was theDecember 11, 2006 when to Foura town of 15,000 inhabitants in the province of Como, a massacre took place, making the small town the protagonist of one of the most heinous crimes in the history of Italian crime newsto. Of the “Slaughter of Grass” they were sentenced the spouses Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi, found guilty of the murder of Raffaella Castagna, of the 2-year-old son Youssef Marzouk, of the grandmother of the little Paola Galli and of the neighbor Valeria Cherubini. Killed by knife and bolt. But now new elements could bring the Attorney General Francesca Nanni and the lawyer Lucilla Tontodonati to reopen the casor. In recent days the pg of Milan Milan, Cuno Tarfusser, handed over to the two magistrates twenty pages to explain what the new alleged “evidence” is which could lead to the reopening of the case: a report drawn up on the basis of new elements presented by the defense of Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi.
A case he has on his shoulders over 16 years of final sentences, queen trials, confessions made and then retracted. The pool of lawyers of the two spouses has produced a series of new documents that the deputy attorney general of Milan Cuno Tarfusser has collected, asking the Attorney General – and therefore his superiors – to reopen the fileretransmitting the documents to the Court of Appeal of Brescia, “in all conscience, for the love of truth and justice and for the intolerability of the thought that two people, probably victims of a judicial error, are serving a life sentence”.
The “Slaughter of Grass”
On the evening of 11 December 2006 they were brutally killed Raffaella Castagna, her son Youssef, who was two years old, and her mother Paola Galli. She was also killed Valeria Cherubiniwho was instead Raffaella’s neighbor. Mario Frigerio, her husband, was slain, but did not die: he had maltormation in the carotid artery which prevented his fatal bleeding. Rosa and Olindo were the neighbors downstairs, in constant dispute with Raffaella and her husband, the Moroccan Azouz Marzouk due to noises that had already caused violent quarrels, insults and mutual threats. There had also been an argument on New Year’s Eve 2005 and one was also in progress civil case between the parties, which should have taken place two days after the massacre: on that occasion, the spouses Romano had attacked and beaten Castagna, who had filed a complaint against them for insults and injuries after an argument broke out that evening, while offering to put it back in exchange for monetary compensation. The episode, however, was only the latest in a long list of hostilities and slights between tenants, which frequently resulted in arguments and quarrels.
On January 8, 2007 they were arrested: Romano was accused of multiple aggravated murder, the woman of competition. On 10 January 2007, before the magistrates, the Romanos separately admitted that they were the perpetrators of the massacre, describing in detail the individual acts, the type of wounds, the position of the bodies of the victims and the type of weapons used. In the three levels of judgement, husband and wife will always be considered guilty, with the confirmation of the life sentence: during the trials the spouses they had then retracted the confession, declaring that they had done so on the promise of house arrest and sentences of a few years to be served in prison.
The request for a review of the trial and the new evidence
According to the reconstruction made by Corriere della Sera, a request for revision signed by the lawyers of Olindo and Rosa will arrive in Brescia in the next few days. Fabio Schembri and Luisa Bordeaux, the couple’s historic lawyers who in years of in-depth study have managed to find new evidence to submit to the judges. Enough to have convinced Tarfusser, the deputy prosecutor, of the defense theses: Olindo and Rosa are innocent. There are three main reasons: the confession of the two defendants, the testimony of Frigerio and the bloodstain of Valeria Cherubini on Olindo’s car.
In essence, the “new evidence” would not be new but would be analyzed in a new light. For the defence the acknowledgment of Mario Frigerio was a “false memory”, induced by the questions about Olindo that the lieutenant of the carabinieri Gallorini asked him while he was hospitalized in extremely serious conditions; Olindo and Rosa’s confession was obtained with “incorrect investigative interview techniques” and there are doubts about the collection, analysis and origin of the blood stain on the car door sill. Three issues already addressed in the second degree. But “they are ontologically”, explains the magistrate in his request for revision, “as are based on scientific, methodological and technological knowledge developed after the first decade of this centurybut even more so if considered and evaluated together with the evidence already evaluated and even more with the evidence in progress and never evaluated”.
Frigerio’s testimony
According to the Courier, “our consultancy brings many experts into play”said the lawyer Schembri, who “proves scientifically that Frigerio’s testimony was not genuine. Nobody says he lied. He had a brain injury and developed what science calls anterograde amnesia which makes it impossible to recover memories.” But this did not find the judges of the Cassation in agreement who instead objected: “Although admitting the suggestive nature of the questions asked by the carabinieri, the witness both before the prosecutors and before the judges always said that he hesitated to mention Olindo, at first, because he wanted understand how it was possible that a normal condominium, with whom he had never had conflicts, had attacked him and his wife so brutally”. Frigerio died years ago. He and his wife, Valeria Cherubini, were involved by chance in the dramatic story because they were going out with the dog when they met Olindo who would have left Raffaella Castagna’s house. According to the judges in three levels of judgment eliminated because they were inconvenient witnesses of that massacre. Frigerio told the first instance judges that he recognized the murderers: “I see them in the courtroom, it’s them, those two criminals, I recognize them. He looked at me with killer eyes.”
The confessions of Rosa and Olindo then retracted and the writings on the Bible
According to Tarfusser the confessions of Rosa and Olindo would have matured in “a context in which to define ‘sick’ is to exercise euphemism”. According to the defense the two spouses would have given in to the pressure of the investigators and victims of a real circumvention. The judges of the Cassation at the time objected that Rosa and Olindo had told a plausible story with details that only those who had been in that house that evening could know. For example: the position of the corpses; electricity interrupted with manual disconnection of the meter; the fact that Raffaella arrived home that evening in the family car and not hers as usual; the fact that the fire was fed by a pile of books, the point from which it started, the position of the bodies, the pillows left next to Raffaella in an attempt to suffocate her, the death of Youssef at the hands of Rosa who was left-handed and he was killed by left hand.
And then there’s what Olindo wrote on the Bible in his cell before retracting: “Forgive us, we didn’t know what we were doing”. And again: “God forgives even those like us who have experienced hell on this earth”, “Welcome into your kingdom Youssef, his mother Raffaella, his grandmother Paola and Valeria from whom we have taken away your gift, life”.
The bloodstain on Olindo’s car
The defense disputed the use that was made of that find which would have been taken in the wrong way so as to question whether it was not the result of a subsequent contamination that is, inadvertently brought into the car by one of the investigators who was working on the crime scene that evening. “The trace was particularly clear” wrote the Cassation, “so as to allow the genetic profile of Valeria Cherubini to be punctually enhanced (…) Being a high quality trace, it had to be excluded that it could have undergone many passages and that it had been exposed to degrading factors”. As for the report signed by carabinieri other than the person who took the sample, “although questionable as a practice, the territorial court believed that this modus operandi was understandable due to the excitement of the moment”.
The pain of the families of the victims
In the years the Castagna family and the Frigerio family kept a low profile. At the news of the probable reopening of the case Peter and Beppe Castagna they vented in a post on Facebook: “I was hoping it was over but here we go again”. And they re-propose a post written in October 2018. “Now, it’s not up to us to defend the prosecutor’s office or the investigators or their work, but allow us to defend the truth, which for us is only one, allow us to be indignant and incredulous in hearing people who define the guilty as innocent victims of summary and biased justice, even defined as ‘a gentle giant and a frail lady’. This gentle giant and this frail lady brutally killed our mother, our sister, our little nephew, Mrs. Valeria, they tried to kill Mr. Mario, breaking his life and our father’s life a few years later, making me and Beppe, a continuous nightmare for Elena and Andrea Frigerio”.