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Black Widow ‘won't work for freedom’

21 October 2011

A few hours of work seems a small price to pay for a taste of liberty. But one of Italy's most infamous inmates, known as the Black Widow, has rejected an offer of work in exchange for limited freedom. She was jailed for 29 years in 1998.

Reporter:

Mark Duff

Patrizia Reggiani 

Patrizia Reggiani is serving a jail sentence for murder

Report

Patrizia Reggiani once said she'd rather cry in a Rolls than be happy on a bicycle. She doesn't seem to have changed her mind.

Dubbed the Black Widow after she was jailed for ordering the murder of her ex-husband, the heir to the Gucci family fortune, Ms Reggiani has spent most of the past 13 years at San Vittore prison in Milan.

Judges had offered her the chance of day release, if she agreed to take a job outside the prison walls. But Ms Reggiani, who's 63, was having none of it. She'd never worked in her life, she told the judges, and she didn't intend to start now.

Her trial in 1998 attracted worldwide interest. It had everything: a woman betrayed by the man she'd loved and the low-life murder of the heir to a multi-million dollar fashion fortune.

For now, though, Patrizia Reggiani, who once complained that her allowance of more than US$630,000 a year wasn't enough to live on, will return to the comfort of her pet ferret and her plants in her cell at San Vittore.

Mark Duff, BBC News, Milan