On 26 November 2010, Yara Gambirasio, 13, went missing. Three months later her body was discovered in scrubland nearby. So began one of the most complex murder investigations in Italian history, which will reach its climax later this year

Yara Gambirasio should only have been gone a short while. On Friday 26 November 2010, at 5.15pm, she left home to go to the gym, just a few hundred metres from her home. Yara, who was 13 and wore train-track braces, was preparing for her rhythmic gymnastics display the following Sunday. All she needed to do was drop off a stereo with her instructor. She said goodbye to her family, who knew where she was going, and left the house.

By 7pm, Yara had still not come home and her parents were becoming increasingly anxious. The town where they lived, Brembate di Sopra, was a sedate place, on the so-called “Bergamask island” between the rivers Brembo and Adda. An hour north of Milan, and just south of the Bergamo Alps, it has a population of 8,000. From its quiet streets, lined with poplars and cypresses, you can see the wooded mountains in the distance, the peaks turning blue-grey. At 7.11pm, Yara’s mother phoned her daughter, but the call went straight to voicemail. Twenty minutes later, Yara’s father called the police.

The call was put through to the public prosecutor’s office, in the centre of the provincial capital Bergamo, a city 11km east of Brembate di Sopra. The magistrate on duty was Letizia Ruggeri, 45, a tough former policewoman who had earned her stripes fighting Cosa Nostra in Sicily. She had been a magistrate for almost 15 years, and knew what needed to be done. Within minutes she had dispatched both state police officers and carabinieri, military police, to Brembate di Sopra.

Yara’s gym instructor confirmed that she had seen the teenager earlier that day and that she had done some light training before heading off. The police quickly established that the last known contact with Yara was a text message she had sent to a friend, Martina, at 6.44pm, agreeing to meet at 8am the following Sunday. That was the last anyone heard from her.

The gym was part of a large sports complex, a garish building with many entrances and exits. Besides the large sports hall there was a running track, a swimming pool, and various courts. A few people said they’d seen two men – possibly in conversation with Yara, standing near a red car – but there was little more to go on than that.

Ruggeri called in tracker dogs: a breed of bloodhound, Segugio Italiano, with short, brown and black hair, long ears, doleful eyes and a keen sense of smell. Instead of following the expected route back to Yara’s home in Via Rampinelli, Ruggeri’s dogs went in the opposite direction, towards a small hamlet nearby called Mapello. When the team analysed the last signals from Yara’s mobile phone, the result showed that it had been registered as present in Mapello at 18.49 that evening.

Everything seemed to point away from Yara’s family, but investigations of this type always start at home. Over the next few days, Ruggeri and her team questioned every member of the Gambirasio family, looking for signs of discord or dark secrets. Yara’s parents were well-known and respected: her father, Fulvio, was a large, solid man with thick glasses, an architect whose father had been the local postman, like his mother before him. Maura, Fulvio’s wife, was a teacher in Longuelo, a nearby town. The marriage appeared strong, they had four children: Yara had an older sister, Keba, 15, and two younger brothers, Natan and Gioele, both under 10.

Ruggeri put wiretaps on hundreds of phones. Her team also tried to trace the owners of all the handsets – some 15,000 – which had passed through Mapello on the day of Yara’s disappearance. One of these belonged to a Moroccan man called Mohammed Fikri. In one wiretapped conversation, in late November, the interpreter heard the phrase: “Forgive me God, I didn’t kill her”. Fikri had been working in a builders’ yard in Mapello, but by the time investigators had put the pieces together, a few days later, he was on a boat bound for Tangiers. On 4 December, Italian authorities intercepted the vessel and arrested Fikri. They searched the van he had been using and discovered that it contained a blood-stained mattress. “People liked him as the guilty party,” Ruggeri told me ruefully last year, “because he was foreign.” But Fikri was quickly cleared. The phrase had been mistranslated, and the blood was extraneous to the investigation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dog handlers search for Yara Gambirasio in December 2010. Photograph: LaPresse/Spada

As autumn slipped into winter, Brembate di Sopra found itself at the centre of a mystery which had captured the country’s imagination. Italian TV is dominated by cronache nere, crime news, and now national camera crews descended. The Gambirasio family were horrified by the sudden glare of publicity. TV cameras became a permanent fixture in their quiet cul-de-sac. The family locked themselves away, lowering their shutters and even turning down the idea of a torchlight procession to raise awareness. Instead, nuns from the Ursuline order, who taught at Yara’s school, came to pray with Maura. A mass was held instead of the procession, and the rare statements from the parents were devout pleas for privacy and patience.

The reticence of the Gambirasio family reflected the culture of this region. The province of Bergamo is much closer to Switzerland than Naples and the Bergamaschi are generally more reserved than their southern countrymen. “It’s in the spirit of mountain people to disdain gossip and not to repeat nonsense,” Piero Bonicelli, the editor of Araberara, a colourful local newspaper, told me. “If I don’t know something, if I have only heard it said, I don’t say anything until I’m certain it’s true.”

Desperate to discover the whereabouts of their daughter, the Gambirasio family did share some photographs of Yara with the press in the days after her disappearance – Yara queueing to take communion; doing the splits in the gym; a studio photo of her in a yellow top; in an Italy football shirt; on the beach – but no one came forward with any useful information. When her parents finally made a televised appeal, a few days after their first Christmas without Yara, they looked awkward. Maura was so uncomfortable she was, unintentionally, rolling her eyes. Fulvio, who wore a rugby shirt, hesitantly read a plea: “Help us return to normality”. He explained that the family values were “love, respect and honesty”, and that they would be giving no interviews.

This wariness towards outsiders owes much to the region’s history. Bergamo is still called, in local dialect, “Bèrghem”, an old name which means “the town of the mountain”. The city has always been a strategically important citadel, one of the last redoubts before the flat, fertile basin of the river Po. The Bergamaschi are used to seeing off invasions. Just a few miles west of Brembate di Sopra is a small town called Pontida, where in 1167 the Lombard League – the alliance of northern Italian cities which joined together to resist the German Holy Roman emperor, Frederick I – was formed. The Oath of Pontida still exerts a symbolic power today. It’s frequently evoked by the separatists of the Northern League to rally sentiment against outsiders: against the perceived indolence and corruption of southern Italy or, more commonly now, against immigrants from developing nations.

This setting was part of what fascinated the Italian public about Yara’s disappearance. The province of Bergamo seemed to represent two different sides of the country. Where Lower Bergamo, towards the plains, is fashionable, well-connected and industrialised, Alpine Bergamo is agricultural, remote and deeply traditional, a close-knit place which nurtures suspicion, even superstition. Some locals talk, without irony, of this being a land of streghe, of witches, who steal or poison young children.

Yara’s disappearance has continued to grip the Italian public over the past four years, becoming one of the most extraordinary, and sophisticated, criminal investigations in Italian history. “It’s like a novel”, a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said “incredible” four times.

* * *

On the afternoon of 26 February 2011, exactly three months after Yara disappeared, a middle-aged man named Ilario Scotti was flying his radio-controlled plane in the small town of Chignolo d’Isola, 10km south of Brembate di Sopra. Chignolo is surrounded by industrial estates, and the scrubland by Via Bedeschi seemed like a safe, unpopulated place for Scotti to try out his new model aircraft. The model aeroplane wasn’t functioning as Scotti wanted, though, so he brought it down to earth amid the tall weeds. As he picked up his plane, he caught sight of some rags on the ground nearby. At first, he thought someone had been fly-tipping. Then he saw the shoes.

Ruggeri was coming back from a day’s skiing with her daughter when she got the call that a body had been found. She dropped her daughter at home and went straight to the crime scene. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition, but Ruggeri could see the black bomber jacket with its elasticated waist which Yara had been wearing when she left home in November. There, too, was her Hello Kitty sweatshirt. Crime scene investigators found Yara’s iPod and house keys, as well as the sim card and battery for her LG phone. The phone itself was missing.

“It was a relief,” Ruggeri told me later. “Yara’s disappearance had really disturbed me – I’m a mother too, and the only thing worse than the death of a child is the disappearance of a child.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chief investigator Letizia Ruggeri at a press conference. Photograph: LaPresse/Spada

The autopsy was conducted by Italy’s most famous forensic pathologist, Professor Cristina Cattaneo. She discovered traces of lime in Yara’s respiratory passages, and the presence of jute, a vegetable fibre used to make rope, on her clothing. Yara hadn’t been raped, although her purple bra was unhooked. She had suffered multiple injuries from a sharp weapon which had pierced her clothing at various points. It seemed that she had been attacked and abandoned. She had died of exposure.

The presence of lime and jute suggested the killer might be in the building trade. The forensics team retrieved two DNA samples, one from Yara’s phone battery and the other from two fingers of her black gloves but neither matched any samples the authorities had on record. Two months later, in April, the commander of the scientific investigations department in Parma phoned Ruggeri. “I’ve got good news,” he told her. “This murder has a signature. We’ve found male DNA on the underwear of the deceased.” It was likely that the murderer had himself been wounded in the struggle, leaving his DNA on the girl’s knickers. Ruggeri and her team named the murder suspect Ignoto 1, “Unknown 1”. Now the hunt for Yara’s killer could begin in earnest.

The workload was huge, and Ruggeri divided up the duties: the police were responsible for taking DNA samples from family members, from school friends and people in the gym; the carabinieri concentrated on the phone records, cross-referencing all the mobile phones that had moved from Brembate di Sopra to Chignolo d’Isola on 26 November 2010. Each phone user whose number appeared in both cells was tracked down and asked for a DNA sample.

It was slow and laborious work. It took geneticists in Parma, Pavia and Rome a minimum of six hours to transform just a few samples of DNA into something which could be read, and compared, on a computer screen. The cost, in machinery and manpower, was immense and the investigation would go on to become one of the most expensive manhunts in Italian history.

Yara’s funeral took place on a hot morning in late May 2011. Onlookers applauded the white coffin, which was topped with a huge bouquet of white flowers, as the hearse slowly drove towards her gym. The ceremony took place in the sports hall where she had spent so many hours training, and where she had last been seen alive. Outside, a large crowd watched the funeral on a giant screen, and heard the condolences of Giorgio Napolitano, the president of the Republic.

By the time of the funeral, investigators had taken thousands of DNA samples but they still had no leads. Close to the scrubland where Yara’s body had been found was a nightclub called Sabbie Mobili (Quicksand). Ruggeri knew that murderers tend to dump bodies in areas with which they’re very familiar, so although it seemed like a long shot, in spring 2011 investigators started taking DNA samples outside the club on busy Fridays and Saturdays. Sabbie Mobili had a reputation for violence – a young man from the Dominican Republic had been murdered outside its doors on 16 January 2011 – but the club had helpful records. Clubbers required a membership card to get in, and so the authorities could easily track down anyone who went there regularly.

Ruggeri finally got a break. One of the samples from Sabbie Mobili seemed strikingly similar to the suspect, Ignoto 1. The man who gave the sample was called Damiano Guerinoni. He was quickly excluded as a suspect – he had been in South America on the day of Yara’s disappearance – but geneticists were convinced he was a close relative of the murderer. “We were all very excited”, Ruggeri told me. “We said, ‘bingo – just a couple of more days’ [and we’ll have the murderer].” As Ruggeri and her team put together the jigsaw of Guerinoni’s family, they made an astonishing discovery: Damiano Guerinoni’s mother, Aurora Zanni, had worked for 10 years as a domestic help in the Gambirasio home. She lived nearby, and had gone to Yara’s home twice a week throughout the young girl’s childhood.

Ruggeri resigned herself to the fact that it was just a coincidence. ‘You couldn’t make it up. This whole case is crazy’

Zanni was a middle-aged woman who was very attached to her employers. She recalled how Yara would always ask her to watch her latest gymnastics moves, and Zanni would tell her to be careful not to hurt herself. In 2011, she was no longer working for the family but said her relationship with Yara’s parents was excellent. To find herself at the centre of the investigation into Yara’s murder was, Zanni said later, “the worst thing that could happen to me”.

“Obviously,” Ruggeri says, “we intercepted [Damiano Guerinoni and Aurora Zanni’s] calls, had them followed, grilled them and tortured them, in the sense that we pressed them.” It was only after months of close surveillance that Ruggeri, in the summer of 2011, resigned herself to the fact that “it was just a crazy coincidence”. “There was no connection”, she says. “You couldn’t make it up. This whole case is crazy.” Having seemed so close to a resolution, Ruggeri’s team reluctantly discarded the angle of the domestic help. The only promising lead they still had was the fact that Damiano Guerinoni’s DNA was so similar to that of Ignoto 1.

* * *

A year on from Yara’s murder, Ruggeri’s team was now under intense pressure to find the killer. Thousands of people were being DNA tested and some locals who hadn’t been approached for a sample suggested to the press that the investigation was haphazard. Politicians made personal attacks on Ruggeri. One Northern League politician, Daniele Belotti, publicly decried her incompetence, writing an open letter in January 2012 to the minister of justice asking for her to be replaced by someone “of proven experience”. (Ruggeri filed a lawsuit against Belotti for libel on 20 April 2012, taking particular objection to his characterisation of her as a person of “low technical and moral profile”.)

Behind these criticisms of Ruggeri was a strong undercurrent of sexism: what hope was there that this woman could solve such a complex crime? She was unconventional, a single-mother with long salt-and-pepper hair, and five earrings in her left ear. She played classical guitar, rode to work on an old Vespa and had a blackbelt in karate. Ruggeri felt she was also being targeted because she had decided to drop the case against the Moroccan labourer, Mohammed Fikri. “Many people thought I had made the wrong decision”, Ruggeri told me, “and they held it against me. The criticism was ferocious … I found it very tough.”

Ruggeri decided to concentrate on the only promising lead she had: the Guerinoni DNA. Her team spent months recreating the Guerinoni family tree. When I visited her office last year, Ruggeri pulled out a folder and showed me hundreds of names, each one annotated: dates of birth, places of birth, relationships within the family. The investigators had worked out a complete genealogical tree as far back as 1815, with other branches of the family going back as far as 1716.

The roots of that family tree were in the small village of Gorno. It’s only 45 minutes’ drive north of Bergamo itself, up the narrow Seriana Valley, but it feels like another world. You arrive through a series of hairpin bends, into a village that smells of woodsmoke and chickens. In the distance, you can hear the sound of waterfalls and cowbells. The village is full of narrow flights of steps – the only horizontal patch of land is a sandy five-aside football pitch. Although only 1,600 people live in Gorno and it seems like a quiet, pious place, according to one former parish, the village is “a bit too hot, in every sense. Let’s say they’re a bit promiscuous.” In 2011 two people in Gorno were murdered in unrelated incidents.

The same families have been here for centuries, and on the village’s war memorial, outside the small church, the names of Benedetto and Pietro Guerinoni are carved into the stone. The Guerinoni family were nicknamed i Fantì, the “infantry”: considered by everyone to be loyal, strong, even hot-headed. Damiano Guerinoni’s father had a brother, Giuseppe, who had died in 1999. Investigators visited Giuseppe’s widow in September 2011 and found two stamps he had licked: one in order to validate his driving licence and another on a postcard he had sent to his family. When DNA results came back from that sample, they had another breakthrough: geneticists were convinced that Giuseppe Guerinoni was the father of Ignoto 1, the suspected murderer.

Ruggeri’s team quickly built up a picture of Giuseppe Guerinoni and his family. Giuseppe himself, a thick-set man with a rugged face, had been a bus driver who played the accordion at village festivals. His marriage, to Laura Poli, had seemed conventional. They had three children: a girl and two boys. Laura had become a Jehovah’s Witness, and after her husband’s death had moved to a nearby town, Clusone. Since Ignoto 1 was male, investigators concentrated on the sons, Pierpaolo and Diego. Pierpaolo was, like his mother, a Jehovah’s Witness; Diego had a drug problem. Neither provided a perfect match with Ignoto 1, however, and neither of them had children.

If Ignoto 1 really was the son of the late Giuseppe Guerinoni, the only explanation was that, somewhere out there, was his illegitimate child. “It became,” Ruggeri says, “an investigation within an investigation.” She was now hunting a woman, presumably in middle- to old-age, who 30 or 40 years ago had had an affair with a married man, now long dead, and given birth to a boy who went on to murder Yara Gambirasio.

* * *

It proved extremely difficult for investigators to penetrate the mountain villages – Ponte Selva, Parre, Clusone and Rovetta – where they were looking for clues and leads. Some Italian journalists spoke of the “cocciutaggine”, or pig-headedness, of the Bergamo Alps – a caricature which only served to antagonise the already defensive locals. “The people here,” says Bonicelli, the editor of Araberara, “were irritated by the stereotype of highlanders closed in on themselves. The word “omertà” was even used, which implies [the silence of] Sicily and the mafia. It was deeply offensive.”

There was incomprehension on both sides. The investigation was, by Italian standards, unusually secretive. Locals couldn’t understand why police hunting the murderer of a 13-year-old girl were taking DNA samples of elderly women. Bonicelli – a fan of the fictional detectives Maigret and Montalbano – says that the investigation “was lacking the traditional, human element: the sort of person who goes into a bar in the village … and puts someone at ease so that something slips out.” Locals felt there was something cold about this investigation, with its invasive demands for DNA samples. And it was changing the atmosphere in these small communities. People thought, says Bonicelli, “that the murderer was here, amongst us. So there was a sort of – not panic, but fear.”

Investigators knew that from the early 1960s onwards, for two weeks every May, Giuseppe Guerinoni used to go to a spa resort called Salice Terme, south of Milan, without his wife. Throughout the spring of 2012, Ruggeri’s team scoured records and registers, tracking all the women who had stayed in the resort at the same time of year as Guerinoni. They searched orphanages and homes for “fallen women”; they tested single mothers and women who had left the mountains for lower Bergamo. They came up empty-handed. The woman they were looking for, they realised, was probably neither single nor “fallen”, but hidden behind the walls of a marriage. Divorce was only legalised in Italy in 1970 – until that time many couples had stayed together despite infidelities.

By the time Ruggeri was searching for Ignoto 1’s mother, Yara’s parents had hired their own expert, a freelance geneticist, in order to review the investigation and explain it to them. For almost a year Giorgio Portera lobbied for the exhumation of Giuseppe Guerinoni’s body from the cemetery in Gorno. He was concerned that investigators has only been able to compare 13 Short Tandem Repeat (STR) regions, which are sequences of DNA, with the DNA of Ignoto 1. Confirmation of paternity demands that at least 15 STR regions be compared. So early on 7 March, 2013, workmen chiselled into Guerinoni’s loculo, the horizontal slot in a cemetery wall where his coffin was kept, and removed his remains. They were transferred by carabinieri to the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo for examination before being returned to Gorno just a few hours later. A couple of camera crews, and a few bewildered villagers, watched. When DNA was extracted from his remains, 29 STR regions could be compared. It was now absolutely certain that Guerinoni was the father of Ignoto 1.

As the investigation dragged on through 2013, the public slowly became aware of why a woman was being sought. It became common knowledge that the late Giuseppe Guerinoni had had a lover, and that she was thought to be the mother of the murderer. “We have rediscovered,” wrote one journalist, “that accursed desire for gossip which spices up small-town life. Now, here, everyone wants to know whose son so-and-so is.”

Long-forgotten infidelities and old suspicions surfaced. Bonicelli laughs as he describes how his journalists discovered five illegitimate children in two small villages: “Five! We could have started a gossip magazine. It was like an open sewer: we were receiving anonymous letters, stories, people telling us about backgrounds and cuckolds.” A society which had always prided itself on its sense of loyalty and traditional Catholicism, suddenly discovered the betrayals in its midst. “Perhaps the point is this,” Bonicelli wrote in an editorial, “we don’t know each other any more.”

* * *

Until this point, the investigation had been characterised by cutting-edge, scientific analysis, but it was an old-fashioned detective who broke the case open. Marshall Giovanni Mocerino was Ruggeri’s right-hand man, working in the office next to hers. His desk is covered in hundreds of scraps of paper, scrawled with names and numbers in different coloured inks. Mocerino has bushy grey hair and black-rimmed glasses and speaks in a light-hearted, informal manner. But he’s also, by his own admission, a capotosta, a stubborn man: “I get fucked off when I can’t solve a case,” he told me. Because of this case, he said, “I haven’t had a holiday for four years.”

Although Mocerino was born in the south, near Naples, he had lived in the Bergamo Alps area since 1983 and he had come to know the region well. He was always talking with local people, and “sensitised”, as he said, thousands to the case. He reminded them that, amid all the gossip about infidelities that had been sparked off by the hunt for Guerinoni’s lover, a young girl had been killed. By 2013, he knew everything about Guerinoni’s life: born in Gorno, Guerinoni had moved in the mid-1960s to Ponte Selva, a nearby settlement which had grown up around the bridge over the Serio river. He drove a public bus for the Motallini (later SAB) bus company. In the 1960s and 70s he would have driven plenty of young women to and from jobs in the various textile factories.

Mocerino questioned Guerinoni’s fellow bus drivers, one of whom had already gone to the press in March 2013 saying that Guerinoni had confessed to having got a young woman “in trouble”. Another former colleague described Guerinoni as a “man” with a “capital M”, implying that he was a womaniser. But it wasn’t until June 2014, that one of Mocerino’s sources finally gave him the name he was looking for. Mocerino has always protected his sources, and refuses to confirm who first whispered the name of the mystery woman to him but however it came about, investigators had the final piece of the jigsaw: Ester Arzuffi.

Arzuffi had been a neighbour of Guerinoni’s in Ponte Selva in the late 1960s. In 1966, aged 19, she had married Gianni Bossetti from Parre, a nearby village. Bossetti was a man whose tough life had turned him inwards: he had been orphaned young and suffered from psoriasis, arthrosis and depression. Arzuffi seemed very different: an outgoing, good-looking woman, she wore short skirts and dyed her hair. She got a job at the textile factory a few miles away in Villa d’Ogna, and took the bus every day.

Ruggeri’s team immediately cross-checked the DNA samples they had, and discovered that Arzuffi had already been tested in July 2012. They double-checked, and realised that a basic error had been made by a geneticist in Rome – Arzuffi’s DNA had been compared not to Ignoto 1’s, but to Yara’s. Now investigators hurriedly reran the test and discovered that Arzuffi was, indeed, the woman they had spent so long looking for. She was the mother of Ignoto 1.

Arzuffi had left Ponte Selva in 1970, but she had continued her affair with Guerinoni, and in the autumn of 1970 she gave birth to twins – a boy and a girl. The boy was called Massimo Bossetti (his middle name was Giuseppe, like his biological father). A slim boy who loved to party, he was nicknamed “the animal” by his friends. He was now 42, a builder, married with three children and living in Mapello, the hamlet near Yara’s hometown where the last signal from Yara’s cell phone had been recorded on 26 November 2010. He was short, with piercing blue eyes, and had a peroxided, pencil goatee.

Ruggeri moved fast. On 15 June 2014, she set up a fake roadblock breathalysing drivers. When her police officers stopped Massimo Bossetti, they pretended the machine hadn’t worked the first time, so they could get two good samples. His DNA was immediately sent for overnight tests and results showed it was an exact match with Ignoto 1. One geneticist told me that the chance of a random match between Ignoto 1 and Massimo Bossetti was 2 x 10-27.

Massimo Bossetti, the man accused of murdering Yara Gambirasio. Photograph: The Guardian

Ruggeri wanted to observe Bossetti before arresting him, to study his movements and behaviour from a distance, but she was also worried that the news would get out and that he might leave town. On 16 June, Bossetti was arrested and charged with the murder of Yara Gambirasio. The Italian home secretary himself released a statement announcing his arrest. Reaction in the mountains of Bergamo, centre of the investigation, was relief: the murder suspect was from lower Bergamo.

The suspect's internet history was troubling, using search words which implied a compulsion for pubescent young girls

Investigators discovered plenty of circumstantial evidence. Bossetti had frequently hung around Yara’s house; he parked his car in Via Don Sala, behind the gym, and ate at the Toscanaccia pizzeria at the end of her road. He had gone for regular UV showers at a tanning shop nearby. His internet searches were troubling, using search words which implied a compulsion for pubescent young girls. More pertinently, records suggested that his phone had been present in Brembate di Sopra on the evening of Yara’s disappearance, but had been switched off from 5.45pm until the following morning at 7.34am. For Ruggeri, the arrest was the reward for almost four years of dogged investigative work. After enduring a barrage of criticism for alleged incompetence, she was now feted for her brilliance.

The case is likely to come to trial this spring. Bossetti maintains his innocence, and his lawyers are planning to contest the DNA evidence, claiming that DNA merely indicates “presence, not responsibility”. Meanwhile, three families are dealing with the devastation of the case. Guerinoni’s widow has been forced, in the autumn of her life, to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity and the existence of his other children. Meanwhile, just as he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Giovanni Bossetti became the nation’s most famous cuckold, learning at the same time as the rest of the country that none of his three children are his (leaks from the investigation revealed that Ester Arzuffi’s third child, Fabio, also had a different father). The marriage of the accused, Massimo Bossetti, has also come under strain: since his defence sought to portray him as a family man, two people have come forward to claim that they had affairs with his wife. Such is the local loathing for Bossetti that since his arrest, his twin sister – herself coming to terms with both her brother’s fate and the fact that the man she thought was her father is not biologically related to her – has twice been beaten up. Her mother, Ester Arzuffi, still denies that she’s ever been unfaithful to her husband.

The Gambirasio family, meanwhile, has remained private. Recently, awarding a gymnastics trophy named after her daughter, Maura Gambirasio struggled to smile and made no public comments. She’s cut her hair short and looks gaunt. Yara is buried between her two grandparents in a cemetery just across the road from her gym. There’s no date on her tombstone, only a signature next to a photograph of her wearing a white alice band. All around the grave are mementoes left by her friends: gym shoes, a metal tulip, rag dolls, plastic angels and little bracelets. Often, in the early evening, you see Yara’s father, Fulvio, standing here, gazing at the resting place of his parents and his daughter.

Tobias Jones’s A Place of Refuge will be published by Quercus in May

Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread

• This article was amended on 13 January 2015 to clarify that a DNA sample came from Yara Gambirasio’s phone battery.