Bogus U.S. film producer Francis Charles Kaufmann has been found guilty of murdering his partner and their 11-month daughter by an Italian court and sentenced to life in prison, with three years of solitary confinement.
The sentence comes some 18 months after the discovery of the lifeless bodies of his partner, 28-year-old Russian national Anastasia Trofimova and their 11-month-old Andromeda in Rome’s Villa Pamphili park on June 7, 2025.
Local investigators took days to establish the victims’ identities and then connect them to Kaufmann, who was travelling under the false identity of a film producer and director named Rexal Ford.
He was arrested on June 13 on the Greek island of Skiathos on suspicion of being the killer, in an operation involving cooperation between the Italian and Greek police forces as well as the FBI, and extradited back to Italy.
In the backdrop, it emerged that Kaufmann had been masquerading as a producer under a number of different aliases and even managed to secure a €863,595 ($996,112) tax credit from the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2020 for a feature entitled Stelle della Notte, which never got made.
During his closing argument, defense lawyer Paolo Foti requested that Kaufmann be acquitted of both charges on the grounds that there was not enough hard evidence to prove his client committed the murders.
The verdict and sentence was delivered by eight judges at Italy’s highest criminal court, the prima Corte d’Assise, in Rome.
