Prostitute killer attacked in prison in Prato: hot oil on face by relative of victim

According to reports, the killer had hoped to hide all traces and was counting on the fact that, little by little, nothing would remain of Denisa's corpse. But the killer would commit numerous missteps. The switching on of the victim's mobile phone on the night of her disappearance for a few minutes was in fact enough to exchange data traffic with at least two other devices. One circumstance allowed investigators to locate phone cells in the Montecatini area.

The investigation will now have to establish whether Denisa was murdered immediately or was kidnapped days before her death. It will also have to be ascertained whether the only person arrested, the 32-year-old compatriot, was also the sole perpetrator of the murder or whether he acted with others. The public prosecutor's office will have an autopsy performed in Prato as soon as possible, an examination that will also provide answers on the manner of the killing.

Maria Denisa Adas was resident in Rome, but in her escort business she occasionally travelled to Prato to meet clients who had contacted her via web platforms dedicated to paid sexual encounters.

The residence where he had taken lodgings and where his car was found was his base for operating away.

Shortly after her disappearance, the possible involvement of her compatriots had already emerged, not least through the testimony of some of her friends, and there had been talk of very violent threats, even to the point of suggesting murder.

A lawyer was also involved in the affair, a lawyer who allegedly looked after the family's interests in the past and contacted Denisa's mother to advise her on what to do to find her daughter.

However, this conversation with the lawyer was omitted by the mother to the Prato investigators, who therefore entered her in the register of suspects for false information to the prosecutor.

Vasile Frumuzache, questioned a second time, confessed to also being the perpetrator of the murder of another woman, Ana Maria Andrei, whose disappearance was reported by relatives on 1 August 2024. And of this victim too, as had been the case with Denisa, the man had the remains found. He had always hidden them in the same impervious and isolated area where he later threw those of the escort among the brambles, on the Montecatini Terme hill, in the Panteraie forest.

Ana Maria was stabbed to death, according to her because she had to be punished for refusing a paid sexual service.

The two investigations are linked by precise clues. From the examination of telephone cells to try to reconstruct Denisa's disappearance from the Prato residence, and in particular from the analysis of the telephone traffic on 15 May, the mobile phone number of Ana Maria Andrei, a woman of whom no one had known anything for months, came up.

Moreover, another decisive trace to induce him to confess, Frumuzache kept the BMW belonging to Ana Maria at his home in Monsummano Terme in the province of Pistoia. He had changed the car's colour, repainting it from red to black, and the number plate. But when investigators went to search the house on Wednesday after the arrest for Denise's death, they noticed the car. At that point a series of checks on the number plate were triggered and it was discovered to their surprise that it belonged to a woman who had been missing for nine months.

When asked for an explanation, in the course of further questioning, the 32-year-old also confessed to the previous murder that nobody knew about until now.

The Prato Public Prosecutor's Office has in fact activated a whole series of investigations on missing women in all the cities where the 32-year-old lived: investigators are currently unable to rule out the possibility that there may be other possible victims, other women killed, probably in the world of prostitution or marginalisation.

From what has been reconstructed, Vasile Frumuzache has been in Italy since he was14 years old: as a boy he lived with his mother in the province of Trapani before moving to Tuscany in 2022.

Married and the father of two children, he works for a company providing vigilante and security services, which allowed him to have a gun for work purposes. In the coming days, the man's wife will be heard and the investigation continues on other fronts.

The public prosecutor's office then carried out another search, an uninvestigated person allegedly having contact with Denisa by telephone between 22.09 and 23.36 on 15 May. The man also appears to have been present at the residence at a time that partly coincides with the time when Frumuzache was there.

Vasile Frumuzache was attacked this morning in Prato prison by another inmate, a relative of the woman who disappeared and was murdered on 1 August 2024, 27-year-old Romanian Ana Maria Andre, a crime confessed to yesterday under interrogation by investigators. He poured boiling oil on her face and is now in the emergency room of Prato's Santo Stefano hospital with first- and second-degree burns. 'The perpetrator was able to act undisturbed without any control,' the Prato prosecutor pointed out,

Luca Tescaroli in a statement. "The fact is of particular gravity, because every person, even if hypothetically responsible for serious crimes, has the precise right to be protected, treated humanely and respected as a human being," says Tescaroli, who has opened criminal proceedings on the matter.