Villa Pamphili mystery: mother and daughter found dead were called Anastasia Trofimova and Andromeda: the little girl born in Malta

The woman found dead on Saturday 7 June in the gardens of Villa Pamphili in Rome has a name and an identity. The young mother of the eleven-month-old baby found dead a few dozen metres away from her, and for whose murder the 46-year-old American Francis Kaufmann is under arrest in Greece, is called Anastasia .

Through a viewer, the Rai program ' Chi l'ha visto? ' managed to contact a woman in Russia who claims to be the mother of the young woman found dead in Villa Pamphili and who had previously introduced herself under the name of Stella Ford. According to what was learned from the Rai3 program, the young woman had gone to study English in Malta, where she met Kaufmann, a US citizen who called himself Rexal Ford and who introduced himself as a director and screenwriter .

The mother said she last spoke to her on a video call on May 27 , with Ford-Kaufman assuring her that she was a good person and wanted to start a family. Then came an email on June 2, in which the girl said she was having problems with her partner but that they were trying to resolve them.

Indiscretions confirmed on Thursday morning by the Rome Prosecutor's Office: the woman found dead in Villa Pamphili is called Anastasia Trofimova , born in Omsk , in the Russian Federation, on 21 September 1996 .

As for the name of the little girl , who Kaufmann says is his daughter (but to be sure, a DNA test is needed, ed.), it would be Andromeda , even if she was later called Lucia. The woman had received photos of him with the little girl in his arms: she showed them to the program and also provided a detail of her daughter, the foot with the tattoo that corresponds exactly to the one shown by the police.

Prosecutor's office also confirms the name of the second victim, Anastasia Trofimova's daughter. "The process of registering the child with the name Andromeda Ford, born in Malta on June 14, 2024, had been started at the US Embassy in Malta," reads a note. "Comparing the victim's fingerprints with those on the passport will allow us to definitively confirm her identification."

The news that comes from 'Chi l'ha visto?', later confirmed by the Prosecutor's Office, adds to a picture that for the Roman investigators remains very complicated, with many pieces of the story still missing. Starting obviously with Kaufmann: on the alleged killer of the newborn/daughter, the FBI has communicated to the Italian investigators that he has a criminal record , had been arrested five times in the United States for domestic violence and assault, and that he was in possession of a regular US passport with the name of Rexal Ford, even if that was not his real identity. To date it has been reconstructed that Kaufmann lived together with "Anastasia" on the island of Malta between 2023 and 2024 , as confirmed by multiple testimonies.

It is not clear when the two and the newborn, perhaps born on the island, arrived in Italy: they would have landed in Sicily via a private boat that Kaufman had searched for using another false name, Matteo Capozzi . Since their arrival in Rome, the story becomes even more complicated: it is not yet known whether the three stayed in some facility without providing their documents or whether they were hosted, while some witnesses have "located" them in some soup kitchens for the needy or sleeping in tents set up in Villa Pamphili, where the mother and daughter were found dead.