There is a grove in the province of Frosinone which is called Fonte Serena. Foreigners who come this far do not know why it bears this name. If they asked, they would hear a story that smacks of youth, school, family affections broken by drugs, murder, misdirection, horror. It is in this wood, about eight kilometers from the village of Arcein the Liri Valley, which on 3 June 2001 was found dead, after two days of searching, the eighteen year old Serena Mollicone. At the time the area was called Fontecupa and no one would ever have wanted to change its name. But the history of places often tells that of people. And this is a story that no one would ever want to tell.
A girl with soap and water
A girl like many others, Serena Mollicone. Brown hair, petite, five foot five of sweetness and affection for her father Guglielmo, who raises her up alone, together with her sister, after a bad illness takes his wife away. A life spent between school, the upcoming high school exam, the family shop, friends, the first boyfriends. But also the first pains: drugs circulate in Arce, some friends die. Papa Guglielmo, who teaches at the local school, tries to encourage the boys to keep away from him. «Serena was against drugs and she helped those who tried to get out of them», Guglielmo Mollicone would later say, «my daughter died for this».
A strange disappearance
The 1st June 2001 Serena gets up early to go to the hospital for an x-ray. She also has a date with the guy she’s been dating for some time. She leaves the house, we lose track of her. In the evening, when she doesn’t see her coming, Papa Guglielmo raises the alarm. To the carabinieri he says: “My daughter always warned when she was late.” The searches start. The owner of a bar says that that morning Serena walked into her club with some boys. They drove off in a white car. A coachbuilder, Carmine Belliconfirms: “I saw her in front of that bar, she was fighting with a blond boy.”
For hours of Serena there is no trace. Papa Guglielmo delivers his daughter’s diary to the commander of the carabinieri station, Franco Mottola, came to his house on purpose to ask him for research purposes. Oddly enough, the delivery is not recorded in any minutes.
Two days later, however, terrible news goes around Italy: Serena has been killed, the body abandoned in a grove, the hands and feet bound by wire, the head closed in a bag. Around her, her books and her school notebooks. But the cell phone is not there. The carabinieri go to the Mollicone house to look for him, they check everywhere, they open all the drawers, but they can’t find him. The autopsy establishes that there has been no sexual violence. The girl, however, received a blow to the head. From whom?
An investigation that doesn’t work
Papa Guglielmo is destroyed. He fears that his daughter has been the victim of some drug dealers. “He wanted to go to the barracks to report them,” he says right away. All of Arce is devastated. A torchlight procession is organized on 9 June. The whole country participates, and also father Guglielmo. When he returns home, he opens a drawer already checked by the carabinieri and finds his daughter’s cell phone inside. Has anyone entered the house to hide it from you? The number “666” is registered in the phone book. It is the symbol of Satan: Has Serena fallen victim to a satanic sect?
“I don’t believe it,” says Papa Guglielmo. Indeed, investigations in this direction turn out to be only a waste of time. Meanwhile the funeral is organized. During the religious ceremony, the police arrive by surprise and take away Serena’s father. The next day, suspicions against Guglielmo Mollicone stand out in all the newspapers. But it wasn’t he who hurt his daughter: in barracks he just had to sign some papers. Why take it out in front of everyone like that? Why focus attention on him?
An innocent in prison
Months of fruitless investigation. Then, in September 2002, just over a year after the crime, the carabinieri arrested Carmine Belli, the coachbuilder who had seen Serena arguing with a blond boy in front of a bar. According to the investigators, he would have killed Serena. However, he is convinced that he is just a scapegoat to close the affair and that his fault was that of having tried to help the girl’s search. Indeed, the blond boy with whom he claimed to have seen her the morning she disappeared, none other than Marco Mottola, the son of Marshal Mottola, a young man in the country rumored to be involved in drug dealing. “I’m innocent,” shouts Carmine Belli, who is portrayed as a monster and locked up in prison. At trial he is acquitted.
Then, for years, silence. Broken only by the requests of father Guglielmo to shed light on the crime of his daughter. Everything useless. Until 11 April 2008, when a carabiniere from the Arce station, Santino Tuziis found dead in his car.
A suicide that is not convincing, the investigation into the barracks
According to the carabinieri, the colleague killed himself for love: he had a mistress. He allegedly shot himself in his car with the service pistol, which is found in the seat next to him. Too bad that, some time before his death, Santino Tuzi had told the Prosecutor that he had seen Serena Mollicone enter the carabinieri barracks, only to not leave it, on the very day of her disappearance.
“My daughter went to report the marshal’s son”says papa Guglielmo, “they killed her for me. And they induced Santino Tuzi to commit suicide, who had finally made up his mind to speak up ».
The investigations focus on the carabinieri. And it turns out that Serena was actually killed in the barracks, following an argument. Later, a series of red herrings would be put in place to prevent the fact from being discovered. TO process the ex marshal Franco Mottola, his wife and his son Marco end up on charges of voluntary murder and corpse concealment. In addition to two carabinieri accused of aiding and abetting and the other of inducing Tuzi’s suicide.
Serena killed in the police station
According to the indictment, after a fight on the street with Marco Mottola (as told by the coachbuilder Carmine Belli), Serena would have forgotten her books in the boy’s car. Then, she would go to the barracks, to the Mottolas’ apartment, to retrieve them. Here, during a quarrel, she would have been pushed by Marco Mottola and would have hit her head violently against a door. A very strong blow, enough to leave marks on the door, which was then seized.
Serena, however, was not going to die right away. If she rescued her, she could have been saved. Instead, again for the prosecution, she would be left to die later five hours of agony. All while Marco Mottola went around the country in order to create an alibi, and his father obtained the ribbon and the materials with which the girl would be tied up and abandoned in the woods. Later, again according to the accusation, the marshal would have set up, with the help of two colleagues, a series of misdirections to divert the investigation and save his son.
The misdirections started before the searches
Misdirection started right away: the girl’s diary asked to dad Guglielmo with the excuse of having to look for the girl. Serena’s body was found in a grove far from the bar where she had been seen arguing with the marshal’s son, a place that would have been chosen on purpose to avoid an association between the two episodes.
The girl’s cell phone disappeared and then hidden in the house taking advantage of the absence of her father: on it, strangely, there were no fingerprints. The number “666” registered in the phone book to divert the investigation towards the satanic sects. The attempt to make suspicions fall on the girl’s father himself. The arrest of Carmine Belli, who as a witness to a dispute has found himself accused of murder. Finally, the attempts to convince the carabiniere Santino Tuzi to retract his deposition to the prosecutors and those of to pass his death as a suicide for love.
Only Serena’s dad is missing from the trial
“We are innocent,” shout the Mottolas. At the trial, their lawyers attempted to debunk the charges one by one. “DNA was found at the scene of the crime that does not belong to the defendants, and theirs are not there”, says the criminologist Carmelo Lavorino, who is part of the defense pool, “the door against which, for the prosecution , Serena would have been beaten cannot be the murder weapon, as the impact is not compatible with either the height of the girl or with the wound “. But for all the culprits are they. Too bad that Guglielmo is no longer at the trial: he died in May 2020, after spending twenty years of his life trying to get his daughter justice.
The story of Giulia rejected by her family because she is transsexual
Serena Mollicone, the father: “As for Cucchi we tried to hide the truth”
Serena Mollicone. according to investigators she was killed by Marco Mottola
Source: Vanity Fair
