Via Poma, “To know who killed Simonetta Cesaroni, you have to hear that man”

He was twenty years old and, the August 7, 1990was killed with 29 stabs of a letter opener. Simonetta Cesaroni was found in via Poma, in the Prati district, in Rome. Of her She was on the floor, dead, naked, with white socks on her feet, her bra pulled down and a bodice resting on her. Who killed her so brutally was never known.

And this is how «the case of via Poma», as it was later called over the years, became one of those many unsolved Italian mysteries, a bit like Emanuela Orlandi, Ustica or Italicus: exhausting research, past years to make vague hypotheses, passing the baton between protagonists and extras, for a very intricate story that has remained hanging.

“But there is one person, who I know is still alive, who could give fundamental explanations.”

Raffaella Fanelliwho is a journalist by trade and who has never stopped following the investigation over the years, is so confident in saying it, that she has written a book about it, just published, entitled Who killed Simonetta Cesaroni? (Ponte alle Grazie, pages 219).

Because, if you still don’t know the name of that murderer, it’s true that someone actually knows but does not say. «At the crime scene serious mistakes were made by those who should have investigated», writes Raffaella Fanelli, «False clues and missed interrogations, bloodstains analyzed after twenty years. In via Poma everything is damned incomplete, intricate and confused. And the key to the mystery is precisely in the ignored traces, in the shortcomings and misdirections».

A fundamental figure, according to the author’s hypotheses, would be the lawyer Francesco Caracciolo of Sarno, president of the regional committee of Aiag, the Italian youth hotel association, where Simonetta worked. Now dead, he managed to go through the process unscathed: «I met him», says the journalist, «When they were trying Raniero Busco, Simonetta’s boyfriend, I looked for a lawyer. I was convinced of Raniero’s innocence, despite the fact that he had been sentenced to 24 years in prison. But there was a new blood trail in the elevator that didn’t add up. In short, I went to the lawyer who, who knows how for years had managed to pass himself off as dead by making him fall silent, and I had a disagreement: he tried to agree with me so that I didn’t say anything, but luckily I the recordings of that meeting and the photographer who accompanied me immortalized the moment. Caracciolo was the president of the Hostels, Caracciolo insisted that Simonetta go to the office that day, Caracciolo was searched for by someone with a crime not yet discovered, Caracciolo would have suggested a version to a witness: already in 2010 there was enough to look for him, but not it is done. He was definitely a shady person and, by his admission, had contacts with the Secret Service. He had mentioned that friend of his from SISDE, who is still alive and who however does not speak ».

Not to mention the fact that a few years after the killing of Simonetta, in 1999, by chance a commando led by Massimo Carminati, who at the time was on the loose but awaiting trial for misdirection in the investigation into the massacre at the Bologna station and for the murder of the journalist Mino Pecorelli, he opened and robbed a safety deposit box that the lawyer Francesco Caracciolo di Sarno had in the vault of the Banca di Roma branch, in Piazzale Clodio. “Why his? What was it? What was hidden in there?”

So many perplexities that Raffaella Fanelli exposes in the book: even that suicide of Pietrino Vanacore, the porter of the building in via Poma, accused of being in some way an accomplice to the incident, does not add up: «Vanacore was the lightning rod. I heard the son who has many doubts: how can a man drown in 50 centimeters of water? Isn’t it strange that, after years of allegations and assumptions, he killed himself three days before he was due to testify in court?’

The investigation into Simonetta has been reopened, «The investigations are still ongoing and must not be archived. There are those who can give explanations. They took blind paths: I am thinking of that obvious misdirection by super-witness Roland Voller who brought up Federico Valle, a twenty-year-old boy who was acquitted in the preliminary investigation phase. In the meantime, however, he wasted more time ».

Many hypotheses have been made, from sexual mania to the hoarding of compromising documents: «What if I had to reconstruct history? Well, in the meantime I would say that 29 letter opener shots on a body should have made that room a butcher’s shop and instead everything was clean. Simonetta was probably killed elsewhere or in any case someone had the time to clean up all that office properly. It’s easy that she was killed because she had discovered something, because she wanted to cover up for someone important to her. Let us remember that in that period there was an investigation into the black funds of the SISDE and that not by chance the lawyer Caracciolo had a friend in the SISDE… The truth, unfortunately, is stunned by the time that has passed. Thirty years is a long time. Too many”.