An American man with shifting identities and grandiose movie plans is convicted of murdering his girlfriend and child in Rome

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, CNN

Rome, Italy (CNN) — “My name is Rexal Ford,” the man born under the name Charles Francis Kaufmann told an Italian courtroom, in English, at the start of his double-murder trial in February. “I am not a killer. I am a film producer.”

The former Kaufmann, a 47-year-old American, did legally change his name to Rexal Ford in 2019. In Malta, in 2022, however, he was known as Daniel R. Foster, with a British passport and Maltese residency papers to match. Three years later, hiring a boat from Malta to Sicily, he had an Italian identity document identifying him as Matteo Capozzi — a name that also appeared with his photo on a now-deleted IMDb page claiming production credits on major film projects.

“You’re going to get caught up on names of convenience?” Ford asked me, when I raised the subject of his multiple passports. “You’re saying you never pretended to be someone you aren’t? Even once?”

On Thursday, in Rome’s Court d’Assise, Ford was convicted of double homicide and concealment of a corpse for, according to the prosecution, killing his 28-year-old partner, Anastasia Trofimova, and their 11-month-old daughter, and dumping their bodies in a public park. Judge Paola Roja read the verdict without comment, sentencing Ford to life in prison with three years of solitary confinement.

Ford’s lawyer said that he expected the verdict to be appealed, a standard practice in Italy where even small crimes are afforded two appellate trials.

Behind the verdict lay a long-running, sensational case of gruesome mystery, tall tales and shifting identities, at the junction of con artistry and the film business — of a man who wined and dined would-be investors and producers in Rome’s finest restaurants while he and his family lived in the streets and slept in the park.

Across multiple interviews before and during his trial, in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison and Santo Spirito Hospital psychiatric ward, Ford maintained that he was not the person who committed the killings.

“I had nothing to do with it,” he told me, in his easy California accent, when we first met in the prison visiting room in October 2025.

Other claims of his were not so consistent. When we spoke in May, in the psychiatric ward during a pause in his murder trial, Ford claimed to be “John Montgomery from England.” He also told me that he was a spy and that other people in the room were clones. The court had allowed him to be hospitalized for what it called a “brief psychiatric condition,” then brought him back after a court-appointed consultant deemed he had improved and was likely “faking psychosis.”

Before the murders, in 2023, Ford managed to convince the Italian Film Board to offer him nearly $1 million for a fake movie project, according to the ministry of culture, in a scandal that led to the resignation of a government official.

A disturbing discovery and national call for clues

On June 7, 2026, a child playing on a jungle gym in Rome’s Villa Doria Pamphili park saw what she thought was a doll under the bushes. It was the body of a baby. Her nanny raised the alarm and police were called.

Within an hour of searching the park, the city’s largest, police had found the body of a woman as well, this one in an advanced state of decomposition, leaving her unrecognizable. She had blond hair and the authorities were able to identify four distinct tattoos: a skeleton with a surfboard on her outer right arm, intertwining bird wings on her inner right arm, an ornate floral garland with hanging stars on her abdomen, and a winged red design on her inner right foot.

Autopsies revealed that the two were mother and daughter, and that they had died on different days, the woman around June 4 or 5 and the child late on June 6, the day before they were discovered. The causes of death, the authorities reported, were suffocation and strangulation that had left no broken bones and no bruises or marks. The child had not been fed for perhaps days before she was killed, but she had no other injuries, prosecutors told the court during the trial.

The two remained nameless for more than a week. Finally, after an Italian missing-persons TV program, “Chi L’ha Visto,” aired images of the tattoos, someone called in to say that they recognized the ankle tattoo. It belonged to a woman the caller had often seen with a man and a baby in Campo de’ Fiori in central Rome.

Not long after, another member of the public sent the program a snapshot of that same family. In it, the man was bleeding from his temple, after what the caller alleged was a drunken fight. The woman, she said, had appeared to be trying to comfort the man while holding the baby.

More people called in, declaring that they had seen the couple in a Starbucks, at a local vegetable market, and in the park where they sometimes slept. The media reported, and prosecutors confirmed during the trial, that police had encountered the man twice between June 5 and 6, while he was acting drunk and erratic and carrying the still-living baby.

In both instances, police said they had let the man go after he flashed his American passport and film credentials. Asked about the incidents, a spokesperson for Rome’s police said they routinely stop “drunk Americans” and let them go. The spokesperson said, and testified in court, that Ford had told the officers his wife was sleeping in their hotel room.

Giuseppe Cascini, the chief prosecutor in the case, said that the police involved in the encounters had been sanctioned for their failure to intervene.

Police had also received a phone call late on the night of June 6 from a 16-year-old boy who said he’d seen a man carrying a “limp baby” on the street by Villa Doria Pamphili, near a place where there is a breach in the park wall. The police did not dispatch a car to check, in part because the teen admitted he had been out at a club all evening, vice prosecutor Antonio Verdi said in his closing arguments.

An arrest in Greece

Ford said in an interview that he had not seen any of the media coverage after the bodies were discovered. “I don’t speak Italian and I don’t watch Italian news,” he said.

Had he known about the deaths at all? “How would I?” he said. “She took the baby and left me for an old boyfriend who was rich.”

On June 11, CCTV cameras captured him leaving the Campo de’ Fiori area with a large dark rolling suitcase, which investigators never found. Using his Rexal Ford passport, he flew to the Greek island of Skiathos, famous as the backdrop of the film “Mamma Mia.”

Police say they tracked his passport and cell phone to locate him, with the help of the FBI, and he was arrested under a warrant from Interpol. He did not fight extradition, according to the lawyer who was representing him at the time, and was brought back to Italy on June 13, when his name and various aliases were released to the public. Rome’s public prosecutor would eventually announce the names of the dead on June 18.

Ford denied any involvement in the killings, and he accused the Italian investigators of being “mafiosi” who were out to get him, according to evidence given by the lead prosecutor in his trial.

After “Chi L’ha Visto” had run a few episodes on the murders, a Russian woman from Siberia contacted the program, saying she was Anastasia Trofimova’s mother. The producers flew her to Rome, where she told them that she and her husband had lost touch with their daughter in Malta, but that she knew Trofimova had had a baby with a “rich American film producer.”

One of the show’s producers said in an interview that the woman didn’t have photos of her daughter to share, and she couldn’t offer much in the way of detail about her life. Through an interpreter, she said that her daughter had lost all of her documents when her backpack fell into the sea on the family’s trip from Malta to Italy in 2025.

The self-identified parents were unable to produce enough documentation to repatriate their daughter’s body to Siberia. They stopped communicating with the Italian authorities, said Arturo Salerni, the lawyer representing the victims’ interests, and they were unavailable to return to Rome or to testify during the murder trial.

During closing arguments at the trial, Verdi did show a grainy phone video of Trofimova holding the baby, which he said had been sent by Trofimova’s parents. In it, Trofimova is speaking English as the baby squirms in her lap.

Mother and child both remain frozen in a Roman morgue, unclaimed, the coroner said at the end of the trial.

Making movies from Malta

Ford said he met Trofimova in Maltia, in the fishing village of Marsaskala, in 2022. “We hooked up and hung out and then she disappeared for about a year,” he said. “Then she showed up on my doorstep and I regret ever letting her in.”

A dark-haired waitress who goes by Ana at the St. Thomas Bay bar in the village could confirm that the couple had been there, Ford said. A waitress matching this description at the bar, who would not give her last name when approached, said she had been friends with Ford and Trofimova, who everyone had known as Stella. Ford used a credit card in the name of Daniel R. Foster, she said, but everyone called him Rexal or Rex, and she had assumed that was what the middle initial R. stood for.

Ford’s landlord in Marsaskala, who asked not to be named due to concerns over the possible negative impact on his rental business, said he had registered under the Foster name, and had paid his rent six months at a time.

Ford said that while he was in Malta, he was working on a film called “Food Fight: The Great Culinary Battle of Malta.” The movie was listed on IMDb and then removed, but still appears in other databases, which describe the subject as “two ruthless rivals who come head-to-head in this intense battle of culinary supremacy of the Mediterranean.” It was never released.

Also during his time in Malta, he said, he applied to the Italian Ministry of Culture for a filmmaking grant for a project called “Stelle della Notte,” to be produced by his own company, Tintagel Films, in conjunction with the Italian production firm Coevolutions. The application was submitted in 2020, and after the film board’s internal vetting process, the grant was awarded in 2023.

In Rome, Ford would entertain potential backers of “Stelle della Notte” with lavish meals, promising them a star-studded production shot at premium — and pricey — locations including the Piazza Navona, Castel Sant’Angelo and some of the Eternal City’s best terraces, according to three different people who took part in the meetings. He boasted of jetting between Japan, New Zealand, England and Hawaii to finalize various film projects; a document obtained by Italian television and presented in court claimed that Harrison Ford was on the budget as lead, for $4 million, with Kevin Spacey at $600,000 as a fallback option. Chef Gordon Ramsey would play himself, according to the bogus grant application.

Marco Perotti, the executive producer of Coevolutions, insisted in an affidavit entered into evidence that the film for which he’d co-signed the grant application was genuine, but said he had no idea he was “working with an assassin.” Perotti did not respond to requests for comment, but he continues to produce films with Italian and international producers.

A secretive crossing

The couple’s child was born at home on June 14, 2024, delivered by a Russian midwife named Rita, according to Ford. Reached in person in Malta, Rita confirmed that she had delivered the child, but couldn’t remember the exact date.

Ford said he contacted the US Embassy in Malta to register the child, but there are no records of a foreign birth abroad to an American on the date he said she was born. Prosecutors told the court in Rome that the child had no legal birth certificate, and that Ford, as her sole living parent, is the only person who could arrange for her body to be repatriated.

Trofimova, Ford claimed, had been working as a computer hacker for a Russian crime syndicate when they met. He described a hotel in Marsaskala where she had allegedly worked with a group laundering money for the syndicate.

An anti-mafia investigator in Malta said in an interview that the hotel and Trofimova, who was living in Malta under a different identity, had both been under investigation in a hacking inquiry. The investigation into Trofimova was dropped after her death, according to the investigator.

When I visited the hotel in question, a low-rise cement structure with an internal courtyard swimming pool and rundown ‘80s decor, a Russian-speaking guard stopped me from entering the second floor, saying the rooms were rented out “for an event.” Outside the building were an assortment of generators, cables and Starlink dishes.

Ford claimed that he and Trofimova had started siphoning funds from the people she worked for, and their theft was discovered. Between that trouble and the baby’s lack of papers, he said, they needed to escape Malta anonymously, via private boat.

“We had to leave without being followed,” he said.

Italian investigators said that Giovanni Costagliola, a boat service operator in Malta’s capital, Valletta, told them Ford had contacted him by text message, under the name Matteo Capozzi, seeking passage for his “wife and infant” and asking if they needed documentation. After he told Ford that insurance did require the documents, Costagliola testified in court, “He never contacted me again.”

According to a re-creation of their movements during the murder trial, the family did arrive at Ragusa, on a private yacht in March of 2025. The skipper who transferred them testified that the woman and baby were silent on the 90-minute trip.

From Sicily, the family traveled by train to Rome, where Ford got in touch with a fantasy book author he had been seeking to make a deal with, Federico Carro. He told Carro he was working to get financing to buy the rights to one of his novels. Carro told RAI public television that Ford said he had been scouting locations in Malta, New Zealand and then Iceland. Carro said Ford had also told him that he was the son of the rock star Lita Ford, of the Runaways.

On April 5, Carro met Ford, Trofimova and the baby, who was introduced to him as Sara. They spoke several more times about various projects, but then Ford told Carro he had gone back to England.

On June 5, Ford left a final voice message on Carro’s phone, which was entered into evidence in the murder trial. In it, Ford asked if he and the baby could stay at Carro’s house for a few nights.

“I’m back in Rome now, just me and my child,” Ford said. The baby’s mother, he said, had left him for a wealthy old boyfriend.

An ‘unorthodox approach’

After Ford was returned to Rome and charged with double homicide, Nicola Borrelli, the General Director of Cinema and Audiovisual at the Italian Ministry of Culture, stepped down and the ministry issued an apology to Italian taxpayers for having made the film grant.

The Italian film board launched an investigation into how the grant had been approved. Among the lines of inquiry was whether Trofimova had used her hacking skills to falsify some of the background information that made Ford’s Tintagel Films look like a legitimate company. A lawyer for Borrelli declined to comment on whether the investigation had found anything to support that speculation.

In our interviews, Ford often bragged about films he had previously made including one called “Story: The Movie,” in 2008. In a video on YouTube, Ford – Kaufmann at the time – is seen being interviewed at the premier as the movie’s director. In the video, he appears young and confident, telling his interviewer, “I’m excited for my first time out … I lucked out with the cast because you know I actually went through sort of an unorthodox approach.”

Ford was not present for the verdict. His lawyer said that his client had refused to meet with him since June, and that when Ford returns to court for an appeal, “it won’t be me next time.”

The prosecutor Verdi, addressing the media after the verdict, called Ford “cold, calculating, manipulative, and a pathological narcissist.”

“He possesses a strong, distinct personality,” Verdi said, “but he is an imposter whose game is up.”

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