On June 16, 2024, Nicole Virzi had spent more than 12 hours in an interview room at Pittsburgh police headquarters when prosecutors say her explanation of the night she babysat her best friend’s newborn twins suddenly shifted.
For hours, the 29-year-old PhD student had 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 rushed his twin to the hospital after discovering unexplained injuries. But Virzi then unexpectedly asked to speak with the lead detective again, prosecutors said.
When Detective Janine Triolo returned to the room that evening, Virzi made a recorded statement. “Um, I’m going to tell you the truth,” she said. “The biggest part of that truth is that I did not want him to die.”
Her voice reportedly moved between nervousness and an unsettling calm as she continued: “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 occurred just weeks before Virzi was due to earn her doctorate in behavioral medicine from the University of California at San Diego. She had traveled from California to Pittsburgh for a brief visit with her close friend and the family at their home in the affluent Shadyside neighborhood.
Instead of simply spending time with the twins’ mother, Savannah Roberts, Virzi told investigators that she became resentful after feeling she had been left to provide childcare. “I kind of grew angry because I was being put to nanny work,” she said in the video-recorded interview, excerpts of which prosecutors played during a court 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,” Virzi said, according to the recording.
She also told detectives that she heard what sounded like a crack and placed the infant upside down on the tiled bathroom floor.
Nicole Virzi faces charges of criminal homicide, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children in connection with the six-week-old twins, Leon and Ari Katz
Baby Leon died after suffering multiple skull fractures while his parents took his twin brother to the hospital with unexplained injuries
“Something just came over me I couldn’t control,” she told police. “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 allegations concern both Leon’s death and the injuries suffered by his twin brother. She was denied bail and has remained in custody, while pleading not guilty to every charge.
Unless she changes that plea — a possibility her lawyers have suggested — Virzi is scheduled to stand trial on October 1. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Her defense attorney, Bill Difenderfer, said in June that discussions over a potential plea agreement were still underway.
Pennsylvania has not carried out an execution since 1999, and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro has said he will not sign death warrants. Despite that, the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office maintains that capital punishment is warranted because of the circumstances surrounding the alleged offenses.
Prosecutors have cited aggravating circumstances, including Leon’s extremely young age and evidence they say indicates the infant was tortured.
The police recordings from Virzi’s June interrogation are expected to play a central role in the upcoming trial.
Her defense team has sought to prevent the recordings from being admitted. Virzi now denies killing Leon, and her lawyers argue that the statement was involuntary, claiming she was subjected to an excessively long and oppressive detention. They told the judge that investigators used “nearly every trick in the book” to pressure Virzi into speaking.
Virzi has alleged that she was shackled to the floor, denied the opportunity to make a phone call 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 should hear the evidence. She noted that Virzi had consulted a defense lawyer and spoken with her parents before giving the statements. “The vast majority of time she was in that [interview] room, she did not appear to be in any distress,” Rangos said at a February hearing, concluding that the 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’ husband, Ethan Katz. Virzi had been raised in the wealthy New Jersey suburb 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.
Savannah and Ethan Katz with their babies. Savannah was best friends with Nicole
‘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,’ said Virzi
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.
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 Our News Outlet 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 Our News Outlet. ‘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.’
‘I did not want [Leon] to die. That was not my goal. I just wanted him to feel a little pain,’ she said
Virzi reportedly told the police she had suffered from anxiety, depression and an eating disorder
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.
Virzi is set to be examined in a Pittsburgh courtroom
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.
