Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo was 33 years old and had an idea that filled her with purpose: to travel across Europe and the Middle East dressed as a bride, hitchhiking with strangers, to show that trust between different cultures could build peace. Her artistic name was Pippa Bacca. On March 8, 2008, she left Milan with her colleague Silvia Moro on a project called “Brides on Tour”. On their website they wrote: “Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in human beings”.
Upon arriving in Istanbul, the two artists decided to separate and meet again later in Lebanon. On March 31, Pippa agreed to get into a black pickup truck on the outskirts of the city. That same afternoon she used her credit card for the last time. Police found the person responsible because he turned on Pippa’s phone using his own SIM card: a mistake that gave him away immediately. Murat Karatas, 38 years old, father of two children and with a prior record for theft, confessed to the crime and led investigators to the body, hidden among bushes in a forest near Gebze, 65 kilometers from Istanbul.
Twenty-four days after setting out to show that the world could be trustworthy, Pippa Bacca was gone. Turkey’s leading newspapers published front pages marked by shame. Karatas was sentenced to life in prison. The court that upheld the sentence wrote that the convicted man “was disconnected from human values”. There is a particular cruelty in the fact that they wrote that phrase about the man who killed the woman who believed in them the most.
