Nicole Virzi pleaded guilty to killing a six-and-a-half-week-old Pittsburgh infant she babysat for a close friend, after confessing she shook and dropped the baby because she wanted him to feel pain.
On Wednesday, the 32-year-old entered a last-minute guilty plea to third-degree criminal homicide in the June 2024 death of Leon Katz, along with aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children, six counts in all. She also injured Leon’s twin brother, Ari, while watching the boys at the family’s Pittsburgh home.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty. Under the plea, Virzi faces an ordered prison term of between 35 and 80 years. In Pennsylvania, the maximum for third-degree criminal homicide is 40 years.
The district attorney indicated the family specifically wanted the deal to spare themselves the trauma of a full trial. A Pittsburgh police officer who was among the first at the scene did not hide his reaction outside the courtroom.
Daily Mail reported the officer’s blunt assessment:
"To go from murder-one to this? It’s pretty amazing. We know she did it. She confessed to it."
Virzi was not a stranger hired off an app. She was Savannah Roberts’s former best friend and one-time maid of honor. The two women met as research coordinators in Drexel University’s graduate psychology department in Philadelphia.
By the time of the killing, Virzi was weeks away from a PhD in clinical psychology at UC San Diego. Her father, Dr. Peter J. Virzi, is a prominent New York City cardiologist. He and Virzi’s mother, Jennifer Graham, sat in the courtroom as Roberts delivered her impact statement.
In June 2024, Virzi came for a weeklong visit and babysat at the family’s Pittsburgh home. On June 15, she claimed she noticed a bloody injury on Ari’s groin. The parents took Ari to the hospital and left Leon with her.
Virzi later told a story about going to the kitchen for a bottle, hearing screaming, and finding the baby had fallen from his bouncer chair. She called 911. Leon was pronounced dead a few hours later from a severe skull fracture and multiple brain bleeds. An autopsy determined the injuries resulted from blunt force trauma and were consistent with child abuse.
Prosecutors said she inflicted the skull fracture and brain bleeds captured on a CT scan, and that she also injured Ari. Virzi retreated to an Airbnb and was arrested the following morning.
During interrogation, Virzi denied involvement for more than 11 hours, according to prior reporting referenced in coverage of the case. Her lawyers later argued the confession was involuntary and coerced across a 13-hour session. A judge ruled prosecutors could use the videotaped statement as evidence.
Portions of that confession were played in a court hearing last fall. Lead detective Janine Triolo took the statements. In them, Virzi abandoned the bouncer-chair account.
She said something came over her that she could not control, and described a long-running compulsion:
"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."
Anger over babysitting, she said, built up. Alone with Leon, she acted on it.
"So when I was alone with (Leon) I shook him a couple times, hard. And I dropped him a couple times, hard."
She told investigators she heard “some kind of crack.” Coverage of the confession also described her admitting she flipped the baby upside down on the tiled bathroom floor. She insisted death was not the goal.
"I did not want him to die. That was not my goal. I just wanted him to feel a little pain."
She added that she was done lying about it. Through her attorney at the plea hearing, Virzi declined to speak in court. She wrote a letter to the victims’ family; its contents were not released in the reporting.
Savannah Roberts faced the woman she once trusted with her twins and described what the crime destroyed. She and her husband are both twins. They had dreamed of having twins of their own.
"I'm a twin, my husband is a twin, and it was always our dream to have twins. We thought our dream had come true."
Roberts said the attack wiped out her sense of safety in every part of life and shattered her self-confidence. She said she would never fully understand what was done to her boys, and that the experience changed her as a person.
"I've learned that the bogeyman is real and monsters really do live under the bed."
Ari, now two, lives with his parents in Pittsburgh. The family has been seen grieving together in the city in recent months.
The plea closed a path prosecutors had openly pursued. They called for Virzi to face capital punishment for the killing of a six-and-a-half-week-old left in her care by a friend who believed she was safe.
Instead, the case resolved on third-degree criminal homicide and related assault and endangerment counts. The stated range awaiting her is 35 to 80 years in state prison. The officer who answered the original call called the drop from a first-degree murder track “pretty amazing,” while stressing the confession left no mystery about who did it.
Roberts’s impact statement made plain the human cost the paperwork cannot measure: a murdered newborn, an injured twin, a mother’s safety and identity broken, and a trusted friend who admitted she had carried an urge to hurt children for most of her life.
A near-PhD in clinical psychology confessed to shaking and dropping a baby until she heard a crack, and still walked out of court with a negotiated sentence instead of a jury’s full judgment.
