A Connecticut woman who admitted killing her husband and leaving his body in the basement of their Burlington home for months was found dead on Wednesday, hours before she was due to be sentenced. Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi, 76, pleaded guilty to manslaughter earlier this year in the 2017 death of 84-year-old Dr. Pierluigi Bigazzi, a professor of laboratory science and pathology at UConn Health. Under a plea deal, she was due to be sentenced to 17 years in prison, USA Today. Police said she was found unresponsive at her home and the case has been "categorized as an untimely death investigation."
Kosuda-Bigazzi, a former UConn faculty member who had worked with her husband, also pleaded guilty to first-degree larceny. Investigators said Bigazzi's paychecks continued to be deposited in the couple's joint account for around eight months between his death and when his body was discovered during a wellness check requested by his UConn colleagues in February 2018, NBC Connecticut. Investigators believe Kosuda-Bigazzi killed her husband in July 2017 and wrapped his body in plastic before leaving it in the basement. She was released to home confinement after her 2018 arrest.
Investigators said that in writings found in the home, Kosuda-Bigazzi said she killed her husband in self-defense after he came at her with a hammer during an argument over repairs to their backyard deck and she wrested the tool from him, the New York Post reports. "I hit him just swinging the hammer in any direction + then he was quiet — for a few seconds + then he stopped breathing," she wrote. Defense attorney Patrick Tomasiewicz told USA Today that her death was "not anticipated." "She was a very independent woman who was always in control of her own destiny," he said. (More Connecticut stories.)
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