Mother had a premonition about her son so horrifying she ran to the bathroom to vomit... hours later police arrived at her door

A mother whose 23-year-old son was bludgeoned to death by a drug-crazed aristocrat has revealed the terrifying nightmare she had the night before he was killed. 

Katja Faber's son Alex Morgan was born in Islington, North London but was living in a quaint Swiss town beloved by the wealthy when he was brutally killed by art dealer Bennet von Vertes in December 2014.  

Alex, who studied at King Charles' former boarding school Gordonstoun in Moray, Scotland, was staying in the Gold Coast of Lake Zurich when he was attacked by the aristocrat armed with a candlestick in his parents' villa.

Drug-fuelled Von Vertes, who was high on ketamine and cocaine at the time, threw Alex against a glass table which shattered, before battering him with a 3ft candlestick and thrusting it down his throat.

In 2019 British former barrister Ms Faber had previously won a legal fight to put von Vertes behind bars for what was originally a 12-year sentence. However last year, he was released on parole.

Speaking in the podcast Killer Privilege which details the gruesome murder of her son, Katja revealed her horrifying premonition about his killing which she had the night before she learnt he had died. She believes the dream occurred at the exact moment Alex was killed. 

In the nightmare, Katja recalled, Alex was screaming in pain, leading her to wake up at 6:13am and run to the bathroom to vomit. 

She said: 'Alex's face was pushed against mine and he was screaming, then his eyes were filled with terror and he was in pain. I could see a shadow walking behind what looked like a sofa, backwards and forwards.

'He was a terrorised person in pain, it was almost like his face had melted into mine, as if I was the person going through this horror. 

'It woke me up, it was violent, horrific and unseen, it was awful and I had to stagger to the bathroom, I was retching, I was so horrified.' 

Katja believed this was the exact moment her son was being beaten to death and it was her body's primal reaction to his murder. 

She added: 'The moment of Alex's death on his death certificate is not precise, they don't know exactly when he died, but I can't help but think actually I do know when he died which was at 6:13am.' 

After reaching out to her son and getting no respons, Katja knew in her gut that something bad had happened to him. 

Eventually she called the police in Zurich and they asked for her address, hours later they arrived at her door and she knew instantly what they were going to tell her. 

She said: 'I let out a scream. It's like being hit by a truck. You just can't breathe. You know, even though I'd somehow known it, until somebody tells you, you can't process it.

'And I remember thinking, I'm not here anymore. And I felt this howl of horror just come up through my throat. And I started screaming and I thought, I have to just scream.

'I have to just get this out. And I didn't want to scare the children. And I ran into the kitchen and I was beating the kitchen cupboards. And it's the most horrific feeling.

'I remember Alex's little brother coming down the stairs and having heard me screaming. And to this day, he says that he'll never be able to get that out of his mind.'

She was later sent a bill for over 1217 Swiss franc (more than £1,000) for the plastic sheeting that was used to remove her son's body from the crime scene. 

She said: 'And I remember reading this and looking at it, and I literally had to lie down in bed, and I crumpled the bill in my hand, and I just wept and wept and wept. 

'The thought of my Alex being put on this sheet, and I getting the bill. It was just so awful.'

Katja sat with Alex's body every day for a week after he died, his funeral was held two weeks after the murder and it had to be a closed casket due to the severity of his injuries. 

The grieving mother, who is divorced from Alex’s father, revealed she needed to be near him while she still had his body before he was cremated.

She recalled: 'I would get there sort of in the mid-afternoon. And the light would change and it would get dark. And I would just stay there and put my hand on the wooden casket and try and imagine Alex in a white tunic.

'And I just wanted to take the pain away, to just take his hurt away, because it was just so awful. 

'And I remember thinking, if I could lie on top of the coffin and just make it better, just make it better. 

'Because you spend your life as a mother making sure that they don't get a cold and that if their knee is scratched, you make sure that they have the antibiotic cream and that when they break their arm, you make sure they get to ER and they put it in a cast and you spend all your life, you know, like, don't go without your coat.

'And then you're suddenly meant to be OK with sitting there and your child is in a coffin, and that's hard.'   

However learning the precise details of Alex's killing was to take Katja's trauma to a new level, the list of injuries took up five pages on a court report and it took Katja nearly two years to bring herself to read them.

Alex suffered more than 50 injuries to just his head alone during the brutal and prolonged attack. While Bennet was left with just a small cut to his hand.

Katja said: 'I was unable to talk for three days. I mean, when I found out what actually led to Alex's heart stopping, that Bennet had rammed a candle so far down Alex's throat and into his trachea, that the contents of Alex's stomach had come up into his lungs, and he had suffocated to death as he was being strangled, and that he had bruise marks on his shoulders where, supposedly, Bennet had either stepped or knelt on him. 

'I couldn't talk for three days. Literally, I lost my voice.'

Katja, who now lives on a farm in Spain and helps other families suffering grief, began to suffer from panic attacks, insomnia memory loss and her hair began to fall out after the loss of her son. 

She was diagnosed with PTSD and a dangerously high blood pressure.

To her horror, after the police investigation, the state prosecutor wanted to return some of Alex's belongings — which included the candle that had been removed from his throat. 

Since Alex's death, questions have been raised about potential signs Bennet was capable of violence. During the trial, the prosecution noted an alleged incident in 2011 when Bennet is said to have attacked his father with a stick. 

Bennet said afterwards that he thought his sister and the stepmother were witches and his father was a wizard while he was high on drugs. 

He was sent to rehab after this particular incident, but by 2014, the violence had resumed. His ex girlfriend revealed during the court case that he was violent to her and even warned Bennet's parents about his escalating behaviour.

Five months before Alex's killing, Bennet, who was high on drugs in Ibiza, allegedly tried to push his former girlfriend out of a moving cab. He later raped her and choked her until she blacked out in a London hotel.     

In court Bennet's lawyers were claiming that he had killed Alex during a drug induced psychotic break, giving him diminished culpability.

He was found guilty of intentional homicide but the case was sent back to court in 2019 for appeal, where Von Vertes claimed he was so high on ketamine, cocaine and sleeping pills that he went that he went temporarily insane and believed Alex was a green alien.

Katja, who is a former criminal barrister and journalist, said: 'I mean, when I started on this journey of trying to, you know, get justice, whatever that means, I could never have imagined that it would take as long as it did. Brace yourself, I would have said.

'Brace yourself, this is going to be the fight of a lifetime. It's going to push you further into hell more than you can imagine.'

The conviction was briefly quashed and the killer sent to an enclosed rehab facility, but Katja fought for another appeal.

She said: 'I have to fight this and not only fight this for Alex, I have to fight this for anyone else who's ever going to be in this situation.

'This is just wrong. I didn't have any tools to use, except somehow create awareness to talk to the media, and talk to politicians, and go to the parliament and create enough of a momentum that people would say, hey, this is just wrong. 

'This Article 263 needs to be revised or removed from the law books, because it can be misused.'

Katja estimates she spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund the mammoth legal fees, even selling her house to cover them.

However her fight was worth it because Bonnet was again found guilty of intentional homicide. The original sentence was reimposed, although he remained at the rehab unit, which Katja said was like a luxury spa facility.

The Supreme Court denied Von Vertes's final attempt at freedom in 2023, meaning he had to accept his guilt, which also included a conviction for raping his ex girlfriend the London hotel.

After receiving treatment for addiction from rehab, Bennet was released on full parole on December 30, 2023, the anniversary of Alex's death.

Katja tried to fight this, writing an eight-page letter about why she opposed his release, but this time she was unsuccessful. 

During the first trial it was also established that Bennet — who had driven a Porsche, and offered character witness evidence from his manicurist — should cover part of Katja’s legal costs to the tune of 130,000 Swiss Francs (around £116,000). 

He was also ordered to pay 20,000 (£17,800) in emotional damage for taking Alex’s life. 

A similar sum for emotional damage was due to his rape victim. The rape victim specified that she would like her payment to go directly to the charity Medecins sans Frontières. 

Months after his release, Katja was sent an image of Bennet from a now deleted Instagram account.

The image showed the now 40-year-old art dealer tanned and topless, giving the middle finger and sticking his tongue out at the camera, with a bio reading: 'Catch me if you can.'

She has been sent other information apparently documenting his movements around Europe and he is also said to have been spotted back in the mountains of Zurich.

However while Bennet has been holidaying, his victims have been persisting in trying to get him to pay his dues. 

His lawyers argued he was destitute and had no way of paying. To this day Bennet has neither paid Katja’s legal costs, nor his rape victim’s damages. 

The podcast reached out to Bennet's legal team who claimed that he has paid was is owed. 

They said: 'The payment of 130,000 francs to the victim's mother was transferred long ago by the family of my clients. It is therefore absolutely untrue to claim that this payment has not been made to the victim's mother.'

Katja claimed her family have received payment for the emotional damages and the funeral costs. 

However, she claims that, as of January 2025, she has never seen any payment for the legal costs Bennet still owes her, amounting to well over 100,000 francs.

Katja believes he has no remorse for what he did to her son and revealed she had hoped he would want to change his life. 

She said: 'You know, if Bennet had learned something, if Bennet had changed in some way, if he'd been able to say, ''oh, you know, I want to change my life'', you know, Alex is dead and this is awful, then somehow it would give Alex's death meaning in some kind of weird way, that one young man died so another could find his way. Almost kind of like a Greek play in some ways.'

Bennet is part of the Vertes art-dealing family in Zurich and runs a modern gallery in the city, displaying works by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. 

Bennet was spending about a thousand francs a month on drugs by the time of Alex's killing.

Alex and Bennet, who are both were from very affluent families, met while studying in London. 

Back in December 2014, Alex travelled to Switzerland where Katja had an apartment, planning to join her on a skiing break.

En route he met up with his ‘friend’ Bennet and accepted the offer of a bed for the night in the von Vertes family’s opulent villa in the exclusive enclave of Kusnacht, where residents at the time included Tina Turner.

Following a high-spirited evening which included a drug-fuelled game of chess, the pair returned to the villa, and it was here, in the drawing room overlooking Lake Zurich, that von Vertes, high on cocaine and ketamine, set upon his friend. 

Worryingly there is evidence that Bonnet has been dipping his toe in the dating scene. 

A German-language newspaper documented how he had joined an online dating site, using a fake name, but his image was later uploaded on to a site where women shared concerns about potential dates. 

Katja said: 'I was horrified when I heard that he was online and on a dating platform using a fake name.'

Bonnet's parents are divorced but his father, a Hungarian-German aristocrat owns an art gallery in Zurich and his mother lives in Germany. She was a constant presence at his trial but his father never showed up. 

Katja now counsels other parents who suffer the death of a child and divides her time between Switzerland and Spain, where she owns a farm.

Yet her heart is in Switzerland, where Alex is buried.