The 70-year-old wife of an elderly medical professor appeared in court on Tuesday morning to be charged with his murder which police believe may have happened eight months before his body was found.
On February 5, police found Pierlugi Bigazzi’s body at the home he shared with his wife Linda Kosuda Bigazzi in Burlington, Connecticut.
Police had been called there to perform a welfare check after receiving a concerned phone call from Pierlugi’s colleagues at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
Authorities at first were unable to identify the corpse. Days later, once they had determined that it was Pierlugi, they arrested Linda, 70, for his murder.
She posted her $1.5million bond and has been at home since.
On Tuesday, she arrived at Bristol Superior Court flanked by a legal team. She said nothing as she entered the courthouse.
Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi appears in court on Tuesday morning to be arraigned on murder and evidence tampering charges. She is accused of murdering her elderly husband then hiding his body in their home for as many as eight months
The doctor had been working remotely to write study materials which students could access online.
In August 2017, his key card was used on campus.
The university said they had no reason to suspect anything was wrong until January this year when they tried to contact him and he did not reply.
On February 5, having still not heard from him, they asked police to perform a welfare check.
Police will not say how long ago they believe he died but they have yet to find anyone who has spoken to him since June.
They are appealing to contractors or construction workers who did work at the home but will not say why.
Neighbors have since told how the couple were rude and kept to themselves.
They were married for 38 years but did not have any children together.
Much of the case remains a mystery, including where in the house Pierlugi’s body was found and why police believe his wife killed him.
Linda’s arrest affidavit, which likely includes such information, is under seal.
As part of their investigation, they have asked the man’s first wife, Anna, to turn over the alimony checks she received from him in the last year to determine who wrote them.
That woman told The Hartford Courant she knows nothing more about his death.
‘The state police asked me to request copies of the checks from the bank and I am waiting for them.
‘I really haven’t had any contact with my former husband in 40 years and I have no idea what is going on,’ she said.
Pierlugi married his second wife in 1975, six months after he divorced his first.
Bigazzi, 70, kept her head down as she arrived at court on Tuesday morning and said nothing to the media gathered outside
The couple lived together in this home in Burlington, Connecticut. Police found Pierlugi’s body there ‘wrapped up’ after being called by his worried colleagues who had not heard from him in months
Linda also worked at the university though her job is not known.
Colleagues have since revealed that they did not know the pair were married and that when they worked together on experiments, he had ‘total control’.
‘I had no idea that they had a personal relationship. She was very quiet — seemed like she was more like a technician who was working for him, not a fellow scientist,’ David Greiner, who worked with them on several projects in the 1990s, said.
Kosuda-Bigazzi, 70, is pictured in her February 9 mugshot
Other colleagues said they were ‘antisocial but inseparable’.
‘They came to work together and left together,’ Nicholas Potter said.
He said Linda followed her husband’s orders and was never in charge of their experiments despite being a qualified scientist herself.
‘She wasn’t on that track so he would have been the one making decisions regarding projects.
‘She was just a very quiet person who did whatever he told her to do.’
The university confirmed that she worked there as a ‘science instructor’ from 1986 to 1998 but then carried on assisting her husband until the summer of 2017.
The pair co-wrote medical texts about auto-immune diseases. Before his death, Pierlugi had been producing online materials for them.
Police are yet to establish a suspected motive.
Sources said Linda has access to $4million in property assets including a $300,000 condo in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and a home in Switzerland.
The house where she lived with her husband is roughly valued at $290,000. Pierlugi earned $200,000 from the university.
The couple worked together at the University of Connecticut’s Health Center where they conducted experiments and wrote medical texts for their research on autoimmune diseases