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A 76-year-old woman who was convicted of killing her husband with a hammer before hiding his body in the basement and pocketing his paychecks for months has been found dead just hours before she was due to be sentenced.
Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi was found dead at a home in Burlington, Connecticut, on Wednesday, according to Connecticut State Police.
Officers responded to the property just after 10.30am after attempts to contact her were unsuccessful.
Based upon initial findings, the incident is being treated as an “untimely death investigation,” police said.
In March, Kosuda-Bigazzi pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and larceny over the 2017 death of her husband Pierluigi Bigazzi, an 84-year-old professor of laboratory science and pathology at UConn Health.
Investigators believe Bigazzi was killed sometime around July 2017, but it wasn’t until February 2018 – when UConn officials requested a wellness check – that state troopers found his body in the basement of the couple’s home and arrested Kosuda-Bigazzi.
His body was wrapped in plastic and was in an advanced stage of decomposition.
The medical examiner determined that he died from blunt trauma to the head, the outlet reported.
In writings found inside the home, Kosuda-Bigazzi confessed to killing her husband with a hammer in self-defense, investigators said.
She claimed that she and her husband got into a fight after she told him they needed to carry out repairs to the deck of their backyard.
She claimed that he then came at her with a hammer, but she managed to wrestle it from him after a lengthy struggle, investigators said.
“I hit him just swinging the hammer in any direction + then he was quiet — for a few seconds + then he stopped breathing,” she wrote.
“I just wanted to slow him down. I sat on the floor by the kitchen cabinets across from the stove — next to him for a long time.”
Kosuda-Bigazzi then allegedly hid her husband’s body for months in their basement while continuing to collect his paychecks in their joint account.
After taking a plea deal in March, Kosuda-Bigazzi was set to be sentenced at 2pm on Wednesday in Hartford Superior Court to 13 years in prison.
She had stayed out of priosnafter posting a $1.5m bail.
Her lawyer, Patrick Tomasiewicz, told The Associated Press that her death was unexpected.
“We were honored to be her legal counsel and did our very best to defend her in a complex case for the past six years,” he said in a statement. “She was a very independent woman who was always in control of her own destiny.”
A UConn medical official was also disciplined in March 2018 after she was supposed to monitor Bigazzi’s work but had not had contact with him for months.
The Independent has contacted the Connecticut State Police for further information.
