Netflix "loves" stories with real crimes and this time, in collaboration with RTI, prepared a movie that will shock. The film "Yara" is based on the true story of 13-year-old Yara Gambirasio and will premiere on November 5.
But let's start from the beginning, since it concerns a crime that shocked Italy in 2010 and is one of the most complex murder investigations in the history of the country.
On Friday, November 26, 2010, at 5:15 pm, 13-year-old Yara Gambirasio left home to go to the gym, which was 700 meters away. The girl was preparing for the rhythmic gymnastics show she had the following Sunday and was excited. All she needed to do was leave a stereo on her coach and she would be back right away. She said goodbye to her family, who knew where she was going and left the house.
At 19:00, Yara had not yet returned home and her parents began to worry. The community of Brembate di Sopra where they lived, was a quiet place, with a population of 8.000, between the rivers Brembo and Adda.
At 19:11, Yara's mother called her daughter, but the call went straight to the answering machine. Twenty minutes later, Yara's father called the police. The call was sent to the prosecutor's office, where it was answered by Letizia Ruggeri, a dynamic former police officer who had put up with Cosa Nostra in Sicily. He was a judge for almost 15 years and knew what had to be done. Within minutes he had sent police and carabinieri to the Brembate di Sopra.
Letizia Ruggeri
Yara's fitness teacher confirmed that he had seen the teenager earlier that day and that he had done a short workout before leaving. Police found that the last contact with Yara was a text message he had sent to a friend of hers, Martina, at 6:44 p.m., agreeing to meet at 8 a.m. the following Sunday. That was the last sign from her.
Ruggeri immediately called special police dogs. The Segugio hounds, instead of following the expected route back to Yara's house, went in the opposite direction, to a small village called Mapello. When the team analyzed the latest signals from the girl's cell phone, the result showed that the location was registered in Mapello at 18:49.
13-year-old Yara
In the following days, Ruggeri and her team interrogated each member of the Gambirasio family, looking for signs of discord or dark secrets. But Yara's parents were respected members of the community and their marriage seemed happy. They had four children: Yara had an older sister, 15-year-old Keba, and two younger brothers, Nathan and Gioele.
Ruggeri put hundreds of phones to the test, and its experienced team tried to locate the owners of all the cell phones - about 15.000 - that had passed through Mapello on the day of Yara's disappearance. One of them belonged to a Moroccan named Mohammed Fikri. In a telephone conversation in late November, the interpreter heard the phrase: "Forgive me, my God, I did not kill her." Fikri was working on a construction site in Mapello, but by the time investigators assembled the pieces, a few days later, he was on a ship bound for Tangier. On December 4, Italian authorities intercepted the boat and arrested Fikri. They searched the van he was using and found that it contained a blood-stained layer. "People wanted him guilty because he was a stranger," he told the media, but it turned out that he had not killed the little girl.
Brembate
Winter was approaching and 13-year-old Yara had not yet been found. The community of Brembate di Sopra was at the center of a mystery that had captured the imagination of the country. Italian television was constantly dealing with the disappearance of the little one and the Gambirasio family was terrified by the sudden publicity. The TV cameras were permanently installed outside the house and all of Italy speculated about the child's whereabouts.
Desperate to find out where their daughter is, the little girl's parents shared some photos of Yara in the press and a TV call, a few days after their first Christmas without her, where they looked embarrassed. Her mother felt so uncomfortable that she involuntarily rolled her eyes and her father hesitantly read an appeal: "Help us get back to normal." He also explained that his family values were "love, respect and honesty" and that they would not give interviews.
On the afternoon of February 26, 2011, exactly three months after Yara's disappearance, a middle-aged man named Ilario Scotti flew his radio-controlled plane to the small town of Chignolo d'Isola, 10 kilometers south of Brembate di Sopra. Chignolo is surrounded by industrial districts and the bushy area of Via Bedeschi seemed like a safe, uninhabited place for Scotti to try out his little plane. However, it did not work as he wanted and so Scotti landed it. What followed would haunt him for the rest of his life. The man saw some rags on the ground and then saw the shoes…
Ruggeri was returning from a day skiing with her daughter when she received a phone call that a body had been found. She left her daughter at home and ran straight to the crime scene. The body was in advanced decomposition, but he could see the black jacket Yara was wearing when she left home in November. There was also her favorite sweatshirt "Hello Kitty". Crime investigators found Yara's iPod and house keys, as well as the sim card and battery for her phone, but the device was missing.
The autopsy was performed by Italy's most famous medical examiner, Professor Cristina Cattaneo. She discovered traces of lime in Yara's airways and a fiber used to make rope in her clothes. Yara was not in a hurry, although her purple bra was damaged. She had suffered multiple wounds from a sharp gun that had pierced her clothes in various places. She seemed to have been attacked and abandoned.
Yara's funeral took place on a hot morning in late May 2011. People applauded the white coffin, which was over a huge bouquet of white flowers, as the hearse slowly drove to her gym. The ceremony took place at the sports center where she had spent so many hours training and where she was last seen alive. Outside, large crowds watched the funeral on a giant screen and heard the condolences of Giorgio Napolitano, the president of the Republic.
One year after Yara's murder, Ruggeri's team was under intense pressure to find the killer. Thousands of people underwent DNA tests and the prosecutor had set a goal in life to locate the little girl's killer.
We will stop the narration somewhere here, as we do not want to reveal more, since it is worth watching the development of the case in the movie on Netflix.
We leave the trailer and do not miss it!
With information from Guardian, Corriere, La Repubblica
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