's father. Alex is well acquainted with Zurich. He spent his teenage summers working and holidaying out there and two years of sick form in the city. But it's London that has his heart at this particular point. He's 20, 3, 5 9, a talented rugby player and a keen guitarist and he's just started his first job in commercial property.
- [10:42]
Katya Faber
Alex was larger than life. There was something about him, I mean from even when he was little. I mean, he would walk into a room and people would be drawn to him. He had an energy that was charismatic.
- [10:58]
Katie Strick
Two phrases come up again and again when I speak to Alex's friends about the man he was before his death. Free willed and slightly obsessive. He had an all or nothing kind of attitude.
- [11:10]
Katya Faber
They all tell me he either loved something or he didn't. And if he didn't, he let you know it. He could be incredibly frank and give his opinion fearlessly. He didn't really care what people thought.
- [11:27]
Sam Hunter
Of him once he let down his walls. He was one of the warmest human beings I've ever met and really funny. Like he was always cracking a joke or he always had a witty remark. He was one of the quickest people that I knew.
- [11:41]
Katie Strick
Here's Sam Hunter, an Australian musician and childhood friend of Alex's.
- [11:46]
Sam Hunter
He was a leader you know, and people sort of gravitated towards him and he would always give people the truth in whatever story. He didn't like to sugarcoat things, but yeah, he was one of those friends that you just, you just wanted to be around all the time. And if you weren't hanging out with Alex and not doing what Alex was doing, you were missing out.
- [12:08]
Katie Strick
Sam moved to Zurich from Australia in 2006 and got to know Alex through their mothers, Katya and Helen. Like their boys, Katya and Helen got on like a house on fire. From the off.
- [12:19]
Sam Hunter
Friendship at first sight was just amazing.
- [12:22]
Katie Strick
It was almost a physical feeling.
- [12:26]
Sam Hunter
We were like two kindred spirits.
- [12:30]
Katie Strick
Katya and Helen quickly developed an inseparable bond. On a typical evening, they and their children would congregate at one of their houses, drinking, eating and talking late into the night. Helen was fond of Alex and developed a close bond with him.
- [12:46]
Sam Hunter
He was pretty young then, but he was a very curious, very curious young man.
- [12:52]
Katie Strick
And I would often find him sitting.
- [12:56]
Sam Hunter
On the stairs to my mezzanine, just looking out, contemplating the world.
- [13:05]
Katie Strick
I've got to know Katya, the Hunters and dozens of members of Alex's inner circle pretty well. Over the last year. We've poured through old photos and video clips of Alex taken on various early noughties smartphones, and I feel they've painted me a pretty good picture of the kind of young man Alex had become and the kind of elite, cross continent, jet setting world he'd inhabited by the time of his death. His photo library showed him on nights out with the model, Cara Delevingne and Rosamund Pike's stepdaughter at music festivals in Ibiza, Barcelona and the Alps, cigarette balanced between his lips, carefree and smiling. Katya once told me she liked to think of her son as a kind of Swiss, British version of James Dean. Charming, rebellious, talented. It's clear from the pictures that he was a good looking guy. Dark hair, big eyebrows, bright eyes and he had an infectious laugh. According to friends.
- [14:03]
Katya Faber
Alex was 23 when he was killed and almost all his friends were 23, 22, 20, they were more or less that age and they were just big kids. There were these tall boys with, you know, smiling and, you know, their hair sort of sticking up on end and starting to find their way in the world.
- [14:28]
Katie Strick
When I asked Sam about a particular photo of Alex, cigarette in mouth, legs dangling from a pub windowsill, the one that sums up his living on the edge attitude, he said one thing in particular that struck me. We thought we were invincible back then. The Truth was, far from it. Not too long after this photo was taken, Alex, Katya's smiling, lovable life and soul of a son was dead. We'll be right back. I could go on for hours here painting you a picture of this charismatic all or nothing young man living in London, his love of dogs and his obsession with the rugby haka. But what sets this story apart from other murders isn't Alex's character or his untimely death, but the world of privilege it takes place in. This part is crucial to our story because it not only impacts what happened to Alex that night in December 2014, but what's happened since. Alex was born in Islington, an affluent neighbourhood in North London. Katya was working as a journalist at the time, having hung up her barrister wig a few years previously. Alex's father, Katya's then husband, Benedict Morgan, was a former director at Commers bank in London. He'd once worked as a banker in Moscow and owned a million pound apartment overlooking the Solent on the south coast of England near Southampton to give you a glimpse of the world Alex was brought up in. Alex and his younger sister were raised in Putney in South West London and educated at Ibstock Place, a private hippie ish kind of school in Roehampton. It's where Mick Jagger sent his kids, if you want a flavour of the types you'd bump into at parents evening. His secondary school attracted a similar roster of the rich and famous. He attended Gordonstoun, King Charles alma mater in the Scottish countryside. At 16, Alex left Gordonstoun and moved to Hull School in Zurich, which is Katya's birthplace and the city she moved back to after her marriage to Benedict disintegrated. Alex, their eldest, was nine at the time. Zurich was cleaner, safer and more reliable than London, which Katya felt was too dangerous a city to raise teenagers. It was an environment that also gave Alex a tight social set. Mostly other offspring spring of upper middle class parents, many of whom, like Alex, have spent their teens jetting between British boarding schools and the Gold coast of Zurich. The Gold coast is a place known for its privacy to the point where even the area's most a list former resident, the late great Tina Turner, could do her shopping without being disturbed. Sasha Bafiani, a Swiss journalist, describes it as an extraordinary place of of wealth, privacy and power.
- [17:23]
Sasha Bafiani
They live at the Gold coast because the evening light shines golden into their houses at their side of the lake, whereas the other side lies in shadow.
- [17:34]
Katie Strick
Sasha knows the area well and tells me it's a Difficult place to describe.
- [17:38]
Sasha Bafiani
You have these perfect houses between these big hedges, so you don't really see them, but you feel that they're really big. And as almost everywhere in Switzerland, it's very clean. You have these big cars and you have tennis courts, and then there is this lovely lake. Just a quiet place where you can enjoy your luxurious life, I guess. But to be honest, it's not that easy for journalists to get into this world if you don't have friends and people who would invite you for whatever reason. It's kind of gated community. I mean, there's not a lot of access.
- [18:25]
Sam Hunter
It's its own little country, like, so far in. In the Swiss Alps. And you feel so secluded. But it's beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful cities.
- [18:35]
Katie Strick
Sam, whose mother, Helen, had moved to Zurich with her job, remembers being the token Aussie kid in a new, dazzling world of great wealth and low taxes and luxurious lakeside villas.
- [18:48]
Sam Hunter
People know that you're not from Kusnacht. They certainly look at you at a certain way, and they look at your shoes and your clothes and your demeanour and everything.
- [18:57]
Katie Strick
Like Alex, Sam attended an international school in Zurich. It was different to Sydney in so many ways, One of the more surprising being that it seemed as though a lot of his peers were on their own.
- [19:09]
Sam Hunter
Sort of like that scene in Home Alone, you know, where Macaulay Culkin goes to New York and he gets himself into the hotel using his father's credit card. You could imagine if, like, these kids are just living in. In that lavish lifestyle, and they have maids and servants, and they don't really see their parents much because their parents are out doing whatever.
- [19:30]
Katie Strick
It's a strange thing Sam describes here, this world of deep pockets and giant houses where parents were leaving their kids to fend for themselves. Sam says it was normal to go out partying from Thursday to Sunday by the time these kids became teenagers. And he remembers one house party in particular that epitomizes the world he'd found himself thrust into.
- [19:51]
Sam Hunter
Someone took a TV off the wall, threw it out into the pool. I went down to check out more carnage at the pool, and there was, like, a, you know, a guy passed out in the bathtub, and people were urinating on him, and all these, like, really foul, like, bad behavior, you know, it's just, like, inhumane. The house got robbed. It was destroyed. People were breaking windows, taking art. And it was the most destructive scene that I had had ever witnessed in my life. And that's when I first went, like, wow, like, what is this? You know, like, are people really so wealthy and naive that they can just do anything and get away with it?
- [20:32]
Katie Strick
Today, many of those same teenagers are entrepreneurs, artists or financiers. The kind of confident, moneyed, globe trotting young men who respond to my messages with whatsapps like, hi Katie, sorry for the delay. I was in Belgium performing at some festivals or let's talk next week, hunting insane Moritz at the moment, alongside a picture of themselves with a bloodied goat slung over their shoulder. Stefan, a childhood friend, now working as an entrepreneur in Zurich, remembers meeting Alex during sixth form and quickly discovering a shared love of food, films, deep house music and winter sports.
- [21:10]
Stefan
Winter was always going up to the mountains. I enjoyed that a lot. He loved skiing, so there were just a lot of common threads.
- [21:18]
Katie Strick
They came of age together. Teens spent sharing their first beers. Summers spent traveling across Europe or the west coast of California, their early 20s plotting the businesses they'd never have a chance to start.
- [21:31]
Stefan
You know, in Switzerland the drinking age is quite young. So we started going out and, you know, nightclubbing it and bars at, you know, 15, something like that. And I'm actually really thankful for that because I had so many good nights with him, so many nights out.
- [21:50]
Katie Strick
Stefan still has a picture of Alex as the screensaver on his phone.
- [21:54]
Stefan
He's a background on my phone. We were in Barcelona one summer and there was a music festival, so we were on the beach next to the W and we were just kind of hanging out, having a good time.
- [22:09]
Katie Strick
Having a good time. This is another phrase that's come up several times in my interviews about the young moneyed Swiss set Alex found himself hanging out with before his death. That drug fueled lifestyle wasn't just the stuff of movies. In their world, it was normal. Here's Sam again.
- [22:28]
Sam Hunter
The key word is normalized. Being a part of that community and having like unlimited access, it was like the, the catalyst to many years of that continuing on, you know, and it was very normalized because of the accessibility, but also because everyone had money.
- [22:53]
Katie Strick
Like many young men, Alex and his friends were chasing cool, whatever that meant back then. So it's perhaps no wonder that his mother's apartment on the edge of a forest in the small cosy city of Zurich felt a little sanitised, a little safe. Most of Alex's friends had their sights set in America as a place to study after school. But for Alex, it was always London, the city of his birth. His favourite football team, Chelsea fc, and the place his father and Gordonstoun friends lived.
- [23:26]
Katya Faber
He Liked the sort of grainy side of London, the mix and match of the people and the history. I think he thought it was kind of more edgy and it had more potential for him to start living a life as a young man compared to Zurich.
- [23:42]
Katie Strick
After completing his A levels, he enrolled on a business degree at Regent's College, now Regent's University in North London. That one near the leafy Japanese gardens in the heart of Regent's Park. And it is here that he met Bennett, a man seven years his elder who would go on to become a friend for a while at least. So who was, who is this Bennett character exactly? How close a friend was he to Alex? How did Tina Alex come to be together that night in December 2014? And what went so wrong? It's 2014 in Zurich, Switzerland and Bennett von Vertes, a 29 year old business graduate and heir to a Hungarian German art dynasty, is running his own art gallery in the centre of the city. He's tall and slim with blonde shoulder length hair combed back into a bun. He's a playboy kind of figure, the type who drives a Porsche and boasts an expensive wardrobe of loafers and cashmere jumpers. He was born in Munich and attended Schuler Schloss Salem, a high end school in Germany that counts the Lake, Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Sophia of Spain amongst its alumni. Then Hertwood House, a British boarding school in Surrey for his A levels. Bennett's parents are separated like Alex's. His mother, Geyser, has lived in Hamburg in Germany since the divorce. His father, Laszlo, or Chaba as he's called on the Gold coast, is a prominent art dealer who lives in Zurich with his new partner Yvonne. Bennett is living in Zurich too, spending most of his time in an apartment close to the centre of the city, paid for by his father. Holidays are spent in the mountains or at the family property in Klosters, which is an exclusive Alpine village known for its secluded Ayles Villas and world renowned rehab centre where troubled souls can seek respite for £70,000 a week. King Charles has been known to visit the area during winter and Roger Federer lives nearby.
- [25:43]
Sasha Bafiani
You know, the funny thing is it always sounds like a cliche, like a bad Netflix series, because you think, is that really true that you know, for example, you go partying in Ibiza, like you know these Netflix series. Oh they would always, you know, the rich kids would always go to Ibiza. So at the beginning I was like no, that's, that's impossible. But actually that's how it is. Well, again, according to these friends of Bennett, that's really how it is. So you have this kind of map. So it was London, Ibiza to party, Milan, shopping, Paris. Then of course it's St Moritz in winter and then it's Cot Azur in summer or other places. So it's, as I said, it sounds like a big, big cliche, but that's how they described me, their lifestyle.
- [26:46]
Katie Strick
At this point, Bennett's CV is as jet set as his lifestyle school in Germany. A bachelor's degree at Webster University in Geneva, an MBA at Regent's University in London. He's now back in Zurich running a contemporary art gallery, an offshoot of his father's own gallery on the city's prominent Barnhofstrasse, a street known to locals as the Swiss equivalent of Bond street, filled with banks and luxury boutiques. His father's gallery sells works by Man Ray and Henri Matisse. Bennett sells Hearsts and Warhols. There are two types of people in the art world, several insiders explained to Sasha.
- [27:24]
Sasha Bafiani
So there are, you know, those who understand a lot about art and maybe pay a little bit less attention to the money side of it, and then there are those who are mainly interested in the money. You know, they could sell fish or cars, it doesn't really matter.
- [27:45]
Katie Strick
And Bennett's family very much fell into.
- [27:47]
Sasha Bafiani
The latter, which is not a crime, of course, why should it be? But it says something about about them.
- [27:57]
Katie Strick
What also says something about Bennett is his choice of pastimes outside of work. Drugs, partying and kickboxing appear to have been Bennett's main hobbies back then. Emphasis on the partying. A contact who knew him tells me that on an average week, Bennett would consume as much as 5 grams of cocaine and 10 grams of ketamine, a medication originally intended for injured horses, but now a mainstay drug in global club and party scenes. 10 grams of the stuff plus 5 grams of cocaine in a week is, well, let's put it this way, a hell of a lot of drugs for anyone to get through.
- [28:35]
Sasha Bafiani
He was a party animal. He was seen a lot of times in bars and clubs, not just in Zurich, but all over the place. Munich as well, London as well, I guess. There is always a new gallery opening somewhere where you can have a good time and I think that's what he had. Just flying around, partying a lot, having a lot of drugs all the time.
- [29:04]
Katie Strick
Drugs, clubbing, having a good time. This seems to be where the circles of Alex and Bennett's Venn diagram overlapped. But there is an important distinction here, because there are layers to these things. Alex and his Zurich set are wealthy, sure, but unlike Alex, Bennett's Facebook page shows him in linen suits in front of grand marble staircases and posing for selfies with Prince Constantine of Bavaria, whose royal wedding four years later would be attended by the likes of Princess Sofia and Prince Carl Philip of Sweden. And on. Like Alex, Bennett and his Zurich set could easily spend the equivalent of 9,000 pounds on a single night out. Sasha spoke to several young men from Bennett's world over his years reporting on this story.
- [29:50]
Sasha Bafiani
They also told me about the places they meet and become friends. So they often begin at boarding school. The classmates become substitute families. And the interesting thing is that even later, when school is over, you. You kind of stay among yourselves. That's what they told me. And a lot of times, you know, they told me the sister of a guy whose brother has something with the cousin of the other. You know, they're kind of dating among friends and among this group because it's easier. And the thing I had to laugh was when one of Bennett's friends told me it was like the aristocracy in the old days.
- [30:32]
Katie Strick
It's the world of the top 1%, a world few of us have probably grown up in, including Alex. So how did Alex and Bennett become such good friends, exactly? The truth is, they weren't. Not really. The pair met during their degree at Regent's University, where Bennett, a master's student who ran with a notably younger crowd, was widely regarded as a loner type figure who covered up his insecurities with his height and his money. He was known across campus for his wealth and would often pick up the bill at nightclubs after leaving, he and Alex had stayed in touch. They weren't close, though, according to Katya, or at least not compared to his friendships with Sam and Stefan.
- [31:16]
Katya Faber
I had never, ever, ever heard the name Bennett.
- [31:21]
Katie Strick
Some of Alex's Swiss friends had, though they would occasionally cross paths with the art dealer through the Zurich nightlife scene.
- [31:28]
Stefan
I met him at a friend's place. He was just that German guy sitting there talking a lot.
- [31:35]
Katie Strick
That's Andre, another childhood friend of Alex's, still living in Zurich.
- [31:40]
Stefan
Nothing grew on my part, and really hard to say what Alex saw in him. You know, just maybe the clubbing or hanging out with a guy that has, like, I don't know, financial freedom, being able to, I don't know, tag along during his clubbing sessions or so.
- [32:01]
Katie Strick
Alex didn't suffer falls, so Katya doesn't know what drew him to Bennett. Exactly. But she does know that he and Alex had two things in common. Nightlife and Zurich. Which is how they came to be together on 29th December 2014. The night had started just like any other. Whenever Alex and his friends were back for the Christmas holidays in Zurich. Alex had flown in from London that morning, ready to spend New Year skiing with his family. He'd met friends in the city centre and they'd gone to get their haircut.
- [32:35]
Katya Faber
Together, which I thought was like, okay, is that what dudes do? Like, you know, bonding? Do you go and have a haircut? I don't know. I really, I've always thought, okay, well maybe you just go and have a haircut.
- [32:46]
Katie Strick
At this point, Katya was still in Spain with Alex's younger sister. Alex had lost his keys to the family apartment, so he'd agreed to sleep over at a friend's that night. The details after that are a little more unknown. What Katya does know is that Alex spent a debauched evening with friends, eating, drinking and consuming copious amounts of ketamine and coke. They watched videos and ended up playing a drug fuelled game of chess. And then at some point, Alex accepted Bennett's offer for bed that night. The snow was thick on this particular evening, 25cm or so, with more falling from the sky.
- [33:27]
Katya Faber
And one of his friends, I remember saying, oh, he was so excited, you know, we were all sick of snow. It's like, oh, it's snowing again. And he was coming from London and he was saying, oh, this is great, look at this, it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. It's the snow. It's so beautiful.
- [33:41]
Katie Strick
At some point in the early hours, as they wandered through one of the squares in Zurich city centre, Alex remarked to Bennett that it felt like they were the last people on earth. At around 4am, the pair hailed a taxi and returned to the Von Werther's family villa to listen to music and take more drugs. All washed down with fine wine from the cellar. Three hours later, at around 7am, the police received a call. It was Bennett calmly telling them that his finger was bleeding and his friend was dead. According to a reporter who was at the trial, the exact wording went something like, My body tried to kill me, my whole hand is bleeding. I had to fight back, my body is dead. He attacked me. Come on. The news when it broke over the hours and days that followed, had ripple effects across the world.
- [34:35]
Sasha Bafiani
If this were a feature film, you know, the night Alex got killed, you would see all the Snow on the roofs of Zurich. The streets still empty. A cold and lazy winter day. And suddenly you would see dozens of young people's smartphones beeping and vibrating in villas on Zurich's Gold Coast. In chalets in St. Moritz, but also in chic apartments with floor to ceiling windows. In London, they would pick up the phones and look at the screens sleepily. And the message they would read would always be the same. Did you hear what's supposed to have happened?
- [35:18]
Katie Strick
So what did happen that night in Bennett's family villa? Well, that's for next time. In episode two, we'll hear from Katya about the dream she had just hours before she heard the news of her son's killing.
- [35:33]
Katya Faber
Alex's face was pushed against mine and he was screaming. Then his eyes were filled with terror and he was in pain.
- [35:42]
Katie Strick
We'll hear from Alex's friends about the funeral and the ripple effects of grief among his party set around the world.
- [35:48]
Sam Hunter
And then you do things like try to remember, like the last conversation you.
- [35:54]
Katie Strick
Have with them and the moment Katya discovered the horrifying truth of that night in the Von Werters villa and realized she was set for a fight.
- [36:04]
Katya Faber
Brace yourself. I would have said, brace yourself. This is going to be the fight of a lifetime. It's going to push you further into hell more than you can imagine.
- [36:23]
Katie Strick
Killer Privilege is a London standard and message Heard production. I'm your host, Katie Strick. This episode was Produced by Sophia McNulty. Harry Stott is our senior producer and James Cox is our production coordinator.
- [36:38]
Katya Faber
Sophie.
- [36:38]
Katie Strick
Sandra Ferrari, Anna Van Praack and Jay Quarren are executive producers. Sound editing by Alan Lear and music composition by Tom Biddle.