Garlasco: Alberto Stasi and Andrea Sempio, the two reconstructions compared

Alberto Stasi and Andrea Sempio. The former Bocconi student and the former clerk in a telephone shop. One definitively sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment, almost entirely expiated, for killing Chiara Poggi, the other accused by the Pavia Public Prosecutor's Office for the same murder and for whom an indictment has now been requested in the belief that he was responsible for the crime in Garlasco, which occurred on the morning of 13 August 2007.

The trial proposal put forward by the Pavia prosecutors against the 38-year-old requires us to remember the elements that, on the one hand, led to the final sentence for Stasi, whose defense focuses on the review, and on the other the public prosecutors, with a new investigation opened after 18 years, to believe that the sole author is the friend of Chiara's brother.

For the Supreme Court, which issued the final verdict on 12 December 2015, there were seven pieces of evidence which, read in an overall context, led Stasi to be considered guilty "beyond any reasonable doubt". We start from the "copious quantity" of Chiara's DNA on the pedals of his bike, and then move on to the inconsistencies in her story. He said he had found his girlfriend's lifeless body, but the absence of traces of blood on the soles of her shoes and on the carpet of the car and the description of how she appeared assigned him the role not of "discoverer" but of "aggressor".

Then, in addition to the fact that Chiara, at that time of the morning, would never have opened the door to a stranger, there is the dot print of a size 42 Frau shoe left by the killer, the very number that Stasi wore, and the two prints of his right ring finger on the soap dispenser "used by the attacker to wash his hands after the crime". Finally, the silence about the black bike then seized in the father's workshop (and which corresponded to the description of the witness) and the temporal alibi that he provided and which "does not eliminate him from the crime scene": for the judges, he could have killed her in the time window that goes from 9.12, the time in which the alarm in the Poggi house was deactivated by Chiara, to 9.35, when he turned on the PC to get to work on his thesis.

The Prosecutor's Office, led by Fabio Napoleone, instead offered an alternative reconstruction, pointing the finger at Sempio. The key element is the DNA compatible with the paternal line of her family traced on the edges of Chiara's nails. Then, his fingerprint, palmar 33, found on the wall of the stairs leading to the cellar of the house and not very far from the body. And again the receipt from the Vigevano car park defined as a pre-established alibi, the trace of the dot sole compatible with his foot number, 44, the three calls or telephone contacts, between 4, 7 and 8 August 2007, to the Poggis' landline, made not to look for Marco, who he knew was on holiday in Trentino, but to check if the 26-year-old was at home.

In addition, the intimate video of her and Alberto found on the computer used by the whole family to which she would have reacted badly, the now well-known soliloquies with even insults directed at Chiara and intercepted in her car and interpreted by the prosecutors as "confessions". In addition to a sheet of paper thrown in the garbage, notes in his diaries with phrases that led to hypothesizing the motive for refusing an approach. And again that illness during the 2008 interrogation which was not recorded and also that money taken from him and his father to buy, according to the prosecution, the dismissal of the previous investigation started against him. Elements, around twenty in total, those listed by the prosecutors, which for Sempio's defense, however, mean nothing and do not rewrite the history of the Garlasco crime at all.