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An Italian court has convicted American Rexal Ford of murdering his partner, Anastasia Trofimova, and their 11-month-old daughter, and concealing their bodies in a Rome park. The Court of Assise in Rome sentenced Ford to life in prison, including three years in solitary confinement. CNN reported on the case.
Judge Paola Roja read the verdict on Thursday without comment. Ford’s lawyer said he expected to appeal, a standard process in Italy, where even minor crimes can be subject to two appeals.
Ford, 47, was born Charles Francis Kaufmann and legally changed his name to Rexal Ford in 2019. In Malta in 2022, he used the name Daniel R. Foster and held a British passport and Maltese residency papers. In 2025, while travelling by boat from Malta to Sicily, he had an Italian identity document in the name Matteo Capozzi. That name, alongside his photograph, also appeared on a since-deleted “IMDb” page claiming credits on major film projects.
Ford pleaded not guilty. In interviews before and during the trial, including at Rome’s Rebibbia Prison and the psychiatric ward of Santo Spirito Hospital, he denied killing Trofimova and their child. At one point, he told CNN, “I had nothing to do with it.”
During another interview, Ford said he was “John Montgomery from England,” claimed to be a spy and said other people in the room were clones. The court had authorised his hospitalisation for what it described as a “brief psychiatric condition”; he was later returned to court after a court-appointed consultant said he had improved and was likely “faking psychosis.”
Mother and child found in Villa Doria Pamphili
A child playing at Rome’s Villa Doria Pamphili park found a baby’s body under bushes on June 7. Police searching the park, the city’s largest, found the body of a woman nearby. She was badly decomposed and initially unrecognisable, but authorities identified tattoos including a skeleton with a surfboard on her outer right arm, intertwined bird wings on her inner right arm, a floral garland with hanging stars on her abdomen and a winged red design on her inner right foot.
Autopsies established that the woman and baby were mother and daughter and that they died on different days. The woman died around June 4 or 5, while the child died late on June 6, the day before they were found. Authorities said the causes of death were suffocation and strangulation; neither body had broken bones, bruises or other marks. Prosecutors said the child may not have been fed for days before she died, but had no other injuries.
The pair remained unidentified for more than a week. After Italian missing-persons programme “Chi L’ha Visto” broadcast images of the tattoos, a viewer recognised the ankle tattoo on a woman she had seen with a man and baby in central Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. Another person sent the programme a photograph of the family, showing the man bleeding at his temple after what the caller described as a drunken fight. The caller said the woman appeared to be comforting him while holding the baby.
Other members of the public said they had seen the couple at a “Starbucks”, a local vegetable market and the park where they sometimes slept. Media reports, later confirmed by prosecutors at trial, said police encountered the man twice between June 5 and 6 while he was acting drunk and erratically and carrying the living baby.
Police said they let him go on both occasions after he showed an American passport and film credentials. A Rome police spokesperson said officers routinely stopped “drunk Americans” and released them. The spokesperson testified that Ford had told officers his wife was asleep in their hotel room. Chief prosecutor Giuseppe Cascini said the officers involved had been sanctioned for failing to intervene.
Late on June 6, police also received a call from a 16-year-old who said he had seen a man carrying a “limp baby” on a street beside the park, near a gap in its wall. Vice prosecutor Antonio Verdi said in closing arguments that police did not send a car to check, partly because the teenager said he had been at a club all evening.
Ford arrested in Greece after leaving Rome
Ford said he had not seen media coverage of the deaths, telling CNN, “I don’t speak Italian and I don’t watch Italian news.” Asked if he knew about them, he replied: “How would I? She took the baby and left me for an old boyfriend who was rich.”
On June 11, CCTV cameras recorded him leaving Campo de’ Fiori with a large, dark wheeled suitcase that investigators never found. Using his Rexal Ford passport, he flew to the Greek island of Skiathos, known as a filming location for “Mamma Mia”. Police said they traced his passport and mobile phone with FBI assistance and arrested him under an Interpol warrant. His lawyer at the time said Ford did not contest extradition. He was returned to Italy on June 13, when authorities made his name and aliases public. Rome’s public prosecutor named the dead on June 18.
Ford denied involvement and accused Italian investigators of being “mafiosi” who were targeting him, according to evidence from the lead prosecutor. The woman’s parents, who identified themselves as Russian and from Siberia, contacted “Chi L’ha Visto” after the programme aired several reports on the killings. The woman said she had lost contact with her daughter in Malta and knew she had a child with a “rich American film producer”.
A programme producer said the woman had no photographs of her daughter and could provide few details about her life. Through an interpreter, she said her daughter had lost all her documents when a backpack fell into the sea during the family’s journey from Malta to Italy in 2025. The people who identified themselves as the parents could not provide enough documents to have the bodies returned to Siberia. They later stopped communicating with Italian authorities and were unavailable to return to Rome or testify, said Arturo Salerni, the lawyer representing the victims’ interests.
In closing arguments, Verdi showed a grainy phone video he said had been sent by Trofimova’s parents. It showed Trofimova speaking English while the baby squirmed in her lap. At the end of the trial, the coroner said the mother and child remained unclaimed in a Rome morgue.
Film grant and claims of movie projects
Ford said he met Trofimova in 2022 in Marsaskala, a fishing village in Malta. He said they became involved, then she disappeared for about a year before returning to his home. A waitress at a bar in the village, who went by Ana, said she had been friends with the couple, whom locals knew as Stella and Rexal or Rex. She said Ford paid by credit card under the name Daniel R. Foster and that she had assumed the “R” stood for Rex.
Ford’s landlord in Marsaskala said he had registered under the Foster name and paid rent six months at a time. The landlord asked not to be named, citing concerns about the possible effect on his rental business.
Ford said he was working in Malta on a film called “Food Fight: The Great Culinary Battle of Malta”. The project was listed on “IMDb” before being removed, but remained in other databases. Its description referred to two rivals competing for Mediterranean culinary supremacy. The film was never released.
Ford also said he applied to Italy’s Ministry of Culture for a grant for “Stelle della Notte”, to be produced by his company, “Tintagel Films”, with Italian firm “Coevolutions”. The application was submitted in 2020 and, after internal checks by the film board, the grant was awarded in 2023. According to the ministry, Ford had persuaded the board to offer nearly $1 million for a fake film project. The scandal led to a government official’s resignation.
In Rome, Ford hosted prospective backers of “Stelle della Notte” at expensive restaurants and promised a star-studded production at costly locations including Piazza Navona, Castel Sant’Angelo and rooftop terraces, according to three people who attended the meetings. He claimed to be travelling between Japan, New Zealand, England and Hawaii to finalise film projects. A document obtained by Italian television and presented in court listed Harrison Ford at $4 million for a lead role and Kevin Spacey at $600,000 as a fallback. The grant application said chef Gordon Ramsay would play himself.
Marco Perotti, executive producer at “Coevolutions”, said in a sworn statement entered into evidence that the film behind the grant application was genuine, but that he had no idea he was “working with an assassin”. He did not respond to requests for comment and continues to produce films with Italian and international producers.
Ford said the couple’s daughter was born at home on June 14, 2024, delivered by a Russian midwife named Rita. Contacted in Malta, Rita confirmed that she had delivered the child but could not remember the exact date.
