Over the decade since Alex Morgan’s brutal killing, his mother Katja Faber has struggled to unravel the mystery of what happened to him.
She wishes she could pinpoint the moment his killer, the aristocrat Bennet von Vertes, flew into a drug-induced rage and decided to bludgeon him to death — if, in fact, he decided to at all. “We are the last people on earth,” Alex, 23, is believed to have said to Bennet, then 30, an old university friend and the heir to a Hungarian-German art dynasty, as they walked through the snowy streets of Zurich on the night of the killing on December 30, 2014. At some point in the hours that followed, Bennet — a 6ft 5 kickboxer and art gallery founder who peddled works by Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol — is understood to have thrown Alex against a glass coffee table in his parents’ ski chalet and beaten him to death with a 3ft candlestick, which he then rammed down his victim’s throat.
