On August 13, 2007 in Garlasco, a village like many of them in the Lombard countryside, lying among the rice fields of Lomellina, summers of firm air, white heavens of heat and mosquitoes, Chiara Poggi, 26 years old, large blue eyes and a life defined by the cassation of a “clarity” that the intrusiveness of the criminal investigations has never crossed, is found lifeless on the steep stairs of the cellar of the holiday of the holiday The brother and parents, all three in those days on holiday. Chiara had stayed at home to share time with her boyfriend, engaged in the drafting of the degree thesis. From that day Garlasco becomes, despite himself, the Antonomasia of a crime.
In 2015 the final sentence
The “case” finds definitive procedural response in 2015, when the Court of Cassation confirms the ruling of Appeal Bis with which Chiara’s boyfriend, Alberto Stasi, was sentenced, at 16 years old (the 24, provided for by the code for the unconvited voluntary murder, were discounted by a third party as a result of the abbreviated judgment, chosen by the accused accepting to be judged to the state of the documents). Competent to investigate at the time, it was not Pavia, as now, but the Prosecutor at the Vigevano Court, then returned among those suppressed in 2012 as part of the revision of judicial geography: a law decided to close the smaller offices and merge them to other larger, reducing a little the proximity of justice to citizens, to rationalize resources, but also to limit the risk that the cases of life and the rules on territorial competence Very complex events on offices, and the relative judicial police, do not equip the case needed to face you with due experience.
The first acquittals
Stasi’s judicial path begins with aacquittal at first instance (2009) “For not having committed the fact”: the GUP (judge for the preliminary hearing) of Vigevano considered the “contradictory and highly insufficient” picture to decide for the guilt, in spite of some insights arranged by himself.
The acquittal is confirmed in the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Milan (2011)who rejects the requests of the Prosecutor General to renew some acts to better clarify controversial points. On procedural history weigh uncertainties and inexperienced from the early hours: carabinieri entered without shoes or gloves; Access defined as “incorrect” by all the judgments to the computer on which the suspect was working have compromised part of the data; Failure to seize a women’s bicycle used by the Stasi family, to verify its potential correspondence with that described by two different witnesses, laid on the gate of the victim’s house, an hour compatible with the crime.
For all the degrees of judgment, the likelihood of Stasi’s story remains under the lens of investigators and judges: The boyfriend would have discovered Chiara’s body, after calling her several times in vain on the phone, entering the house with the floor smeared with blood. But neither on the shoes he wore, delivered the next day to the carabinieri, nor on the car mats, nor do traces of his passage remain in the house. This data, combined with inconsistencies in the description with respect to the body found by the investigators and the fact that the absence of signs of effort and scuffle leads us to think that the girl knew her killer and trusted, direct suspicions about him. Two clues are always stable: the presence of the digital imprint of the right ring finger of the only stasis on the liquid door of the bathroom sink in which the killer was believed to have washed his hands; Traces of DNA of the girl, “highly cell” material, on both pedals of the men’s bicycle of Stasi. During the appeal, the manufacturer will document that they are not the original pedals that are mounted on that model.
The Cassation changes to the trial
The procedural affair changes route in 2013 when the Cassation cancels the acquittal sentence by postponing to another Court of Assizes of Appeal: According to the Supreme Court, in fact, in the first appeal judgment, the clues would have been evaluated in a “atomistic” way, that is, I took one by one like dislegated from each other, dismissed by the context and not, as per jurisprudence for the circumstantial processes, in the set of an organic evidentiary reasoning.
To the new Court of Assizes of Appeal, the Cassation by postponing the documents, indicates to proceed with a “reinterpretation of all the evidence available, of the surrounding material acquired and of the potentially client elements”. And to re -evaluate the requests for investigation denied by the first appeal judge.
In light of the results of the non -small preliminary activity carried out in the bis appeal, including the experiment that reproduced “with multiple and more accurate modes” the walk inside the house and on the first steps of the scale, from which we distributed to establish the unreliability of the story of the discovery and reconsider the whole, lDepending on the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Milan he considers the serious, precise and sufficiently concordant clues to condemn beyond any reasonable doubt. The Cassation confirms.
An investigation against Andrea Semplio, friend of Chiara Poggi’s brother, in Pavia is open and archived between 2016 and 2017. Alberto Stasi today in semi -freedom is serving with great dignity the sentence in the prison of Bollate. A request for review in 2020 was rejected by the Court of Appeal of Brescia and the Cassation. The appeal to the European Court of Human Rights establishes that the process was fair.
The new investigations for crime competition
The rest is chronicle: from March 2025 a new investigation for competition in murder has been opened in Pavia in March 2025: the public prosecutor’s consultants believe that traces found at the time on the scene of the crime and judged not reliable with the tools of that time, can re -establish today with new techniques trace back to Andrea Semplio. An evidentiary accident will have to check if it is so. And, after, if the hypothesis is confirmed, it would be a matter of demonstrating that the tracks cannot have been led to the house before the murder.
