Yara’s disappearance has continued to grip the Italian public over the past four years, becoming one of the most extraordinary, and sophisticated, criminal investigations in Italian history. “It’s like a novel”, a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said “incredible” four times.
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On the afternoon of 26 February 2011, exactly three months after Yara disappeared, a middle-aged man named Ilario Scotti was flying his radio-controlled plane in the small town of Chignolo d’Isola, 10km south of Brembate di Sopra. Chignolo is surrounded by industrial estates, and the scrubland by Via Bedeschi seemed like a safe, unpopulated place for Scotti to try out his new model aircraft. The model aeroplane wasn’t functioning as Scotti wanted, though, so he brought it down to earth amid the tall weeds. As he picked up his plane, he caught sight of some rags on the ground nearby. At first, he thought someone had been fly-tipping. Then he saw the shoes.
Ruggeri was coming back from a day’s skiing with her daughter when she got the call that a body had been found. She dropped her daughter at home and went straight to the crime scene. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition, but Ruggeri could see the black bomber jacket with its elasticated waist which Yara had been wearing when she left home in November. There, too, was her Hello Kitty sweatshirt. Crime scene investigators found Yara’s iPod and house keys, as well as the sim card and battery for her LG phone. The phone itself was missing.
“It was a relief,” Ruggeri told me later. “Yara’s disappearance had really disturbed me – I’m a mother too, and the only thing worse than the death of a child is the disappearance of a child.”
Chief investigator Letizia Ruggeri Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Chief investigator Letizia Ruggeri at a press conference. Photograph: LaPresse/Spada
The autopsy was conducted by Italy’s most famous forensic pathologist, Professor Cristina Cattaneo. She discovered traces of lime in Yara’s respiratory passages, and the presence of jute, a vegetable fibre used to make rope, on her clothing. Yara hadn’t been raped, although her purple bra was unhooked. She had suffered multiple injuries from a sharp weapon which had pierced her clothing at various points. It seemed that she had been attacked and abandoned. She had died of exposure.
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The presence of lime and jute suggested the killer might be in the building trade. The forensics team retrieved two DNA samples, one from Yara’s phone battery and the other from two fingers of her black gloves but neither matched any samples the authorities had on record. Two months later, in April, the commander of the scientific investigations department in Parma phoned Ruggeri. “I’ve got good news,” he told her. “This murder has a signature. We’ve found male DNA on the underwear of the deceased.” It was likely that the murderer had himself been wounded in the struggle, leaving his DNA on the girl’s knickers. Ruggeri and her team named the murder suspect Ignoto 1, “Unknown 1”. Now the hunt for Yara’s killer could begin in earnest.
The workload was huge, and Ruggeri divided up the duties: the police were responsible for taking DNA samples from family members, from school friends and people in the gym; the carabinieri concentrated on the phone records, cross-referencing all the mobile phones that had moved from Brembate di Sopra to Chignolo d’Isola on 26 November 2010. Each phone user whose number appeared in both cells was tracked down and asked for a DNA sample.
It was slow and laborious work. It took geneticists in Parma, Pavia and Rome a minimum of six hours to transform just a few samples of DNA into something which could be read, and compared, on a computer screen. The cost, in machinery and manpower, was immense and the investigation would go on to become one of the most expensive manhunts in Italian history.
Yara’s funeral took place on a hot morning in late May 2011. Onlookers applauded the white coffin, which was topped with a huge bouquet of white flowers, as the hearse slowly drove towards her gym. The ceremony took place in the sports hall where she had spent so many hours training, and where she had last been seen alive. Outside, a large crowd watched the funeral on a giant screen, and heard the condolences of Giorgio Napolitano, the president of the Republic.
By the time of the funeral, investigators had taken thousands of DNA samples but they still had no leads. Close to the scrubland where Yara’s body had been found was a nightclub called Sabbie Mobili (Quicksand). Ruggeri knew that murderers tend to dump bodies in areas with which they’re very familiar, so although it seemed like a long shot, in spring 2011 investigators started taking DNA samples outside the club on busy Fridays and Saturdays. Sabbie Mobili had a reputation for violence – a young man from the Dominican Republic had been murdered outside its doors on 16 January 2011 – but the club had helpful records. Clubbers required a membership card to get in, and so the authorities could easily track down anyone who went there regularly.
Ruggeri finally got a break. One of the samples from Sabbie Mobili seemed strikingly similar to the suspect, Ignoto 1. The man who gave the sample was called Damiano Guerinoni. He was quickly excluded as a suspect – he had been in South America on the day of Yara’s disappearance – but geneticists were convinced he was a close relative of the murderer. “We were all very excited”, Ruggeri told me. “We said, ‘bingo – just a couple of more days’ [and we’ll have the murderer].” As Ruggeri and her team put together the jigsaw of Guerinoni’s family, they made an astonishing discovery: Damiano Guerinoni’s mother, Aurora Zanni, had worked for 10 years as a domestic help in the Gambirasio home. She lived nearby, and had gone to Yara’s home twice a week throughout the young girl’s childhood.
Ruggeri resigned herself to the fact that it was just a coincidence. ‘You couldn’t make it up. This whole case is crazy’
Zanni was a middle-aged woman who was very attached to her employers. She recalled how Yara would always ask her to watch her latest gymnastics moves, and Zanni would tell her to be careful not to hurt herself. In 2011, she was no longer working for the family but said her relationship with Yara’s parents was excellent. To find herself at the centre of the investigation into Yara’s murder was, Zanni said later, “the worst thing that could happen to me”.
“Obviously,” Ruggeri says, “we intercepted [Damiano Guerinoni and Aurora Zanni’s] calls, had them followed, grilled them and tortured them, in the sense that we pressed them.” It was only after months of close surveillance that Ruggeri, in the summer of 2011, resigned herself to the fact that “it was just a crazy coincidence”. “There was no connection”, she says. “You couldn’t make it up. This whole case is crazy.” Having seemed so close to a resolution, Ruggeri’s team reluctantly discarded the angle of the domestic help. The only promising lead they still had was the fact that Damiano Guerinoni’s DNA was so similar to that of Ignoto 1.
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A year on from Yara’s murder, Ruggeri’s team was now under intense pressure to find the killer. Thousands of people were being DNA tested and some locals who hadn’t been approached for a sample suggested to the press that the investigation was haphazard. Politicians made personal attacks on Ruggeri. One Northern League politician, Daniele Belotti, publicly decried her incompetence, writing an open letter in January 2012 to the minister of justice asking for her to be replaced by someone “of proven experience”. (Ruggeri filed a lawsuit against Belotti for libel on 20 April 2012, taking particular objection to his characterisation of her as a person of “low technical and moral profile”.)
Behind these criticisms of Ruggeri was a strong undercurrent of sexism: what hope was there that this woman could solve such a complex crime? She was unconventional, a single-mother with long salt-and-pepper hair, and five earrings in her left ear. She played classical guitar, rode to work on an old Vespa and had a blackbelt in karate. Ruggeri felt she was also being targeted because she had decided to drop the case against the Moroccan labourer, Mohammed Fikri. “Many people thought I had made the wrong decision”, Ruggeri told me, “and they held it against me. The criticism was ferocious … I found it very tough.”
Ruggeri decided to concentrate on the only promising lead she had: the Guerinoni DNA. Her team spent months recreating the Guerinoni family tree. When I visited her office last year, Ruggeri pulled out a folder and showed me hundreds of names, each one annotated: dates of birth, places of birth, relationships within the family. The investigators had worked out a complete genealogical tree as far back as 1815, with other branches of the family going back as far as 1716.
The roots of that family tree were in the small village of Gorno. It’s only 45 minutes’ drive north of Bergamo itself, up the narrow Seriana Valley, but it feels like another world. You arrive through a series of hairpin bends, into a village that smells of woodsmoke and chickens. In the distance, you can hear the sound of waterfalls and cowbells. The village is full of narrow flights of steps – the only horizontal patch of land is a sandy five-aside football pitch. Although only 1,600 people live in Gorno and it seems like a quiet, pious place, according to one former parish, the village is “a bit too hot, in every sense. Let’s say they’re a bit promiscuous.” In 2011 two people in Gorno were murdered in unrelated incidents.
The same families have been here for centuries, and on the village’s war memorial, outside the sm