Murder of Yara Gambirasio
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The disappearance of 13-year-old Yara Gambriasio became known as the murder that obsessed Italy for years. Her killer left behind his DNA on her clothing, but Italian police could only identify him as Unknown 1.

Unknown 1 quickly became the number one suspect in Yara's disappearance and murder. But the only problem was, the police didn't know who Unknown 1 was. His DNA wasn't in any local or national DNA databases. It was as if their suspect didn't even exist.

How could police and forensic scientists use genealogy, DNA testing, and old-fashioned detective work to finally track down their suspect, Unknown One? This week on Forensic Tales, we cover the murder of Yara Gambirasio, the murder that obsessed Italy. ♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. As always, I am your host, Courtney. Each Monday, we release a new episode that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case.

Now, some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases have been left sitting on the shelf collecting dust in the cold case division just waiting to be solved by forensic science.

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Our story this week takes place in the Italian region of Lombardy, called Brombat di Sopra, which is about an hour or so north of the city of Milan.

Now, you guys, before I really get into this week's story, I just want to apologize in advance for my pronunciation of a lot of these names and places in this week's episode, as most of them are Italian and I don't have any experience speaking Italian. But I promise to do my very best with this one.

So on November 26, 2010, around 5.15 p.m. in the evening, 13-year-old Yara Gambriasio left her home to practice her gymnastics routine at a local gym, and she needed to return a stereo to her instructor, which was only about 700 meters away from her house. So she wasn't going to be very far.

So Yara left the house wearing a Hello Kitty t-shirt. She was a girl who had a mouth full of braces. She was just a young teenager who left her house to practice for an upcoming performance. Now, Yara had an older teenage sister and she had two younger brothers who were both under the age of 10 years old. Her dad was a local postman and her mom was a teacher in a neighboring town.

So even though Yara was only 13 years old at the time, I'm sure her parents felt fairly comfortable with the fact that their daughter was only going to be a few hundred meters away from the house and she was only going to drop off a stereo with her instructor and then she was basically going to come straight home.

Now, around 7 o'clock p.m., Yara's parents started to worry about their daughter when she didn't return home on time. So just a few minutes later, at 7.11 p.m., Yara's mom tries to get a hold of her by calling her daughter on her cell phone, but Yara doesn't pick up. And not only did she not pick up the phone, her mother's phone call actually went straight to voicemail, so her cell phone didn't even ring.

Now, Yara's mom and dad didn't really waste any time. And just about 20 minutes later, they called the Cara Bignari, which again, I apologize if I'm pronouncing that wrong. But the Cara Bignari is Italian's main law enforcement agency. And they called to report that Yara was missing, that she didn't return home on time.

So the call for missing Yara was put through to the public prosecutor's office and the case was right away assigned to a very experienced Italian magistrate.

So Yara's case was assigned to 45-year-old Letizia Ruggeri, who was a former policewoman, and she had actually been an Italian magistrate for just over 15 years by this point. So you really wouldn't want anyone else but this lady working on Yara's case.

So once the call came in about missing 13-year-old Yara Gambriasio, Ruggeri dispatched both the state and the military police to Yara's hometown. And when police get there, they quickly confirmed with Yara's gymnastics instructor that Yara had in fact been at the gym earlier that evening and that the teenager just did some exercises there in the gym before heading home.

Now, a search of Yara's cell phone revealed that the last communication either to or from her cell phone was at 6.44 p.m. that evening. And the text message was just between Yara and one of her girlfriends, Martina. And the girls were just agreeing to meet up with each other on the following Sunday. And that was pretty much it.

And after that text message around 6.44 p.m., her phone records basically just go cold. There's no incoming calls, there's no outgoing calls, no text messages, nothing. So Letizia Ruggeri, who was the magistrate in charge of Yara's case, immediately called in Italian tracker dogs to help in the search for missing Yara.

They brought the dogs to the gym where she was last seen in hopes they would be able to track her scent to her current location. But instead of the dogs following Yara's scent back to her house, the dogs actually went in a completely opposite direction towards the town of Mapelo.

Now, the direction the tracker dogs took matched the last signals of Yara's cell phone that pinged a cell tower in the city of Mapello at 6.49 p.m., a huge sign that they were headed in the right direction to find Yara.

Even though Yara's parents didn't appear to be involved in their daughter's disappearance, the Italian police still had to look into the possibility and they needed to officially rule them out as possible suspects in the case. So Ruggeri and her team of Italian investigators not only questioned Yara's parents, but they ended up questioning the entire Gambriasio family.

But she couldn't find any evidence to suggest that Yara's parents or really anyone in the Gambriasio family for that matter had anything to do with Yara's disappearance. Now, Ruggeri and her investigators knew that Yara's cell phone pinged in the Mapello area the evening that she went missing.

So to get a better idea of the people who were in that area that night, she put up wiretaps on literally hundreds of people's cell phones. And besides the wiretaps, she also had her team basically track and trace all of the cell phones that passed through Mapello that evening, which turns out was over 15,000 cell phones.

The first big tip from the wiretaps on the cell phones passing through Mapello the night Yara was last seen came shortly after her disappearance. And it came from the cell phone of a Moroccan man by the name of Mohamed Finkri. In one of these recorded phone conversations, Finkri was recorded as saying, quote, forgive me, God, I didn't kill her, end quote.

Now, okay, we've got this guy in the city of Mapello where Yara's cell phone was pinging shortly after she disappeared. And now we have him saying something about not killing her. So, of course, Ruggeri and her team really wanted to talk to this guy and they wanted to talk to him right away.

When they arrested Mohamed Finkri on December 4th, if he didn't look good for it already, he looked even better when police found a blood-soaked mattress in his van.

But unfortunately for investigators and especially for Yara's family, Finkrey was cleared as a possible suspect shortly after his arrest and he was officially cleared in Yara's case. Now, weeks turned into months with no sign of Yara anywhere and the hope of finding her alive started to really fade into the new year.

Yara's family stayed completely out of the media during this time. They were declining any interviews about the case. And it was even when they were approached about a torchlight procession to basically bring more awareness and attention to Yara's case that they declined. They didn't want any part of it. So three months go by and there's no sign of Yara anywhere until February 26, 2011.

A man was flying his remote-controlled plane about five or six miles away from where Yara lived and was last seen. Now, the area that he was flying his plane is basically just an open field. There aren't any houses or anything like that. So it was a pretty good spot to do something like fly your remote-controlled plane.

But the plane wasn't working so well, and it actually went down and crashed into a field of some tall weeds. So the man goes to find his airplane, and once he gets there, the first thing he sees are girls' clothes and some pairs of shoes.

Ruggeri and her team of investigators show up at the site, and it's clear that they have discovered the body of Yara Gambriasio. She was wearing the same exact clothes as she was last seen in, and she still had that same Hello Kitty t-shirt, the same black bomber jacket. There was no question in the mind of investigators that this was Yara.

Her body was discovered in a pretty advanced state of decomposition, which tells us that she likely died very shortly after she disappeared some three months ago. And very close to where her body was found, police also found her iPod, her house keys, and they also found the SIM card and battery to her cell phone. But it's important to note that the actual cell phone was nowhere to be found.

Yara's autopsy was conducted by one of Italy's most renowned forensic pathologists. And the pathologist discovered traces of lime in her respiratory passages. And she also discovered the presence of jute on her clothing, which is basically a vegetable fiber used to make rope.

So the autopsy revealed that Yara hadn't been raped, but she did have many injuries on her body from what appeared to be some sort of sharp object. But the worst part is that the pathologist believed that Yara didn't actually die from those injuries, but rather she had died from exposure.

So the presence of Lyme and Jude suggested that Yara's killer may be involved in some sort of building trade, or maybe he's some sort of building worker. And forensics also recovered two DNA samples. One was from her cell phone battery, and another sample was from the black gloves that she was wearing.

So both DNA samples were sent off to the forensics lab and they went through testing basically in order to determine if the sample matched any of the DNA samples in both local and national DNA databases. But both samples didn't match anyone on record.

Now, even though Yara wasn't sexually assaulted by her killer, a few weeks after the autopsy, forensics found another DNA sample on her underwear. Now, because the DNA wasn't left behind from a sexual assault, investigators believed that it ended up on her underwear because the killer likely injured himself during a struggle with Yara.

So Ruggeri and her team now referred to the unknown male DNA sample from Yara's underwear as Unknown 1.

So with this DNA sample of a known one, police began testing family members, friends of Yara, people who went to the gym that she was last seen at. And they even started cross-referencing cell phone records and tested whoever passed through Yara's hometown on the day of her disappearance.

Now, obviously, testing this amount of DNA takes a lot of time to do, and it's not cheap either. It costs a lot of money. The hunt for Yara's killer and all of the DNA testing that had to be done here became one of Italy's most expensive manhunts in the entire history of the nation.

So by this point, the Italian police had taken literally thousands of DNA samples to compare it to unknown one. But it didn't really lead to any solid leads. So Ruggeri and her team did something kind of unusual and out of the box here. In spring 2011, investigators took DNA samples from everyone who entered a local club on Friday and Saturday nights.

Like if you wanted to get into this club, you had to provide the police a DNA sample, which I think is pretty cool. And this idea, which is pretty out of the box, finally led to a huge break in the case.

One of the DNA samples that was collected from the nightclub was very similar to unknown one, although it wasn't an exact match. Now, the man's name was, okay, bear with me, Damiano Ghirioni. But the only problem was, is that he was in South America the day of Yara's disappearance, making it nearly impossible to believe that he had anything to do with it.

But because his DNA was very similar to Unknown One's DNA, it was quite possible that he was maybe a relative to the killer. So police investigators look a little closer into the family. And it turns out that his mom, Aurora, actually worked at Yara's family home as like a housekeeper for about 10 years.

Now, Aurora lived nearby Yara's house and was inside the family home at least twice a week for over 10 years. But after the police monitored Aurora and her son's cell phone records, it just became a weird and crazy coincidence that she in fact worked with the Gambriasio family for so long, but ultimately she had nothing to do with Yara's murder.

And even though this seemed like a dead end in the investigation, it really wasn't because the police still knew that Damiano's DNA was so similar to unknown one. And a year would go by with increasing pressure from the public to find Yara's killer. The Italian people really wanted to get justice in this case.

So Ruggeri and her team really started to get heat from not only the public, but also from the media and even local politicians who started to criticize the fact that a woman investigator couldn't possibly solve a case like Yara's. But instead of letting all of the criticism get to her, Ruggeri went back to her one solid piece of evidence in the case, the DNA.

Ruggeri was able to compile a complete genealogical family tree of the DNA sample all the way back to 1815, identifying every single family member with ties to the same DNA.

And police learned that Damiano Gironi's father had a brother, Giuseppe, who died in 1999. And when police went to visit Giuseppe's widow, they collected a DNA sample from two postage stamps that he licked sometime before his death.

And when they ran the DNA test, forensic scientists were shocked to discover that Giuseppe was the biological father to Unknown One, who was the main suspect in Yara's murder.

Police learned that Giuseppe had two sons, Pierpaolo and Diego. And because Unknown One was male, the police really focused in on these two brothers as possible suspects in Yara's case. But the only problem was, neither of Giuseppe's son was a perfect match to Unknown One's DNA. But how could that be?

They know that Giuseppe is the biological father to Unknown One, but both of his sons' DNA aren't a match. The only explanation was that somewhere out there, Giuseppe has an illegitimate son. But here's the hard part.

Ruggeri and her team now had to find a woman who had an affair with Giuseppe, who's been dead for years, who gave birth to his illegitimate son, who then went on to become Yara's killer. Police learned that Giuseppe would visit a spa resort for two weeks every May, and he would go without his wife, which is a little weird, but okay.

Which to police seemed like a pretty good place to start searching for a possible mistress, right? He's going to the same exact resort once a year for two weeks at a time. And he's going every time without his wife.

So Bruggeri and her team searched through all of the spa resorts records and they tracked down every single woman who stayed there around the same time that Giuseppe did. They literally searched through thousands and thousands of records without any luck.

While Ruggeri continued to search for Unknown One's mother, Yara's family went out and hired a private geneticist of their own, Gio Portero. Portero argued that Giuseppe's body should be exhumed in order to perform more extensive DNA testing.

He argued that the police investigators only compared 13 short tandem repeat regions, or STR, which are basically DNA sequences, with the DNA of unknown one. But he argued that in order to confirm a DNA paternity test, 15 STR regions should actually be compared.

So on March 7, 2013, Giuseppe's remains were exhumed to be yet again compared to Unknown One's DNA sample. This time around, forensic scientists compared 29 STR regions to Unknown One.

And without a doubt, 100%, Giuseppe was the father of Unknown One, the suspected killer in Yara's case. The confirmation that Giuseppe was in fact the father of Yara's killer intensified the search to find his mistress from all those years ago, who was also the mother of Unknown One.

A man who was described as Ruggeri's right-hand man, Marshal Giovanni Marcerino, looked into every aspect of Giuseppe's life, trying to find the woman that he had an affair with all of those years ago. He questioned all of Giuseppe's former co-workers and everyone else who knew him throughout his life.

And a lot of people who knew Giuseppe described him as being quite the womanizer, which doesn't exactly help the investigation because that means that there could be possibly hundreds of women that he may have fathered an illegitimate son with.

By June 2014, one of Mossorino's sources provided him a name of a woman who did have, in fact, had an affair with Giuseppe. And her name was Esther Arzufi. Esther Arzufi was a neighbor of Giuseppe back in late 1960, which makes her look even better as a possible mother of a known one. But Mossorino and the police didn't.

learn that they already took a DNA sample from Arzufi in July of 2012, but when they double-checked the DNA test results, they discovered that a testing error was made on her sample. They had compared Arzufi's DNA to Yara's DNA and not to Unknown One's DNA.

Police retested Arzufi's DNA sample and compared it to Unknown One. Ruggeri and her team finally found the woman they were searching for. Esther Arzufi was the mother of Unknown One, Yara's killer. In 1970, Arzufi gave birth to twins, a little boy and a little girl. The boy was named Massimo Giuseppe Bossetti.

after his biological father. Massimo was now 42 years old and was working as a builder. He's married with three children, and he also lives in the city of Mapello, the same town where Yara's cell phone gave off its last known signal. Ruggeri and the police didn't waste any time tracking down Massimo.

On June 15, 2014, police set up a fake roadblock to breathalyze all drivers who passed by, kind of like our DUI checkpoints here in the States, in an attempt to match Massimo's DNA to unknown one. After stopping Massimo at the roadblock, they immediately sent off his DNA sample for comparison.

The DNA test results revealed that Massimo Bossetti's DNA was an exact match with Unknown 1. Police finally had Yaro Gambarsino's killer. Massimo Bossetti was arrested for Yaro's murder a few days later on June 16th. Not only did they have his DNA sample, they also had a ton of circumstantial evidence against him.

Massimo was known to hang around Yara's home. He frequently went to a tanning salon right down the street from her house. And a search of his internet activity revealed that Massimo regularly searched for pictures of young girls on the internet. And most troubling was the fact that Massimo's cell phone was present right near Yara's house the evening of her disappearance.

but was turned off from 5:45 p.m. until the following morning around 7:30 a.m. This would have been the same exact time Yara was kidnapped and murdered. Massimo Bossetti denied having any involvement in Yara's murder.

He claimed that the DNA sample obtained from Yara's clothing that linked him to the murder was "fabricated and because her body had been exposed to the elements for so long, it couldn't possibly be a good DNA sample." Massimo's wife even testified for him at trial and provided an alibi for her husband.

She said that Massimo was with her the evening that Yara disappeared, making it impossible for have him to be involved. But Massimo's wife's story just wasn't believable and couldn't explain away the fact that his DNA sample was found on Yara's clothing.

And ultimately, on July 1st, 2016, Massimo Bossetti was sentenced to life in prison for Yara Gambriasio's murder. And about one year later, in 2017, the Italian Court of Appeals upheld the murder conviction. Massimo will spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering Yara.

Yara Gambriasio is buried in a cemetery across the street from the gym where she once practiced her gymnastics and where she was last seen alive. She's buried right in between her two grandparents. Her gravesite is often covered with little gifts left behind from her family and friends, including plastic angels and gym shoes.

The disappearance and murder of 13-year-old Yara Gambriasio, only a few hundred meters from her house, terrorized Italy for years. Ruggeri and her team of investigators spent months and years searching for her killer. They never gave up hope that they would find their suspect, Unknown One, who left behind his DNA on Yara's clothing.

Forensic science and DNA testing ultimately led police right to their suspect, Massimo Bossetti. And thanks to the comparison of 29 STR regions or sequences of DNA, Italian police were able to put a selfish and cold-hearted killer behind bars. ♪

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