Part 4: The Rebellion

Summary

(In)Justice: Killer Privilege - Episode 4: The Rebellion

Host: Katie Strick
Production: Evening Standard | Message Heard
Release Date: June 5, 2025

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Introduction to Tragic Parallels

The episode opens with Katie Strick introducing the heartrending stories of two mothers, Cheryl Simmons and Katya Faber, each grappling with the brutal loss of their sons. Cheryl shares the devastating loss of her daughter Julie, who was killed by her then-boyfriend, paralleling Katya's own suffering over her son Alex's murder by Bennet, a privileged university friend.

Notable Quote:

Cheryl Simmons [00:19]: "To say we were close is an understatement. She was attached at the hip."

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Cheryl Simmons' Grief and Insight

Cheryl recounts Julie's vibrant personality and her own deep connection as a mother. She expresses her maternal instincts that foreshadowed the tragedy, revealing her fears about Julie's relationship with Bennet.

Notable Quote:

Cheryl Simmons [00:46]: "I hate so much that I didn't give her that part of the intuition to see into people's faces or souls that not everybody was fixable."

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Katya Faber's Initial Struggle for Justice

Katya Faber, Alex's mother, is introduced as she connects with Cheryl through an online grief platform. Both mothers share a profound bond over their shared experiences of losing a child and the ensuing legal battles against their children's killers.

Notable Quote:

Katya Faber [03:54]: "It's almost as if you're annihilated. I mean, a part of me just leaves the body."

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The Appeal and Legal Loopholes

In 2019, Bennet’s legal team appeals his conviction under Article 263, a Swiss law that reduces sentences for individuals deemed intoxicated and therefore not fully responsible for their actions. This maneuver drastically shortens Bennet's sentence from twelve and a half years to just three years, leading to his immediate release.

Notable Quote:

Frank Erbenjock [09:24]: "The appealing court... they said, no, Bennett was incompetent because of the drugs and he did not know what he did."

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Katya's Transformation: From Grief to Defiance

Devastated by the appeal's outcome, Katya transitions from a grieving mother to a fierce defender for justice. Determined not to let Bennet walk free, she abandons her anonymity and publicly challenges the legal system, advocating for the repeal of Article 263.

Notable Quote:

Katya Faber [06:16]: "Something is wrong and you know that it's wrong. It gives you a strength that perhaps you didn't know you had."

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The Role of Mothers in Pursuing Justice

The episode delves into the phenomenon of mothers often becoming the primary advocates for their lost children. Through discussions with Cheryl and observations from friends, it becomes evident that the maternal instinct to protect and defend is a driving force behind such relentless pursuits for justice.

Notable Quote:

Cheryl Simmons [26:17]: "If you think about it, we carry those babies inside of us for nine months. My daughter heard my heart before anybody even knew it."

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Breaking Through Legal Barriers

Katya’s unwavering determination leads her to challenge the legal system, navigating through Switzerland's direct democracy to potentially alter or remove Article 263. Despite immense emotional and financial strain, she persists, embodying the resilience and strength forged from her grief.

Notable Quote:

Katya Faber [17:14]: "I have to fight this... I have to fight this for Alex and for anyone else who's ever going to be in this situation."

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Supreme Court Intervention and Final Verdict

In 2021, the Swiss Supreme Court overturns the initial appeal decision, mandating a re-hearing that upholds Bennet’s original conviction. Katya and supporters celebrate this legal victory, feeling a profound sense of justice finally being served after years of struggle.

Notable Quote:

Katya Faber [28:13]: "It was a huge sense of relief of having done right by Alex."

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Bennet’s Release and Lingering Injustice

Despite the final conviction, Bennet's release from a lavish rehab center and subsequent parole on the anniversary of Alex's death leaves Katya feeling that true justice remains unfulfilled. Bennett's lack of genuine remorse and continued freedom exacerbate Katya's grief, highlighting systemic issues within the justice system.

Notable Quote:

Katya Faber [30:56]: "Alex was still dead. And somehow I had all this energy that I challenged into fighting for him and doing right by him was now somehow not needed anymore."

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The Psychological Toll and Continuing Struggle

The episode concludes by exploring the ongoing emotional and psychological burdens borne by Katya and Cheryl. Their relentless fight underscores the profound impact of loss and the lengths to which a mother will go to seek justice for her child, often at great personal cost.

Notable Quote:

Katya Faber [22:51]: "I couldn't really concentrate very much. I would read a page and I would forget it."

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Conclusion: The Cost of (In)Justice

"In)Justice: Killer Privilege" Episode 4, "The Rebellion," poignantly illustrates the intersection of wealth, privilege, and the justice system. Through Katya's and Cheryl's stories, the episode exposes legal loopholes that allow perpetrators to evade appropriate punishment, and it highlights the extraordinary lengths mothers will undertake to honor and seek justice for their lost children.

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Credits:
Produced by Sophie McNulty. Senior Producer: Harry Stott. Production Coordinator: James Cox. Executive Producers: Sandra Ferrari, Anna Van Praagh, Jake Warren. Sound Editing: Lizzie Andrews and Alan Lear. Music Composition: Tom Biddle.

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Transcript

[Katie Strick]

This episode contains descriptions of violence, sexual assault, grief and depression.

[Cheryl Simmons]

Julie was the one person who would never ever forget anything and brought the family together to stay close knit.

[Katie Strick]

That's Cheryl Simmons, a medical professional from Michigan. She's telling me about Julie, her daughter and best friend.

[Cheryl Simmons]

To say we were close is an understatement. She was attached at the hip.

[Katie Strick]

Julie was a people person. She was always gathering friends, planning family get togethers, hosting Christmases or Thanksgivings. She saw the good in everyone, says Cheryl.

[Cheryl Simmons]

And she always wanted to fix them. And for me to try to explain to her that you can't fix everybody, it's not possible. She would never see it that way. Never. She felt that even the most broken person could be fixed. And I hate so much that I didn't give her that part of the intuition to see into people's faces or souls that not everybody was fixable. So when she got with this guy, they were together three months, knew each other for. I got scared. In my heart, I was deathly afraid for her because I seen something in him that scared me.

[Katie Strick]

Cheryl's motherly intuition turned out to be tragically correct. In July 2016, Julie's then boyfriend, the one Cheryl says scared scared her, ran Julie over and left her for dead.

[Cheryl Simmons]

And as a mom, I don't care what anybody says, you look at your child and I knew she was gone. But I. I still wanted that hope. I wanted it more than anything.

[Katie Strick]

Julie died a week later after being taken off life support. She was 27 years old. Her killer pleaded guilty of a moving violation causing death, which in the state of Michigan is only a misdemeanor charge. When Cheryl Simmons first connected with Katya Faber, Alex's mother, she recognized much of herself in her.

[Cheryl Simmons]

It was very much an unspoken connection.

[Katie Strick]

Like Katya, Cheryl knew what it was to lose a child in the most traumatic way possible.

[Cheryl Simmons]

I was still not grasping that my daughter was not coming over to my house or calling me. It wasn't hitting me. So there was a lot of severe pain. But I went five days with no sleep. I lost 32 pounds. I was down to about 85 pounds at once. I'm five foot seven. I can honestly say that there's parts of that first year that I don't remember at all. Not at all.

[Katie Strick]

And like Katya, Cheryl wasn't prepared to watch her child's killer get away with a sentence she didn't believe reflected the severity of the crime.

[Cheryl Simmons]

All I wanted to do was to defend her. And I think that's what we do as parents, we defend our children, we protect them, we keep them safe. That's part of what we do when they're being raised, as they're growing up, when they're born.

[Katie Strick]

Katya had started writing about traumatic grief publicly by the time the two mothers connected through an online grief platform. And Katya kept using a term to describe the impact of losing a child that resonated with Cheryl. Parental annihilation.

[Katya Faber]

It's almost as if you're annihilated. I mean, a part of me just leaves the body, I think. I mean, certainly I. I now live life on a different level.

[Katie Strick]

The trauma Katya and Cheryl have both been through changed everything for them. So much so that Katya still finds it difficult to think of the time before that trauma.

[Katya Faber]

It's hard to go back to 2014, I have to say. I don't really think about it. The time before Alex was killed, I would say I was living the life of an average middle aged woman in the West. You know, if you'd seen me in the supermarket, you wouldn't have said, oh my goodness, look at that person. I would have been doing the shopping for dinner.

[Katie Strick]

Katya might have come from a world of privilege in many ways, but she's down to earth and considers herself a pretty ordinary mother of three. That is, up until the point her son Alex was killed. She went to work, she did the housework, spent time with friends and busied herself with her kids. The Katya I've got to know over the last 12 months is strong, fearless, and determined in her fight for justice for Alex. But up until this point in our story anyway, she has essentially played the role of a grieving parent or co victim, as she described herself during the trial.

[Katya Faber]

I can't speak for other co victims, but certainly my experience is that we're always treated like collateral damage, that we're almost an impediment to the very serious business of implementing the law.

[Christine Brandt]

But all that was about to change when Bennett's lawyers announced their decision to appeal after he was convicted of both intentional homicide and a sexual assault.

[Katie Strick]

Because like Cheryl, whose daughter's killer was.

[Christine Brandt]

Freed after just six months in jail, Katya made a decision as she watched Bennett's lawyers go into battle. And like Cheryl, she was about to undergo a transformation.

[Katya Faber]

Katya just went into legal mode.

[Katie Strick]

And she said to me on more than one occasion, if I don't do.

[Katya Faber]

Something about this, this guy's gonna walk free.

[Katie Strick]

A defender. That's what Katya was to become when.

[Katya Faber]

Something is wrong and you know that it's wrong. It gives you a strength that perhaps you didn't know you had.

[Christine Brandt]

Katya calls it her rebellion, the transition from mother to defender that she underwent in those next few months after the appeal was announced. She wasn't going to let Bennett get away with the killing of her son.

[Katya Faber]

It's a little bit like perhaps if you're practicing for a play, an amateur play in a small village hall and no one's there, and then suddenly you're on Broadway or the West End and the curtain goes up, but suddenly the place is full and you go, oops, I hadn't quite expected this.

[Katie Strick]

I'm keeping Katie Strick and this is Killer Privilege from the London Standard and Message heard episode four the rebellion.

[Frank Erbenjock]

In.

[Katie Strick]

2019, two years after the initial trial, the appeal began. Katya could barely get into the lobby area of Zurex High Court, its appeal court. When she arrived, it was heaving with people and there was a strange atmosphere in the air. The case was being taught in universities by this point. A case study for diminished responsibility, apparently so. There were law students everywhere, notebooks at the ready, eager to watch one of the biggest recent cases in Swiss law play out for themselves.

[Katya Faber]

And at the time, it actually hurt me somehow to think that Alex was just part of case law, and he would have thought that that was incredibly crazy.

[Christine Brandt]

Katya Faber was about to find out whether her son's killer, the man who was sentenced to 12 and a half years in jail two years ago, was to be successful in his appeal. Bennett's legal team consisted of three private lawyers paid for by his family. One to fight the intentional killing sentence, a second to fight the rape sentence, and a third to geo block any.

[Katie Strick]

News stories about it.

[Christine Brandt]

And to prevent Bennett's name from being published in connection with the crimes. The latter was that same media lawyer, Andreas Miley, who announced the appeal outside the court at the end of episode three. It's far from commonplace for a defendant to have their own media lawyer during a homicide trial. But this, as we already know, was far from an ordinary homicide trial. Together, Miley and his colleagues claimed Bennett was so high on cocaine, ketamine and sleeping pills on the night that Alex died that he went temporarily insane and believed Alex was an alien with, quote, green ears and red eyes trying to kill him.

[Katie Strick]

They claimed he had not been aware.

[Christine Brandt]

Of what he was doing because he was under the influence of drugs. And nine days after they put their.

[Katie Strick]

Case before judges, they received a decision.

[Frank Erbenjock]

It was really special. When this case was in front of the Higher Court, it Changed totally. That happens rarely in Switzerland.

[Katie Strick]

Here's Swiss court reporter Christine Brandt, who followed the case closely.

[Frank Erbenjock]

The appealing court, the higher court, sometimes changed the verdict a little bit and says, nah, not 12 years, maybe 10 years or maybe 15 years. But they changed the verdict completely. They followed the arguments of the lawyers of Bennett and they said, no, Bennett was incompetent because of the drugs and he did not know what he did. And so he just got three years of prison. And also the rape. The judge did not believe the ex girlfriend of Bennett. And so they said they don't have enough proof that this rape really happened. So it was like, we have a word in German. It's like Persilchein. It's like everything is cleaned again.

[Katie Strick]

Bennett was acquitted of both aggravated rape and aggravated sexual assault. After his appeal, he was still found guilty of killing Alex. But because he was assumed to be completely insane due to the drugs that night, his charge was changed to one that carries just a three year sentence, time he had already served. Just like that, it was announced that Bennett could be released from jail. He was technically a free man.

[Katya Faber]

And I remember thinking, I can't. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I need to get out of here.

[Katie Strick]

Katya was devastated, lost for words. For her, it was not only an insult to the injury of Alex's death, it was but a reminder of something Cheryl had said after her daughter's killer got off with a very lenient plea deal.

[Cheryl Simmons]

It was as if I was being re. Victimized. I cried, I screamed, you just killed my daughter again for a second time. And now I have to suffer.

[Katya Faber]

Alex's killer is just going to be back on the street again and, you know, with a bit of rehab. And how is this possible? We fought for so long. And how, how can it be that he's now just not guilty?

[Katie Strick]

Katya wasn't the only one left asking these questions. As a court reporter, Christine was familiar with the Swiss legal process. But even she was astonished.

[Frank Erbenjock]

For me, it was. It was difficult to believe and it was surprising. I never, never guessed that that could happen. And I'm still wondering why it did happen.

[Katie Strick]

So too were Katya's friends, Helen and Kim.

[Katya Faber]

I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. That was just bullshit.

[Helen]

It was torture. It's a cruel and unusual punishment to the victim's family. It really is. And so, yes, I would say over time, this continued challenge and continued fight affected mental health of, frankly, all of us that were close to Katja or to Alex.

[Katie Strick]

You're probably asking yourself the same questions I did when I first heard this story. How could this be allowed to happen? How did Bennett manage to downgrade his sentence to just three years? The answer, it transpired, lay in a funny little legal loophole that Bennett's team were able to take advantage of. It's called Article 263.

[Sasha]

So first of all, it's possible that under the influence of drugs or alcohol, that this reduces your ability to really recognize what you are doing. So this is the reason why sometimes, and I say really sometimes, it's possible that this reduces your responsibility in the legal system.

[Katie Strick]

Frank Erbenjock is a Swiss German psychology professor. He's considered a leading international expert in forensic psychiatry with a focus on violent and sexual offences. I spoke to him in a bid to understand this particular legal loophole and the role it played in this extraordinary case. His explanation was as shocking as it was simple. In Essence, under Article 263, anyone who has proven to be of, quote, unsound mind as a result of self induced drunkenness or intoxication can face a reduced sentence, either a fine or a prison sentence of up to three years. Yes, you did hear that correctly. It essentially means you can get away with just three years for murder.

[Sasha]

It's common, for example, in traffic crimes where somebody maybe drives a car under the influence of drugs or alcohol and maybe he produces an accident. Then you say, okay, the question of what is his responsibility is not in the moment when he drives a car with a lot of alcohol. It's in the moment when he started drinking and drove the car. The problem is when you started drinking. This is the idea of 263.

[Katie Strick]

This question of when an offender started drinking or taking drugs and whether they were aware of the potential consequences is at the crux of Bennett's case.

[Sasha]

The question is when this guy started drug consumption, couldn't he know that he could react in that violent way?

[Katie Strick]

Because this trial was not about who killed Alex. Bennett wasn't denying that part. It was about whether or not he knew what he was doing. Professor Irbanjoch believes Bennett's history of violence was key.

[Sasha]

Here you have this history of violence, then you have these sex offenses against the ex girlfriend and you have to bring all of that together and not narrow your mind too early to its only ketamine. You always have to separate. Is there a personal history? Are there personal traits that are linked to a tendency committing violent crimes? And is the consumption of drugs and alcohol important for that?

[Katie Strick]

Bennett had a proven record of violence as we know. We also know he'd been warned by doctors not to take ketamine again. And yet, in Bennett's appeal, this personal history was all but dismissed. Bennett was deemed out of his mind on drugs, unaware of his actions, and exempt from any true culpability. If you're going to stab someone, make sure you down a bottle of wine first, was the message Katya and many of her supporters saw this verdict as sending. Bennett was convicted of Article 263 in 2019 and released from jail to attend an enclosed rehab, the kind that has cloisters and garden therapies and a glossy brochure in case you were picturing some kind of soulless, sanitised hospital. And Katya, well, this is where her rebellion began.

[Katya Faber]

I was shaking. I remember it was shaking. Shaking of just. I don't know, shock, probably. And at that point, I thought, no, no, I can't. I can't just accept this. And I turned to my lawyer and I said, I want to lose my privacy. My anonymity is worth nothing. I. I have to fight this.

[Katie Strick]

We'll be right back. Katya made a decision that would go on to define the next six years of her life. She dropped that cloak of anonymity that had been shielding her from public attention in the years since her son's killing. She decided to speak out and took her story to the press.

[Katya Faber]

I and some friends went back to the house of a very close girlfriend of mine, and we sat there and we had the criminal code open in front of us. It was almost like a sort of a meeting of, how are we going to organize this rebellion? What does it take? And as that evening wore on, somehow the idea kind of solidified in me. I have to fight this. And not only fight this for Alex, I have to fight this for anyone else who's ever going to be in this situation. This is just wrong. And so I didn't have any tools to use, except somehow create awareness to talk to the media and talk to politicians and go to the parliament and create enough of a momentum that people would say, hey, this is just wrong. This article 263 needs to be revised or removed from the law books because it can be misused.

[Katie Strick]

I have a picture of Katya taken in December of that year, 2019, a month after Bennett's release was announced. She's standing in the Swiss Parliament with the politician Alfred Heer, campaigning to have Bennett's conviction reinstated. And there's a steeliness on her face that speaks to that transition from mother to defender. She's standing upright, frowning slowly, looking straight ahead with a kind of fierceness about her. To me it says I'm not going to take no for an answer and I'm prepared to fight for as long as it takes. But to Katya, that picture tells a different story.

[Katya Faber]

It's funny, actually. I know the photograph and I look really serious in that photograph. I think there was a resolve, there was a. A grit, a mixture of I have to do something. This is just not right. In my gut it felt that it wasn't right. But I did feel terribly small. You know, I was going to parliament all by myself. It would have been nice to have had somebody with me. But I didn't. And I'm a nobody, you know, I'm just like the mum on the way to parliament.

[Katie Strick]

Switzerland has a direct democracy, meaning citizens can bring issues to parliament if they drum up enough support. So if Katya gained enough signatures, she could theoretically launch a referendum to do away with Article 263. Altogether. Katya was keen to explore this, hence her decision to attend Parliament. But before embarking on another all consuming legal battle, she was determined to see her fight with Bennett through to the end. This time it was Katya who appealed. Or rather, she insisted the prosecutor appeal on her behalf.

[Katya Faber]

The second time we turned up at the appeal court was very different. It was the beginning of the summer. It felt different.

[Katie Strick]

Katya herself was certainly different this time round. Her friend Kim, another mother from that international school crowd in Zurich, observed a shift in Katya almost immediately.

[Helen]

That was the part where you saw the person go from somebody you didn't recognize, this just internal, imploded person back to the person that you recognize. And I always believe that a person's true character comes out during times of stress and duress. And Katya's character is strength and determination. And that's what came out times 10 come out.

[Katie Strick]

It did. And battle, I think, is the right word here. It's important to remember this is a woman who'd already had a nervous breakdown and half her hair fall out due to the trauma of learning the details of her son's death. But Katya had other ideas. She was overcome with what she can only describe as an instinct. An instinct to protect Alex in death just as fiercely as she'd tried to when he was alive. Wary that she was up against the von Werther's legal army, she sold her Swiss apartment and used the funds to pay the mounting legal fees. The prosecutor hadn't wanted to appeal initially and had only agreed on the grounds that Katya and her lawyers did all the work. It was the COVID pandemic by this point, too, which added another hurdle to Katya's fight. Here's journalist Christine Brand again.

[Frank Erbenjock]

For me, it was clear it's not over. When one court says it's like this and the other court says no, it's the opposite way, then it's clear that the highest court has to decide. And it was clear that Katya will fight.

[Katie Strick]

Katya estimates she spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund the mammoth legal marathon she had just embarked on. But for her, it was the emotional costs she felt more acutely than the financial ones. During those dark months in 2021.

[Katya Faber]

Some people have said to me, would I have undertaken this fight had I known that this was what I was going to have to do? And the answer is always yes. I mean, I would have just handed over the keys and said, hey, take the apartment and let me know how it goes. The bit that nobody could have warned me about and I didn't realize is that I would not only have to pay huge amounts of money, but that I would have to fight as well. So actually, it was quite expensive. It was expensive on an emotional front, psychological front, and financial front, and money is money. But on the emotional, psychological front, that's a heavy price to pay.

[Katie Strick]

The grief fog of losing Alex, as Katya calls it, had left her feeling so disarmed, so incapable, that she'd been unable to work for years up until this point. So reading through pages and pages of court documents in another language, even with her legal background, made her brain ache.

[Katya Faber]

I couldn't really concentrate very much. I would read a page and I would forget it.

[Katie Strick]

And yet Katya doesn't know which one would have been worse. Sitting at the sidelines as a grieving mother without any input into the legal process, or going through what she did and being actively involved in the prosecution, she suspects the former.

[Katya Faber]

Why would I deal with it any differently? He was still my son, and it was one of the ways that I could be his mother.

[Katie Strick]

I want to pause here for a moment because there's something Katya said to me during our conversations about her legal fight that struck me in particular about the role of a mother.

[Katya Faber]

When I look at history and the news, I'm always struck by the fact that it seems to be mothers who are fighting for their children.

[Katie Strick]

It's a question I'd not really stopped to consider before, but. But Katya is right. When I think back through so many of the stories of Grieving families I've encountered over my journalistic career. Rosamund Kissy, Deborah, mother of London schoolgirl Ella, who died of air pollution. June Steenkamp, mother of Oscar Pistorius, victim Riva, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo whose children were kidnapped in Argentina. The imbalance is striking. Why is it so often the mother, not the father, the sibling, or the grandparent who's left fighting for their dead or missing child?

[Katya Faber]

And it's challenging. I mean, most of us don't have a background of, you know, public speaking, and that's not what we set out to do with our lives. And yet many find the courage and their voice because their child has died.

[Katie Strick]

Cheryl, who's still outraged by the many injustices of her daughter's trial, agrees. It's interesting, that trope of the mother who so often ends up fighting for the victim in a lawyer's absence.

[Cheryl Simmons]

I don't know. I think as mothers, we're automatically defenders. I mean, anybody who has kids know that if something's going on, their kids being bullied at school, you are a defender. You're going to defend your child.

[Katie Strick]

She believes it's to do with that unbreakable motherly bond that's so often talked about.

[Cheryl Simmons]

If you think about it, we carry those babies inside of us for nine months. My daughter heard my heart before anybody even knew it.

[Katie Strick]

Let's zoom back in now and rejoin Katya in June 2021. It had been almost two more years since the Appeal Court's shock decision to free Bennett. But in 2021, the case was brought before the Swiss Supreme Court. And this time, if you can believe it, something more shocking happened.

[Frank Erbenjock]

The Federal Court said that the verdict of the highest court is wrong. They really said it's not correct how you were handling the situation with the rape. It was like the Federal Court did not understand how the higher court could come to this verdict. And it was like a bas.

[Katie Strick]

In a decisive move, the Supreme Court struck down the appeal court decision and ordered a re hearing of that initial appeal. Basically, the Supreme Court was arguing that the judges in the appeal did a subpar job and they needed to evaluate the arguments of Bennett's team a second time. So in May 2022, the final appeal hearing took place in Zurich's Ability Appellate Court.

[Frank Erbenjock]

And so the end verdict was then nearly the same like the first one. And also they believed the ex girlfriend. So he was convicted also for the rape.

[Katya Faber]

It was.

[Frank Erbenjock]

It was nearly the same verdict like the first one. It was just a unnecessary extra round. And for the relatives, for Katya, for the people who knew Alex. That's super hard because you wait for years, it lasted years until this final verdict was here.

[Christine Brandt]

Bennett was found guilty of intentional homicide, once more effectively throwing out the 2019 decision and reinstating his original sentence of 12 years. After an unnecessary two and a half years of stress and legal fees for.

[Katie Strick]

Katya, she herself had won.

[Christine Brandt]

Bennett was guilty again. He was a convicted killer. A fact that would never change.

[Katya Faber]

It was a huge sense of relief of having done right by Alex, that somehow it had been worth all the effort and stress and money and time. And, you know, we left the court and we were all so elated. We walked down into the old town of Zurich, down a little alleyway, and we went into a sort of cafe place and we ordered a coupli, which is basically a glass of champagne or prosecco. And we were just so, so elated and so happy.

[Katie Strick]

But this story doesn't stop in that champagne bar in central Zurich. Relieved as Katya was in that moment, for many people less strong willed than Katya, that might have been the end. She had won. The case was closed. But Katya's search for justice didn't stop at Bennett's final sentencing.

[Katya Faber]

You know, if Bennett had learned something, if Bennett had changed in some way, if he'd been able to say, oh, you know, I want to change my life, you know, Alex is dead and this is awful, then somehow it would give Alex's death meaning in some kind of weird way, that one young man died so another could find his way. Almost kind of like a Greek play. In some ways.

[Katie Strick]

Bennett had not found his way or shown any kind of remorse for his actions. Not in Katya's eyes.

[Katya Faber]

There was a conviction. And I'd done what I set out to do and I'd been through so many different emotions and this process and I'd met lost parents, I'd done all this, all this stuff, and yet Alex was still dead. And somehow I had all this energy that I challenged into fighting for him and doing right by him was now somehow not needed anymore. And he was still dead. And it felt awful.

[Katie Strick]

Katya found herself falling into a deep hole. She struggled to rejoice every time a reporter approached her for a quote on achieving justice or whether she could finally offer Bennett forgiveness. She could have forgiven Bennett for the killing if he'd apologised afterwards and made an effort to turn his life around. Instead, hers felt like a hollow victory. The outcome. She'd ended up with Bennett behind bars minus any seeming Pangs of conscience felt like the least satisfying of all the possible outcomes in terms of forgiveness and made it impossible to move on. She found herself thinking about a letter she'd received way back in 2019, shortly before the first appeal.

[Katya Faber]

I received a letter, handwritten letter, from Alex's killer. And I remember not wanting to touch the paper. I felt somehow disgusted by it, which I thought was odd. And I observed myself thinking, how strange is that? It's only a piece of paper.

[Katie Strick]

Katya keeps that letter in a plastic sleeve inside a safety deposit box. Six years on, she still can't bring herself to touch it. I have a copy of it in my hand, here in front of me. The letter's written in large, childlike handwriting, printed across a sheet of squared paper, the type you're given in maths lessons at school. Paint you a picture, it reads, quote, I have written countless letters which I have never sent out of fear that I would be unable to find the right words. I would give everything to undo what I have done.

[Katya Faber]

He seemingly was apologizing and saying how difficult it was for him to write the letter. And on and on it went. And I turned the page over and I got to the end and I remember sitting back and thinking, okay, maybe that's true or maybe it isn't, but there's one word missing. And it was such a glaring omission. I kept thinking, how can he have not said this one word? And the one word was Alex. He had not mentioned Alex once in the entire letter. And I thought, how weird is that? You're apologising for killing Alex and yet you fail to mention Alex.

[Katie Strick]

It was all about him, all about Bennett. It would turn out to be a fitting summary for Bennett's actions over the following years, because the British papers had got one thing wrong in their reporting of the outcome of Katya's appeal. While Bennett did see out the final months of his original nine year sentence, as he was supposed to, he did not serve them from jail. Instead, he stayed where he was at that luxurious leafy rehab centre from which he'd been allowed to attend art history lectures. Around a year later, he was moved to a halfway house in in Canton Zurich to see out the remaining months of his sentence. So in total, only four years of his sentence were actually served behind bars in the traditional sense. After receiving treatment for addiction from rehab, Bennett was released on full parole on December 30, 2023, the anniversary of Alex's death. In episode five, Alex's friend Sam tells us about the death of a second friend in chillingly similar circumstances.

[Cheryl Simmons]

I've got chills up my spine and goosebumps thinking about it every time I talk about it.

[Katie Strick]

Alex's social circle discussed the psychology of wealth and the issue of substance abuse amongst privileged young men. So partying. Yeah, I reckon it started off was, I don't know, these festivals depending on music, mostly electronic music and then also the older we got, we went into various clubs in Zurich and Sasha the reporter delves into the mysterious death of another of Bennett's friends.

[Sasha]

So suddenly you had two friends that were dead and that made it, I would say, an interesting story.

[Katie Strick]

Injustice killer.

[Christine Brandt]

Privilege is a London standard and message Heard production.

[Katie Strick]

I'm your host, Katie Strick. This episode was Produced by Sophie McNulty.

[Christine Brandt]

Harry Stott is our senior producer and James Cox is our production coordinator. Sandra Ferrari, Anna Van Praagh and Jake.

[Katie Strick]

Warren are the executive producers.

[Christine Brandt]

Sound editing by Lizzie Andrews and Alan Lear and music composition by Tom Biddle.