A 47-year-old American man who used multiple identities and lived in Marsaskala between 2023 and 2024 has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his partner and their 11-month-old daughter. Francis Charles Kaufmann, from California, who had been using the fake name of Rexal Ford and presenting himself as a film director or producer, met his partner, 28-year-old Anastasia Trofimova from Siberia, in Malta during a vacation in 2023. Their daughter Andromeda was born in June 2024, and the family later moved to Rome. On 7th June 2025, the lifeless bodies of both the woman and her infant daughter were found in Rome’s Villa Pamphili park. Six days later, he was arrested on the Greek island of Skiathos. The operation involved cooperation between a number of European police forces and the FBI… and it was actually popular Italian programme Chi L’Ha Visto, which had run a few episodes on the murders, that helped in his identification after the couple had fought in the street once. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lovin Malta (@lovinmalta)Kaufmann had been masquerading as a producer under a number of different aliases and even managed to secure a €863,595 tax credit from the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2023 for a feature called Stella della Notte, which never got made. In Malta, he claimed to be working on a film called Food Fight: The Great Culinary Battle of Malta. This was also never released. Living in Marsaskala with a valid residence permit, the man had claimed that his partner was working as a computer hacker for a Russian crime syndicate from a hotel when they met in Malta. CNN has since reported that both the hotel and the woman “had both been under investigation in a hacking inquiry”. On Thursday, an Italian court found Kaufmann guilty of murdering both the woman and their daughter, and was sentenced to life in prison with three years of solitary confinement. The verdict and sentence was delivered by eight judges at Italy’s highest criminal court, the prima Corte d’Assise, in Rome, and Kaufmann, who was described by public prosecutor Antonio Verdi as “a clear-headed individual, a pathological narcissist with manipulative abilities, an impostor”, is expected to appeal the judgement.•