A British man living in Italy has admitted stabbing his partner to death, claiming he did it after she accused him of cheating on her.
Michael Whitbread, 75, told a court he could not remember how many times he stabbed fellow Briton Michele Faiers, 66, in October 2023.
The couple had been living in a renovated cottage in Verratti, a remote village in Abruzzo, at the time of the killing, the Times reported.
Whitbread fled the scene and drove back to the UK but his daughter alerted police to his whereabouts when Faiers’s body was discovered. He was extradited to Italy for the trial.
In his first statement on Friday, the former diving instructor from Torquay alleged Faiers had accused him of having an affair over several months after she saw him patting a woman’s bottom at a party in 2022.
Whitbread, who has denied cheating, told the courthouse in Lanciano that the couple would have violent arguments about the incident. “It was an odd clip round the head, then it got worse.”
He said that on the evening of 28 October 2023, Faiers woke him and started hitting him, saying: “I wish you were dead.”
Whitbread said he took a knife from the kitchen, gave it to her and said: “Kill me. I have had enough.”
“It was after 10 months of being accused of something I did not do,” he continued.
“She kicked me in the intimate parts and was trying to push me down the stairs. I thought: she’s going to cut me. That is when I grabbed the knife in panic.”
Faiers was found by Italian police lying in bed with seven stab wounds to the back. “I stabbed her, I don’t remember how many times,” Whitbread told the court.
He claimed that Faiers’s behaviour before her death had led him to attempt suicide.
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The court heard Whitbread had been married three times previously, with two of those marriages ending as a result of his affairs.
Faiers’s three adult daughters attended the hearing, consoling each other as Whitbread described how he killed their mother.
The daughters’ lawyer, Nadia Germanà Tascona, said after the hearing: “It’s important he’s confessed; something he has never done. That was really important for Michele’s daughters because it is a way to begin again.”
The trial continues, with the judge having commissioned a psychological assessment of Whitbread.
