A former Scottish public schoolboy was stabbed and bludgeoned to death by a wealthy art dealer who believed he had turned into an alien.
Ex-Gordonstoun pupil Alex Morgan, 23, was stabbed with a shard of glass, beaten with a 3ft candlestick, a 4lb gold sculpture and an antique figure, and then strangled.
His attacker Bennet von Vertes was so high on drugs, he believed Alex had “turned into a little green man”, a Swiss court heard.
Von Vertes, 31, has also claimed to be suffering from amnesia.
He was asked in court: “From which point did you see the victim as a human again and not an alien any more?” He refused to answer.
Alex was attacked when he went to von Vertes’s chalet on the shore of Lake Zurich during a skiing holiday in December 2014.
The men met at Regent’s College in London.
Alex grew up in London. His mum Katja Faber, 53, was in court to watch the trial start on Monday.
Katja, a former barrister, said in a statement: “My darling Alex deserved to live a good, amazing life, to bring love, laughter and originality to this world, not to be bludgeoned to death.”
Alex’s dad Benedict Morgan, 56, was a director at Commerzbank and worked as a banker in Moscow.
Von Vertes’s defence is that he involuntarily killed Alex during a psychotic episode. Prosecutors want him convicted of reckless homicide.
They say he should have foreseen what would happen, having suffered paranoid delusions because of his drug use.
(Photo: Getty Images)
The court was told von Vertes claimed that, in the chalet, he and Alex took drugs and discussed “the end of the world”.
Von Vertes told a psychiatrist he had argued with Alex about Swedish folk music and ketamine.
The German – whose family run the Salis & Vertes gallery in Zurich – had been dependent on ketamine, cocaine and sleeping pills since 2011.
The case continues.