Sempio returned to via Pascoli on the day of the Garlasco crime: the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office dismantles his version with a map
In the classics of crime literature, the culprit always returns to the scene of the crime. Now, Andrea Sempio will not be guilty until a sentence says otherwise. Innocent until proven guilty, in fact. In the meantime, the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office is preparing to build one of the most stringent points in the prosecution case against the 38-year-old, who prosecutors Civardi, De Stefano and Rizza want to bring to trial as the true murderer of Chiara Poggi – killed in Garlasco on 13 August 2007 with at least 12 blows to the head and face, a crime for which Alberto Stasi was finally convicted in 2015.
A statement that doesn’t add up
The point is geometric even before it is judicial. Sempio declared in 2008 that he passed through Via Pavia with his father on the afternoon of the crime, that he noticed an ambulance and some people near Via Pascoli, and that he stopped out of curiosity. But the maps attached to the documents by the Prosecutor’s Office, geometrically, raise suspicion: that route did not include Via Pascoli – indeed, it was “exactly in the opposite direction”. And from the short distance travelled, with two roundabouts in between, it would not have been possible to see the people in front of the Poggi house. Sempio’s version, the prosecutors write, is “clearly unlikely”.
In 2008, Sempio also declared on record that he had noticed, while passing with his father, “the presence of an ambulance and people”. A seemingly harmless phrase – the curious passerby, the small town, the August afternoon that slows down around an accident. However, the sentence does not hold up to the topography. And that first version was followed by another: around 4pm, alone, he returned “out of curiosity” to Via Pascoli, where a journalist told him that a girl had been found dead, and someone had mentioned the name of Chiara Poggi. Then he returned home. He later returned again, with his father. An itinerary that the prosecutors apparently read as the gesture of someone who cannot stay away from what they have done.
The complexity of Garlasco’s protagonists
In an attempt to reconstruct the “traces of the past” that Sempio would have erased, the new investigation even activated a letter rogatory in the United States to obtain from Meta the contents of a Facebook profile closed by the clerk at the end of February 2017 – immediately after the first interrogation, the one that ended up being archived nine years ago. The letter rogatory produced nothing: “it did not allow the information gap to be filled”, write the prosecutors. The void remains. But the gesture of closing a profile the day after an interrogation – that timely digital cleaning – has its own completely singular silent eloquence. From analyzes of web searches, diaries and notes, moreover, the prosecutors paint a portrait of a man obsessed with violence and non-consensual sex: a profile that the prosecution uses as a psychological background, aware that it alone is not enough, but that it colors every other element.
The defense of Sempio – who has been living in de facto reclusion for months, “buried at home” according to his lawyer Angela Taccia – is working to dismantle the accusatory castle. Meanwhile, Stasi continues to serve his sentence, buried in prison.
