Nineteen years of investigations, trials, acquittals, convictions, requests for revision, re-examined findings and reconstructions that have continued to overlap have transformed the Garlasco crime into one of the most stratified judicial cases in Italian news, but while a war continues around the murder of Chiara Poggi made up of complaints, accusations, conflicting consultancies and television statements, the real judicial game is progressively narrowing down to a few concrete elements, destined to weigh much more than the noise that surrounds the investigation.
The date around which this phase revolves is 28 September 2026, when the further investigations ordered by the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office should be completed after the filing of the defense advice, and the central point is not so much the quantity of evidence collected against Andrea Sempio but their ability to withstand a rigorous technical verification and, above all, to support a possible accusation in the courtroom.
There are four, in particular, the areas on which the investigators’ attention is now focused: the genetic material recovered under Chiara Poggi’s nails, the shoe prints found in the house in Via Pascoli, the compatibility between those traces and Andrea Sempio’s foot, in addition to the psychiatric evaluation of the suspect, called to offer a specialized reading of some behaviors and a series of monologues intercepted during the investigations.
September 28, however, will not coincide with the day on which it will be established who killed Chiara Poggi nor with an automatic decision on Sempio’s indictment, because the Prosecutor’s Office will first have to evaluate whether the set of elements collected, once compared with the objections of the defense and with the new investigations, is sufficiently solid to support the accusation in the next phase.
The DNA under Chiara’s nails, the strongest and most contested data
The genetic material recovered under Chiara Poggi’s nails probably represents the most scientifically delicate terrain of the entire new investigation, because precisely from that trace came one of the elements that contributed to bringing Andrea Sempio back to the center of the investigations, but simply calling it “Sempio’s DNA” means reducing a much more complex and controversial piece of data to an overly clear formula.
The investigations have traced that genetic material back to the paternal line of the Sempio family, but the decisive point is not only biological compatibility, but rather the meaning that can be attributed to the presence of the trace, the moment in which it could have been deposited and above all the mechanism through which it would have arrived under the victim’s nails.
It is precisely on this passage that the defense insists most, arguing that the mere presence of a compatible profile is not sufficient to demonstrate a contact that occurred during the attack and putting forward the hypothesis of contamination or indirect transfers, circumstances which, if deemed plausible, would significantly reduce the probative value of the data.
The problem, in other words, is not only to establish who a trace may belong to, but to understand whether that trace can be connected to the time of the crime, because a genetic compatibility can become a very strong clue only when it is possible to insert it into a dynamic consistent with the attack, while without this connection the risk is that of knowing the possible owner of the material without being able to demonstrate when and why that material ended up there.
The bloody footprints and the knot of the “dot” shoe
The second front concerns the shoe prints found in the villa in Via Pascoli, including those left in the blood and which have become over the years one of the most discussed elements in the various reconstructions of the crime, because in this case too the prosecution and defense start from the same findings but arrive at profoundly different conclusions.
Among the traces that have attracted the most attention is that associated with the so-called “dot” sole, on which Sempio’s defense has built one of its most relevant objections, arguing that the shape of the suspect’s foot would not be compatible with the print found at the crime scene.
According to this reconstruction, the comparison cannot be reduced to the simple shoe size, because to truly evaluate compatibility it would also be necessary to take into consideration the width of the foot, the distribution of the support and the overall morphological characteristics, elements which, according to the defense consultants, would distance Sempio from the trace left in the Poggi house.
The Prosecutor’s Office wants to verify precisely this point, because it is one thing to state that a certain footprint can be compatible with a certain size, while it is another to demonstrate that the suspect’s foot can actually produce that specific footprint, with all its characteristics and proportions.
Sempio’s foot and compatibility with tracks
The third in-depth analysis is closely linked to the previous one, but has its own technical autonomy, because it concerns the anthropometric evaluation of the compatibility between Andrea Sempio’s foot and the shoe prints considered significant at the crime scene, a passage that returns with particular clarity the point at which the investigation has reached.
The prosecution and defense are no longer just discussing new findings or new testimonies, but are rereading materials collected years ago and trying to understand which interpretation is best able to withstand a scientific comparison, and this is precisely the difference between a simple investigative suggestion and an element capable of surviving the examination of a trial.
The defense filed various reports on Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, palm prints, medico-legal aspects, genetic material and shoe prints, and the Prosecutor’s Office, after receiving these counter-arguments, ordered further checks with the aim of understanding whether the objections raised are capable of significantly weakening the prosecution case or whether the elements collected retain sufficient coherence.
In this phase, therefore, we do not necessarily look for new clues, but we try to measure the stability of existing ones, and it is precisely on this basis that it will be decided whether the investigation can make the leap from the investigative phase to the procedural one.
The psychiatric profile and the risk of forced interpretations
The fourth front is perhaps the one most easily transformed into a spectacle and, precisely for this reason, the one that requires greater prudence, because the psychiatric consultation on Andrea Sempio also concerns material collected through environmental interceptions, writings and behaviors that have already been widely discussed and reinterpreted outside the courtrooms.
Among the most cited elements are the monologues recorded while Sempio was alone in his car, in which he talks about the relationship with Chiara Poggi, the context preceding the murder and some details that the investigators are trying to place within the broader investigative framework.
The defense rejects any confessional reading of those sentences and maintains that these are reasonings formulated many years after the crime, at a time in which Sempio already knew he had returned to the center of investigative and media attention, and for this very reason any evaluation of their meaning must be carried out with extreme caution.
A psychiatric consultation, moreover, cannot establish whether a person has committed a murder, but it can help interpret behaviours, modes of expression, reactions and psychological conditions, offering the procedure elements that can only have value if inserted within a broader evidentiary framework.
This is precisely the border on which one of the most delicate battles between the prosecution and the defense will be played, because the risk, in a case that has also thrived on media suggestions for years, is that of attributing to a phrase or an attitude a meaning that forensic science alone is not able to transform into evidence.
Footprint 33 and the great misunderstanding of the «queen test»
For months, palm print number 33, found on the wall near the stairs leading to the basement where Chiara Poggi’s body was found, was presented as one of the potentially most important elements against Andrea Sempio, also because the prosecutor’s consultants attributed it to the suspect’s right palm on the basis of the correspondence of various fingerprint details.
The defense, however, radically contests this conclusion and maintains that the number of points that can actually be used is lower than that indicated by the prosecution’s consultants, as well as believing that some marks on the wall may have been interpreted as papillary features even though they were in reality interferences or irregularities of the surface.
Even in this case, therefore, the problem is not simply to establish whether a compatibility exists, but to determine how reliable that compatibility is and how much it can be valorised within a criminal proceeding, because the distance between an investigative indication and sustainable evidence in the courtroom can be much wider than appears in the media story.
The dispute over footprint 33 therefore remains open, but it is important to distinguish this element from the further investigations that are characterizing the final phase of the investigations, because the famous footprint is already part of a technical conflict that has settled in recent months, while the new consultations serve above all to complete the comparison between the theses of the Prosecutor’s Office and the objections advanced by the defence.
It is precisely for this reason that speaking of a single “queen piece of evidence” risks being misleading, because the Sempio case, at least in its current configuration, is not based on a single element but on a mosaic of clues which will have to be evaluated in their overall coherence.
From the laboratory to the judge, the truly decisive step
The Prosecutor’s Office does not have to prove Andrea Sempio’s definitive guilt by 28 September, because that step possibly belongs to a trial, but it must establish whether the elements collected are solid enough, convergent and resistant to defense challenges to justify moving on to the next phase.
In this sense, the number of clues matters less than their quality, because twenty-one elements can be irrelevant if the main scientific points of the accusation do not hold up, while even a smaller number of circumstances can take on much greater weight if they are coherent, verifiable and difficult to explain in an alternative way.
Likewise, the challenge of a single element does not necessarily determine the collapse of the entire reconstruction, because everything will depend on the ability of the Prosecutor’s Office to demonstrate that DNA, fingerprints, anthropometric compatibility and other clues converge towards the same scenario without leaving too much room for alternative hypotheses.
This is why the month that separates the investigation from September 28th will probably be much less televised than it might seem, because the fate of the new judicial line will not be played out in the statements of the lawyers, in the clashes between television programs or in yet another document shown live, but in the ability of a few scientific elements to resist technical verification and transform from suspects into usable elements.
The game will be played on a genetic sequence recovered many years ago, on the shape of a sole, on the width of a foot, on the quality of a palm print and on the interpretation of words spoken while believing one was alone, and it is precisely on this apparently tiny set of details that the decision to bring Andrea Sempio before a judge could depend.
Only then will the Garlasco case truly enter its most complex phase, because any new accusation will inevitably have to deal with an already existing judicial truth, the one that definitively condemned Alberto Stasi for the murder of Chiara Poggi, and it will be precisely the coexistence between these two levels, that of the sentence already pronounced and that of the new investigative hypothesis, that will make what could happen in the coming weeks even more delicate.
