Avetrana is a small rural town – in beautiful Apulia, overlooking the gulf of Taranto – that comes alive especially during the summer season due to the influx of tourists looking for low-priced accommodation compared to the trendier resorts in the region. In the early 1980s, Avetrana was the site of demonstrations by the anti-nuclear movement in opposition to the desire of the national government to plant a nuclear power plant in the territory, though nowadays if you ask an Italian what is the first thing that comes to their mind when you say “Avetrana”, sadly they will almost certainly think of Sarah Scazzi.
Avetrana
Sarah’s case also arguably represents one of the latest examples of the “dark tourism” that has led hundreds of people to travel to the places where the most heinous crimes in recent Italian history – from the murder of Samuele Lorenzi to that of Meredith Kercher and Chiara Poggi – were committed. In the initial months following Sarah’s disappearance, the media has shone a spotlight on the small town from which Sarah disappeared and on its sometimes strange inhabitants. TV stations “dramatized” the whole affair and turned it almost into a soap opera for their loyal viewers. The lowest point in this story was finally reached when, on October 6, 2010, a reporter broke the news of Sarah’s body’s discovery to her mother on live television. This is how journalist Stefano Nazzi describes what happened in Avetrana in the days following Sarah’s disappearance:
From the end of August 2010 and for many months it became one of the most famous places in Italy. A place where an ugly crime had happened turned into a TV set where all rules were skipped, where reporters competed to grab exclusive interviews with those who perhaps had nothing to say.
It should be noted that – despite the fact that the criminal cases mentioned here have occupied the front pages of newspapers and news programs for a long time – it has become much more difficult in recent years for similar events to be treated so obsessively and morbidly by the mass media. Of course, TV programs that unabashedly eviscerate every aspect of a said murder still exist, but traditional news channels now seem to adhere to more careful guidelines on how to treat crime cases.
1. The disappearance
On the afternoon of August 26, 2010, at the Carabinieri Station Headquarters in Avetrana, 15-year-old Sarah Scazzi was reported missing, having left home – as her mother Concetta Serrano Spagnolo declared – in the early afternoon to go to the house of her cousin Sabrina Misseri, with whom she was supposed to take a trip to the beach. Sarah had on a pink T-shirt, pink shorts, and flip-flops, carried a black fabric backpack with writing on it, as well as the inseparable cell phone, recently received as a gift from her older brother and which she always held in her hand.
Who was the 15-year-old and what can be said more precisely about the hours surrounding her disappearance? Sarah reportedly had a strong character, was a bit lazy, liked Avril Lavigne and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She suffered from being away from her father and especially her brother, to whom she was very close (the two men were working in Milan at the time of the incident). She probably resented her mother’s strictness and saw her cousin Sabrina’s family as a safe haven, to the point of asking to be “adopted” by her aunt Cosima Serrano and her uncle Michele Misseri (at least this is what Cosima and Sabrina will say later).
Concerning what happened in the hours around Sarah’s disappearance, her mother Concetta reported that Sarah had left the house around 9 am; she had returned briefly during the course of the morning to get some money needed to buy some cream on behalf of her cousin Sabrina, and then she had gone home to go, almost immediately, in the company of her father to do the groceries around 12:30 pm; the two had returned home shortly before 1 pm. What happened next is a point of contention, but the most likely conclusion is that Sarah left her house to go to the Misseris between 1:55 pm and 2:00 pm – as indicated by Sarah’s housekeeper Maria Ecaterina Pantir – lying to her mother by saying that she had received Sabrina’s message telling her to go to her house.
Then, at 2:23 pm, Sabrina received a text message from her friend Mariangela Spagnoletti (“[give me] the time to put on the costume and I’m coming”) and immediately afterward notified her cousin (2:25:08 text message from Sabrina to Sarah “put on the costume fast and come”). Sarah, who had no cell phone credit, answered with a ring at 2:28:46 – this is her last alleged communication.
In an email sent to the editor of a local magazine in late August and made public in early September, psychic Rosemary Laboragine wrote:
I see a house but also a kind of garage. I don’t know, unfortunately I have a feeling of death. I feel her buried in the nearby countryside. I see wood and water.
Sarah
2. The investigation
The search for Sarah begins a few days late by virtue of the fact that her disappearance was initially thought to be a voluntary departure. Sabrina suggests investigating Sarah’s father’s hometown and his unsavory acquaintances there. A man from Lecce who had sent a message to Sabrina pretending to be Sarah is heard by the Carabinieri. It also turns out that the 15-year-old had three Facebook profiles and had recently communicated with a married man, but this trail leads nowhere. On September 7, 2010, Carabinieri from the Taranto Investigative Unit
handed prosecutors a report in which they requested (and obtained) an
urgent wiretap of Claudio’s cell phone, since it was “suspicious
that the young man did not feel the need to return to Apulia to
inquire directly about his sister’s fate”.
An initial breakthrough in the investigation came with the discovery of the victim’s cell phone by Michele Misseri on September 29, 2010, the day after he was interrogated by the investigators in this case. Misseri recounted that he had gone, with the intent of retrieving a lost screwdriver, to a plot of land where, the previous day, he had done some cleanup work with a friend. There, in a burned pile of olive leaves, he had found the cell phone.
On October 4, 2010, at 4:20 pm, Michele Misseri was served an invitation to appear in the afternoon of October 6 at the Taranto Carabinieri Provincial Command. On the same evening, at 9:58 pm, a phone call between Sabrina Misseri and her ex-boyfriend Andrea Merico was intercepted, in which Sabrina was concerned about the fingerprints left by her father and herself on Sarah’s phone, admitting that she had touched the device on the very day of Sarah’s disappearance.
On October 5, a soliloquy of Michele Misseri in his car was recorded at 5:59 am. Misseri closed the door but did not start the engine and, after standing still and in silence for about a minute, spoke to himself, uttering the following words: “I feel sorry for my family... if they go... I will find them out [sic]”.
On October 6, Michele, his wife Cosima and their daughter Valentina went together to Taranto for their interrogations. At 7:59 am, a conversation was recorded in their car: Cosima advised her husband not to be specific about the times when, on the morning the cell phone was found, he had left home. At 15:46 am, Giuseppe Serrano, colleague and brother-in-law of Michele, tells the investigators that, on August 26, the latter arrived at work “way behind schedule”, 45 minutes later than when he was supposed to be there. Finally, in the evening, after 9 hours of interrogation,
As the search for the little girl continued unabated, Michele Antonio Misseri confessed to having killed his niece, strangling her, and to having suppressed her corpse; he, reserving the right to clarify at a later date the reasons and modalities of that insane act, led investigators to a well located in contrada Mosca in the countryside of Avetrana and allowed the discovery, following laborious digging operations that lasted all night, of Scazzi’s lifeless body and some of her personal belongings. Misseri’s confession was recorded in the presence of his defense counsel.
Misseri confessed that, the day Sarah disappeared, he was working in the garage to fix the tractor that wouldn’t start. At 2:25 pm, Sarah had suddenly arrived and, coming down to the garage, had told him “Uncle...” without adding anything else. The moment the little girl had then turned again to leave, Misseri had taken a piece of rope and twisted it around her neck twice, tightening about five to six minutes, even after Sarah had fallen to the ground. Misseri claimed that he had been seized by an “inexplicable rapture”, by a burst of nerves caused by the tractor not starting, but that it was not at all his intention to rape his niece, toward whom he had no sexual attraction.
The following day, during the hearing for the confirmation of the provisional arrest, Misseri changed drastically his account. To the judge’s and prosecutor’s questions about the possible sexual nature of the cause of his attack, he answered enigmatically: “It may be as well”. He confided that he had sexually assaulted Sarah on August 26, that she had reacted and he had had to kill her.
On October 15, 2010, Misseri was heard again and that consisted of a turning point in the case. In the morning interrogation, he confirmed the self-accusatory version already set forth in the two previous ones, but enriched it with details: he claimed that Sabrina had looked out onto the garage ramp immediately after her cousin’s killing, while Sarah’s body lay covered by a piece of cardboard; to the prosecutor’s objection that, in that case, Sabrina could not have failed to notice at the very least Sarah’s beach slippers, which had been left out of that hastily organized cover, Misseri further modified his account, asserting that Sabrina had arrived at the garage entrance to warn her father that she was going to the beach, and she had noticed Sarah’s body covered by the cardboard. Sabrina had exclaimed: “Daddy, what have you done?” and had burst into tears.
The “glaring inconsistencies” inherent in this version led prosecutors to suspend the interrogation at 11:35 am. Three hours later, at 2:26 pm, a new interrogation began:
Misseri claimed that Sabrina had forcibly dragged Sarah into the garage, where he was already standing, in order to verify, in a three-way confrontation, whether it was true that he had molested Sarah, as she had reported to her cousin. Upon Scazzi’s confirmation, Sabrina Misseri had pinned her down, encircling her around the waist with her arms and demanding that she tell the truth in front of her father; the latter, at that point, becoming impatient, had strangled his niece with a rope he was holding, twisting it around her neck, while his daughter held her cousin down.
From the left: Sabrina Misseri, Sarah and Michele Misseri
3. Sabrina’s detention and Michele’s accusatory statements against her
On October 18, 2010, Sabrina Misseri was questioned by the preliminary hearing judge, denying any involvement in the killing of her cousin. Four days later, a conversation that took place in prison between Michele Misseri and his daughter Valentina was intercepted and filmed. After an initial moment of emotion upon seeing his daughter again, who immediately reminded him of Sabrina’s status, detained because of his accusatory statements (“Daddy, but look I love you anyway, you know? Sabrina loves you too, of course she can’t come now, she knows you’re here, right?”), Michele, shaking his hands, told her in dialect: “The fact... Which Sabrina is hiding… [I wish] she would talk about it”.
On November 3, criminologist Roberta Bruzzone was appointed as a consultant to Michele through his defense lawyer Daniele Galoppa. Two days later, in jail, Misseri had a conversation with Galoppa and Bruzzone; he began to cry and, quite unexpectedly – after he had until then described the incident by reverting to the initial exclusively self-accusatory version – declared that he was not the one who killed Sarah, but his daughter Sabrina. For that reason, with the consent of Misseri himself, a request was made by his defense attorney for investigators to come in for questioning.
At 3:32 pm, before prosecutors, Misseri articulated a version in which he declared himself to be completely uninvolved in the murderous action, which he attributed to Sabrina. Misseri declared that after he had finished eating, at about 1 pm, he had been called by his daughter who had told him, “Daddy, come to the garage ‘cause something happened”. He had then gone there and found Sarah on the floor, with her arms towards the door and with a rope (a meter long, not too tight and with many knots) twisted around her neck; Sabrina had said that her cousin had fallen while they were playing. “[Sabrina] says they were playing in the garage… she says she slipped and fell [...] however, in my opinion, to show that it was suicide she put the rope around her neck…”
Prosecutors deemed this story illogical because of the weapon used, the dynamics of the murder, and the justification given by Sabrina, so they stopped the questioning at 4:10 pm, at the request of the defense counsel, and resumed at 5:04 pm (after Misseri had conferred with attorney Galoppa and consultant Bruzzone). At this point,
Misseri mutated his account by reporting that the murder weapon was a “belt”, not a rope, and claimed that he had been awakened, while he was asleep in the deck chair, by his daughter Sabrina who, in a state of agitation, had said to him: “Dad, come here for a moment ‘cause something has happened”; following his daughter, he had run into the garage and had seen Sarah lying on the floor upright on the right side of the slide, with her head down facing the entrance; he had then exclaimed “But what is it that you have done?” and his daughter had told him “Yeah, anyway she was bothering me as well”. Misseri later specified that to the question “What happened?”, his daughter had said “I was playing with Sarah… she slipped, she fell”, and to his further question “And the belt around her neck, why does she have it?”, Sabrina had replied, “She was bothering me anyway”.
November 19, 2010 was the day of the special evidence pre-trial hearing (whose function is to “anticipate the acquisition and formation of evidence during the preliminary investigation”). These are the salient points:
- Michele essentially reaffirmed the heteroaccusatory version against Sabrina, but also reintroduced the theme of the “game” that allegedly led to Sarah's death;
- he admitted he had confessed the truth (i.e. Sabrina’s responsability in the murder) to a priest two days after he was arrested, and that happened significantly earlier than his first version mentioning Sabrina;
- he specified that he had never asked Sabrina why she had killed Sarah being able only to speculate that the reason was jealousy for Ivano, since he had heard from others that she liked him and, from Sabrina herself, after Sarah’s death, that the young girl had become “too attached” to Ivano;
- when asked why he had accrued the decision to accuse his daughter Sabrina, he replied, “Why did I have to do so many years if I did not do that thing?”;
- Michele added that while he was searching with his daughter for Sarah’s SIM card, Sabrina had only asked him if Sarah was in a safe place, and he had answered in the affirmative, that is, that the body was in a safe place, where only he could find it; his daughter had also asked him about Sarah’s cell phone, and he had told her he had destroyed it.
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