Why the Garlasco case concerns all Italians

Premise number one. I have always been convinced that there is a logic to everything, that there is no hidden agenda that cannot be intuited (proving it is quite another matter), and that there is no murder without a motive, unless the murderer is a madman or a mafia hitman. While it is true that such a motive is not necessary in a trial, it is, however, essential for understanding a story, for trying to make sense of it, and for telling it. An intellectual’s privilege.

Second point. I grew up (professionally) amongst police stations and police headquarters, but that does not mean I believe that the judicial police’s reports always tell the verifiable truth as it stood at that time and in that place. On the contrary, precisely for this reason – because I have come to know it and seen it at work – I am aware that within the mountains of reports reaching the public prosecutors’ offices there are more or less deliberate oversights, prejudices, tears and blood, anger, helplessness, pain, sacrifice, deeply personal convictions, brilliant insights, and sometimes bad faith. Any crime reporter—cynical and a little blasé—who has worn out their shoes, sacrificed sleep, and spent time recounting the horrors of the human soul, thinks the same. 

To recount that eclipse of reason and decline of will which, as Dostoevsky wrote, precedes the crime and instils in the murderer the conviction that he will go unpunished, to the extent that he leaves behind a multitude of traces and clues. Traces and clues that cannot all be contained within the confines of a reassuring but insufficient genetic test.

This is why I have always been convinced of Alberto Stasi’s innocence, even though I was aware of the court rulings but not all the details of the investigation (I have never written about it). The few pieces of evidence found proved to be misleading, and no one has ever explained the motive behind that crime—the origins and circumstances of which were never recounted—an incident that unfolded so rapidly and suddenly that it could only be justified by a sudden fit of madness. For me, rightly or wrongly, it has always been this way, and I would never have given it another thought had that incident – dating back almost twenty years – not become a legal case which, in its technical implications, concerns all Italians and which risks profoundly undermining the extremely delicate relationship between the judicial police, the public prosecutor’s offices, the courts, and even the Court of Cassation. This has a knock-on effect stemming from a loss of trust in those who produced the evidence.q

The judicial police must work to establish the truth; as a public authority, their actions are presumed to be true until proven otherwise, and any errors must (or should) be corrected as the investigation progresses. Should reports of the shocking failings of the RIS in Parma in 2007 – a centre of excellence within the Carabinieri and a benchmark for forensic investigations – be confirmed, the entire structure of criminal investigations would be thrown into disarray. Not just in the Garlasco case. If it were proven that everything known so far about the DNA analyses, the blood tests, the missing alibi, the undetected fingerprints and so on is true, it would be legitimate to wonder how many other times this may have occurred and whether, under the same circumstances and without having done anything wrong, someone might come knocking on our door tonight as well.

The controversial investigations into the murder of Chiara Poggi involved not only specialists from the RIS but also local police units, with the quality of the investigations carried out at the time being extremely poor. From their testimonies, broadcast on talk shows on several occasions, it is clear that they relied on confirmation bias – a ‘tunnel vision’ that effectively ruled out any possible alternative leads to Alberto Stasi. But even in this case: how many other times were searches carried out with negligent delay? How many alibis were not checked? How many wiretaps were transcribed ‘by the book’? How many guilty parties have gone unpunished because they were not within the investigators’ sphere of interest? How many pieces of evidence have been lost? One need only spend time in courtrooms to know that this was the case then and remains so today. But not everyone has the means to defend themselves by paying for high-quality lawyers, experts and consultants. Not every trial has deserved or deserves the attention of the press and television.

As for the talk shows: setting aside the differences of opinion and style amongst the commentators, it must be acknowledged that had they not covered the case (with a sometimes excessive, even unbearable, barrage of coverage, and a pornographic and obsessive focus on every conceivable detail), the path to a retrial for Alberto Stasi would never have opened up, and the truth about Chiara Poggi’s death would have remained the fabricated version presented in the final judgements. Giada Bocellari, one of Stasi’s defence lawyers, was asked why, during the initial investigations and right up until the final conviction, they had not sought greater media attention, and why they had shied away from interviews and public debates. Her answer was both painful and stark: out of principle and out of respect for the judicial system, they had initially opted for a low profile and focused on the defence during the trial; later, they realised that without media attention, the case would have been dismissed as yet another instance of routine injustice. They chose the opposite course of action and were right to do so. Yet, how sad.