A Bucks County woman shot her partner dead, kept his decomposing body inside her home for more than a week and paid someone to dig a hole in her yard to bury the man, according to police records.
Anna Maria Tolomello, 48, is accused of killing Giovanni Gallina, described in a police affidavit as her common-law husband. She admitted to investigators that she shot Gallina, 65, in the head on March 16 and kept the body wrapped in a tarp and comforter in a bedroom of their Hilltown Township home, according to the affidavit.
The pair owned Pina’s Pizzeria in Chalfont, Pa. the court document says.
Police officers were alerted about Gallina’s disappearance on Tuesday of this week after his son, who lives in Italy, told them he hadn’t heard from his dad since around the time of the killing, according to the affidavit.
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The son told police that Tolomello told him Gallina had gone away on business, but she would not give specifics about where he went or how long he’d be gone, the affidavit states.
Pizza shop employees also told police officers they hadn’t seen Gallina “in a while,” the affidavit says.
On Tuesday, police officers interviewed a “cooperating witness” who told them Tolomello sent a text on March 19 asking the witness to dig a hole in her driveway because she wanted to “bury one or more items,” according to the document.
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Tolomello told the person that she would fill the hole in herself with a shovel and have it covered in blacktop, and she refused the person’s offer to help, according to police.
Under surveillance by investigators, the person then went to Tolomello’s home and dug the hole, for which she paid the person $350 in cash, the affidavit said. Police also recorded the person asking Tolomello where Gallina was, to which she replied, “He is away,” according to the affidavit.
Representatives with the Hilltown Township Police Department and the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office then executed a search warrant. They encountered Tolomello in the driveway and she, unprompted, told them she had shot Gallina in self-defense, the court document states.
She later said she shot Gallina with a handgun as he was trying to choke her on their bed, according to the affidavit. Tolomello then said she disposed of the mattress in the dumpster of the pizza shop, tried to clean the blood on the carpet in the home, wiped down the gun to get rid of fingerprints and got rid of the spent and unspent bullet casings, according to the affidavit.
On Wednesday, detectives went back into the home and found Gallina’s body wrapped in bloody bedclothes, and his head covered by a black garbage bag, the affidavit says.
Tolomello is jailed on charges of homicide, abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence and possession of an instrument of crime. Online court records did not list an attorney who could comment on her behalf.
