Arce crime, no one guilty for the death of Serena Mollicone: Marshal Mottola, his wife and son acquitted on appeal

Acquitted. Again. There are no guilty parties for the death of Serena Mollicone. The Court of Assizes of Appeal confirmed the first-instance sentence and therefore the acquittal for the Mottola family: Marshal Franco, his wife Anna Maria and their son Marco. The prosecution had asked for 24 years of imprisonment for the marshal and 22 for his wife and son.

The sentence was received in silence with the Mottolas embracing their lawyers. Afterwards, outside the courtroom, the protests. “There is divine justice!” shouted one of the protesters. Many had been in front of the Palace of Justice in Rome since the morning, wearing T-shirts with the words “Serena lives”. “I am very bitter. This is not justice” said Consuelo, Serena Mollicone’s sister. Mottola’s defense instead says that “justice has arrived twice”.

Two years have passed since the first-degree trial, issued by the Court of Assizes of the Court of Cassino. 23 years have passed since the crime. Serena Mollicone was found dead in a grove in Arce, in the province of Frosinone, on June 3, 2001, having disappeared two days earlier. She was 18 years old. It will take years to reconstruct the case: first the arrest of the body shop mechanic Carmine Belli, who had only testified to having seen the girl and spent 17 months in solitary confinement as an innocent man. From 2004 to 2008 no evidence allowed the investigation to be reopened until April 11, 2008 when Brigadier Santino Tuzi, who was, at the time of the murder, on duty at the Arce barracks, took his own life. A few days before killing himself, he had told his superiors and the magistrate that he had seen the girl enter the Carabinieri barracks in Arce on 1 June 2001 and that he had never seen her come out again.

In 2011, the Cassino prosecutor’s office requests the archiving of the five people investigated for insufficient evidence: the Mottolas and two carabinieri, Vincenzo Quatrale and Francesco Suprano. The Mollicone family presents an opposition and two investigations are launched.

According to the prosecution, after arguing on the street with Marco Mottola (as told by the body shop mechanic Carmine Belli), Serena forgot her books in the boy’s car. Then, she went to the barracks, to the Mottola apartment, to get them back. Here, during an argument, she was allegedly pushed by Marco Mottola and hit her head violently against a doorA very strong blow, so strong that it left marks on the door, which was later confiscated.

Serena, however, would not have died immediately. If she had been helped, she could have been saved. Instead, always according to the prosecution, she would have been left to die after five hours of agony. All this while Marco Mottola was going around the town in order to create an alibi for himself, and his father was procuring the tape and materials with which the girl would be tied up and abandoned in the woods. Later, according to the prosecution, the marshal would have set up, with the help of two colleagues, a series of red herrings to divert the investigation and save his son.

In the new trial there are five defendants, those accused of voluntary homicide and concealment of a corpse for the former marshal Franco Mottola, his wife Annamaria and his son Marco. The result is always the same: all acquitted and no one guilty for the death of Serena Mollicone.