Making of a monster: Sister reveals Diego Novella's past

Diego Novella’s sister told the Cape Town High Court on Tuesday that the man who murdered his girlfriend in Camps Bay in 2015 was not the brother she grew up with.

Lucila Dougherty made an impassioned plea for mercy during arguments about the sentencing of Novella, who was found guilty in June of murdering his 39-year-old American girlfriend Gabriela Kabrins Alban.

Dougherty was the first of her family to receive the news that Novella had been arrested when a police officer called her saying that he was suspected of murdering his girlfriend.

At the time, she said, their whole family was in a state of disbelief. Her father, Jean Paul, who had lost his wife to a heart disease in 1999 and his son to a car accident in 1989, found the news “too much” to bear. 

Dougherty said Novella was happy until the age of 15, when his brother, Paul, was declared brain dead after being killed in a car crashing. She said part of Novella “died” with his brother, and he became lonely and depressed. 

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* This article has been amended to correct that Paul was not the first-born, and not the driver of the car that crashed.