It's hard to live. And today I'm not living, because my life is either locked in my room, or at the lawyer's, or away, when maybe we go to meet with consultants. Andrea Sempio, accused in the new investigation by the Pavia prosecutor's office of having killed Chiara Poggi, the sister of his school friend Marco, almost 20 years ago in Garlasco, returns to speak on television. But after describing the state of mind he has been in for a year and a half now, he returns to deny all accusations.
Fingerprint 33 "cannot be attributed to anyone"; the size 42 shoe "I tried it on and it didn't fit. All the ones I still have at home, even old ones, are 44". And above all it calls into question the one who, however, the new investigation seems to exonerate: Alberto Stasi, Chiara's ex-boyfriend and former Bocconian student definitively sentenced to 16 years in prison, which he is finishing to atone for.
"In my opinion the sentence is fair" said the 38-year-old interviewed on 'Porta a Porta'. So no miscarriage of justice. "There are things that don't convince me in the alternative story that would see Stasi as innocent. Some things that are raised don't convince me. It seems to me that they are more logical and explained as they were explained at the time." The very likely trial will tell if Andrea Sempio is right or if the entire first investigation was based on a gigantic error. What is certain is that from the masses of papers deposited in the second closure of the investigation against Sempio, details emerge - in particular, from the documents acquired by the Pavia prosecutors at the Parma Ris - of the work of the investigators of the time and which is now at the center of a parallel line of investigation. A tranche that focuses, among other things, on the failure to file negative DNA data on the pedals of Stasi's bike dated 20 September 2007 and on a "psychological evaluation" of the student under investigation at the time, which was also never included in the documents. And also on the management of finds, including the samples from the plaster of palmar trace 33 and the fragments of the victim's nails, destroyed in 2016, but with a regular procedure, according to a note from the current head of the RIS Matteo Donghi.
The then prosecutor in charge of the first investigation, trained in Vigevano, Rosa Muscio, but also the former Stasi defense consultants, Professor Francesco Maria Avato and Doctor Matteo Fabbri, could soon be heard on all these chapters. Furthermore, the current defenders, Giada Bocellari and Antonio De Rensis, are working to collect as much material as possible in view of the request for review, but they are also analyzing possible crime profiles by digging into the new papers: complaints about the alleged irregularities in the investigation started in 2007 are not excluded. Irregularities which, if found, could soon lead the public prosecutors of Pavia to enter crime cases and people in the register of suspects.
Among the papers that the investigators are rereading are, among other things, the communications of the former RIS commander Giampietro Lago, who retired a year ago. After yet another request "for the release of copies of documents and documentation" from Stasi's lawyers, in January 2018 he asked for an "opinion" from the Legislation Office of the General Command of the Army on the "conformity" of his position, which was still negative. Opinion requested given "the relevance of the problem" which could, "in the future, affect the entire structure" of the Scientific Investigations Group and which could "result in possible disputes, including of a legal nature". The reply was as follows: "once the procedure has been defined, in the absence of a Judicial Authority formally in charge of the case, the Department that holds the documents is the only body competent to assess the existence of the conditions to satisfy or not the requests". Rome, however, highlighted the "faculties" and "guarantees recognized to defenders" and the possibility of appeals "to the administrative judge", an "aspect which suggests adequately justifying the refusal". Which he later gave, strengthened by the dialogue with the "judicial authority".
And ten years earlier, on 27 August 2008, Garofano, then number one in the RIS who was leading the investigation into the murder, asked one of his subordinates to deal with the investigations on the shoe prints in this way: "If Captain Mattei went a little further on the uniqueness of the design and outlined a measure (with all the necessary precautions), it would be desirable". Mattei wrote that the traces "are compatible with Stasi's size, precisely because of their incompleteness". And Garofano in another email pointed out that "on the typology of bloodstains", ignored, in his opinion, by Avato, a "practical and also theoretical discussion" needed to be done, which would allow "his 'nonsense' to be ridiculed".
