A 76-year-old woman from Connecticut, Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi, was found dead at her home on Wednesday, just hours before she was supposed to be sentenced for killing her husband and hiding his body while still collecting his paychecks.
Police went to her Burlington home for a welfare check around 10:30 a.m. and are now investigating her sudden death. They haven’t shared any more details yet.
Kosuda-Bigazzi was set to be sentenced at 2 p.m. Wednesday in Hartford Superior Court as part of a plea deal. She was facing 13 years in prison for killing her husband, Dr. Pierluigi Bigazzi, 84, in 2017.
Her lawyer, Patrick Tomasiewicz, said her death was unexpected and described her as an independent woman who managed her own life well.
Kosuda-Bigazzi had admitted to manslaughter and larceny in March after being charged with murder. She claimed she killed her husband in self-defense with a hammer during a fight about home repairs. She had been out on bail of over $1.5 million.
According to police, Kosuda-Bigazzi wrote that she and her husband fought after she mentioned needed repairs. She said he attacked her with a hammer, and she took it away from him, hitting him until he stopped breathing. She then sat with him on the kitchen floor for a while.
In February 2018, police found her husband’s body in their basement during a wellness check requested by his work. The body was wrapped in plastic and badly decomposed. The cause of death was blunt trauma to the head.
Investigators believe Pierluigi Bigazzi died in July 2017, but his paychecks were still being deposited into their joint account until his body was discovered.
An internal investigation by UConn revealed that a school official who was supposed to keep track of Bigazzi’s work had not contacted him in the months before his body was found. This official faced disciplinary action.