arcangeli held six interrogations, during which he provided contradictory versions of events: he said he had killed him for believing him a spy, then only to rob him, then for believing him a jew or a lutheran (arcangeli would have been suspicious of a book written with strange characters that he had noticed on the scholar's desk – but actually written in greek). apparently, arcangeli did not think "signor giovanni" was rich, and in the flight after the attack he did not subtract the two medals. the strangeness of winckelmann's behavior was also noticed, i.e. his registration under assumed name, the absence of any contact with authorities or notable people during his stay in trieste as well as his association with a disreputable individual like arcangeli and his reticence to openly identify himself in the hours before his death. it is commonly thought that winckelmann was killed during an attempted robbery, but even the hypothesis of a sexual crime was very successful: contemporaries had no doubts about winckelmann's homosexuality, seeing it as part of winckelmann's true love for the classical antiquity, and there was the suspicion that the scholar was killed for having made avances on an unwilling (or no longer willing, given the number of days spent together) arcangeli.