A California psychology PhD student who once lectured on depression and heart disease has pleaded guilty to the brutal murder of her best friend’s 6-week-old son, after chillingly admitting to cops that she has felt an uncontrollable compulsion to harm children since she was a little girl.
Nicole Virzi, 32, entered the guilty plea Wednesday in a Pittsburgh courtroom to third-degree criminal homicide and related charges in the June 2024 death of Leon Katz. She will serve 35 to 80 years in state prison under the deal, which spared her a potential death sentence and allowed the devastated parents to avoid a public trial.
In a bone-chilling 13-hour police interrogation, Virzi confessed that she shook the infant hard, dropped him repeatedly, and flipped him upside down onto the bathroom tile floor while babysitting.
“Something just came over me. I couldn’t control it,” she told detectives. “I’m telling you this because I can’t keep lying about it.”
She went further, revealing a lifelong darkness: “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.”
The horror unfolded in the family’s Shadyside home while parents Savannah Roberts and Ethan Katz rushed Leon’s twin brother, Ari, to the hospital for genital injuries that prosecutors say Virzi also inflicted. Left alone with Leon, the trusted friend, who had even been Roberts’ maid of honor, called 911 claiming the baby fell from a bouncer. He died hours later from a severe skull fracture and multiple brain bleeds.
Virzi, who was weeks from earning her doctorate in clinical psychology through a joint UC San Diego and San Diego State University program, had researched the links between depression, stress, trauma, and cardiovascular disease. In one academic video presentation, she calmly discussed how somatic symptoms of depression can predict mortality and heart events, even as family photos of the smiling parents cradling their newborn twins played beside her.
She told investigators she grew angry during the visit because she felt treated like a nanny. That resentment, combined with her long-standing urges, led to the attack, according to her statement.
Virzi stayed silent in court as her attorney said no apology could suffice. Roberts previously described the betrayal as destroying her sense of safety forever.
The plea deal came after prosecutors consulted with the family, who wanted Virzi locked away for most of her life without forcing them to relive the torture of their son in open court. Deputy District Attorney Emma Schoedel said the office chose to invest in the parents’ healing.
What began as a visit from a close friend studying the human mind ended with a newborn dead, his twin scarred, and a scholar facing decades behind bars for a compulsion she claimed she could not control.
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