Why we should have no doubts about who killed Yara Gambirasio

The evening of November 26, 2010 Yara Gambirasio13 years old, disappears from Brembate di Sopra. She left home to go to the Sports Center in via Locatelli, where she arrives at 5:30 p.m.

That Friday, for her it is not a training day, she goes out specifically to bring the stereo, as her mother Maura will report. She lingers to watch the younger athletes training and then leaves at 6:30 pm. Returning home (her cell phone hooks up to different cells to indicate that the subject is in motion) she exchanges messages with a friend of hers until 6:50 pm, they agree on a race. Then Yara disappears into thin air.

Already at 7:00 pm her parents were alerted and went to the sports centre to look for her, but not finding her, around 8:30 pm they went to the Carabinieri to file a complaint. His body was found in a field in Chignolo D’Isola on February 26, 2011.

The recently released Netflix series on the murder case of little Yara Gambirasio seems to have the ambition to dismantle the accusatory theses that led to the definitive conviction of Massimo Bossetti. The title already seems premonitory of the structure and purpose of the series “The Yara Case. Beyond any reasonable doubt”.

So, faced with a case that has always divided opinions, between those who believe it is guilty and those who believe it is innocent, the proposed narrative could appear partial with respect to those elements which led to the pronouncement of such a heavy sentence against Bossetti. The five episodes in fact propose, in the first part, an accurate and detailed reconstruction of the facts, then leaving more space for Bossetti’s defense and its consultants who raise critical issues regarding the evidence against their client.

So let’s try to review them, sentences in hand.

The place where Yara was killed

Yara Gambirasio’s body was found, after months of searching, in a field that had already been searched (although it was revealed during the investigations and the trial, only along the perimeter edges and not in the internal parts) three months after disappearance.

The body is in an advanced state of decomposition and is affected by numerous puncture and cut wounds which, however, will not be found to have been, by themselves, the cause of death. Professor Cristina Cattaneo will in fact ascertain that, given the uncertainty due to the state of the corpse, it was possible to conclude that the child died on the evening of November 26, 2011 due to a combination of causes including the injuries sustained and the stay in a place with very low temperatures.

Maybe Yara could have been saved. Bossetti’s defense, in proposing the validity of alternative hypotheses, hypothesizes that the little girl may have been undressed, wounded, wrapped in a cloth and then taken to the Chignolo field at a later time, also because, they argue, the wounds do not correspond with the cuts found on the clothes she was wearing.

In fact, as can be read in the expert reports, all the wounds found, with the exception of two, could have been produced while the victim was dressed, as there was overlap between wounds and cuts in the clothing. The remaining two wounds could have been produced simply by lifting the clothes, which the murderer certainly did, as demonstrated the bra found unfastened.

There are then a whole series of other elements to demonstrate the fact that the murder took place in that field and the little body has always remained there. The body was in fact camouflaged in the ground and its vegetation, Yara’s right ankle was wrapped in stems of a grass that although very common, It is typical of that field.

Yara was clutching a tuft of the same species in her hand, the body had left its imprint on the ground, on the clothes and on the edges of some lesions and under a nail of the right hand some botanical remains present in that place were found.

Under the head of Yara was found a turgid leafevidently preserved from the previous autumn thanks to the protection provided by the body, larvae with different levels of development resulting from repeated ovipositions were found in various body areas, indicative of aexposure of the corpse for two or three months and furthermore, in one wound a quantity of soil was found that suggests that the contamination occurred precisely in that place.

Lime particles and metal spheres

On Yara’s clothes and wounds were found Lime particles and metal spheres typical of some construction work environments. During the investigation, checks were therefore immediately carried out on suppliers and employees of the 14 companies that overlooked the area where the body was found, with saliva samples that did not give positive results.

Furthermore, the same particles were searched in the home of his family, in the sports center and in the land of Chignolo, with negative results. Even these elements, if not exhaustive by themselves, will be significantly relevant in the constitution of the circumstantial evidence against Bossetti.

Massimo Bossetti’s DNA

Central part of the prosecution case it is the presence of Bossetti’s DNA on Yara’s clothes. In fact, only two genetic profiles different from those of Yara have been identified: that of UNKNOWN 1 and that of Silvia Brena (which we will discuss later).

In detail, sample 31, taken from the girl’s underwear and leggings, in conjunction with a J-shaped cut, contains male DNA. first identified as UNKNOWN 1 and then attributed to Massimo Bossettieven in traces mixed with the victim’s DNA, demonstrating that those traces were left concomitantly.

The defense contested the usability of the evidence for various reasons, starting from the lack of guarantee of adversarial proceedings, to the fact that expired kits had been used for some tests, up to the validity of the evidence itself, contesting the absence of mitochondrial DNA in the traces in question. It is worth remembering that at the time the tests in question were carried out, male DNA was found on the girl’s panties and leggings, the identity of the subject was not known (in fact we are talking about IGNOTO1) and therefore it was impossible, since there was no suspect, that his lawyers or consultants were there.

Some investigations were inevitably carried out with unrepeatability formulagiven the state of the trace. As for the absence of mitochondrial DNA, it must be said that this does not affect the validity of the trace itself for identification purposes. In the forensic field, nuclear DNA is used to identify the identity of a subject; mitochondrial DNA could be missing for various reasons, since these are mixed traces.

The nuclear genetic profile is however of excellent quality and allowed the identification of Massimo Bossetti using 24 SRT markers (in forensic settings 15-16 markers are required for an identity assessment).

The alternative track

Bossetti’s defense brought attention back to individuals who, for different reasons, could be suspects. Among these in particular Silvia Brena, gymnastics instructor at the Sports Center that Yara attendedwhose DNA was found on the cuff of the victim’s jacket.

It is logical to assume that by attending the same center and meeting often, Brena could have come into contact with the child at any time, leaving that trace on her jacket. During the investigation, however, Silvia Brena and her family were listened to and subjected to wiretaps, without anything relevant emerging.

Also Walter Brembillathe gym’s caretaker was monitored and intercepted during the investigation without any evidence emerging against him.

The motive for the murder of Yara Gambirasio

The motive identified by the prosecution is of a sexual nature. Whoever tortured Yara, causing her death by abandoning her in that camp, acted on her body driven by sadistic sexual impulses, as evidence of this are the superficial and therefore non-fatal cuts made on the child’s body with the aim of causing her suffering, the cut leggings and panties and the undone bra.

In the Netflix series, Massimo Bossetti’s defense attempted to dismantle the motive, minimizing the value of the web searches that Bossetti allegedly made even after Yara’s murder with clear child pornography content (indeed, excluding that the content was child pornography in nature).

Bossetti’s wife claims that she used those contents even in her husband’s absence and reports that some searches were not voluntary but generated automatically. From computer results However, it emerges that the searches carried out concern sites that talk about girls with “shaved” vaginas or content such as “girls+virgins+redheads”, “slutty girls” or “thirteen year old girls for sex”, the strings are preceded by the letter Q that Google attributes to user searches, therefore not suggested by the search engine and with an evident child pornography matrix.

Some of this research was done when Bossetti was not workingtherefore probably by him and not by his wife, as she claimed. Marita Comi, on the contrary, during two wiretaps on 13 December 2014 and 17 January 2015, denies having visited child pornography sites.

These are just some of the elements that constituted the accusatory framework against Massimo Bossetti, found, beyond any reasonable doubt, guilty of the murder of Yara Gambirasio.