Nicole Virzi Accused in Child-Killing Case: Her Alleged ‘Confession’

On June 16, 2024, Nicole Virzi had spent more than 12 hours in an interview room at Pittsburgh police headquarters when prosecutors say her version of the night she babysat her best friend’s newborn twins suddenly shifted.

Virzi had repeatedly denied harming six-week-old Leon and Ari Katz. She said she could not explain how Leon suffered multiple fatal skull fractures while his parents took his twin brother to the hospital after he was found with unexplained injuries. But as the questioning continued, she abruptly asked to speak with the lead detective again, according to prosecutors.

Detective Janine Triolo returned to the room and sat across from Virzi, then 29, as evening approached. In the police recording, the clinical psychology student began: “Um, I’m going to tell you the truth. The biggest part of that truth is that I did not want him to die.”

Her voice sometimes sounded anxious, yet she was composed at other moments. Virzi then told the detective: “From a very, very young age, I don’t know what it is, but I always had this urge — almost like a compulsion I can’t control — to hurt kids.”

Leon’s death came shortly before Virzi was due to earn her doctorate in behavioral medicine from the University of California at San Diego. She had flown across the country for a brief visit with her close friend and the family at their home in Pittsburgh’s affluent Shadyside neighborhood.

Instead of simply spending time with the twins’ mother, Savannah Roberts, Virzi said she became angry after feeling she had been assigned to care for the babies. “I kind of grew angry because I was being put to nanny work,” she told investigators in the statement later played for jurors at a hearing last November.

“So, when I was alone with (Leon) I shook him a couple times — hard. And I dropped him a couple times — hard,” she said.

Virzi also said she heard “some kind of crack” and placed the infant upside down on the tiled bathroom floor.

“Something just came over me I couldn’t control,” she told detectives. “I’m telling you this because I can’t keep lying about it.”

Virzi was charged that same day with criminal homicide, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children. The charges concern both Leon’s death and the injuries allegedly suffered by his twin brother. She has been held without bail since her arrest and has pleaded not guilty to every count.

Unless Virzi changes her plea — a possibility her attorneys have suggested — she is scheduled to stand trial on October 1 in a case where prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Her defense lawyer, Bill Difenderfer, said in June that plea negotiations were still underway.

Pennsylvania has not carried out an execution since 1999, and Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has said he will not sign death warrants. Even so, the district attorney’s office maintains that capital punishment is warranted because of the alleged circumstances surrounding the case.

Prosecutors have cited aggravating factors including Leon’s age and evidence they say indicates the infant was tortured.

The recorded police interviews from that June day are expected to become a central part of the prosecution’s case at trial.

Virzi’s defense team has already sought to keep the recordings out of court. She now denies killing Leon, while her lawyers argue that investigators obtained an involuntary confession after holding her for an excessive and oppressive period. They accused police of using “nearly every trick in the book to manipulate Ms Virzi into making a statement.”

Virzi has said she was shackled to the floor, denied access to a telephone and made to urinate in front of two police escorts.

Judge Jill Rangos of the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas nevertheless ruled that the jury could hear the recordings. She noted that Virzi had met with a defense lawyer and spoken to her parents before making the statements. “The vast majority of time she was in that [interview] room, she did not appear to be in any distress,” the judge said at a February hearing, concluding that Virzi’s statement had been “knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily made.”

The disturbing case began in mid-June 2024, when Virzi traveled to Pittsburgh to stay with Roberts and Roberts’s husband, Ethan Katz. She had been raised in the wealthy New Jersey community of Upper Saddle River and is the daughter of a prominent New York cardiologist.

The two women had been friends since 2021 when they worked together as research coordinators in the graduate psychology department at Philadelphia’s Drexel University.

Virzi’s PhD research focused on how ‘depression, stress, negative affect and trauma’ in vulnerable groups impacts physical health and behavior, like heart disease and exercise, her university biography said at the time.

During Virzi’s stay, Roberts repeatedly asked Virzi to watch over her little boys.

According to court papers, Virzi – who taught spinning classes while studying for her doctorate – visited their apartment on the afternoon of June 15 and, as Roberts was having a nap, she offered to change Ari’s diaper.

She told police she noticed there was blood in the child’s nappy and his genitals were swollen, photographing the injuries on her phone and sending the pictures to Ethan Katz. There were also small scratches on his face, which Virzi said he received when he flailed his arms as he was being placed in his car seat. Prosecutors argue that Virzi was responsible for Ari’s injuries.

The parents, who denied causing the injuries themselves, said they had never previously seen them on the baby who had never had any medical emergencies. At around 6.30pm that day, they rushed Ari to hospital, leaving Virzi alone in their home with Leon.

She would later tell police that Leon had been in a baby bouncer seat and, having failed to strap him in, she then dozed off.

Virzi claimed that when she woke up, she went into the kitchen to get him a bottle of milk when he suddenly began to scream.

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She returned to find the baby lying on the floor with a bump on the left side of his head having fallen out of his chair. She called 911 at around 11.15pm and later rang the Katzes from the hospital.

Leon was pronounced dead a few hours later after suffering what doctors said was blunt force trauma. An autopsy confirmed he had a severe skull fracture and a brain that was bleeding in several places.

According to the criminal complaint against Virzi, a doctor and child abuse specialist later told investigators the injuries to both twins were ‘consistent with having been sustained as a result of child abuse, as these are inflicted injuries that are not natural and not accidental.’

At around 6am the following morning, Pittsburgh police arrived at the local Airbnb where Virzi had been staying and, after ascertaining she had no ‘plausible explanation’ for his wounds, persuaded her to come with them for questioning, according to the criminal complaint. She agreed to hand over her phone and purse but was not arrested or handcuffed.

At police headquarters, detectives said they twice read her Miranda rights to her, saying she had the right to remain silent, but she kept talking.

Detectives told her that Leon’s serious injuries were inconsistent with falling from a seat that was only 12 inches off the floor, but for hours she stuck to her story.

Later, say prosecutors, she changed her mind. According to the interview recording, some of which was played at a court hearing a year ago, she also told Detective Janine Triolo: ‘I did not want [Leon] to die. That was not my goal. I just wanted him to feel a little pain.’

She went on to say she’d been just three or four when she first felt she wanted to hurt children.

Virzi claimed she was seven when she locked a two-year-old child in a bathroom and pinched her until she cried. When she was in high school, she said she put a hot mug on a baby’s arm and pinched the infant.

‘This is the first time this happened as an adult,’ Virzi said of the alleged attack on the twins. ‘There’s some weird drive in me that wants to see kids in pain.’

In her statement, Virzi also told the police she had suffered from anxiety, depression and an eating disorder. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore,’ she told them. ‘I know the best thing is for me to go away – or maybe worse.’

A few weeks after Leon’s death, Virzi’s attorney, David Shrager, stressed that his client had no criminal history and was devastated by Leon’s death while insisting her innocence.

He described her as a ‘loving person’ who ‘would never harm anyone’s children.

‘If there was something that she would want to convey, it would just be the absolutely horrible pain that she’s feeling,’ he said. ‘These were her close friends.’

Although her lawyers are expected to once again argue in court that the damning statement she made to police was coerced and shouldn’t be relied on, some who know Virzi have told the Daily Mail that it tallied with some things they knew about her – especially what they described as her ‘bottled-up rage’ and ‘underlying anger.’

Elin Lantz Lesser, who was a graduate student at Drexel with Virzi and Roberts, said she felt she needed to ‘mind my p’s and q’s around her a little bit, like I don’t want to get on her bad side.’

Lesser remembered a co-worker once getting some ‘very biting text messages’ from Virzi regarding a work issue.

Another former psychology major, who knew Virzi from her studies at a different university, said she, too, was wary of her.

‘There always seemed to be some underlying anger,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘Some colleagues that I’ve spoken to have had similar thoughts about it, that there was this bottled-up rage or something that never came out but you felt it was right there, even though she was friendly.’

She went on: ‘She had this rigidity, like she would never be even a minute late for a meeting or class. In a way, because of that, I think I’d almost trust her to babysit more than anyone because she was so controlled and she followed rules to the letter.’

However, Cindy Miller-Perrin, a clinical child psychologist and professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, where Virzi was an undergraduate and tried her hand at student journalism, said she had been ‘an incredible student’ who ‘was very high-achieving.’ The latter, she conceded, was linked with certain personality traits.

Prosecutors say Virzi still has the support of her family although her parents split up in around 2019. She has one sibling, Alysha, who appears to live with their father in Upper Saddle River.

Neither Virzi’s family nor the Katz’s have commented on the case. The latter have described the accused as a ‘trusted family friend’ and little Leon as ‘a happy, smiley, goofy baby boy.’ Like the woman accused of killing her son, Savannah Roberts also went on to become a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, in her case at the University of Pittsburgh.

Virzi provided a few insights into her personality in her student journalism articles. In one, she described how she hated the conviviality of new student orientation at Pepperdine and felt ‘suffocated’ by it.

‘Upon realizing that I was very different from many of my peers, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that something was terribly wrong with me,’ she wrote. ‘But now, I draw a different conclusion: I am an introvert. And contrary to popular belief that doesn’t mean I’m antisocial or shy or have no friends – it simply means that I draw my energy from internal sources instead of external ones. And that’s not a bad thing at all.’

People, she added, ‘tend to gravitate towards introverts when looking to create lasting friendships.’

Whether Savannah Roberts made a terrible mistake when she was drawn to create what she perhaps hoped would be such a lasting friendship with Virzi is set to be examined in a Pittsburgh courtroom.