The disappearance of Sarah Scazzi #3

August 26, 2010. The reconstruction

For to the Court, “decisive and definitive proof of the correctness of [this] reconstruction” of the relationship between Sabrina and Ivano and between the former and the victim, comes from a “datum of extraordinary genuineness” – Sarah’s last diary entry:

• August 26: “Today had the sweet awakening with the drill, last night then I went out for a while with Sabrina and her friend Mariangela, we went to the brewery for a quick red bull, then we came home and Sabrina as usual got mad because she says that when Ivano is there I’m always with him, and I believe you at least he cuddles me unlike her, I could have 1 boyfriend like that! But whatever, I’m used to it anyway.....By Buffy Rock 95”

According to all the testimonial evidence, on both the morning and afternoon of August 26, Sarah (once she’d returned from San Pancrazio) went to Sabrina’s house; but why would she do so if the relationship had broken down? The Court considers this issue, advanced by the defense, and replies that

once her brother had left, hanging out with Sabrina represented, for young Sarah, hungry for life and leisure, the only opportunity to get out, to escape from a family environment that appeared to her to be rigid and, at that time, with her grandfather dying and her mother busy caring for him, certainly bleak and oppressive.

Anna Pisanò’s testimony sheds light on the underlying conflict between the cousins, although her account of the morning – as well as the other portions of her testimony – has been rejected by the defense, who argued that Pisanò’s role as a “super-witness” (more on this later) was the by-product of her resentment towards Sabrina, of “her willingness to create misunderstandings” and of the shared religious beliefs with Concetta. The Court rejected this argument reporting that Pisanò and Sabrina were quite intimate friends before the disappearance and the religious practices Pisanò participated to still don’t explain why she would have falsely accused Sabrina. In any case, Pisanò was a client of Sabrina; she said she was close with her, although the latter contradicted her in court.

7:55-9:30 am: Pisanò said to the investigators and later to the judges that, on the morning of August 26, she went to Sabrina’s for a session (she worked as a beautician off the books); after like an hour, Sarah arrived. Pisanò noticed that she looked unhappy and that she didn’t greet her as usual. The prosecution used this episode to argue the confrontation of the night before continued on August 26, but the defense replied that either a) Pisanò was disliked by Sarah because two years before she had said to Sarah that her father was a womanizer or b) the story narrated by Pisanò was false since the other witnesses who saw Sarah that morning don’t report anything unusual about her. Make of that what you will.

12-12:30 pm: Once she had returned to her own home, coming from the Misseris, Sarah informed her mother that she was “probably” going to the beach with Sabrina and that, in any case, she would have to wait for confirmation by her cousin. Immediately thereafter, Sarah had asked to accompany her father, who was headed for meat and fruit shopping.

1:45-2 pm: Sarah left her house and headed for Sabrina’s without having received the confirmation message from Sabrina. This is corroborated by

• testimonial evidence (Sarah’s housekeeper Pantir, since the first time she was heard by the investigators, on September 1, 2010, but also later, on December 14, has always maintained that Sarah left the house to go to her cousin’s approximately shortly before 2 pm, after having quickly eaten a chicken cutlet; Antonio Petarra, an Avetrana resident and neighbor of Sarah, saw her walking down the street around 1:45 pm; likewise, a young couple;
• forensic-pathological evidence (medical examiner Strada calculated the ToD considering that Sarah had eaten precooked and homogenized food around 1:30 pm; this was contested by the defense for two reasons: a) the first, methodological, is based on the failure of the state’s forensic pathologist to analyze separately gastric content and b) the scientific questionability of the consequences of stress on the digestive phenomenon);
• cell tower evidence (the first worrying contact someone had with Sarah’s phone was Sabrina’s call at 2:42 pm – the call went to voicemail, apparently making Sabrina go in hyperventilation – and from the analysis of cell towers we know that, during this call, Sarah’s terminal pinged off the tower 40067-60241-TA-AVETRANA-Via Ludovico Ariosto-Sett.1, serving Michele’s garage, while, in the previous contacts from her schoolmate and Sabrina, the tower used was the one serving the Scazzis and the Misseris. This tells us that either Sarah was killed shortly before 2:42 pm by Michele in the garage or that Sarah’s corpse was moved in the garage by someone after she had been killed inside the house. If we hold forensic pathologist Strada’s conclusion that Sarah was strangled with a belt as true, the second hypothesis seems the more likely narration. If we additionally take into account that Sarah didn’t reply to her schoolmate messages and rings – and she was used to respond instantly according to the latter – we can conclude that Sarah was already dead at 2:25 pm and that moves the clock back also for Sarah’s departure from her house).

The Court stated that the reconstruction advanced by the defense – according to which Sarah waited for the 2:25 pm confirmation message in order to go to Sabrina’s – can’t be accepted also because it didn’t make sense for Sarah not to reply to her schoolmate Francesca’s messages if she was really waiting for the confirmation message and wasn’t engaged in any housework. The most plausible reasons why she left before receiving the message are to be identified with the fact that Sarah didn’t want to participate in the house renovations and was anxious to go to the beach.

The defense also attacked the testimony of Pantir indirectly arguing that the “young couple” – that’s the name media used to describe Giuseppina Nardelli and Fedele Giangrande – since a week after the disappearance have always said that they’d seen Sarah walking down the street after 2 pm. The Court countered that Sabrina had tried to influence the memories of the people involved in the case and that’s the distal cause of the young couple’s testimony:

[I]t is well understood how the imprimatur of a certain time indication that placed Sarah’s disappearance around 2:30 pm and, in any case, before 2:42 pm, the time when the search for her began, was provided precisely by Sabrina Misseri in the course of the interviews she gave, with the effect of conditioning not only, as already seen, the memories of Sarah’s family members, but also the information disseminated by the media.

That would explain why the missing person report compiled by Concetta mentioned 2:30 pm as the time of disappearance – Sarah’s mother had simply taken at face value Sabrina’s indication that she’d sent the confirmation message around that time. Moreover, in at least another occasion, Sabrina tried to influence directly a person informed about the facts surrounding the disappearance, namely Mariangela. This is an excerpt from an intercepted conversation between two on September 30, 2010 in the Carabinieri headquarters:

• S: “If… sitting under the porch I was, you know”
• M: “No, Sabri”
• S: “Look, you’re misremembering…”
• M: “No, Sabri”
• S: “That… that if I was sitting…”
• M: “No… you were sitting, last time you were sitting, when I came you were… And you had even closed the gate and I said, ‘what about Sarah?’”

It’s also a fact that the after-2-pm version was initially accredited because everyone thought the last movements of Sarah’s cell phone were genuine and not the result of post-mortem manipulation (more on this later), so it’s not illogical to think that the young couple could have “aligned” their memories with what they deemed to be true. Still, I think the defense raises a good point; ultimately, it’s likely that Giangrande and Nardelli misremembered or made a bad estimation because their original memory (in the later versions they admit it could have been also 2 pm) simply doesn’t fit with all the other evidence, especially Pantir’s testimony, who talked about 2 pm as the time of Sarah leaving the house when everyone else thought the correct time was another.

1:50-2:05 pm: Sarah arrived at Sabrina’s. Testifying to this there are Cosima’s intercepted words: “it would have been better if lightning had fallen on the house, electrocuting us all that day… electrocuting us all before the girl came”. It’s unlikely that she went to the garage as hypothesized by the defense since, even according to Sabrina, she wasn’t used to hang out alone there at all. Moreover,

It is utterly implausible that Sarah Scazzi – if previously molested, as the Defenses assume – could have decided, for no plausible reason, to voluntarily descend into the dark garage, into the clutches of her molesting uncle (as will be said shortly, just as the latter, enraged by the failure to start the tractor, was shouting and “swearing” like a possessed).

Sabrina testified in court that around this time (when, for example, she received her cousin Adamaria’s call and didn’t respond to it) she was resting in the double bed of her parents, though this is contradicted by Michele even when the latter was offering a completely self-accusatory version: he said that he’d talked to Sabrina in the house before Sarah arrived. On the other hand, Cosima – who according to Sabrina was lying next to her in the double bed – never mentioned the numerous calls, messages and rings her daughter had received in those minutes. Why would she lie about this, in any case?

There was, in fact, a need to defer the moment of her exit to the porch, in order to exclude the possibility of a meeting with Sarah at the moment when the latter – according to the defense version, which saw her leaving the house after receiving confirmation text messages from her cousin – was arriving at the Misseri house.

It’s difficult to understand, moreover, why Sabrina would send the message, “I’m trying [to poo] in the bathroom :)”, to Mariangela if, as she testified in court, the “attempt” lasted only a few seconds. But there are lots of contradictions in Sabrina’s accounts of the events. The shower that, according to previous statements, she had taken once she got out of bed, in the trial statements became a “rinse” of her private parts; regarding the message of 2:39:27 pm to Mariangela (“Ready”), Sabrina, in her statements of October 15, said she’d typed it when she was on the porch, but – faced with the contestation that she had stated that, 55 seconds earlier, when she had received the message from Angela Cimino, she was with certainty in the bathroom – she argued at trial that this message had been sent when she “was going out on the porch”. Concerning these details, the defense tried to deflect holding that Sabrina was in a state of “mental confusion” caused by her cousin’s – to whom she was very close – disappearance. The Court replied that

The detectable contradictions cannot be the result of mnemonic deficits, especially since, most of the time, this is not the explanation that was given by the defendant to justify the narrative inconsistencies.

At this point, though, we have to introduce a crucial witness who showed up quite late but was deemed genuine (at least in his first deposition) by the prosecution and then by the Court; his name is Giovanni Buccolieri and he was a florist in Avetrana.

The kidnapping: the dream of the florist and Cosima’s motive

The finding of kidnapping, contested in complicity to Cosima Serrano and Sabrina Misseri, in the reconstruction of the criminal facts constitutes the logical and factual antecedent of the murder of Sarah Scazzi: the young girl, shortly after entering the house, hastily left [Sabrina’s house], heading on foot toward her home; however, she was chased and immediately tracked down by Cosima Serrano who, together with Sabrina Misseri, forced her to board the Opel Astra car and, placing herself in the driver’s seat again, drove her back to her home in Via Deledda, where she was strangled.

The path by which the information about the kidnapping reached investigators was tortuous. On April 5, 2011, super-witness Anna Pisanò talked with the investigators to report that, in September 2010, she’d heard by her daughter Vanessa Cerra that “someone” she knew had seen Cosima grab Sarah by the hair, snatch her and throw her in the Misseri car on the afternoon of August 26, 2010. Pisanò had asked many times to Cerra who was this mysterious individual, but she decided to make his name only when she left for a job in Germany (saying that, if questioned, he would have said that it was only a dream). When Pisanò discovered the identity of the witness, she went to the investigators.

April 9, 2011 is the day Buccolieri appeared before prosecutors to offer information about Sarah’s disappearance. Only two days later, however, he requested another interview to retract what he’d already told, justifying himself by saying that he wasn’t sure it was real – it could have been a very vivid dream. The prosecutors immediately charged him with perjury, since either the first or the second interview contained false information. Then, in court, Buccolieri used his right to remain silent, although the content of the first interview was mentioned in the motivation report that sentenced Cosima (and Sabrina) to life in prison.

The florist’s dream is one of the most contested points of the sentence. The Supreme Court observed that Buccolieri retracting his testimony about having seen the kidnapping has to be explained in terms of an “attempt to evade the judicial responsibilities incumbent on him”. On the contrary, Cosima’s and especially Sabrina’s defenses argued that only Anna Pisanò reported the incident by talking about a real fact and not a dream, and that she cannot be trusted for the reasons described above.

Concerning the validity of the testimony, the Court considered firstly the discrepancy between Buccolieri’s preoccupation with the incident and it supposedly being just a vivid dream:

that Buccolieri continued, in the days and months that followed, to talk about the affair, albeit representing it as a “dream”, to relatives, relatives-in-law and friends while showing agitation and disturbance, however, makes it quite clear that he – aware of the seriousness of the episode and its significance as an essential junction in the reconstruction of the murder – could not help but think about it and, therefore, talk about it.

Mention has already been made of Pisanò’s credibility, which again becomes an important point here. The woman reported to investigators that her daughter had told her about the incident in terms of a real fact, while the daughter claimed that Buccolieri had only ever told her about a very vivid dream that made it difficult to understand whether it was real or not. Cerra said in court that, when she had asked again Buccolieri to go talk with the investigators, he replied, “If they call me, I deny everything”.

This is probably the strangest piece of evidence pertaining to this case, the only one directly implicating Cosima and it’s quite difficult to assess its validity. The Court considered the issue and tried to justify its reasoning in more than 100 pages. There are reasons both to believe and not to believe that it was a vivid dream.

Firstly, we know for a fact that Buccolieri did have a flower delivery to do on that day. Interestingly, his description of the abduction temporally preceded the discovery of Sarah’s body; this suggests that he may have been truthful insofar as he would have anticipated other evidence emerging from the trial. Another reasoning in favor of the theory that the kidnapping was real is that Cerra wouldn’t have asked Buccolieri to talk with the Carabinieri if his narrative had been really told in the terms of a dream; at the same time, Cerra wouldn’t have refused to tell her mother the name of the dreamer. It would also have been strange for Pisanò – if she had falsely said that the kidnapping was real – to have been able to predict that Buccolieri would speak in the terms of a real fact in his first interview. Finally, the Court considered that the fact Buccolieri said to Cerra that only she knew how things went proved that what he said to his wife and mother-in-law (namely, that it was all a dream) was false – in other words, only Cerra was able to listen to the “true” account of the events; Pisanò then managed to discover it and told about it to the investigators.

On the other hand, it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that Buccolieri to this day maintains that the prosecutors somehow convinced him that the episode was factual, when in reality, according to him, it was only a dream. Other bits of intercepted conversation suggest either that Buccolieri was truthful when he accredited the dream version or that he was trying to impose it to Cerra: “The two of us, when we talked, we talked about a dream and that’s all… we didn’t talk about anything else”. Others again seem to imply that there was a common preoccupation, between Buccolieri and Cerra, with not being involved in the case: “You have to say that… the right things, Va”, “But I said the right things”. In court, Buccolieri’s wife Giuseppina Scredo testified that her husband seemed worried about the “dream” because at the same time he told her about it circumstantial items against Cosima had emerged – but prosecutors replied that, in reality, Cosima became a suspect only in 2011, so it’d have been exaggerated for Buccolieri to be worried about the dream:

[Buccolieri], however, would have had no reason to feel such dismay if it was merely a dream going back in time or if he was in doubt between dream and reality, and even less so if [the story about the kidnapping] was the result of popular suggestion or a “collective dream” of the Avetranese who disliked Serrano. […] Unless we want to attribute to Buccolieri premonitory powers and divinatory abilities, it is not possible that, immediately after Michele Misseri’s arrest, he could have already had suspicions – based, it should be assumed, solely on the unjustifiable dislike he felt for a fellow citizen with a “strong” character whom he saw appearing on television – about Cosima Serrano, so much so that he became convinced of her guilt and “dreamed” of her involvement in the victim’s kidnapping.

It’s also important to ask what would be Cosima’s motive. The Court considered that

The attention that the entire family paid to the aspect of public consideration is further evidenced by Valentina Misseri’s statement at trial about the reasons underlying the reproaches that she and her sister Sabrina used to address to the young Sarah because of the young girl’s affectionate attitudes – which they considered excessive and out of place – to people of the opposite sex, or the makeup that was too “heavy” for her age, which could have, in the older cousins’ view, aroused the gossip of the Avetranese community (“people who talk and are gossipy”) by having the minor girl ‘labeled’ as a ‘no-good’.

Cosima was therefore greatly concerned about what might be said about her daughter if her failed intercourse and on-and-off relationship with Ivano were discovered and especially held Sarah responsible for the humiliation her daughter suffered. As for why she decided to follow Sarah back to her house like the florist had described, the Court considers that the news of the argument was not supposed to reach the Scazzi home – if it had happened, Sarah’s parents would’ve been outraged at Cosima and Sabrina for everything “improper” for a 15-year-old Sarah had discovered or participated to (especially in a rural, tight-knit community as Avetrana is): from knowing about the intercourse to being photographed in pajamas with Sabrina by a shirtless Ivano late one night in May 2010.

It is also shown that the defendant [Cosima] Serrano paid extreme attention to the profile of family respectability, opposing conduct of her daughter that appeared to her, in terms of mentality, age, and culture, to be excessively uninhibited – so much so that she regularly called Sabrina insulting epithets alluding to her sexual mores (“bitch”, “whore”). […] The affront suffered at the hands of the little girl, her rebellion against the authority of her aunt and the fear that she would reveal facts that would compromise the honorability of the Misseri family, generated a strong emotional reaction in the woman that induced her to commit the kidnapping and, once the little girl was brought back home, to commit the crime of murder.

Cosima Serrano

The murder and the weapon

According to the Court that convicted the defendants, Sarah entered the Misseri’s house and stayed there for only a few minutes before leaving abruptly. The fight that broke out that afternoon had to be different from the typical altercations between the two girls, having required the intervention of Cosima.

Sarah, who was attacked and reprimanded, did not suffer supinely this time: she must have experienced those reprimands, those accusations as so undeserved, disproportionate and unjust that she reacted harshly toward her aunt in harsh tones, and with accusations, certainly serious and unexpected, that affected not only her cousin, but also her aunt because of the seriousness of them. […] The questioning of the authority of the two women, Serrano’s outrage at what must have seemed to her to be intolerable accusations made by Sarah and an inadmissible act of rebellion, as well as a show of ingratitude on the part of the little girl who had been welcomed and raised “like a daughter” in that home, the realization that Sarah had grown up and was no longer the shy and submissive child who could be “managed”, but a person capable of reacting, responding in kind, questioning the authority of the two “parental” figures, even rivaling her older cousin and revealing her habits and secrets, shaming her before her mother’s eyes, all these things triggered the reaction of Sabrina Misseri and Cosima Serrano.

After they had returned to the Misseri’s house on the Opel Astra, Sabrina and Cosima strangled Sarah with a belt, one holding her down and the other tightening her grip around the neck. This is also corroborated by the forensic-pathological evidence: according to prof. Strada’s autopsy, “a flat, ribbon-like furrow in the front of the neck is clearly visible [on Sarah’s neck], even to the layman”, while “excluding the mode of strangulation hypothesized by the defense [i.e. a kind of complete hanging] is the absence of signs of fracture of the hyoid bone and cricothyroid cartilages”. Strada concluded therefore that the murder weapon was a belt, the seams of which produced the furrow present on Sarah’s neck.

Against the objections of Sabrina's and Cosima’s defense – which argued that the indication of the murder weapon was intended to shift the blame towards the two defendants – there is the fact that the autopsy was filed on November 11, 2010, when Michele was still the only suspect: Strada could not have known that Sabrina and Cosima would be investigated shortly thereafter.

It is therefore clear that the indication of a belt, not a rope, as the murder weapon preceded the reconstruction that, only later, by virtue of an unambiguous circumstantial framework, came to identify the Misseri family home as the scene of the murder.

The Court noted that “the defense counsel ultimately failed to provide a plausible alternative explanation for the presence of the whitish furrow ‘averaging 2.6 cm wide’ found on the front of the victim’s neck, nor did he effectively explain the origin and nature of the repetitive segmented, in-line impressions present at the edges of said furrow”. In response to the argument that the weapon may have been a rope (such as the one indicated by Michele), the Court underlined that Strada argued extensively that the furrow couldn’t have been produced by such a constraining means.

In addition to that, the Court holds that – since on Sarah’s neck “a sharp, smudge-free pattern was detected” and “the victim did not put up any resistance, especially since it was found that there was no further injury to the ‘structures’ of the neck” – the perpetrators of the vicious attack must have been two, namely Sabrina and Cosima. It was also argued that, if Cosima should be held responsible for kidnapping Sarah and make her go back to the Misseri house, then it becomes quite hard to explain how she didn’t also participate to the actual murder. If the florist’s story is not a dream, Cosima is responsible for killing her niece.