Ġiġa's daughter: ‘My parents are innocent, there was no evidence against them’

Updated at 11.04am

The daughter of Ġiġa Camilleri has spoken out in a rare interview to insist her parents were framed for the 1960 murder of their son, Twannie Aquilina.

Marthese Camilleri claimed that a lack of forensic evidence and her sister’s “coerced” testimony led to a historic miscarriage of justice.

Speaking on Andrew Azzopardi’s Campus FM radio show on Saturday, Camilleri chose not to show her face for fear of stigma and discrimination.

She argued that the 17-day trial in 1961 was far too brief to uncover the truth, noting that the jury deliberated for just two hours before returning a guilty verdict.

"There was no evidence against my parents. No fingerprints, no nail clippings, nothing," she said.

Also, a crucial detail is often overlooked: eight-year-old Twannie had been sexually assaulted before he was killed, she said.

“So, it couldn’t have been my mother for sure,” she insisted, echoing her father’s belief that the real killer walked free because the authorities simply “wanted to blame someone”.

The assault was never proven in court, but a nail clipping was found in Twannie’s underwear at the murder scene, and it was confirmed that it did not belong to the boy or to his parents.

8-year-old found with throat slashed

The murder of Twannie Aquilina in 1960 and the subsequent trial of his mother, Ġiġa Camilleri, remains arguably the most controversial case in Maltese criminal history.

Eight-year-old Twannie was found in his family's Valletta apartment with his throat slashed. The gruesome nature of the crime, combined with the prosecution's focus on his own mother, ignited a national frenzy. 

Ġiġa and her husband, Leli, were eventually found guilty, with the mother becoming the first woman in over a decade to be sentenced to death by hanging.

The case was heavily built on the testimony of Ġiġa’s young daughter, Carmen, who was seven at the time, and whose accounts were often inconsistent.

There was also a lack of forensic evidence, and while Scotland Yard was called in to assist, the conviction relied more on circumstantial details and the public’s perception of Ġiġa as a "monster", Camilleri said.

Following a massive outcry and a petition for clemency signed by nearly 100 lawyers, the governor at the time commuted Ġiġa's death sentence to life imprisonment.

She was ultimately released after serving 10 years and lived a quiet life until her death. She continued to claim innocence till the end, and always asked: "How can a mother kill her son?"

In an interview with journalists Peppi Azzopardi and Fr Joe Borg in the 1990s, she said her only wish is to learn who truly killed her son, even if it is just five minutes before she dies.

A seven-year-old's testimony

During the radio programme on Saturday, Camilleri said her sister Carmen was coached by lawyers in a private room and told exactly what to say, leading to the confusing testimony that ultimately sealed their mother's fate.

She also said her father always maintained that modern DNA technology, which was not yet developed at the time, would have proven his and his wife's innocence.

During the show, former Xarabank journalist Fabian Demicoli, who had investigated the case extensively a decade ago, and law student Omar Rababah, who carried out further research more recently, confirmed the case was always, and still is, riddled with inconsistencies that, at best, cast serious doubt on Ġiġa’s guilty verdict.

Demicoli said that for one thing, a nail clipping found in the victim’s underwear did not match either Ġiġa or her husband, Leli.

“And Carmen lived with the remorse that her parents were unjustly convicted because of her,” he said.

Years later, Carmen had eventually admitted on Xarabank that it was not true that she saw her parents kill Twannie.

Living as ‘Ġiġa’s daughter’

Camilleri, who is now 67, described the lifelong stigma of being “Ġiġa’s daughter”.

She recalled being bullied at school, claiming a nun encouraged other children to beat her because of her mother’s reputation. Even visits to her parents in prison were traumatic, held under heavy guard with a strict policy that prohibited the children from touching their parents.

Addressing the notorious allegations that Twannie had been burnt with cigarettes – a detail that emerged during the trial – Camilleri said her father admitted it happened only once as a symbolic, albeit harsh, lesson about the fires of hell after the boy stole money from his teacher.

“The teacher told his parents what had happened, and my dad told him: ‘Do you know what you did? Do you know that’s a sin? And do you know what happens to sinners? They go to hell. And this is what it feels like’. And that’s when he burnt him with a cigarette. It happened once and that’s it,” Camilleri said.

The social stigma on Twannie’s parents at the time was so intense that many legal historians now view the proceedings as a classic 'trial by media', where the defendant was found guilty in the court of public opinion long before the jury deliberated.