Casefile True Crime - Case 47: Yara Gambirasio

Episode Date: February 25, 2017

The Italian town of Brembate di Sopra is home to a quiet, close-knit community, and like the other local youths, 13-year-old Yara Gambirasio felt safe navigating the streets alone. On November 26 2010, Yara left the town’s sports centre and didn’t hesitate to walk the 700-metre journey home by herself. However, when she failed to arrive, it turned out the streets of Brembate di Sopra weren’t as safe as everyone thought... ---  Researched and written by Anna Priestland For all credits and sources please visit casefilepodcast.com/case-47-yara-gambirasio

Introducing the all-new Kia Nero EV. They say the first step is always the hardest, to walk into the unknown. But it's when we have the courage to step forward that the real adventure begins. With up to 407 kilometres of range on a single charge, the Kia Nero EV is a subcompact SUV that lets you travel farther and smarter. The all-new Kia Nero EV, your first step into the electric world. Kia, movement that inspires. Bremberte di Sopra is a small and picturesque town

seven kilometres or four miles northwest of the city of Bergamo in northern Italy, about an hour's drive from Milan. The province of Lombardi covers the cities of Milan and Bergamo, including the small town of Bremberte di Sopra. With its close proximity to Lake Como and to the Swiss and Austrian borders, it is a popular stopover for tourists. The area is dotted with ancient billers and palastos. It is a humble town, not modernised to the extent of nearby Milan.

Many homes still use wood-burning stoves, raised chickens and grow their own vegetables. Postcards of the snow-capped Bergamo Alps sit in shop displays and the views from the small town are a reminder that things don't change at a fast pace in rural Italy. The town has a traditional historic centre, classic church steeples and winding paths and gardens. It still feels like an old town with old traditions and values. Every year the small town hosts a street parade where townsfolk and others from the area come together to dress in harlequin fancy dress and make traditional wooden floats to parade the streets. Like many old areas of the country, family values are deeply rooted and people are fiercely loyal.

With around 8,000 residents, Bremberte di Sopra is a quiet, close-knit, rural community, a safe environment for a young family. A place where a 13-year-old girl walking to a nearby sports centre alone in the late afternoon was not given a second thought. Music In November 2010, winter was setting in. The days were cold, averaging around 7 degrees Celsius or 45 Fahrenheit. And the nearby ski resorts were gearing up for the season.

13-year-old Yara Gambiracio was passionate about gymnastics, enjoyed school and lived with a happy family. She always wore her dark curly hair out, except while doing gymnastic training or competitions where it would be pulled straight back tightly off her face. Her father Fulvio, an architect, was a solid man with thick glasses. His wife and Yara's mother, Mara, was a teacher. They were a grounded family who were active in the community. Their families had been in the area for generations.

Fulvio and Mara had four children. The eldest was daughter Kiba, aged 15. Yara, who was 13. And then two younger sons, Natan and Gioli. On Friday the 26th of November 2010, Yara was gearing up for a gymnastics competition the following weekend. After spending the afternoon with her family at home, she left about 5.15pm.

She told her mother she was going to the local sports centre where she trained to return a stereo to her gymnastics instructor, Sylvia Brenner. Yara left the house in black leggings, a Hello Kitty t-shirt and a black bomber style jacket. The short type with knitted ribbed bands at the hem and sleeve cuffs. The sports centre was only 700 metres from her family home. Yara was at the sports centre often and usually got there by walking on her own. There was a large sports building, much like a school, with a big gate, many entrances, sports courts, a running track and a swimming pool.

Yara briefly greeted her instructor and saw some of her gymnastics friends before she did a little training. She left the building just prior to 6.44pm. At 6.44pm, Yara sent a text message to her gymnastics friend Martina confirming they would meet the following Sunday at 8am. It was the last contact Yara had with anyone. Her mother, Mara, didn't expect her to be gone long and she kept a close watch on the clock. By 7pm she was worried.

At 7.11pm she phoned Yara's phone, but the call went straight to voicemail. 20 minutes later, Yara's father Fulvio called the police. The call was put through to the public prosecutor's office in Bergamo where the prosecutor on duty was Laetitia Ruggieri. Ruggieri was 45 years old, a tough former policewoman who had earned respect within the force working against the Sicilian mafia in Sicily, southern Italy. Ruggieri didn't waste time and within 5 minutes of receiving the call

had dispatched both state police officers and the Carabinieri military police to their village. The family was fraught. People came out of their houses to help search for Yara. The fire department walked the banks of the river. Police and volunteers searched nearby fields, abandoned buildings, and asked passersby if they had seen Yara. The entire sports centre was searched inside and out. Walter Brimbilla, who was the manager of the centre, said that at midnight the night Yara disappeared. They were still searching the centre in case she was trapped or hiding.

As snow started to fall that evening, Yara's gym instructor Sylvia Brenner confirmed Yara had made it to the gym, but she hadn't seen her since. Laetitia Ruggieri was the chief investigator on the case. She called in tracker dogs, a breed of Italian bloodhounds, to try to track the path where Yara had gone. The tracker dogs didn't follow the path back to Yara's home. Instead, they trailed off towards Mapello, a small hamlet three kilometres or 1.8 miles in the opposite direction. By then, the team had been able to analyse the last signals from Yara's mobile phone. Her phone had shown a signal in Mapello at 6.49pm the evening of her disappearance,

only five minutes after Yara had sent a text message to her friend Martina as she left the sports centre. The police realised that it was very likely Yara, or at least her phone, had travelled by car to where it was last pinged in Mapello. Over the next few days, Ruggieri and her team questioned every member of the Gambiracio family, looking for signs of problems, arguments or secrets. Although shy from the enormous media presence that had descended on their quiet street, they seemed like a happy close family with nothing to hide. The family shared some photographs of Yara with the media in the days after her disappearance,

Yara queuing to take communion, doing gymnastics, a photo of her in an Italian football shirt and a few others. But no one came forward with any useful information. A few people told police they thought they may have seen Yara talking to a couple of people near a red car, but it was a false lead. With no sign of Yara, investigators concentrated their efforts on tracking down people whose mobile phones had been used near where she disappeared. Approximately 15,000 phones were found to have been in the area that day. Police commenced the enormous task of tracing each phone to its owner.

Hundreds of phones were wire tapped and what would be a record for any investigation in Italy's history. Tens of millions of phone calls were intercepted. Crime news dominates Italian TV, often playing out on television like a soap opera. Reports can be dramatized and people involved hounded for their story. Not since the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007 had Italian TV been so captivated by an investigation. The Gambiracio family lowered their shutters and hid from the prying eyes of the national media. They refused the torchlight vigil the town hoped to have to raise awareness for Yara's disappearance and instead accepted the offer from nuns who taught at Yara's school to come and pray with the family.

A mass was held instead of the vigil and the family pleaded with the public for privacy. Yara's father, Fulvio, was criticized for not being out there with the volunteers, constantly searching. A similar thing can be said for many missing persons cases worldwide, but people deal with disappearances in many different ways and Yara's father couldn't face the thought of being the one to come across his daughter's body. He occupied his mind with video poker games and taking care of his other three children. As part of their investigation, the police bugged the house of Fulvio and Mara to track their conversations. While intercepting a phone call from one of the handsets known to have been in the area on the day,

an interpreter working for the police overheard an alarming call. While in mid-conversation, a Moroccan man, Muhammad Fikri, was overheard saying, Forgive me, God, I didn't kill her. At the time of Yara's disappearance, Fikri had been working in a builder's yard in Marpello, but by the time the call was intercepted, three days later, Fikri was on board a boat bound for 10 years. Three days later, in early December, Italian police intercepted the boat and Fikri was arrested. While searching the van he had been using, police found a blood-stained mattress. The blood was tested, but what looked like to be a promising inquiry quickly fizzled out.

The blood was found to have nothing to do with the case, and shortly after, news broke that the words overheard by the translator had been mistranslated. Fikri was cleared of any involvement. Ruggieri later stated, People liked him as the guilty party because he was foreign. No one wanted to believe that someone from their quiet and peaceful part of the country could be responsible for Yara's disappearance. Surveillance video footage was released showing a vehicle driving past the sports centre. It was a small white utility vehicle with an open back tray.

This vehicle was captured driving past the sports centre around the time of Yara's disappearance. The same vehicle was also shown to pass several times on other days leading up to her disappearance. No registration plate was able to be seen on the footage, so police released images of the vehicle in the hope that either the owner would come forward, or someone else who recognised the vehicle would come forward. A few days after Christmas, almost a month since their daughter had disappeared, the Gambiracio family, desperate, made a public televised appeal. They looked extremely awkward and uncomfortable in front of the media.

Mara was so uncomfortable she was unintentionally rolling her eyes. Fulvio nervously read a plea. Open the door that separates her from her freedom. Please give us our daughter back. We are a simple family. A household whose unity is based on love, respect, sincerity and the glow of our peaceful existence. For the past month, we have been asking ourselves endless questions about who, what, how, when and why all this is happening to us. We are not looking for answers.

We do not seek to know. We are not tormenting ourselves trying to understand. We are not pointing the finger at anyone. We just want, immensely, for our daughter to return to her world, to her village, to her home, to the embrace of those who love her. We beg the compassion of the people who have taken Yara. We ask them to find some spark of love in their conscience. Look her in the eyes and open the door or gate that separates her from her freedom. We beseech you to give us our daughter back.

Help us to peace our daily lives back together again. Help us to rebuild our normality. People know us. We have never done or wished ill on anyone. We have always shown we are an open, transparent family, ready to help others. We do not deserve to continue our life without Yara's smile. Thank you. Rumours started to fly that this may have been a retaliation ofduction.

The media started to report that Yara's father had testified against a mafia member in Naples. But it wasn't long before these rumours were confirmed to be completely false. On the 25th of February 2011, three months after Yara went missing, a middle-aged man named Ilario Scotty found an open field in the small town of Xinyon de Isola to fly a remote-controlled aeroplane he had just bought. The town is 10km southwest of Rembatay de Sopra and is surrounded by industrial estates, spare lots, fields and scrum. As he flew the remote-controlled aircraft, Ilario discovered it wasn't working properly

so he landed it amongst some tall grass. As he walked over to pick it up, he saw what he thought was some rags and rubbish on the ground. That was until he saw the pair of shoes. It was Yara's body. Her body was frozen but showed some signs of decomposition, as did parts of her clothing. This particular field had already been searched in the days after Yara's disappearance. The police speculated that the killer had dumped her body after, knowing they had already searched there.

She appeared to have been attacked with a very sharp cutting object and there were several cuts on her body, some were deep. Chief Inspector Rujeri had spent that day skiing with her daughter and was on the drive home when she got the call that her body had been found. She dropped her daughter off at home and went straight to the crime scene. In a way, Rujeri felt relieved. She told a journalist, 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. The scene was filled with state police officers, carabinieri military police members and crime scene investigators. Near the body they found Yara's iPod and house keys. They found the SIM card and battery for her LG phone, but the phone itself was missing. Forensic evidence was found at the scene and swabs were taken.

There had been many days of snow in the three months since Yara went missing and the freezing temperatures had helped to preserve some of the forensic evidence that may have ordinarily been destroyed. The autopsy was conducted by Italy's most famous forensic pathologist, Professor Cristina Cattaneo. She discovered traces of lime in Yara's respiratory tract and the presence of a vegetable fiber used to make rope on Yara's clothing. She suffered a head injury, possibly inflicted with a rock,

and several blows to the body. She had also been stabbed numerous times, but it was determined that she didn't die from the lacerations or from loss of blood. It appeared Yara had died from exposure to the cold weather after she lost consciousness. It was noted in the report that the presence of lime and the rope fibers suggested that the killer might be in the building trade. Two months later, in April, the commander of the Scientific Investigations Department in Parma phoned Rujeri.

I've got good news, he told her. This murder has a signature. We found male DNA on the underwear of Yara. He reported it was likely that the murderer had himself been wounded in the struggle, leaving his DNA on Yara's underwear. This led them to the theory that it was likely the attacker had attempted to assault Yara, but she had given a good fight and stopped him, or maybe his intentions were interrupted in some other way.

There was no sign of sexual assault. It was confirmed that Yara had likely been dumped unconscious and died of exposure. On the 28th of May, three months after the discovery, Yara's body was handed back to the Gambirasio family for her funeral. On that hot morning, thousands lined the streets leading up to the sports centre she had disappeared from. As the hearse slowly drove by and onlookers saw the white coffin topped with a huge bouquet of white flowers, their wailing cries turned into loud cheers, as the community gave Yara an emotional send-off. The funeral was held by the Bishop of Bergamo.

A message was read out from the President of the Italian Republic, and outside, those who couldn't fit in the gymnasium, lined the car park and street to watch the memorial on a giant screen. Yara was buried between her two grandparents in a cemetery just across the road from the sports centre. There's no date on her headstone, just a signature next to a photograph of her. Friends have left mementos like Jim Shoe's, metal flowers, ragdolls, plastic angels and little bracelets. After the funeral, police gave a statement that was not just intended to put Yara's family and the public at ease that they would find their killer, but it was also intended to scare the person responsible.

Scare them so that they knew the investigators had good forensic evidence. They said, Despite exposure to the wind, rain and snow, those two DNA traces were excellent, and we were able to exclude saliva and sperm, so that leaves blood. It was a message to the killer that they had a solid piece of DNA, and they would spare no expense in both time and cost to hunt him down. The killer was given a nickname, Unknown One, and the investigation to find Unknown One,

kicked into overdrive. The search for Unknown One included alongside Rujeri, a select team of eight special agents who despite huge media pressure maintained utter silence throughout the investigation. The media were like vultures over this case, and they weren't prepared to risk any leads getting out. The largest DNA dragnet in Italy's history was about to unfold. They continued to tap the phones of thousands of people and called for the public's help to volunteer DNA samples to catch Yara's killer. Classmates, families of classmates, friends, and members of the community came forward.

Rujeri felt lucky she didn't have to get any court orders to obtain DNA from any person, as everyone they contacted was willing. It is believed that up to 22,000 people from the area volunteered their DNA. This raised a few eyebrows across Italy, with people believing the investigators were haphazard and had no focus in their investigation. Rujeri was publicly called incompetent, and some even asked for her to be replaced as the head of the investigation. She wasn't your expected lead investigator, but she was tough, and she was like a dog at a bone. Amongst all the backlash, she kept it cool.

She reassured the community she knew what she was doing. She divided up the responsibilities amongst the team. The first person to give DNA samples were family members. Then, each owner of the phone numbers who had made or received calls or messages to Yara were tracked down and DNA was requested from them. The net then moved outward into the community. The DNA matching was slow work. It took different 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. The cost in materials and manpower made this investigation one of the most expensive manhunts in Italian history. As the investigation continued, police placed hidden cameras at Yara's grave site in case her killer visited. They then turned their sites to a nightclub in the estate nearby to where Yara's body was found, called La Sabi Mabili, or Quixin. Luckily for the investigation, managers of the nightclub had a policy of creating membership cards for anyone who entered, complete with phone numbers. Investigators worked through all of the people who had visited the nightclub around the time of Yara's disappearance. They requested DNA samples, and were in luck. They found one of the people who volunteered had DNA closely resembling the prime suspect, Unknown One.

The owner of the sample that resembled Unknown One was a 20-year-old man named Damiano Guarioni. He was quickly excluded as the suspect, as he had been in South America when Yara disappeared, and his DNA wasn't an exact match. But what was clear was that he was a close blood relative of Unknown One. Rujeri and her team were ecstatic. They felt it would only be a matter of days before they would have the murderer behind bars. It didn't take long for the team to track down Damiano's family. Rujeri was shocked to find that Damiano's mother, Aurora, had actually worked for Yara's family for 10 years as a housemate. Aurora lived nearby, and had been at Yara's house twice a week since she was a baby. Aurora and Yara were very close too. Yara always asked Aurora if she would watch her do her gymnastics routines,

and Aurora, who was very protective of Yara, was forever telling her to be careful. When investigators questioned Aurora, she said that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was distraught. Police didn't tell her that her son, Damiano, had been identified as being a close blood relative of the killer. Police had Aurora and Damiano followed. They bugged their house and tapped their phones. But after months of surveillance in the summer of 2011, the investigators realized they weren't connected to the murder. This didn't alter the fact that Damiano's DNA was so similar to Unknown One. Damiano's father, Joseph, was one of 11. One by one, the investigators spoke to each of Damiano's uncles and aunts and retrieved DNA samples.

One of Damiano's uncles, his father's brother Giuseppe, had died in 1999. After clearing through the rest of the family, police still needed to rule out the family of Giuseppe. They contacted the widow of Giuseppe, Laura. She showed them a box of documents that had belonged to her husband, in the hopes that they could find something to gain his DNA from. Considering he had died many years before Yara's murder, Laura didn't feel too worried. In the box, they found an envelope with a stamp on it. They also found a postcard he had sent to his family. They knew there was a high chance he had licked the stamps, meaning they would have his DNA. They were able to confirm it was Giuseppe who had licked the stamps,

and the DNA sequence was an even closer match to Unknown One than his nephew Damiano's. This meant Giuseppe was the father of the killer. The team started to build the picture of Giuseppe and his family. Laura and Giuseppe seemed to have had a conventional marriage. Giuseppe had been a local bus driver who also enjoyed playing the accordion at local festivals. Together they had three children, a daughter and two sons. The investigators focused on the two sons as they knew the killer was male, but DNA checks showed that neither man was Unknown One, and neither of them had children of their own.

The forensics team was convinced that Giuseppe was the father of Unknown One, so that left only one possibility. Somewhere out there was the illegitimate son of Giuseppe. In order to make absolutely sure, investigators had Giuseppe's body exhumed from its vault in the local cemetery, and another DNA test was performed. It was confirmed again. Giuseppe was the father of Unknown One. Police were now making a complete U-turn in their investigation. Instead of searching for a man, they were searching for a woman, the killer's mother. A woman, possibly in her 60s, who had had an affair with Giuseppe decades earlier,

got pregnant and went on to have Giuseppe's son, who then went on to kill Laura. The team got to work investigating the bus routes Giuseppe used to drive. A fellow bus driver remembered him and told the police, ah yes, he was a ladies' man, lots of young women travelled on his bus to work. One at least, he got into trouble. Another bus driver said he was a man with a capital M. News ended up getting out that police were searching for the mother of Unknown One, who had had an affair, and the media lost it.

It turned into a soap opera. In all the media excitement, police reminded the public that amongst all the speculation, finger pointing and gossip, a young girl had been murdered. In the summer of 2013, in the nearby city of Rowe, staff at the hospital chapel came across a confession in their visitors' book. Usually reserved for the thoughts and prayers of sick loved ones, or thanks for the help of doctors, they were shocked to find handwritten inside. Tell the police at Bergamo that the killer of Yara Gambiracio was here.

May God forgive me. Police stated, whether the letter was written by a compulsive liar or not, it is important that we do not stop investigating. We have a duty to give answers to a family that has waited, in silence, to know the truth. By mid-2013, the life of a young Giuseppe began to unfold. He had moved villages in the mid-1960s, and he drove a public bus for almost two decades, where he would drive numerous women to their jobs in the local textile factories. They searched orphanages and homes for single mothers, testing everyone they could find.

But turned up nothing. They realized that there was a high chance that the woman they were searching for was married to someone else and had the child in secret. There were 532 women listed as possibly being the woman who was the mother of Unknown One. The team began the task of tracking down each one. As police conducted their hunt for the mother of Unknown One, the villages surrounding Bergamo were searched, conversations and whispers leading police from one house to the next.

One by one, talking to each woman on their list of over 500. In the small villages, older people still lived like long ago, some with home phones, some without. Most were reserved, but some openly questioned the tactics police were using. By now it was June 2014, three and a half years after Yara had disappeared. The killer only had to drive three hours and he could be in France, Switzerland, Austria or Slovenia. The chance of the killer still being in the hilltop villages of Lombardi seemed unlikely. But police were persistent and one day they finally got a name.

It was apparently given reluctantly in a whisper. Esther Azulfi Introducing the all-new Kia Nero EV. They say the first step is always the hardest, to walk into the unknown. But it's when we have the courage to step forward that the real adventure begins. With up to 407 kilometres of range on a single charge, the Kia Nero EV is a subcompact SUV that lets you travel farther and smarter. The all-new Kia Nero EV, your first step into the electric world.

Kia, movement that inspires. In the late 1960s, Esther had been Giuseppe's neighbour. She married a man named Giovanni Bassetti from a nearby village. Giovanni was the total opposite to Esther. Esther was fun and outgoing. Giovanni was an inward man who kept entirely to himself. He suffered from arthritis and depression. Esther had a job in a textile factory and rode the bus to work every day.

Esther and Giovanni had brought up three children. Twins, a man and a woman now in the early 40s, and another son. Grugieri's team checked their records and found that two years earlier in 2012, Esther had actually given her DNA for testing voluntarily during the sweep of the area police had already done. But an error had been made by a geneticist in Rome. The lab technician had tried to match Esther's and presumably others' DNA to Yara's instead of to Unknown One. Therefore, the result came up no match. They rushed to retest Esther's sample and confirmed that Esther, now in her 60s, was the woman they had been searching for.

She was the mother of Unknown One. She and Giovanni lived in Brambate di Sopra. The investigation had done a full circle back to the small village Yara had lived in and disappeared from. Esther denied ever having an affair with Giuseppe, but the police knew her sons were born in the right time period. One son was quickly ruled out. The other, who was the male of the twins, Massimo Bossetti, was a 42-year-old married father of three. He lived in Mapello, where the last signal from Yara's phone pinged. He was a bricklayer and had not given a DNA sample during the investigation.

A slim man who was once known for his love to party, Massimo was nicknamed the animal by his friends. He was short and very tanned, with piercing blue eyes and a peroxide-pencil goatee. Ruggieri and her team moved quickly, but they had to be careful. They had already made one incorrect arrest and would not be making another. They decided not to ask Massimo for his DNA sample in case he disappeared while they were waiting for the results. They placed him under surveillance and observed his movements. Within a few days, they decided the best approach would be to set up a roadblock near his house for random breath testing. This way they could collect his DNA without him suspecting anything.

Massimo was driving home with his wife and three children when he was stopped by police. The officer knew exactly what he was doing. He pretended the first breath test didn't work and so performed the second one. The officers now had two sets of Massimo's DNA and Massimo had no idea the random breath test was actually a test to confirm if he had murdered Yara. The following day, on the 16th of June 2014, Ruggieri received a call she had been waiting for. Massimo Bossetti was unknown one. The results showed 21 compatible markers, 16 to 17 are normally considered enough, meaning the forensic experts were completely sure that Massimo was the murderer.

Esther's husband, Giovanni, would learn that his wife had actually had more than one affair. Massimo and his twin sister were not biologically his own children, but neither was their third child, who was also fathered by another man. Giovanni learned this on the same day he found out Massimo was being arrested for the murder of Yara, whose case had captivated the country for nearly four years. Laura Giuseppe's widow was shocked that her husband had fathered children while having an affair. During their search for unknown one, police actually unearthed a number of secret affairs and infidelities in the small villages of the area. In two small villages alone, five other illegitimate children were uncovered in different households.

People still criticised the hunt for unknown one's mother, mainly the length of time it took and the leaks to the press throughout the search. Many thought the search should have been kept more closely guarded. Many felt Massimo would be unable to get a fair trial, as he had already been found guilty by media. Italy's privacy watchdog criticised the way the investigation into the parents of unknown one had been conducted. They said in a statement, not even the public interest legitimises the media frenzy over intimate personal details, such as to create irreparable damage to family life and personal relations.

The afternoon after the match was confirmed, the 16th of June 2014, Massimo was working on the second story of a local construction site, when a group of the carabinieri, the military police, pulled up. They climbed to the scaffolding and placed Massimo under arrest in front of a group of confused co-workers. He was then escorted down to the ground, taken away and charged with Yara's murder. He had no prior criminal record. He denied any involvement and claimed he was innocent. The Italian Minister of Internal Affairs Angelino Alfano announced the arrest on Twitter,

saying the murderer of Yara has finally been apprehended. Massimo's wife made a statement that her and their young children were at home with Massimo the evening of the murder. Massimo claimed that he suffered from nosebleeds and that someone had stolen his work tools, including a knife and a towel, possibly bloodstained because of his nosebleeds. In October 2011, while the search for unknown one was still happening, doubts had arisen over the forensic evidence produced in the first trial of Amanda Knox and her boyfriend for the murder of Meredith Kercher. This doubt swayed the jury of two judges and six civilians to acquit them of the murder and they were freed. Italy was reeling in the wake of questionable policing and poor investigation techniques

and to the entire country was watching every moment of the Yara investigation. The lab who conducted the testing in Yara's case released the statement. The important fact is that this man's DNA is the same as the DNA found on Yara. The statement also noted that the odds of anyone else sharing the same genetic profile was one person out of two billion of billions of billions, or practically nonexistent. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when the investigators matched Massimo's vehicle to the small white utility vehicle that had been spotted on the security footage surrounding the Sports Centre, on the days leading up to and to the afternoon of Yara's disappearance. The last time the utility was seen in the footage was just a few minutes before Yara disappeared. Massimo argued that he just happened to drive by the Sports Centre on his way home from work the day Yara disappeared.

But police confirmed that he didn't go to work that day. Investigators used telephone records, surveillance video and testimony from colleagues to rebut his alibi. The crime lab took his utility and pulled it apart for forensic testing. Massimo's defence team requested he be released prior to trial. The courts annoyed this request and confirmed that Massimo would remain in custody until his trial. He remained in jail throughout his preliminary hearing and by the time his trial commenced on Friday the 3rd of July 2015, he had been in for over a year. The trial was held at the court of a sizes of Bergamo. Massimo had not moved from his claim of innocence. People were surprised that facing such clear DNA evidence against him, he still swore he was innocent.

His wife testified he was home having dinner with her and their kids at the time of the murder. The trial would include 60,000 pages of records of inquiry. 120 witnesses were called to testify for the prosecution. Massimo's defence said they had 711 witnesses as well as about 50 experts and consultants. The court made them cut this down to a total of 160 people. Sylvia Brenner, who is Yara's gym instructor, faced scrutiny at the trial when she became a focus of Massimo's defence team. On the night of Yara's disappearance, Sylvia's father confirmed that Sylvia cried all night with no explanation. She could also not explain why she and her brother had sent text messages to each other at the time of Yara's disappearance, which they almost immediately deleted, but they didn't delete any other messages. A bombshell was then dropped in the courtroom, something that had never come out before the trial and the reason why Sylvia became the defence team's hot ticket.

The forensic lab noticed what they called dark halos, indicating the presence usually of blood on the sleeve cuff of Yara's bomber jacket. When testing the stain, they discovered that the DNA belonged to Sylvia. It was confirmed that there was no way for this DNA to have been left as contact DNA, and after three months in the elements, it had to have been significant fluid such as blood. Sylvia was criticised for answering, I don't know, to at least ten questions on the witness stand, including how her DNA got on Yara's sleeve cuff. Massimo's defence lawyer also contested the DNA evidence matched to Massimo and the lack of mitochondrial DNA found in the sample on Yara. The crucial piece of DNA evidence collected from Yara's underwear was a clear match for Massimo's nuclear DNA, but his mitochondrial DNA did not show up in the sample. DNA can be divided into two types, nuclear DNA, which is the DNA contained in the cell's nucleus, and the content is inherited half by the father and half by the mother of any individual. And mitochondrial DNA, contained in the mitochondria of the cell, that is inherited only by one's own mother, who in turn got it from her mother, and so on.

Mitochondrial DNA mutates very, very slowly, much slower than nuclear DNA. This means that it is nearly identical to that of your straight-line maternal ancestors who lived thousands of years ago, and because of this, it can match many others, including sisters, aunts, and grandparents. This type of DNA, which can be extracted during DNA tests, is not necessarily restricted to a single individual, like a nuclear DNA is. Captain Staines and Fabiano Gentile, who carried out the genetic analysis on Unknown One, spoke at length on the DNA. In a report of almost 1,300 pages, they proved the validation of the nuclear DNA. They defined the sample as a perfect and complete profile, with no margin of error. They also showed that the lack of mitochondrial DNA present was not important. And it wasn't just the DNA evidence the prosecution was relying on.

There was other circumstantial evidence which tied in. Rujeri and her team examined Massimo's computer after his arrest. What they found painted a picture of a man who was interested in young girls. Massimo regularly hung out around Yara's house and the sports centre where she trained. He was seen on security footage circling the gym on different days, parking nearby on some occasions. He was also seen on footage eating at a pizzeria at the end of Yara's road. He visited a tanning salon nearby to the sports centre twice a week, and his phone was found to have been in the area many times in the lead-up to Yara's disappearance,

and also nearby on the afternoon she disappeared. Massimo had switched his phone off at 5.45pm the day Yara disappeared, and he did not switch it back on again until 7.34am the next morning. They also had the footage of him driving past the entrance of the sports centre just minutes before Yara went missing. And the fibres found in Yara's wounds were compatible with the fibres on the seats found in Massimo's vehicle. The argument from Massimo that his tools had been stolen along with a bloody towel was thrown out, as it was discovered that he had actually reported his tools stolen two years after Yara's murder. A local woman testified that around 7pm on the day Yara disappeared, she was taking out the garbage at her home nearby.

She saw a vehicle matching Massimo's drive by at high speed. She saw a young person inside, but she was unsure if it was a boy or girl. She heard screaming coming from the vehicle, and it was cut off mid-scream as she looked up. She had gone to police and given them this information as soon as she heard of Yara's disappearance. Three witnesses came forward who contradicted Massimo's claim that he only ever spent his evenings with his wife and children. On the 1st of July 2016, the Asaisas court of Bergamo reached their verdict. Massimo Bossetti was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Yara, Gambiraccio. The court also ordered compensation amounting to 1.3 million euros be paid.

400,000 euros to each of Yara's parents, 150,000 euros for each sibling of Yara's, and 18,000 euros for lawyers. The day after his verdict was read, Massimo received a visit from his wife in prison. She went alone without their children. The Gambiraccio family, meanwhile, remained as quiet and as private as they had always been. They presented a gymnastics trophy in Yara's name shortly after. Massimo immediately filed an appeal. Almost three months after he was sentenced, the Bergamo court of appeals denied his appeal and published an explanation for the sentence they had originally placed.

The entire document is 158 pages. Part of it reads, Yara's killing was a homicide of unprecedented gravity that took place in the context of a series of sexual advances, which the girl likely rejected, unleashing a violent and sadistic reaction. The physical torments inflicted on the victim and the moral and subjective cruelty with which the defendant appeased his drive to cause pain in absence of feelings of compassion and pity are indicative of his evil spirit. The presence of the defendant's DNA is what proves his guilt. That fact, which is devoid of any ambiguity and cannot be read in any alternative way, has not been disproved or placed into doubt by any evidence gathered by the defense.

The murder of Yara Gambiraccio turned on its head the lives of many families. Giuseppe's widow and their children learned that he had been unfaithful and had fathered other children, one of whom was a murderer. Not long after the reclusive Giovanni learned that his wife of over 40 years, Esther, had numerous affairs. His three children were not his own, and one of those children he had brought up was a convicted murderer. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Esther still denies she had an affair. Massimo Bossetti's marriage didn't just suffer the effects of a husband and father convicted of murder, but two people came forward and claimed they had had affairs with his wife. Massimo's twin sister was beaten up twice following the trial.

Although Sylvia Brenner's DNA being found on Yara's cuff was an explosive development and something the defense relied heavily upon to try and create reasonable doubt, police played it down and stated Sylvia was never a suspect. She was looked at thoroughly and cleared. It's unclear if she ever gave an explanation to police about the DNA or how exactly she was cleared, but she was. Yara's family were surprised to learn it was Aurora, their housemaid and friend for over a decade, who was one of the first links in the long and winding trail to locate Unknown One, and justice for their daughter. You