(In)Justice: Killer Privilege | Episode 2: The Party Is Over

0:00Injustice, Killer Privilege, brought to you by the London Standard and Message Heard. The six-part investigation explores the devastating story of Katya Faber's fight for justice after the brutal killing of her teenage son, Alex. What begins as a personal tragedy becomes a wider examination of privilege, accountability and injustice. We'll be running one episode each Thursday in place of our usual daily show. Now, let's begin. This episode contains descriptions of violence, grief and depression.

1:01It was almost as if I was the person going through this horror, but not quite because I could see the terror in his eyes. It's hard to describe. This is Katia Faber, Alex Morgan's mother, telling me about the dream she had the night before she learned the news that Alex had been killed. Even ten years on, she remembers it vividly. I'd never had such a dream and it woke me up. And I didn't know what it was that I'd seen. I knew it was violent and horrific and painful and it was just awful, it was just awful and I actually had to kind of stagger to the bathroom and I was retching, I was so horrified It was 6.13am on the 30th of December, 2014 when Katia woke up from that nightmare horror struck What she didn't know then was that Alex was at that very moment being bludgeoned to death in an attack so hideous that a closed coffin was required at the funeral all.

2:01Looking back, Katia wonders if the nightmare and the retching were some kind of primal reaction. Did her body wake her up at the exact moment that Alex was killed? The moment of Alex's death on his death certificate is not precise. They don't know exactly when he died. And I can't help but think that actually I do know when he died, which was at 6am and 13 minutes passed. And I think that's what I saw. And that was Alex. And I can't explain it, but there is a lot we can't explain. That dream, the disfigured face, stayed with Katya all day. She couldn't shake it. So when a friend texted her a few hours later, asking if she'd heard from Alex, she had even more of a hunch that something was wrong.

2:49her friend had heard a rumour that something bad had happened in Kuznacht overnight a fight or something and that the victim was a young man Katia called Alex immediately they'd not spoken in a couple of days which was normal at the time no response she left messages on his voicemail still nothing eventually Katia called the police in Zurich and they called back asking for her address And they came to the door and I was expecting them. I had been told that police would come to the door, so I was up. Two Spanish officers from Interpol turned up at Katia's door at around 2am that night, eight hours after her friend's text message.

3:36By this point, a part of Katia was already expecting the worst. and I stood there shivering and there was a policeman and a policewoman and I remember thinking to myself oh of course they've sent a woman because they're going to tell me that Alex is dead and I thought about it completely rationally I think I was having an out-of-body experience at that point I was in shock probably and they said we have some news we need to talk to you and I said well I think you'd better come in and I said I think I need to sit down so you can tell me as I'm sitting down. So they said, of course. So we walked into the sitting room and I sat down and I put my hands on the armchair.

4:21And the policeman, it was the male policeman, in fact, who then said, I am so sorry. He said this in Spanish. Su hijo ha fallecido, which means your son has died. Katia's response was guttural. it's like being hit by a truck. You just can't breathe. You know, even though I'd somehow known it until somebody tells you, you can't process it. And I remember thinking, I'm not here anymore. And I felt this howl of horror just come up through my throat. And I started screaming. And I thought, I have to just scream. I have to just get this out. And I didn't want to scare the children. And I ran into the kitchen and I was beating the kitchen cupboards.

5:11And it's the most horrific feeling. Eventually, she collapsed on the floor. But once I managed to stop screaming, the police were still there. And then again, my rational mind took over. And I said, what happened? Show me what happened. Because the policeman had a piece of paper in his hand. And he said, I can't show you this. And I said, yes, you can. You have to. And I think he looked at me and he kind of thought, yes, I have to, kind of like, I'm not going to not show this to the mother. And he showed me the piece of paper and Alex's name was it. And then it had homicide. I was just crying and crying.

5:49I was just like, you know, that kind of sobbing that you can't control. You can't even breathe between sobs. And I remember the lady policeman, I think she was so young and she knelt next to me. And I remember turning around to her and saying, I am so sorry you're having to see this. I am so sorry. Because it was just so awful for all of us. I remember Alex's little brother coming down the stairs and having heard me screaming. And to this day, he says that he'll never be able to get that out of his mind.

6:28Homicide. That was all the police had told her. The only thing she knew about Alex's death at this point. I knew that he had been repeatedly hit over the head. I didn't know what with. There were rumours that there had been a large candelabra used. So what had happened that night in the Von Vertes villa? Katia knew that Bennett had already admitted to being there when Alex died. that there'd been an altercation at his parents' house. But what she didn't know was that she was about to embark on a nine-year legal fight that would push her to her emotional and professional limits. Why it became such a marathon battle is a story that speaks to the world Alex had found himself in.

7:18That world of privilege and power among the European elite and how that privilege and power can play a part in that seemingly trusted institution we like to think of as the justice system. I'm Katie Strick, and this is Injustice, Killer Privilege from the London Standard and Message Heard. Episode 2. The party is over.

7:45It was actually just a short press release of the police when I first heard about the case, and it was not really spectacular. It was just written, there was a dead man found and another man was arrested. This is Christine Brand, a Swiss journalist and court reporter. It was around New Year's Eve that she first got wind of the news that a young man had been killed in a private villa in Küsnacht. But then after a few days, I learned more and more. The case took place in Küsnacht. That's the place where the rich people are living. And the suspect was the son of a rich gallery owner. He came from a scene of rich kids who don't have to do anything and can have everything.

8:28That this very brutal, evil crime happens in a place where everything seems to be perfect. That was very special. The press were quick to jump on the story. As Christine says, this kind of crime just didn't happen here. Not in Kuznarkt, on the Gold Coast, where money shielded its residents, where people felt safe, where privacy was paramount. And because of those strict Swiss privacy laws, there were no names given at the start, just a slow drip feed of remarkable and disturbing details. The police had reportedly walked in on the scene of a massacre when they arrived at the Von Werters Villa. The glass top of a coffee table was lying shattered on the floor.

9:15A water purification system had been ripped out of the bar. There were pools of blood on the carpet and splashes of it up the walls. Why did one kill the other one in such a brutal way? And there were no answers about it. It was something about drugs that was clear. My brother, he phoned me up and he basically broke the news to me that different implements had been used on Alex. And I remember almost kind of like falling down again. It would be two years before Katia, Christine, and anyone brave enough to read the eventual indictment would discover the full horrifying details of what really went on in the von Werters Villa that night in December 2014.

10:01Katia was so in the dark about it, she actually found herself feeling sorry for Bennett in those first soul-crushing days after the attack. And I remember actually the first night thinking, oh my goodness, probably, you know, something must have happened and Alex might have fallen down the stairs and broken his neck and this poor guy has been arrested and it's all a terrible mistake and oh my goodness how awful. Initially I was really concerned about him. It was a messy time full of unanswered questions but then new details started to emerge that Bennett was accusing Alex of being the aggressor Not him.

10:40That a photo taken at his arrest showed Bennett without a single scratch. For Katya and the rest of Alex's loved ones, these details only made matters worse. Alex's death still felt beyond comprehension. How could Bennett turn so suddenly on a friend? Had Alex really tried to attack him first? Just how many drugs had they taken? Within days, Katia's sympathy for Bennett was replaced with a rage at his seeming lack of remorse since the attack. She and Alex's friends might not have known the facts, but they knew enough to realise that something brutal, something sinister, had gone down between Alex and Bennett that night.

11:23It was not only the shot of losing someone close to them that rippled through the friendship group in those early days and weeks. It was the fact that Alex had been killed by a man they'd all known. that it had happened in what they'd assumed to be the safe confines of Kusnacht. And it was enough to quickly shatter the veneer of invincibility they'd all grown up feeling protected by. How could this happen? For me, losing someone I really held close to my heart was not easy. Something like this happens and then reality kicks in and it's shocking that something so horrific can happen so close to you.

12:01This is Alex's school friend, André. who we heard from in the last episode. Their friend Sam, the Australian newcomer to the Gold Coast, was equally shaken up. The first couple of years I couldn't process it and I felt guilty and I leaned heavily to my addictive side and I abused substances and used it as a form of escape, you know? And I think a lot of us did when it comes to Alex But definitely for me, it destroyed my love and trust for the world for a long time. And that's sad because I'm not that person. And it just happened so quick. Katya was acutely aware of the impact the news had had on Alex's friends.

12:59They just crumpled and a lot of them came round to the house and they would be shaking and they were terrified. I don't think they realised that their innocence had been ripped away from them, but I could see that. I could see that in Alex dying, they had their childhood come to an abrupt end. Alex's siblings lost their innocence that day too. Katia's daughter, Alex's younger sister, slept in the same bed as her mother for months after Alex died and her youngest son, Alex's brother, kept thinking Alex was going to come back as a spirit. He was only 12 at the time and became obsessed with martial arts.

13:42What if somebody wanted to kill him too? Katia had to stay strong for her two surviving children and for Alex's friends, many of whom looked to her for strength and comfort. And I felt so responsible for them in a kind of mothering sort of way. And I seemed to be the rock. Not that I felt particularly strong, I have to say, but I suppose in comparison I had life experience and I was a mother. And so I looked the part. And so a lot of them would come around and talk to me. Katia sat with Alex's body for a week after he died. And I would get there sort of in the mid-afternoon, and the light would change and it would get dark, and I would just stay there and put my hand on the wooden casket and try and imagine Alex in a white tunic.

14:41She felt that she needed to be near him while she still had his body, before he was cremated. And I just wanted to take the pain away, to just take his hurt away, because it was just so awful. And I remember thinking, if I could lie on top of the coffin and just make it better, just make it better. Because you spend your life as a mother making sure that they don't get a cold, and that if their knee is scratched, you make sure that they have the antibiotic cream, and that when they break their arm, you make sure they get to ER and they put it in a cast and you spend all your life, you know, like don't go without your coat.

15:23And then you're suddenly meant to be okay with sitting there and your child is in a coffin. And that's hard. She wrote her eudogy sitting on the side of the bath and chose wedding flowers for the funeral. Yellows and whites and soft pinks. because she wanted to rejoice in Alex's life. Her son was too young for a normal kind of funeral. The funeral itself was held two weeks after the killing on a freezing January day at an Anglican church in Zurich, a traditional sort of building with pillars and an altar. Sam, who is a professional musician, had written a song for the funeral, Purple Licks, named after the band Alex had played in growing up.

16:10I just poured all of those stories and his sort of life into this song.

16:30Twelve of Alex's friends led the service, and thousands came along to sit in the congregation. School friends, ex-girlfriends, local Swiss families. It was a sea of faces. I mean, I was surprised by how many people turned up, but I think it showed that there was a community in Zurich, and when a young person dies, so many people feel this sense of unfairness about it and of horror. It felt good to have so many people there. It was kind of, we were mourning together. It helped me. Team A. That's what Alex's inner circle quickly began to call themselves. Here's Andre. So yeah, we kind of, you know, had our own group of family and friends being strong for Alex.

17:20Friends put their lives on hold to rally around Katia in those early days and weeks. Helen Hunter, Sam's mum, was back in Australia when she heard the news. And the only thing I said to Katia was, I'm coming. My greatest concern was how is Cartier going to survive because I don't know, faced with the same situation, whether I would have. The death of your child is life-ending in almost all aspects of your being. You're wondering how your heart's still beating. I couldn't get over how she could even engage in a conversation. Katya is grateful for Timei, Helen, Andre, and all the other loved ones who assembled around her as she processed her grief.

18:14Not that grief is the right word for what she was going through. There was something about the sudden, unique nature of this situation that felt completely different to other deaths she'd experienced. It was weightier, more physical, all-encompassing. She began to suffer from panic attacks, insomnia and memory loss. Her hair began to fall out. She was diagnosed with PTSD and a dangerously high blood pressure. I've experienced different types of grief, you know, sibling, parent, friend. And it's difficult to put into words why child loss is different, but it's so physical, certainly for me, and I can't speak for other people, but it was so physical.

18:56It just rips you open. It's almost as if somebody's taken your heart and just thrown it somewhere, and you're expected to keep functioning. It is on a different level. It kind of infuses everything in a way that, certainly in my experience, other griefs didn't. Katia calls it parental annihilation, that pain of losing a child. It's like sleepwalking through life in some ways. You don't know what to do with yourself because you're so destroyed that it's almost like having to learn to live again, almost like being a toddler and having to learn to walk again, having to learn to eat again, having to learn to do everything again.

19:43You just don't know what to do with yourself. It's these layers of grief that come up in stories like this that are so rarely explored deeply. I had come across the work of Dr. Joanne Cacciatore while researching this series. She's a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in trauma and bereavement. It was helpful to get an outsider's perspective on Katya's mindset. To help me understand her story on a more considered level, Dr. Katya Torrey says that what she often hears from grieving parents is a sense that their old self died the day their child did. It changes you as a human being.

20:21You are turned upside down and inside out. Dr. Katya Torrey knows this from experience. She lost her newborn daughter 30 years ago, and went into research after finding there was far from enough science on the grieving process. It affects everything from one's sleep to one's diet to one's entire mental capacity. It quite literally changes your nature as a human being. It affects you in a biological way, certainly through various stress hormones and chemicals that get released into the brain every time you re-encounter the threat of the absence of your beloved. Dr. Katya Torre brought up so many parallels that resonate with Katya's story.

21:04From the immeasurable love between a parent and a child, to the illusion of safety that becomes shattered after a person experiences such a traumatic loss. But one thing stuck with me in particular. The loneliness that can come with living with grief, that can so often be disregarded in what is largely a grief-illiterate or grief-avoidant society. And so I hear many stories from families who have lost a child and they're in the grocery store and they see a neighbour and they lock eyes and the neighbour literally turns the cart around and goes the other direction. Katia says she experienced a similar kind of loneliness after Alex's death.

21:44Some supposed friends fell by the wayside after the news broke, while others leaned in, cooking her meals, helping with the funeral arrangements, sitting with her in her pain. the most powerful thing you can do for someone who is grieving, according to Dr. Katya Torrey. What we really need, at least what I really needed, was someone just to come alongside me and pour over photographs and listen to me cry and validate my feelings. We don't really need words to come alongside grieving people. We need someone to turn toward us and to sit with us and to care for us. Kim, another of the mum friends from Katya and Helen's social group, was one of those who sat with Katia in those early days.

22:27She and Helen cried with Katia. They helped her clear Alex's apartment in Marlebone. They say Katia became almost unrecognizable in those first few months. And what I observed is she kind of imploded a bit. By that I mean she turned inward. She honestly was struggling to get through day by day. In fact, I didn't even recognize the person because normally she's very strong, very extroverted. And during that initial time, after he passed away, she was almost silent, kind of functioning by remote control. Katia says she longed to wrap herself in some kind of black mourning robe, like rural villages used to do in the 19th century, as a physical symbol of needing to be treated with care.

23:15And I often say to people, you know, when you're about to have a baby, you go to the hospital or to these antenatal classes and they teach you to breathe and, you know, just prepare you for the birth and then what's going to happen then afterwards. So you have all this support, the research about what is helpful. And when your child dies, there's nothing. There was no post-death classes that I could go to to help me learn to breathe. And now you do this, nothing. There was just nothing. And so you kind of invent it as you go along. You just think, OK, well, all right, this is what I'm doing. After the break, what really happened in the von Werders villa the night Alex died?

24:06Two whole years passed before Katia finally learnt the full, horrifying details of what went on that night in the von Werders family villa. It was 2017 by this point, two weeks before the trial was due to start, and the indictment had just been published. It set out the events of that evening in gut-wrenching new levels of detail. Katia compares it to a Greek tragedy, a painful crescendo leading to the horror of the indictment. She thought she'd been shocked already, when officers turned up at her door to deliver the news, when she heard that Alex had been killed by a man he'd considered a friend and when she'd been sent a bill for 1 ,217 francs for the plastic sheeting used to remove Alex's body from the villa several months later.

24:59And I remember reading this and looking at it and I literally had to lie down in bed and I crumpled the bill in my hand and I just wept and wept and wept. The thought of my Alex being put on this sheet, am I getting the bill? It was just so awful. But learning the precise details of Alex's killing was to take Katia's trauma to an entirely new level. The list of injuries filled more than five pages and it was terrible to read. Christine Brand, who is set to attend the trial as a court reporter, remembers reading the indictment in horror. They took a taxi in the snowy night of Zurich to drive to the house, to the villa of Bennett's father.

25:50They arrived there and they changed socks because they hadn't weighed feet. And then there are different stories that Bennett told. Clearly both of them consumed more drugs in Bennett's father's villa. And then Bennett told the police that they listened to Swedish Christmas music and they were dancing wild to the music and somehow the situation suddenly escalated. That's one story that he told. And why the situation escalated and why Bennett started to fight like out of mind, it's not really clear. Maybe they did not agree about the music. One story was that they had a fight about the drugs. Maybe Alex told Bennett to stop and he didn't want to give him more drugs or something like this.

26:39It's not really clear whether it was over music or drugs or something else is not known. But what is known is that an altercation broke out. Benet is said to have flown into a rage, throwing Alex against a glass coffee table, which shattered, and then stabbing him with a shard of glass. He went on to bludgeon him to death. It's even hard to tell about it, to speak out the words. So, I mean, nearly all the bones in the head were broken and he had teeth in his throat. It was clear Benedict Alex violently with a heavy candlestick. I think it was six kilograms heavy and also with a statue of a woman.

27:21And after that, he stuffed the candle down his throat and finally he also choked him. And it was really a battle. It's terrible to describe. Alex suffered more than 50 injuries to just his head alone during the brutal and prolonged attack while Bennett was left with just a small cut to his hand. According to the timeline set out in the report, Bennett covered Alex's dead body with various objects including a Santa Claus doll and Christmas decorations. After showering, he called his father, who didn't answer. Shortly before 7am, he called the police. I was unable to talk for three days. I mean, when I found out what actually led to Alex's heart stopping, that Bennett had rammed a candle so far down Alex's throat and into his trikea that the contents of Alex's stomach had come up into his lungs.

28:25and he had suffocated to death as he was being strangled and that he had bruise marks on his shoulders where, supposedly, Bennett had either stepped or knelt on him. I couldn't talk for three days. Literally, I lost my voice. Katia once told me that not even Stephen King could come up with the horror of what Alex went through. And hearing those details listed out in the indictment, I can't help but agree. There's a level of brutality to this particular killing that is truly difficult to fathom. Eventually, Katia regained her voice and broke the news to Alex's two younger siblings. She couldn't bear to, but the prospect of them finding out from a newspaper was even worse.

29:14To actually describe that, because I didn't have any other option. It wasn't that I could shield anyone. It was going to be public knowledge. That was very, very, very hard. That was very hard. This is the part where I think the warrior element of Katya's character really comes through. Her reaction to some of those details of Alex's death is still physical, even almost a decade after first hearing them. You can see the torture on her face as she recalls them, and the anguish of recounting the surreal moment when the police tried to return the candle found in Alex to her. I offered Katia the option of leaving out these more horrific parts of Alex's story from our conversation the next time we spoke.

30:01But she is adamant. Her son's story needs to be told. And she is going to tell it. This is a woman who spent the last decade fighting for justice for her son. and she will spend the rest of her lifetime fighting, if she has to. She wants the world to know. I'm far from the only person who's observed this in Katya. Journalist Sasha Batiani was resolute when I asked him to describe Katya's fortitude. She is someone who would, you know, not leave the things for tomorrow, but just always, always fighting for her, fighting for Alex, fighting for rights of other people who went through these horrible times.

30:46She would be a good journalist, actually. You know, like these dogs. She can bite and she can fight for her rights and for what she thinks is important. By the time the trial came around, Katia still felt completely traumatized, completely disturbed. But she was no longer a shell of herself. not the imploded version Kim described. She was angry. Angry at Alex's death and the lead-up to it. Angry at the police and the authorities. Angry at the lack of support and the layer of pity in people's eyes when they looked at her. The anger was monumental. You could feel it like a hurricane about to land.

31:36This anger came close to blowing up some of Katya's friendships, says Helen. I wasn't sure our relationship would survive. And I wasn't blaming her for that, I was just stating a fact. And it's actually apparently not unusual for, you know, complete fracture of family units. It changed everyone's life. Cassia and Helen ended up having a brawl during a trip to Melbourne in those early years after Alex's death. And we had this knockdown brawl on the tram. The tram was full of people, but it was as if nobody was there because we just went at it. And of course, you know, I said something like, you know, I'm just tired of pussyfooting around you, having to walk on eggshells, having to be conscious of offending you and touching on touchy subjects you don't want to talk about.

32:43Well, it was on. Katya and Helen stepped off the tram. Helen had no idea what was going to happen, which way Katya would go. But then Katya walked up to her. I don't know what the look on her face, I can't describe it. but we just looked at each other and we just, you know, hugged each other and went, OK, let's go and get a spaghetti bolognese. That's what we did. And I think things turned around after that. Helen feels lucky that hers and Katia's friendship survived those turbulent few years. Ten years on, the two still describe each other as soulmates, as family. But what Helen says is true.

33:30Many friends and families aren't so lucky. They do break up after traumas like this. The grief, the bitterness, the anger. It becomes too much. What might have saved Katia and Helen was Katia's ability to channel her anger into fighting. The legal fight became an outlet for her. Something to focus on. She has just got a focused, mechanical, structured mind. She knows what to put first and then put next and on and on and on. She will not ever stop. I think being part of the legal framework of Alex's murder case was an outlet for Katya. And her enduring participation would ensure that justice would be done.

34:34This, says Sasha, was one of the biggest reasons the trial caught the attention of the press in the way it did. You had, of course, Katja as someone who had this kind of development of going through this horrible time. And Katja was very, so she was very often in the news. She was fighting for the rights of her son. And that made her, also for me as a journalist, an interesting protagonist, actually. Katia the protagonist was readying herself by this point. As a former criminal barrister, she'd seen firsthand what facing a rich family with elite lawyers meant when it came to achieving justice.

35:19The Von Wetter's family had deep pockets. She knew the type of fight she had in her hands, or at least she thought she did. I mean, when I started on this journey of trying to you know, get justice, whatever that means. I could never have imagined that it would take as long as it did. 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. The fight of a lifetime indeed. Because what unfolded next would push Katja and Team A to their limits, as Bennett and his team did everything in their power to keep the young art dealer out of jail.

36:15In episode three, Christine tells us about the trial and the attention it brought in from across the world. It was like a setting out of a Hollywood movie. It was some kind of unreal. And that was the thing that triggered the medias and the journalists. Alex's friends delve into the day-to-day realities of attending such a high-profile homicide trial. I went to the trial hoping, you know, for justice and that facts will be spilled and having a clear view or timeline of what had happened. But yeah, it was not that easy. And Katya tells us about the moment she came face-to-face with her son's killer and his family for the first time.

36:55And I remember thinking, what are we doing? What on earth is going on? Why are we shaking his hand? And nothing could have prepared me for that. Absolutely nothing. Injustice, Killer Privilege is a London Standard and Message Heard production. I'm your host, Katie Strick. This episode was produced by Sophie McNulty. Ari Stott is our senior producer and James Cox is our production coordinator. Sandra Ferrari, Anna Van Praag and Jake Warren are the executive producers. Sound editing by Lizzie Andrews and Alan Lear and music composition by Tom Biddle.