(In)Justice: Killer Privilege | Episode 6: Catch Me If You Can

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 adult themes, including descriptions of violence, grief and depression.

0:42On the 30th of December 2023, exactly nine years after Alex Morgan's brutal killing, Bennett von Wertes, his killer, was released on parole. I remember once being in someone's kitchen and being told, oh, guess who I saw up in the mountains? And they said, well, I saw Bennett up and closed us. So yeah, I got some messages saying he's actually enjoying life. Trips to Asia, I heard. I think I read an article the other month that he's just gallivanting around. I'm not sure if it's Zurich or parts of Europe.

1:29I'm holding a piece of paper in my hand here. It's a letter that Katia received from the Swiss debt collecting authorities in 2024. It's a debtor's writ for Bennett. Quote, the debtor is ordered to pay the specified claims and collection costs within 20 days. More telling, however, is what's stamped at the bottom of the page. It says, undeliverable, the debtor has moved. meaning Bennett's new address is unknown. Bennett had been out of custody for just over six months by this point and the rumour mill surrounding his whereabouts had been churning out new information almost weekly. And then suddenly out of the blue I get a message.

2:16So-and-so has matched with him on Bumble. Most of the rumours were, well, just that, rumours. Was Bennett in Zurich? Thailand? Germany? No one knew for sure. But one particular image, a picture of him posted on a now-deleted Instagram account, sent to Katya by a friend, made her stop in her tracks. It was a selfie of the now almost 40-year-old art dealer, tanned and naked from the waist up, with slicked back hair as though he'd recently emerged from the sea or a swimming pool. He's wearing what looks like an airpod in his ear, chunky silver chains on his left wrist, and he's sticking his tongue out in a mocking sort of way.

3:05But what really draws the eye is his middle finger held up in front of him, pointing threateningly towards the camera. The bio at the top of the profile, catch me if you can. Just like the con man in the Leonardo DiCaprio film of the same name, Bennett was on the run when this particular shot was posted, at least financially. He'd been released from custody on the 30th of December the previous year, the ninth anniversary of Alex's death. Anne walked out onto the streets of Zurich, owing thousands to Katya and her family. I would have thought that actually coming to terms with what happened and paying your dues would be the place to start as opposed to trying to lie on a beach and drinking out of a coconut.

3:59Cassia had been trying to move on with her life. She'd spent eight years in the spotlight. Trials and retrials, TV crews rocking up at her door, film adaptations being teased. Even Tatler, which doesn't normally report on grisly murders such as Alex's, had sent a reporter to visit her on her farm. They were intrigued by the idea of such a crime taking place amongst this upper crust, well-to-do section of society about whom we normally know so little. The attention had finally started to calm since Bennett's release, leaving Katya to finally begin healing, or at least try to. But the rumours kept on coming, And before long, they weren't solely about Bennett's whereabouts or his brazen social media posts, but about something even more sinister.

4:55I'm Katie Strick, and this is Injustice, Killer Privilege, from the London Standard and Message Heard. Episode 6, Catch Me If You Can.

5:15On her farm in the hills outside Malaga, a city in southern Spain, Katia grows olives, mandarins, avocados and pecan nuts. She bought the 33-acre homestead and the old stone farmhouse in 2011 and called it La Bonita, the beautiful one. So we would come down here during the holidays and we'd do our bit and plant things and cut things down and, I don't know, fix the windows and do this kind of thing. It was kind of like a family project. The kids rolled their eyes at first, but they helped out anyway. Katia shows me a photo of Alex standing there on the farm months before he died, tanned, a hose slung over his shoulder, squinting into the sun.

6:03And Alex helped in putting the place together. and I will always remember him saying to me one afternoon, you know, Mum, you haven't bought a farm, you've bought a life. And it's funny looking back at that photograph and seeing him so healthy that, you know, a short time afterwards he was dead. It's incongruous. Alex was killed just two years into Katia's new chapter at La Bonita. And while the farm became a strain in the aftermath of his death, an onerous task on top of a mountain of onerous tasks that came with the death of a child. Without it, Katya is not sure she could have survived. Being surrounded by nature allowed her a sense of mindfulness.

6:56The hard physical work helped her to grow what she calls her grief muscle. I realized that nature somehow cradled me. and there was no judgment and I could just be where I was in my grief and if I needed to scream I didn't scare anyone because there were just trees around me and if I needed to chop logs or dig or put my hands in the soil it was a way of expressing my despair and I became completely convinced that nature heals As she moved with the land around her, something happened to Katya. Her grief fog started to lift. She discovered an online community of fellow grievers too, and began journaling, pouring her feelings out onto the page, hoping others would find her.

7:51And I began to write and put my thoughts down. And one thing slightly led to another. I was more online. and I saw that there was a call out for writers for Still Standing magazine that at that time it specialized in stillbirth and infertility and miscarriage and they were kind of reaching out to other lost parents and I basically submitted a couple of articles and they took me on board. So I was having articles published regularly and that's how people started finding me. Hundreds of people reached out, almost all of them women. Overnight, Katia's grief tribe expanded far beyond Team A and her circle of loved ones.

8:40It became global. There are so many names that I remember. I mean, it got to the point where I had a notebook and I would write down the names of these beautiful children. It didn't matter whether the child was one year old or 25. The loss was just indescribable. Cheryl, Julie's mother, who we heard from earlier in the series, was one of those hundreds who connected with Katya in those first months and years after she started writing. She would say things or post things, and I would read it and say, wow, and we just made a connection. It was an undeniable connection. I don't know if she knew I needed her and needed her words or if I just felt that immediate connection to her, but I did.

9:32Talking about child loss can feel like the ultimate taboo in our grief illiterate society. So Katia's writing stood out. It was trailblazing, somehow. The emails came in thick and fast. At one point, I was receiving so many emails that I wasn't quite sure how to manage it because I was on my own journey, if I can put it that way. And, you know, I'm a one man band, so I don't have a secretary or an assistant to somehow say, oh, you must look at this one or whatever. I mean, it's just me. Keen to make sure that what she was saying was responsible, she flew to Arizona, where Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, the American professor we heard from earlier, runs a grief retreat.

10:21And it was very, very instructive, in fact. I'm so glad that I did that. It helped me with the mentoring side of what I was increasingly doing. The fact that Dr. Katya Torre's retreat was held on a farm, like Katya's, was no coincidence. I mean, not only does the natural world have a profoundly beneficial impact on our physiology in terms of height rate variability, blood pressure, stress hormones, right? But also it creates this emotional space in our mind and in, if you will, our hearts, right? It gives us this space to be with and feel what we feel. without any expectations of feeling better, without any expectations of getting over it, without any expectations.

11:09It just allows us to be. Katia's writing was being shared by thousands of people by this point. But it was when she returned from Arizona in the winter of 2019 that this global grief tribe went from an online one to one standing before her in real life. An incredible thing happened after that Arizona visit. fellow grievers started flocking to her farm. Around a dozen child loss and trauma victims visited Katya on the farm, often flying in from as far afield as the UK, the US, and South America. There, they'd help her harvest olives, dig into the earth with their hands, and find healing like she did on Dr.

11:55Joe's farm. Katya hadn't invited all of them, they just somehow found her. I don't know, maybe they think I'm just waiting for people to turn up. I mean, I don't even have a doorbell, so it's actually a challenge for them to get in. But here on the farm, I think it kind of works differently. In part, it's because it's quite isolated. And so I think people feel safe.

12:36It all comes back to something Dr. Joe said earlier in this series, about simply sitting with people in their grief, not trying to resolve it for them. That's what Katya was doing with her visitors, sitting with them in the soil, encouraging them to lose themselves in the catharsis of nature, helping them to build their own grief muscles. If someone is in raw grief, they need to somehow be able to express it. And it's such an intimate moment to actually let those feelings come out and to feel safe to do that. Swiss journalist Sacha Batiani says he was blown away when he too visited the farm in 2023, while deep into his reporting on Katia and her fight for justice.

13:29He remembers the hour-long drive along bumpy roads to get there, and says she was different to other grieving parents, who often take time to warm up. She was open from the off, a brave, soul-bearing warrior of a woman. It's really what she always said it is, it's really a healing place. You know, she told me a lot about one way to overcome her grief was by working in the garden. and again I thought at the beginning that's a nice sentence but when I saw the olive trees and when I was also allowed to harvest a few whatever avocados or lemons I must say I finally understood because you stand with both feet on the ground you know you're surrounded by nature the fruits grow, you have to harvest them.

14:21There is a cycle of things that helps us humans, especially if we go through dark times. Katja often told me that the murder of her son had taken the ground from under the feet. And now on this farm, even me, everyone, you feel that ground, you know? Grief, of course, is a process. and a never-ending one. But on her farm, in the sunlight, among the olive groves, pomegranates and avocados, slowly, Katia began to heal. You know, there is a huge support in knowing that you're not alone. I think that's the major thing, that someone out there gets it, that you don't have to explain.

15:38Every year on Alex's birthday, and also on December the 30th, the anniversary of his death. Alex's childhood friend Andre packs his camera, some candles and a few beers or iced teas into his rucksack. Then he heads to Zolikon, the village near Zurich where he grew up, and the location of Alex's grave. It's rather quiet being so close to the forest and outside of the village. Yeah, depending on time of year or weather, there's wind and you hear like just the leaves doing their things. Yeah, it's pretty serene. It's a calm secluded spot right on the outer boundaries of the cemetery overlooking a forest.

16:29Yeah, so you have this nice light and sometimes snow, sometimes rain sometimes there's chairs you can bring so you can sit in the cold in the rain and just kind of watch the grave there's mostly nice flowers there's a nice tiny tree kind of leaning over the gravestone and always when I go mostly after work yeah it's cold it's dark and I bring I don't know how many maybe nine or ten or more candles so I light up the whole corner of the graveyard Andre likes to talk to Alex as he sits by the grave. Sometimes, one of Alex's ex-girlfriends comes along too. Bottle of champagne in hand. And they make a toast to their late friend.

17:18Other times, he takes a burger and fries and goes alone. He sees it as a chance to spend time with his late friend. To get a new angle on things. To process what happened. depending on group or people that's there we yeah talk about our own personal things but being close to alex it's like he would be there he could like weigh in on certain topics i think mainly it's nice being close to him or you know his grave and in a way yeah you can be there

17:59Sam, Alex's Aussie friend has not been able to make such regular visits to Alex's grave but that hasn't stopped him thinking of Alex particularly on his own birthday which is also the anniversary of Alex's death Sam says he's learnt a lot from those two close deaths in his friendship group both Alex's and Liam's He weaves these learnings into his music. My music is all about love and understanding and about treating people better, about going for the things that you love, being motivated, saying no so you can do whatever it is that you feel like you want to do on this planet. And I write a lot of love songs, so I think because of all those dark years, I've sort of walked into the light and maintained that.

18:48Is it important to be clear with oneself before one helps someone else. I think it could be nothing. Let's take a moment, because this perhaps feels as close to a happy ending as we could have hoped for, a decade since Alex's shocking killing. Andre finding solace in the woods in Zolicon. Sam channelling his grief into his music in Sydney and Europe. Katia on the farm in Spain, helping to heal other parents through her grief work. But there's another feeling I'm left with as we come to the end of this story. What about justice? That, after all, is the real outcome T-May were determined to bring for Alex.

19:30Has that been served? It's a question that Katia and T-May still grapple with, particularly given what happened next.

19:44We'll be right back.

19:52The media continued to report on Alex's death during the years of the trial. But by 2022, when Bennett's conviction was reinstated, most of the papers, and their headline writers at least, seemed to have decided that justice had been served. Mother wins fight to return son's killer to jail, wrote the Times. The Daily Mail took this further still. Justice for Britain killed by an aristocrat with a candlestick. But does justice really look like a prison sentence? Especially when such a large chunk of that is spent in an exclusive rehab facility. What should it look like after such a horrific and traumatic crime?

20:38Katya is asked these questions all the time and says her answer tends to depend on which day she's asked. Her instinct, though, is no, Alex hasn't had justice. That so-called victory in 2022 had always felt like a hollow one when she considered Bennett's actions after the killing. The lack of remorse, the changing of his defence, the self-pitying letter he wrote her from jail without a single mention of Alex. and all of that was before the middle finger selfies and the mocking catch me if you can teasers one of the advantages and disadvantages of being online is that people can find me and i'm forever grateful and surprised by the trickle of information i get regarding alex's killer I sometimes get photographs sent to me or messages saying, oh, he's been seen here or we've seen him there.

21:46I mean, it's impossible for me to verify whether any of these things are true. So I'm very careful about spreading rumors. and you won't get me saying anything in this interview, which I have no proof of, but certainly I have seen photographs and I can say that those photographs look genuine and do not look AI generated of him looking suntanned and being on holiday with palm trees. And it is galling to think that the very person who owes so many of us legal costs and has caused so much hurt and grief seems to be out on a jolly around the world. Life certainly seems to be going on for Bennett, who appears to be enjoying what has become the latest chapter in a cat and mouse game with the authorities.

22:54Rumours surrounding his whereabouts and his behaviour continue to trickle in, week by week. There have been sightings in and around Zurich. It's just plain weird. I mean, if I would be free, I would just, you know, go on the down low and go back to Germany or wherever where nobody knows me and I can, you know, restart my life. There have been screenshots of his purported profiles on dating apps around Europe. I was horrified when I heard that he was online and on a dating platform using a fake name. There have been further Instagram posts, some on an airplane, others on a beach. From what I heard or see on social media and stuff like that, he's, you know, traveling.

23:41Bennett's Instagram posts were later deleted. Perhaps he'd been advised to do so in a bid to re-establish himself as an art gallery owner. His LinkedIn page, where he lists his name as Bennett Vertez, certainly suggests so. It describes him as the founder of Vertez Modern Gallery, from August 2011 to the present day, with no mention of his time in jail. Meanwhile, local media have started referring to Bennett by his second surname, Sikorsky, a change that suggests some kind of damage limitation exercised by his family. His parents could afford to keep forking out for a media lawyer, apparently, but not the thousands Bennett still owed to Katya and her ex-husband.

24:28We reached out to Bennett's legal team about his outstanding debt. They claim, quote,

24:49Katia and her family have received payment for the emotional damages and the funeral costs. However, she claims that as of January 2025, she has never seen any payment for the legal costs Bennett still owes her, amounting to well over 100 ,000 francs and compounding with interest by the minute. In keeping with the whole story of how Alex's killer has handled himself, he hasn't taken responsibility for what he did. so why would he take responsibility for the costs he incurred? Bennett's father Laszlo moved back into his villa just weeks after Alex was killed and never once appeared in court. His mother Geyser finally wrote to Katia from her home in Germany in 2021.

25:42That's four years after the we've both lost our sons to drugs comment outside the court. I mean I nearly fell off my chair when I read this letter. Katia recorded her reactions in a voice note at the time. You know, she basically says, if you have any questions and we are here for you, you know, she sounds genuine. It was a perfectly polite and well-written letter, offering to answer any questions Katia had. But Katia never got those answers, and still doesn't know exactly what Geyser's motive was. Even now, Katya still finds herself hearing fresh rumours about the Von Werters family. Offhanded comments about cocktail parties or dinners hosted in the villa where Alex was killed.

26:33Or chilling new Facebook posts from Bennett, showing an illustration of a half-dissected body and a bird in a cage, captioned, Each of these learnings has been painful, yes. But nothing left Katia feeling quite so sick as when she received a picture of Bennett in a closed Facebook group with over 1 ,000 members. It was called Are We Dating the Same Guy? Switzerland edition. You might be aware of such groups already. They've been popping up all over the world in recent years as a way for heterosexual women in various cities to discuss their online dates and swap anecdotes about disturbing male behavior to warn others off dating the same men.

27:24Anyway, this particular post appeared in a group populated by women in Zurich, and it was shared by a woman who found herself on a date with a 6 '5 blonde man in the summer of 2023. Here's Swiss journalist Sasha Batiani. He had been verbally aggressive towards the end of their date. He wanted her to go to a hotel room and she declined. So things went a bit south. And then he claimed to be fresh out of prison. That's what he said. And I just thought, well, that's not a good line for first dates, if you ask me. Her date went by the name of Benjamin Schwartz. But I've seen the photo. This was Bennett von Wertes.

28:19It's undeniable. You know, if you're a young woman and you're looking to date or hook up with someone, you are aware that it's dangerous out there. But I don't think you expect the people on a dating site to actually be convicts. Katia is right to feel sick. It hurts, the thought of Bennett boasting about being a killer on a date with a poor, unsuspecting woman. It all adds to the feeling that Bennett seems to have walked away from the whole thing, thinking he's untouchable. And that's what doesn't feel like justice. I get the feeling that he's learned nothing from what happened. and that going to prison and having rehab did little to change his way of thinking.

29:14And I think it was wrong of him to put us through so much pain afterwards and to allege that Alex was the aggressor. That I think is unforgivable. And I don't think he needs my forgiveness for that. He did it with full knowledge and intention. He's an adult. He knew what he was doing. If Alex had died so that Bennett could have changed, maybe that would have felt like the justice Katya needed. Or at least proof that Alex had died for a reason somehow. That the gods aren't as cruel as she spent the last decade fearing. I think if Bennett had felt genuine remorse, if there had been any small sign of contrition, it would certainly have helped me with the process of coming to terms with what had happened and the healing if I can call it that.

30:10Katya doesn't know what will happen next as the years go on after Bennett's release but she does know that she'll always have to live with several difficult truths that she can never bring her son back that she may never be able to forgive herself not just Bennett. That's the one that affects me the most because as a mother I had one job and that job was to keep my child alive and I failed. Attia could run into her son's killer any time when she's in Zurich. At the doctor's, at the hairdresser, in the street. And with Bennett out of jail that is something she has to come to terms with. the spectre of her son's killer, on the streets of her city, walking free.

31:00It's something she may never be able to wrap her head around. In the end, she won the long, arduous legal battle. She did whatever she could to secure so-called justice for her son. But none of that changes the fact that Bennett, seemingly unchanged and unremorseful, walks in the world, wherever he is, a free man. It's hard to say what part of this extraordinary tale has unsettled me the most. The gruesome details of the indictment, the appeal's 180 degree reversal, the fact that Bennett was released on the anniversary of Alex's death. When I started looking into this story, I trawled over the details of that night in the Swiss villa.

31:52horrified by the whole thing, searching for clues. But soon I discovered that this story isn't about the shocking details that so many of the media outlets have picked up on over the years. And there's no getting around it. They are truly horrific. This is absolutely a story about betrayal and injustice and violence and grief. All the parts of human nature we don't like to think about. But it's about something else too. The other side, trust and love and motherhood and friendship. Ten years is a long time, and it's impossible for me to know whether I would be the person I am today had Alex not died.

32:38But I get the sense that Alex's death and the grief that I carry has kind of fast forwarded me. and what it's done, it seems to have given me a perspective on life that perhaps would have taken me longer to attain. I see the arc of my life differently now and I don't feel I'm important in the arc of my own life. I see it more from above and I take comfort in that. it's not really about me but the legacy that you leave the kindness you bring trying to minimize the damage you do while you're here so I think in that sense I have changed I've become more philosophical calmer in myself that's not to say that I would give it all back immediately just to have five minutes with Alex but that isn't going to happen not yet anyway and who knows what comes afterwards my months in close conversation with katya have taught me many things about what it is to be a mother what it is to lose a child about the failures of the justice system and i will forever be grateful to her and the rest of team a for sharing their stories of love of grief and pain many of them still so raw a decade on.

34:18For Sasha it's the story of a mother who went through hell and became a different person. Some like court reporter Christine see it as an eye-opener for the pain of a co-victim's experience. Others like Alex's friends Sam and Andre see it as the dismantling of their youthful male invincibility. As for Katia herself, well, she sees it as the story of her son, Alex, and how a mother's love triggered the battle of a lifetime. And as far as Alex's legacy, in many ways, a lot of what I do is motivated by Alex's life. not so much to give it meaning because there's no reason why Alex's life needs meaning.

35:10It was his life and that is meaning enough. But somehow to honour him and to keep his name alive. We'll end with that then. Katia's story. Well, Alex's story, really. Alex was an all or nothing young man. I mean, he'd throw himself into something, and you didn't know whether he understood that at some point he would need to stop doing whatever he was doing. He was an extremist in that sense. If he loved, he loved passionately. If he hated and despised, he made it clear. It was one of his charming sides in some ways. He was disarmingly honest. and his humour could be scathing, sharp, fast, very dark.

36:09And it wasn't to everyone's liking. So I have sometimes wondered whether that's what actually got him killed. Whether he said something that did not land well with his killer. and whether he pushed his luck and was too honest in some way, perhaps too critical, and that his killer decided that he didn't want to hear what Alex was saying. I don't know. We'll never know.

36:50Alex Morgan's family would like to encourage listeners to donate to Battersea Dogs Home in his memory. Please visit battersea.org.uk or contact Katia directly through her website or Instagram page.

37:26coordinator. 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.