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

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, sexual assault, grief and depression. Julie was the one person who would never ever forget anything and brought the family together to stay close-knit.

0:49That's Cheryl Simmons, a medical professional from Michigan. She's telling me about Julie, her daughter and best friend. To say we were close is an understatement. She was attached at the hip. 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. 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.

1:47So when she got with this guy, they were together three months, knew each other for her. I got scared. In my heart, I was deathly afraid for her because I seen something in him that scared me. Cheryl's motherly intuition turned out to be tragically correct. In July 2016, Julie's then-boyfriend, the one Cheryl says scared her, ran Julie over and left her for dead. And as a mom, I don't care what anybody says, you look at your child and I knew she was gone. But I still wanted that hope. I wanted it more than anything. Julie died a week later after being taken off life support. She was 27 years old.

2:39Her killer pleaded guilty of a moving violation causing death, which, in the state of Michigan, is only a misdemeanor charge.

2:52When Cheryl Simmons first connected with Katya Faber, Alex's mother, she recognized much of herself in her. It was very much an unspoken connection. Like Katya, Cheryl knew what it was to lose a child in the most traumatic way possible. 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. 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.

3:52All 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. Katia had started writing about traumatic grief publicly by the time the two mothers connected through an online grief platform. And Katia kept using a term to describe the impact of losing a child that resonated with Cheryl. Parental annihilation. It's almost as if you're annihilated. I mean, a part of you just leaves the body, I think. I mean, certainly I now live life on a different level.

4:34The trauma Katia 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. 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. Katia 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 Katia 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.

5:46I can't speak for other co-victims, but certainly my experience is that we're almost treated like collateral damage, that we're almost an impediment to the very serious business of implementing the law.

6:07But 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. Because, like Cheryl, whose daughter's killer was freed after just six months in jail, Katia made a decision as she watched Bennett's lawyers go into battle. And like Cheryl, she was about to undergo a transformation. Katia just went into legal mode and she said to me on more than one occasion if I don't do something about this this guy's going to walk free. A defender. That's what Katia was to become. When something is wrong and you know that it's wrong it gives you a strength that perhaps you didn't know you had.

6:59Katia 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. 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 and suddenly the place is full and you go, oops, I hadn't quite expected this. I'm Katie Strick and this is Injustice, Killer Privilege from the London Standard and Message Heard Episode 4, The Rebellion

7:49In 2019, two years after the initial trial, the appeal began Katia could barely get into the lobby area of Zurich's 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. 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.

8:32Katya 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 geoblock any news stories about it and to prevent Bennett's name from being published in connection with the crimes. The latter was that same media lawyer, Andreas Maile, 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.

9:18But 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. They claimed he had not been aware of what he was doing because he was under the influence of drugs. And nine days after they put their case before judges, they received a decision. It was really special when this case was in front of the higher court. It changed totally. That happens rarely in Switzerland.

10:04Here's Swiss court reporter Christine Brandt, who followed the case closely. 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.

10:47So it was like, we have a word in German, it's like Persilschein, it's like everything is cleaned again. 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. And I remember thinking, I can't, I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I need to get out of here.

11:32Katia was devastated, lost for words. For her, it was not only an insult to the injury of Alex's death, but a reminder of something Cheryl had said after her daughter's killer got off with a very lenient plea deal. 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. 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've fought for so long. And how can it be that he's now just not guilty? Katia wasn't the only one left asking these questions.

12:15As a court reporter, Christine was familiar with the Swiss legal process. But even she was astonished. For me, 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. So too were Katia's friends, Helen and Kim. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. That was just bullshit. 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.

13:02You'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. 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.

13:54Frank Urban-Jock is a Swiss-German psychology professor. He's considered a leading international expert in forensic psychiatry with a focus on violent and sexual offenses. 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 is 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.

14:44It'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, OK, 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. 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. The question is when this guy started drug consumption couldn't he know that he could react in that violent way?

15:37Because 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 Urban York believes Bennett's history of violence was key here. You have this history of violence, then you have these sex offences against the ex-girlfriend, And you have to bring all of that together and not narrow your mind too early to it's 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?

16:27Bennett 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 Katia 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.

17:17And Katya? Well, this is where her rebellion began. I was shaking. I remember I 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 have to fight this. We'll be right back.

17:49Katya 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. 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.

18:38I 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. 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 here, campaigning to have Bennett's conviction reinstated.

19:31And there's a steeliness on her face that speaks to that transition from mother to defender. She's standing upright, frowning slightly, 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 Katia, that picture tells a different story. 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 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.

20:18You 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. Switzerland has a direct democracy, meaning citizens can bring issues to Parliament if they drum up enough support. So if Katia gained enough signatures, she could theoretically launch a referendum to do away with Article 263 altogether. Katia 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.

21:00This time, it was Katya who appealed. Or rather, she insisted the prosecutor appeal on her behalf. The second time we turned up at the appeal court was very different. It was the beginning of the summer. It felt different. 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. 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.

21:50And Katya's character is strength and determination. And that's what came out, times 10. Come out, 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.

22:35The prosecutor hadn't wanted to appeal initially and had only agreed on the grounds that Katia and her lawyers did all the work. It was the Covid pandemic by this point too, which added another hurdle to Katia's fight. Here's journalist Christine Brand again. For me, it was clear it's not over. When one court say 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 Katja will fight. Katja 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.

23:20Some 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 that, 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.

24:04The grief fog of losing Alex, as Katia 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. I couldn't really concentrate very much. I would read a page and I would forget it. And yet, Katia 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.

24:46Why 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. I want to pause here for a moment, because there's something Katia said to me during our conversations about her legal fight that struck me in particular, about the role of a mother. 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. It's a question I'd not really stopped to consider before. But Katia is right. When I think back through so many of the stories of grieving families I've encountered over my journalistic career.

25:32Rosamund Kissy Debra, mother of London schoolgirl Ella, who died of air pollution, June Steenkamp, mother of Oscar Pistorius' victim Reva, the mothers of the Plaza de Mago, 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. 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.

26:15Cheryl, 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. I don't know. I think his mothers were automatically defenders. I mean, anybody who has kids know that if something's going on, their kid's being bullied at school, you are a defender. You're going to defend your child. She believes it's to do with that unbreakable motherly bond that's so often talked about. 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.

26:59Let's zoom back in now and rejoin Katia 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. 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 bashing. In a decisive move, the Supreme Court struck down the appeal court decision and ordered a rehearing of that initial appeal.

27:52Basically, 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 appellate court. 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. It was nearly the same verdict like the first one. It was just an unnecessary extra round. And for the relatives, for Katia, for the people who knew Alex, that's super hard because you wait for years. It lasted years until this final verdict was here.

28:43Bennett 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 Katya, she had won. Bennett was guilty again. He was a convicted killer, a fact that would never change. 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 kuppli, which is basically a glass of champagne or Prosecco.

29:41And we were just so, so elated and so happy. But this story doesn't stop in that champagne bar in central Zurich, relieved as Katia 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. 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.

30:35Almost kind of like a Greek play in some ways. Bennett had not found his way or shown any kind of remorse for his actions. Not in Katya's eyes. 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 and I'd done 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. Katia 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.

31:37She 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. I received a letter, a 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.

32:27And I observed myself thinking, how strange is that? It's only a piece of paper. Katia 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 is written in large, childlike handwriting, printed across a sheet of squared paper, the type you're given in maths lessons at school to 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.

33:10He seemingly was apologising 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. 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.

34:11because the British papers had got one thing wrong in their reporting of the outcome of Katia'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 him 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 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 30th, 2023, the anniversary of Alex's death.

35:04In episode five, Alex's friend Sam tells us about the death of a second friend in chillingly similar circumstances. I've got chills up my spine and goosebumps thinking about it every time I talk about it. 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 with, 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.

35:46So suddenly you had two friends that were dead and that made it, I would say, an interesting story. 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.