Elisa Claps had left to go to mass. It was a Sunday in September 1993. It has been since that day disappeared until her body was found 17 years laterin 2010, in the attic of the church of the Santissima Trinità in Potenza.
From this evening, for three consecutive Tuesdays, until November 7, on Rai Uno (or alternatively on RaiPlay for online streaming), For Elisa – The Claps case will retrace the tragic story of the sixteen-year-old: the Italian television miniseries is directed by Marco Pontecorvo and produced by Fastfilm Srl Cosmopolitan Pictures Limitedand stars Gianmarco Saurino (as Gildo Claps) and Rosa Diletta Rossi (who plays Elisa).
The disappearance of Elisa Claps is also linked to that of British dressmaker Heather Barnett, a single mother of two teenagers, who was found covered in blood and mutilated in her home in Bournemouth, England on November 12, 2002. The plot of the miniseries unfolds, therefore, through a period of twenty years, connecting events that occurred between Potenza and the English coastand culminates with the discovery of the terrible evidence against Danilo Restivo. For Elisa – The Claps case is based on the 2012 book Blood on the Altar by the writer and journalist Tobias Jones and was created with the advice of the Claps family.
Who was Danilo Restivo
The youngest of three children, Elisa Claps was a student attending the third year of classical high school in Potenza. That September 12th she had told her brother Gildo that she would be home for lunch. The investigation was initially assigned to the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Potenza: it was discovered that Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a twenty-one year old who, from Sicily, had moved to Basilicata with his family as a child. A few hours after Elisa’s disappearance, Restivo he showed up at the emergency room with bloody clothes to have a cut on his hand treated. The clothes, however, were not seized immediately, and Restivo was unavailable for the next two days with the excuse of a university exam in Naples. The investigators discovered that Restivo had a habit of bothering the girls he fell in love with anonymous phone calls. He also used to secretly cut a lock of their hair. When his advances were rejected, he became aggressive. As soon as Elisa’s mother learned that her daughter had met Restivo, she declared that, in all likelihood, the young man had killed her and hidden her body. She asked to focus the investigation on the boy, but she was not listened to.
The discovery of the body
On March 17, 2010, seventeen years after Elisa’s disappearance, her remains were found by chance, by some workers who were carrying out renovation work due to water infiltrations, in the attic of the church of the Santissima Trinità. According to the girl’s family, the discovery would have been a staging: they believed that it had happened previously and kept hidden by the parish priest of the church, Don Domenico «Mimì» Sabia, who died in 2008. When it was ascertained that the body had actually been found previously by the deputy parish priest, he said he had not spoken about it to anyone because that day the archbishop was busy and that the next day the question slipped his mind.
On 19 May 2010 Danilo Restivo, who in the meantime had moved to England, was stopped by the police on charges of voluntary manslaughter of his neighbor, Heather Barnett.
The autopsy on the remains of Elisa Claps highlighted that the young woman had been killed with 13 blows from a stabbed weapon and pointed. The investigators also noticed some typical signs of Restivo, such as the cut lock of hair, and the suspicions were confirmed by dactyloscopic analyzes on the findings: the traces and DNA found on the t-shirt worn by the victim belonged to Danilo Restivo.
The processes
The English trial, which ended in 2011, and the Italian one, in 2014, sentenced Restivo to total sentence of 70 years, 40 years in Great Britain and 30 in Italy. The Italian first degree trial lasts three days, from 8 to 11 November 2011: in addition to 30 years in prison, the man is sentenced toperpetual disqualification from public office and probation for three years at the end of the sentence, in addition to the payment of 700 thousand euros to the Claps family as compensation. On appeal, in 2013, the conviction was confirmed.
On October 23, 2014, exactly 9 years ago, the Supreme Court also confirmed the convictionconsidering the murder of Elisa Claps to be “extraordinarily serious, carried out by a person fully capable of understanding and wanting, as demonstrated by the lucid defensive strategy put in place and the self-control shown in court”.
Source: Vanity Fair
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