Jailed, drug-crazed art dealer who killed friend he mistook for an alien
Bludgeoned with a candlestick
AN art dealer who killed his friend with a 13lb candlestick on a Swiss skiing holiday was jailed for more than 12 years yesterday.
Bennet von Vertes was high on cocaine and ketamine when he battered Alex Morgan, 23, at his parents’ ski chalet.
The millionaire’s son stabbed Mr Morgan, a former pupil of Prince Charles’s public school Gordonstoun, with a shard of glass and forced the candlestick down his throat.
During the savage attack the victim suffered 50 cuts to his head and body, and his head was caved in. Lawyers acting for Vertes, 32, claimed he was in a drug-induced psychosis and mistook Mr Morgan for an alien with green ears and red eyes.
But three judges in the Swiss court ruled that he acted with ‘direct intent’ and found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
Lead judge Joerg Meier said: ‘The deed can only be described as extremely brutal and cruel. The deed happened spon- taneously but he wanted to kill his friend.’
Mr Meier described Vertes as a ‘crass egoist’ whose ever-changing stories about what happened were not credible. The judge said the killing of Mr Morgan ‘ in such a cruel way’ could ‘ cause unbearable trauma’ for his family.
Mr Morgan’s parents wept as the verdict was read out in Meilen District Court near Zurich. ‘I can sleep tonight because the sentence is the best I can hope for,’ his mother Katja Faber said afterwards.
‘It’s devastating to live without Alex. Not a second goes by when we don’t feel the loss.’ The killer – whose father Laszlo von Vertes is from Hungarian-German nobility – is part of the Vertes art-dealing family in Zurich, and ran a modern gallery in the city, offering works by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst.
He and his victim knew each other from studying at Regent’s College in London – now Regent’s University – where Mr Morgan, who grew up in Richmond, south-west London, had recently completed a business management degree.
On December 30, 2014, when he was on a skiing holiday with his mother who lives in Switzerland, Mr Morgan went to the magnificent Vertes villa on the wealthy ‘gold coast’ of Lake Zurich.
As a snowstorm raged outside, he and Vertes partied alone. Vertes consumed alcohol, ketamine, cocaine and sleeping pills and went into a psychotic state with paranoid delusions. Swedish folk music was played but Mr Morgan decided he did not like it.
Vertes, who believed he had super powers at the time, thought his British friend had turned into a green alien who was trying to kill him, and believed they were last people on the planet’.
In an orgy of sickening violence, Vertes stabbed Mr Morgan with a shard of glass from a smashed coffee table and bludgeoned him with the 3ft- long candlestick and a golden sculpture weighing 4lb.
In a brutal twist, he then rammed the candlestick down his victim’s throat, choking him to death.
In an unrelated case, Vertes was found guilty of raping a woman in a London hotel room in November 2013.
He was jailed for a total of 12 and a half years – nine for killing, three for rape and sexual assault and six months for a driving offence.
Courts in Switzerland often deal with multiple cases at the same time. Vertes has already lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court.