The mystery of Guerrina Piscaglia, never found, declared dead 10 years after her disappearance

They have passed exactly ten years since the traces of Guerrina Piscaglia were lost, a fifty-year-old from Ca' Raffaello (in the municipality of Badia Tedalda, in the province of Arezzo) who lived with her husband Mirko Alessandrini and her son Lorenzo. From today the court of Arezzo, as required by law, declared her dead.

His disappearance was at the center of a crime case involving a priest, Father Gratien Alabi, a Congolese friar of the order of the Premonstratensians, who arrived in the town the previous year. Guerrina, who was facing difficulties related to her disabled son and her husband who was out of work, had fallen in love with Father Gratien, and she wanted to move on with him. The two began a relationship, but this love story had a tragic epilogue.

On the day of his disappearance, Guerrina Piscaglia had an appointment in the rectory with the priest, and indeed someone spotted her nearby, but she didn't come home for dinner. Despite the research, the woman was never found, neither alive nor dead.

At the beginning we thought of a voluntary removal, and for this reason the report of his disappearance was presented three months late, also because Father Gratien had reported that Guerrina had run away with the Moroccan street vendor – resident near Gubbio – whom she had invited home for a beer the day before he disappeared. But they were all lies: Guerrina and the priest had exchanged around 4 thousand messages and the priest, after his disappearance, shared some of them, false ones, trying to make people believe that they had been written by the victim, but his grammatical errors gave him away.

The investigators come to the conclusion that Gratien – who was expelled from the Premonstratensian order – had killed Guerrina on the afternoon of his disappearance, to make his body disappear: it is not excluded that the woman confided to him that she was pregnant, even if the hypothesis seems unlikely due to the victim's age. At the end of the investigations, the priest, now 53 years old, came sentenced to 25 years of prison for voluntary homicide and concealment of a corpse. Despite the ruling, despite having admitted the relationship with Guerrina, Father Gratien continues to profess his innocence. Meanwhile, the civil lawsuit brought by some of the woman's relatives is still ongoing with a request for one million euros in compensation.