Yara’s Case, Another Italian Story

“I’m sure there’s someone like me in every prison”: this is how one of Stephen King’s most beautiful stories, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, begins. The protagonist is Andrew Dufresne, sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife and her lover. Dufresne has always proclaimed his innocence, but all the evidence seems to be against him, to the point that even a prison friend, the narrator, is only convinced of his innocence during the 19 years Andrew has spent in Shawshank. “What the hell happened?” the friend asks him once. He smiles humorlessly and replies: “I guess there was a lot of bad luck that night. More than you can usually accumulate in such a short time.” Is Massimo Bosetti Andrew Dufresne? This must have been the question that has haunted Gianluca Neri for years, the creator and former producer of the successful documentary. Sanbareleased on Netflix.

Neri’s work on Yara’s case began even before Yara’s case. Sanba: He has been taking notes, putting aside videos, photos and testimonies for more than ten years. Until he finds what could be evidence to present at the trial: he manages to find a satellite image of the Chignolo Desola camp, taken before Yara’s body was found, but in that image Yara’s body is missing. This calls into question one of the main points of the accusation, that Yara was killed and then left to die in the camp; however, the evidence is not admissible by the judge, but Neri can therefore participate in the trial as a consultant – the press will be forbidden to film and record – and he can read the 60,000 pages of the investigation. We understand the meticulous work behind this documentary, the desire to put everything in order, and above all the desire to make clear that no, the story is not just the one we have been told so far: that Massimo Busetti is guilty “beyond reasonable doubt”.

A small digression: there are points of contact in the stories of Yara Gamberacio and Emanuela Orlandi. The first goes to the gym, the second to the music school, and then they both disappear. However, those places, the last ones where they were seen alive, always remain in the background. Then the story of Emanuela Orlandi becomes a kind of malignant tumor, if we have the courage to consider fragments of history as cancer cells, which can multiply if they take root in the right place, which is what happens in the case of Orlandi, where the scenario is Rome, home of a thousand legends. But Yara remains local, so we do not have – thank God – Popes and Presidents of the Republic, the man from Avon and the Americano, bosses and children of the Magliana gang. However, we have the prosecutor, Letizia Ruggeri, who takes part of that story – the DNA of the unknown 1 – and is convinced that this is the correct evidence, or rather the only one (moreover, it is DNA extracted from “organic traces” on Yara’s underwear).

From that moment on, everything will revolve around this part, whose story is told in more depth in the BBC documentary series. Unknown 1- Yara DNA from the investigationIn this documentary series, the main protagonist is Letizia Ruggeri: we see her training tirelessly in the pool, admiring her muscular physique; we see her wearing her helmet and riding her motorcycle. Ignoto 1 has become Ruggeri’s obsession, she admits that the Yara Gamberacio case has affected her more than other stories, because she is “also a mother”. In the BBC documentary series, the wanderings of this DNA from one laboratory to another are reconstructed, and we can feel the pressure that everyone feels; you can see the tens of thousands of tests carried out and the surprises that the analyses preserve. Events seem to accelerate suddenly when they find the nephew of the driver Giuseppe Guerinone, who frequents the disco near Cignolo d’Essola, and explode when Esther Arzovì, the mother of Bosetti, a character apparently written by Georges Simenon, appears. “The feeling is that it was not us who investigated and discovered things, but a superior force that decided when and how to lead us to the truth,” says a Carabinieri colonel.

Except that at the end of watching the BBC documentaries, which were also supposed to praise the work of the prosecutor, we understand for the first time that if there is a superior force it must be a sadistic entity, which was having a lot of fun. Confusion and pain. The feeling, which is even more reinforced by watching the documentary on Netflix, is that these millions were spent on investigations not so much to discover Unknown 1, but Ester’s extramarital affairs. The narrative of the Yara case in those years was obsessive, and this is particularly evident in Gianluca Neri’s series, which transmits clips from TV shows, from journalist colleagues “just doing their job”, from salons where criminologists writhe trying to find the phrase that makes the greatest impression on the audience, that elicits the most applause. We even see the unexpected Licia Colò, who says something she shouldn’t have said, and who arrives at the Gambirasios family before the investigators inform them. We watch with horror the “made for the press” montage of the alleged van driving around the gym, which turns out not to be Bosetti’s. Massimo Bosetti was arrested with the deployment of forces usually reserved for mafia bosses. We see the images of the crowd chasing him. “It was a mass hypnosis,” says Luca Tellese, one of the journalists interviewed for the documentary. “It seems to me that instead of applying the presumption of innocence, we are applying the presumption of guilt,” Mentana commented at the time in an episode of his program. moving target.

Gianluca Neri proposes a counter-narrative, deliberately using all the tricks and effects that the society of the spectacle offers: it is impossible not to cry in front of the images of the funeral, the dramatic organ in the background, which is slowly replaced by the declaration of innocence of Massimo Bosetti, the man nicknamed “il favola”, that is, with novelistic inclinations but very poor, who has become a meme on the internet, with that image on the sofa holding the cat and the two dogs. Of course, it would be better if the trials were in court and not on television and on social media, but now the famous horses have escaped and it is all a struggle between “narratives”, which sometimes use direct storms, before the crime even reaches the court. The viewers inside are divided, as usual, into the guilty and the innocent, but this documentary tries to highlight a third category, usually the most silent: that of the skeptics. In the end, pathologist Cristina Cattaneo is also skeptical, and at the end she almost says “the idea I had” but then thinks better of it, sighs, rolls her eyes, and says I can’t do the experiment again here. “Maybe…” he says. Maybe there was just too much bad luck that evening.