I was reading the Friday's supplement of the newspaper
La Repubblica (the second newspaper in Italy for diffusion and readers) this morning.
What a surprise when I red the big title: Cold Case.
Considering that yesterday season 5 started, it's a pretty good publicity!
The article talk about this cold case team Italian style in Rome: very interesting.
Here's the pictures.
I tried to make a translation: it's not literal and I omitted some particulars...and sorry for my English.
"COLD CASE - So, in Rome, Police transformed fiction to truth.
Solved the murder of a woman killed in 2000 and of an elderly woman massacred in 1994: a squad inquire into unsolved crimes of the past using new technologies, as in a famous TV serial. Now target to the "case of the cases": the Orlandi mystery.
ROME. "And the Lord God said... Don't kill. Fifth commandment. Book of Exodus, 20 of the Holy Bible". In the Vittorio Rizzi's office, boss of the Rome's
squadra mobile, jealousy kept in a blue folder, there's the title page of the monumental user manual of the cold case squads of American police, which testify an obsession. "To honour dead people's memory finding their murderous. Because an assassin must know that sooner or later we will come. If it's necessary, ten, fifteen, twenty years later. But we will come" says Rizzi. When a corpse became powder, and when powder buried the file in some archive.
Vittorio Rizzi says that the idea to do what in other countries (like USA and England) is routine from decades, and today is also literature and fiction (
Cold Case, on RaiDue), was an obsession from years. When in autumn 2007 this idea became "master plan" of Rome's police headquarters, somebody smiled at it. Today nobody laugh.
Rome's cold case smell of nicotine and sweat, as every italian homicide department. Men and women are the same of the "hot cases". Rizzi smile: "When I get together the boys and girls for the first time to explain what I wanted, I said: go to the Public Prosecutor's archives, find all the unsolved murder's files of the last ten, fifteen years. Read them accurately, even the commas, and try to imagine if we can do something new, that wasn't tried years ago. Don't think that you are better than your predecessors."
A mind and laboratory's work. Less wear shoes. They use to do scientific tests: biologic, ballistic, forensic, genetic, behavioural. They examine the results and come back in the case through a never opened door. In other words, the cold cases removed from the glacier (thirty homicides committed in Rome in the last fifteen years) are compared with new scientific markers. For every case they do a probability calculus. Where Dna can lead us? And a prints? If probability go over a certain limit, the case is reopened.
Says Stefano Signoretti, homicide's boss: "Today the men of the scientific squad supervised by Alberto Intini can do what seven, eight years ago was unthinkable. Not only about Dna, but also the electronic system to compare fingerprints, or the connective tissue analysis that allow to find the exact hour of death. It's like going to the past with a time machine bringing with you the experience of the future. You reopen a case of the 90s and while you discover that the data about mobile phones and credit cards are useless, you realize that a fragment of the victim's tissue or a fingerprint is decisive."
In the last twenty years there are about sixty cold cases in Rome, and in a year the percentage of solved murders is 70%: in twelve months the scientific trail was decisive for the murders of Maria Scarfò (raped and killed in the night between December 29 and 30 of 2000 in the Rome-Naples highway) and Liliana Grimaldi (74 years old, strangled with a nylon stocking on may 1994, in her house). A Dna fragment extracted from a sanitary towel (Scarfò's case) and a fingerprint (Grimaldi's case) were the objective elements which permitted the solution of the murders.
Scarfò's killer was a serial rapist, who after the murder left other traces: police's archives collected his biologic and behavioural profile in retrospect. Grimaldi's killer continued to rob old people in their homes, leaving his biological sign.
The fifteen of the cold case squad -officers and cops of the homicide and scientific police, forensics, biologists, criminal anthropologists- meet three times a month and control the progress of the investigations of every cold case.
Two of them -two women-, contrary to the others who investigate also the "hot cases", are totally busy in the cold cases. Rizzi says: "I know it's like living walled in alive in the past. But I explained to them that a murder of fifteen years ago is like a murder happened last week, and that there is the reasonable hope to solve it."
The idea seems working. Another cold case is clearing up, and also the black zone called "missing persons" is investigated: in Rome, 3500 people since 1990. Among those, statistic and logic suggest murders never denounced. So, also Emanuela Orlandi's case. [This mistery] ended up to the cold case squad's table after the statement of Sabrina Minardi, ex fiancée of one of the leaders of the
Banda della Magliana, Renatino De Pedris, killed in Rome on february 2 1990. They work on this case at full speed, but Rizzi don't talk willingly about that. Too much noise. Too many profiteers. Too many dodgers.
"The solution of the cold cases" he says" needs silence and secrecy. You often have a thin thread in your hands, and maybe it's the only possible trace. I said: a killer must know that we will come. But nobody must know who will be the next. He must know that only the night we will knock on his door".
Carlo Bonini
il Venerdì di Repubblica, September 12, 2008"
she just doesn't know it 
