Nineteen years after the murder of Chiara Poggi, Garlasco was faced with a judicial paradox that until recently would have seemed almost impossible: there is a man definitively convicted for that crime, Alberto Stasi, and at the same time there is another man, Andrea Sempio, on whom the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office has built a new accusation hypothesis for the same murder.
It is within this contradiction, only apparent on a strictly procedural level but enormous on a substantial one, that will be played out next month.
The date to mark is September 28, 2026when the deadline for further investigations ordered by the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office will expire after the closure formally notified on 7 May and after the filing of the advice from Sempio’s defence. It was the prosecutor Fabio Napoleone himself, at the end of May, who ordered new investigations precisely to verify the technical objections presented by the suspect’s lawyers.
We are therefore not starting from scratch. And above all it is no longer just a question of establishing whether there is any suspicious element towards Sempio. According to a reconstruction relaunched in the last few hours, the elements that make up the investigative mosaic are twentyone.
Not twenty-one definitive proofs, and that’s an essential distinction. But twenty-one pieces which, when reading the accusation, should be considered together and not separately. Andrea Sempio naturally remains presumed innocent until a possible final sentence.
The 21 clues: from DNA to fingerprint 33
At the center remains first and foremost the genetic material recovered under Chiara Poggi’s fingernails, traced back to the paternal genetic line of the Sempio family. It is one of the elements that contributed to the reopening of the file and also one of the areas on which the scientific conflict is harshest: the defense claims in fact that that trace could be the result of contamination and disputes its ability to demonstrate the presence of Andrea Sempio during the attack.
Then there is the famous one footprint 33found on the wall in the area of the stairs leading to the cellar where Chiara’s body was found. The new analyzes have brought that trace back to the center of the investigation and the prosecution claims its compatibility with Sempio, while the defense consultants also dispute this result.
But the new investigative system would not be based only on genetics and fingerprints.
The reconstruction of the twenty-one elements includes the telephone calls made by Sempio to the Poggis’ home in the days before the crime, the declarations of Marco Poggi’s friends, the online searches carried out years later on DNA, some passages of the environmental wiretaps, the so-called “soliloquies” recorded by the investigators and the question of the intimate videos of Chiara and Alberto Stasi, which Sempio would have spoken about in the intercepted conversations.
It is precisely one of those audios that has attracted the most attention in recent months. In one conversation Sempio utters the phrase “when I went, there was blood”, then referring to Stasi’s behavior inside the house; in another recording from 2017 he refers to 9.30 when talking about what would happen “that day”. They are sentences on which the prosecution and defense provide radically different interpretations and which, in themselves, do not constitute a confession.
And that’s exactly the point: the Prosecutor’s Office seems to reason on the convergence of the elementswhile the defensive strategy consists in separating and contesting them one by one.
The receipt from Vigevano is an alibi that is being examined again
Inside the file there is also a tiny object that has become one of the symbols of the entire case: the Vigevano parking receipt.
Sempio handed it over to the police to document his passage through the city on the morning of August 13, 2007, when he reached a bookshop which he found closed. For the investigators, however, that ticket would only demonstrate that someone made that payment at that time, not necessarily that it was Sempio himself and, above all, it would not be sufficient to exclude his presence in Garlasco in the time window compatible with the murder.
The new reconstruction also includes his movements that morning, the passage from his grandmother’s house and a note from his father Giuseppe relating to the fact that his son was “on foot”, a detail that investigators relate to the versions provided over the years.
Added to all this is the possible motive constructed by the new accusation: Sempio’s interest in Chiara, a rejected approach and a subsequent obsession. It is perhaps the most delicate point of the entire reconstruction, because transforming a series of behaviors, writings or personal interests into a murderous motive requires an evidentiary leap that will eventually have to stand up before a judge.
September 28th does not automatically mean trial
However, the quantity of elements must not cause a fundamental step to be skipped. The September 28 is not the day on which Andrea Sempio will be found guilty nor the day on which a trial will automatically begin. It is the deadline within which the investigations arranged after the defense’s counterarguments must be concluded.
The Prosecutor’s Office had already notified 415-bis on May 7, charging Sempio with voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives. After the consultations filed by his lawyers, however, new investigations were ordered to verify their scientific solidity.
Only at the end of this phase will the framework that will lead to the next decision be completed. And it is here that Andrea Sempio’s fate inevitably meets that of Alberto Stasi.
The Stasi-Sempio paradox
Stasi is still, legally, the murderer of Chiara Poggi. His sixteen-year sentence is final and no new investigation can automatically erase it.
Since 13 June, however, he has no longer been detained in the Bollate prison: the Milan Surveillance Court has granted him probationary custody to social services after more than ten years spent in prison and a path judged positively by the magistrates. The decision has no legal connection with the new investigation into Sempio.
The most important match for him is another: the review of the process.
His lawyers Giada Bocellari and Antonio De Rensis are working on the request, while the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office is also studying the documents sent by Pavia to verify the existence of the necessary conditions. Already in June the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office had urged the General Prosecutor’s Office to consider reviewing the sentence.
And this is where Garlasco enters very rare judicial territory. Because a possible indictment of Sempio would not automatically make Stasi innocent. Likewise, the opening of a review proceeding would not immediately cancel the final ruling of 2015. The two tracks can proceed simultaneously until a new judicial decision modifies what is currently established by a final ruling.
But if the same elements collected by the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office were considered strong enough to support a trial against Sempio and at the same time incompatible with the reconstruction that led to Stasi’s conviction, the system would be forced to deal with the question that has been hovering over the investigation for months: can the old judicial truth survive the new?
For example, a decisive month even outside the classroom
Meanwhile, the life of the only suspect in the new investigation has been overwhelmed by the case.
The contract for the apartment in which he lived in Voghera was not renewed, in a context marked by the continuous siege of journalists and television crews, while the On August 31st he will also lose his job in the phone shop where he is employed. It is important to point out that the dismissal is not a consequence of the investigation: it also concerns other employees and is linked to the change in management of the business, with the possibility that some workers will subsequently be rehired.
They are personal elements that have no value with respect to ascertaining his responsibility, but they restore the dimension of an investigation that for over a year has stopped living only in the prosecutor’s files.
And this is perhaps the other big problem of the new Garlasco case.
From a trial to a war of all against all
In fact, a second proceeding has opened around the murder of Chiara Poggi, this time a media one, in which lawyers, criminologists, journalists and family members now face each other.
Stefania Cappa, Chiara’s cousin, filed a complaint after the television broadcast of an act relating to another side of the story. The journalist Milo Infantethe recipient of a complaint for receiving stolen goods and violation of investigative secrecy according to what was reported by Cappa’s lawyer, harshly rejected the objections, defining the accusation as “infamous” and declaring that he saw it as a form of intimidation. He also stated that he wanted to personally assume all responsibility, relieving Mediaset.
At the same time, the conflict broke out again Roberta Bruzzonewho announced that they wanted to evaluate legal initiatives against Infante after being called into question on the reconstruction of an alleged conversation regarding Antonio De Rensis and Stefania Cappa.
De Rensis himself defined the accusations concerning him as unfounded, while Liborio Cataliotti, one of Sempio’s defenders, invited the lawyers involved in the affair to “be less protagonists” and to bring attention back to the only question that should count: who killed Chiara Poggi. It is probably the phrase that best describes the point Garlasco finds himself in today.
Because nineteen years after the murder, the risk is that so many parallel processes, suspicions, mutual accusations, leaks of documents, television programs and personal clashes accumulate around the death of a 26-year-old girl that we lose sight of the center of the story.
That center remains a small villa in Via Pascoli, on the morning of August 13, 2007. And a question that Italian justice thought it had already answered once. Next month will tell whether that response can still hold up.
