Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi found dead before verdict in UConn professor death case

A woman who pleaded guilty to manslaughter of her 84-year-old husband and hid his body in her basement for months was found dead in her Connecticut home just hours before her sentencing was due to be announced.

Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi, 76, was found unconscious in her home on Wednesday after someone notified police around 10:37 a.m. and told them they could not contact her, Connecticut State Police said in a news release.

When officers found Kosuda-Bigazzi, she was soon pronounced dead, police said. Based on initial findings, police have classified this incident as an “investigation of an untimely death,” the press release said.

Kosuda-Bigazzi was scheduled to be sentenced at 2 p.m. in Hartford Superior Court to 13 years in prison for the 2017 death of her husband, Dr. Pierluigi Bigazzi, a professor of laboratory science and pathology at UConn Health.

In addition to the first-degree manslaughter plea, Kosuda-Bigazzi pleaded guilty to first-degree theft after authorities discovered that she had been collecting her husband’s wages for months after he was killed.

“Ms. Kosuda-Bigazzi’s death was not foreseeable,” Patrick Tomasiewicz, Kosuda-Bigazzi’s defense attorney, said in a statement to USA TODAY on Wednesday. “We were honored to be her legal counsel and have done our best to defend her in a complex case over the past six years. She was a fiercely independent woman who was always in control of her own destiny.”

What did Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi do?

Kosuda-Bigazzi pleaded guilty to killing Dr. Pierluigi Bigazzi sometime in July 2017, hiding his body in the basement until police found him in February 2018, and depositing her husband’s paychecks into the couple’s joint bank account months before the gruesome discovery.

Burlington police found Dr. Bigazzi’s body during a welfare check at the home arranged by UConn Health. The Connecticut medical examiner determined that Dr. Bigazzi died of blunt force trauma to the head.

Kosuda-Bigazzi reportedly wrote in a journal how she killed her husband with a hammer in self-defense, the Hartford Courant reported, according to court records. In the note, Kosuda-Bigazzi describes in detail how she hit him with a hammer during a fight that began when Bigazzi came at her with a hammer first, the newspaper said. The argument started because she told her husband about work he was supposed to do on their patio.

Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi wanted her case closed

Before the guilty plea, the case had been pending for six years, Hartford District Attorney Sharmese Walcott’s office said in a press release in March.

Tomasiewicz told USA TODAY in March that his client decided to forgo a trial and plead to a lesser charge because she “wanted to close her case.”

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