Nothing Cella it is much more than a cold case. Nada Cella is a remorse. For everyone who was there at the time, for those who came after them. Twenty-five years have passed and still someone tries. Not only because as long as he was granted health by Silvana Smaniotto, his mother, knocked on the door of every new magistrate of the Genoa Public Prosecutor’s Office to ask for justice. That death without guilty, which took place in a small town, where everyone knows each other, still cries out for vengeance to God and men, there is no other way to say it. Especially for the inexperience and negligence of the investigators of the time, authors of an investigation that in criminology seminars is remembered as a compendium of everything that must not be done at the crime scene and in the following days.
The killer on the intercom
On the morning of May 6, 1996, Nada Cella goes to work by bicycle. He is 25 years old, a few months ago she was hired as a secretary in the office of the accountant Marco Soracco, in a building in the old Chiavari. She is the only daughter of Bruno and Silvana, he employee of the municipality, she janitor. “Distinguishing features: good girl” will be the title of the weekly Today. That Monday, Nada opens the studio and turns on the lights, as usual. At 9 o’clock it also opens to a person who rings the intercom. The killer walks down a long corridor, and enters the last room on the right, as if he knows where to go. The boss calls 113 from the upstairs apartment where he lives with his mother. There was an accident, he says. When first aid arrives, Nada’s face and chest are covered in blood. She was hit in the head and pubis at least 15 times, with a heavy and sharp object, never found again. He dies in hospital after a brief agony.
The case of Simonetta
The newspapers deal with it almost only to underline the similarities with the crime of Simonetta Cesaroni, killed in Rome in 1990, also in the office. Perhaps it is also the resemblance to that famous precedent that confines that affair to the sphere of provincial crimes. Or the reason for a removal that still lasts today is the total failure of the investigations, which still hangs in the air of the Ligurian police stations and courts. It is no coincidence that in ordering yet another attempt to reopen the investigation, the chief prosecutor Francesco Cozzi says that he would give a year or even more of life to solve that case. Before arriving in Genoa, he headed the small judicial office in Chiavari. He knows what that story represents, he knows its symbolic significance.
Errors in the investigation
The crime scene is immediately turned upside down. The first investigators arrived on the spot grant Soracco’s mother and aunt, worried about the decor of the building, permission to clean the blood stains left by the girl on the balcony and in some parts of the study. There is no agreement on whether to intercept tenants’ telephone conversations immediately and nothing will be done for weeks. Some DNA samples are not granted due to legal quibbles. “The solution is near, a few days and you will know everything,” said the magistrate in charge of the investigation immediately after the crime. At the end of 1998 the case is closed, with the silence due to the badly managed events. The accountant and his mother, the only suspects, are cleared. Not even a shred of hypothesis about the motive remains in the records. Bruno Cella died of a broken heart in July 1999. Like every day, he was driving towards the cemetery where his daughter is buried.
Failed attempts
Since then, a sterile illusion arises every other year. In November 1999, investigations were made on a bricklayer in the area, guilty of the murder of a Serbian prostitute. In 2005 the file is reopened starting from the girl’s diaries. In 2006 the Public Prosecutor of Genoa investigated two other bricklayers involved in an investigation into a prostitution racket for the crime. In 2011 yet another attempt with the scarce investigation findings, this time it is three hairs that do not belong to the victim. Nothing, nothing and still nothing. Just the latest attempt should lead to caution today. Even Cozzi and the group that deals with cold cases trust in the support of technologies that were not yet available in 1996. For this reason they sent fragments of DNA to Milan, Rome and the United States to analyze them at the FBI. “Nobody told me about it,” Signora Silvana says on the phone. “And I don’t want these news to be due only to the fact that it’s twenty-five years round since Nada’s death. But even if it were, as long as the culprit does not come out it will always be right to try ». At least as posthumous compensation from the state. At least as an implicit way of apologizing to a poor girl and her family.
May 7, 2021 (change May 7, 2021 | 23:41)
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