The new investigation reconstructs a long and ferocious attack: from the first drops of blood in the living room to the killer’s escape.
For almost nineteen years, the Garlasco crime remained fixed in a precise reconstruction: a rapid attack, carried out in a few minutes, with Chiara Poggi surprised and killed near the cellar stairs. Today, however, the new investigation by the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office, coordinated by the prosecutor Fabio Napoleone and conducted by the Carabinieri of the Milan Investigation Unit, completely redesigns the scene of the murder. A much longer, ferocious and fragmented sequence, which would have had Andrea Sempio as its protagonist.
According to the new investigative hypothesis, everything begins in the living room of the villa in via Pascoli, where Chiara was probably having breakfast. This is suggested by three small drops of blood found between the two sofas and never evaluated in the first analyzes almost twenty years ago. That’s where the first violent contact allegedly occurred. Not immediately the hammer, but an attack with bare hands. A slap, perhaps. Then more shots.
Chiara reacts. He tries to defend himself. On the body, the investigators explain, there are bruises and abrasions compatible with a desperate attempt to resist the attacker. The girl tries to flee towards the entrance, but is caught in the space between the door and the staircase leading to the upper floor. Here the aggression continues. Chiara falls to the ground and the killer leaves what the investigators consider one of the first decisive traces: the bloody imprint of an open left hand on the tiles. It cannot belong to the victim, because Chiara’s palm was clean.
At this point the violence changes intensity. The killer grabs Chiara by the ankles and drags her towards the cabinet with the phone. It is a scene that, in the new reading of the Bloodstain Pattern Analysis entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Berti of the Ris of Cagliari, emerges through the blood splashes and the traces left by the movements of the weapon. Because in the meantime the hammer appears. An object compatible, according to investigators, with the one with a square head and “swallow tail” that Chiara’s father reported as having disappeared from the house after the crime.
Chiara still tries to get up. And still she gets hit. The body is moved a second time, to the cellar door. It is here that the scene takes on its most brutal contours. The attacker attacks the girl at least three times before throwing her down the steps. But first, according to the new reconstruction, he raises it to be able to open the folding door that leads to the stairs.
The dynamics in the cellar is one of the most innovative points of the new investigation. In the past it was believed that the killer never went down the steps. Today, however, investigators argue the opposite. The murderer walks up the first steps, reaches Chiara who is now lying down and continues to hit her on the head with the hammer. Four, maybe five more shots. A very violent fury.
As he climbs back up, squeezed into the narrow space of the staircase, he leaves a streak of blood on the left wall. And above all he leaves what has become one of the central traces of the new investigation: the so-called “33” imprint, an inch on the right-hand wall of the ramp. According to investigators, that trace should be read together with another print found on the doorstep, the mark of the heel of a shoe. It would be the point where the killer stops. He turns around. Look at Chiara’s body at the bottom of the stairs. Almost in contemplation of the scene just left behind. The unstable position of his feet would force him to lean against the wall with his hand. A gesture which, according to the measurements carried out by the anatomopathologist Cristina Cattaneo, would be compatible with Andrea Sempio’s build.
After the crime there would also have been an attempt to clean himself up. Not in the bathroom, as assumed for years, but in the kitchen. Here the luminol had highlighted footprints directed towards the sink which however suddenly stopped near a carpet found rolled up and never analysed. A small drop of blood was also found on a furniture door.
Finally the escape. Not far from the house. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the killer would have traveled the road behind the Poggi house to reach Sempio’s grandmother’s house, a few hundred meters away. A stop before returning home. A trajectory that investigators today reread as the last segment of a morning that continues, almost twenty years later, to be one of the darkest pages of Italian news.
