One of the most heinous and inhumane crimes in Greek chronicles, which even today remains known as the “Frantzis case” and its fatal relationship with Zoe Garmani. The gruesome story came to light on June 25, 1987, causing a terrible stir in the nation, which landed abnormally on such a dark case a few days after the celebrations for the Eurobasket victory.
This is one of the crimes presented in the book “100 crimes in Greece” which has been published together with the newspaper Proto Thema this Sunday.
The central character of the story is Panagiotis Frantzis, a young 25-year-old student of ASOEE, from a quiet middle-class family. His acquaintance with the then 16-year-old student Zoe (Zozo) Garmani had begun in 1985 and nothing seemed to indicate that it would have this fatal outcome. Frantzis fell madly in love with her and insisted on making her his own.
Zoe, a very beautiful girl who enjoyed the admiration of her social circle and her youthful vigour, despite frequent and intense scenes of jealousy on Franzis’ part, agreed to marry him in December 1986. Their life together was turbulent from the beginning, with long fights over trivial reasons. The fateful evening of 24 June 1987 was another typical day. According to the account of Franzis (who is apparently the only witness to what happened), Zoe locked herself in the house and did not allow him to enter. When he finally managed to convince her to let him in, and after they made love, they started arguing again over a trivial reason. From that point on, the events went by in a flash. Franzis claims that as he pushed Zoe, she fell and hit her head and was left for dead.
Franzis, always according to his plea, decided to dispose of the body. In order to do this, he began to dismember Zoe’s lifeless body with a Cretan knife and a hammer. Finally, after three hours of the process, he had butchered her into 11 pieces, which he put into bags which he threw into rubbish bins in the area of Kato Patissia.
In a separate bag he put her head, which he had disfigured in such an inhuman way that it was unrecognisable. The next day he even went to work normally, believing that he had committed the perfect crime.
But unfortunately for him, a strike on the garbage trucks that day has left the dumpster untouched. And a passerby, a stamp collector, rummaging through the strange bags, discovered the unfortunate Zoe’s limbs. From there the case was taken over by the police, who, not having the head, searched for clues to the identity of the dead woman. A butcher’s receipt in a bag led them to the area where the couple lived and eventually to Franzis himself, who, as the noose tightened around him, decided to turn himself in.
The case, as is only natural, occupied the media of the time, which even went so far as to publish a photo of Zoe’s dismembered body on the morgue table. An act that shocked readers, prompted the intervention of the judiciary and started the first major debates about the limits of the media. Public opinion was alarmed to an unbelievable degree by the cruelty of the crime, while the constant headlines and pithy newspaper headlines created an unprecedented climate for Greek criminological annals, making Franzis the ultimate villain for popular culture even to this day.
In the lengthy trial that followed, Frantzis claimed that it was all an accident, and that he loved Zoe pathologically, and did not want to hurt her. But the coroner revealed that he had strangled her with his hands before he cut her up. The public prosecutor, following public sentiment as expressed in the newspapers, had asked for his death sentence (although it had been practically abolished in 1972). But on 1 October 1988 the majority of the Court of Cassation sentenced him to life imprisonment for manslaughter with intent and in a particularly heinous manner and two years for the offence of desecration of the dead.
Panagiotis Frantzis was imprisoned for 18 years and released on 20 October 2005. From then on he lived away from the limelight in Athens, remarried and became a father of two children. He and his heinous act, however, will remain one of the highlights in the peculiar “star-system” of Greek criminology. And it was certainly a dress rehearsal for the extreme media frenzy, print and television, that would dominate the years that followed.
