Erba Massacre and Logic Massacre

Dear Beatrice,
How could the ruling of the Court of Appeal of Brescia, which last Wednesday did not allow the review of the trial requested a year ago by the deputy prosecutor of the Milan Attorney General Cuno Tarfusser, persuade me that Olindo and Rosa are guilty of the bloody news stories that we call the “Erba massacre”? I have been studying the case for years, that is, since December 2006, and there is no court that can convince me that these two poor wretches are assassins capable of carrying out several murders in the space of a few minutes, with an expertise and agility that not even specialized hitmen possess, without leaving a trace of their passage and without being seen by anyone. Moreover, Wednesday’s decision does not exclude that the review will be made, there is another level of judgment and the defense lawyers have already specified that they will appeal to the Supreme Court. Magistrate Tarfusser said immediately that he was “disgusted by this system”. And he says this as an insider.

Well yes, justice can make mistakes. It is made by men, imperfect and failing by definition. Personally, I do not fear a justice that slips into error but rather a justice that is not willing to question its judgment, rigid, arrogant. It is surprising that the judges considered the new evidence presented by the lawyers of the spouses sentenced to life imprisonment to be inconsistent, since it included testimonies never received, wiretaps never received, consultancies, investigations. In short, the new material necessary for a request of this type to be accepted was not lacking. The defense had played it safe, filing an impressive and solid mass of unpublished findings, which completely exonerated Rosa and Olindo. I believe that there is a precise will to place a tombstone on what was a proceeding in which everything was already taken for granted, namely that the monsters had been captured.

I still trust in a justice system that, even if faced with a miserable doubt arising from other evidence, calls itself into question to avert the hypothesis that innocent individuals are the ones paying for the crimes of others. The task of Justice is not to catch a guilty person who can satisfy the request and hunger for revenge that arise in the stomach of the community every time brutal and terrible crimes are committed, but to punish the guilty person. All the rest is justicialism, a return to the guillotine, to the gallows, to the public square where one can sit and watch, with vulgar enjoyment, the execution of the condemned.

I take this opportunity to thank Pino Corrias who today, Thursday 11 July, the day after the sentence of the Court of Appeal of Brescia, cited me in his modest and clumsy comment that appeared on Il Fatto Quotidiano, calling me «the last of the innocentists that I have met in this long and desolate march on TV that lasted a dozen years». Corrias believes that from my living room, in connection, I, without having studied the documents, in his opinion, support the innocence of Olindo and Rosa on the basis of down-to-earth and easy considerations. First of all, I would like to specify that I am not an innocentist, I am simply a person who is used to getting to the bottom of things without embracing the dominant thesis out of prejudice, abdicating his own mental faculties, and who is also horrified by the possibility that an innocent person could rot behind bars, something quite frequent even in Italy thanks to easy-going people like Corrias and not like Feltri. It is Corrias who has not studied, not Feltri who has been following the story since December 2006, when he was the director of Libero, a daily newspaper I founded. Corrias, in fact, insists on the confessions of Olindo and Rosa, confessions however full of contradictions (hundreds and hundreds) that clash with the scientific evidence and with the reconstructions of the crime scene. Corrias emphasizes that the witness, Mario Frigerio, the only survivor of the massacre, recognized Olindo as his attacker, shouting in court: “Murderer”. Well, it seems to me that Frigerio accurately described his attackers: tall, powerful, martial arts experts, short foreheads, dark skinned. In short, the perfect antithesis of Olindo and also of Rosa, the former being fair-skinned, anything but athletic, and the latter very petite. Frigerio never mentioned Olindo’s name, but it was insinuated to him by the investigators through their tone and a forbidden question, that is, a question that already contained the answer.

I can continue and review the last of the three elements, frail and cumbersome, on which the life sentence of Rosa Bazzi and Olindo Romano was based, and therefore talk about that alleged blood stain that was found (and this too is doubtful) on the door sill of Olindo’s car, a contaminated stain, which contained water and that anyone, trampling on the court after the arrival of the firefighters who came to put out the flames, could have produced. There are no witnesses who saw the couple fleeing from the building. The murder weapon, or weapons, is missing.

There were also no other traces, as if it were possible to carry out such a massacre and not be covered in blood from head to toe and not spill blood as one passed by to return to one’s home, where it is assumed that Olindo and Rosa had washed themselves but still without leaving any trace of any kind.

I do not urge Corrias to read the files he claims to have browsed through again. I simply invite him to use logic. However, I realize that to use it, one must be equipped with it.