Italian spent 12 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit: “It’s over”

Uthe Italian woman was released this Friday after spending nearly 13 years in prison for a crime she did not commit. The release took place more than ten years after another woman confessed to the crime. 

According to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Monica Busetto, currently 64, was arrested on 30 January 2014 and accused of killing her neighbor. Lida Taffi Pamio, 87, was found dead at home in Mestre, Venice, on the afternoon of 20 December 2012.

The woman was arrested a year after the murder after authorities found the victim's DNA on a small necklace in her home.

Already in December 2014 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and, less than a year and a half later, the story was turned around: a woman confessed to the crime. 

Susanna Milly Lazzarini was arrested on December 31, 2015 for suspected murder days earlier, Francesca Vianello, an 81-year-old friend of her mother's. Later, it was found that he also knew Lida Taffi Pamio.

In March 2016, Lazzarini confessed that he had killed Lida Taffi Pamio and, during three judicial interrogations, ensured that he had acted alone. She told me she went to the victim's house to steal, but she got distracted and got caught. It was then that he assaulted her violently and strangled her with a television cable, until he stabbed her about ten times.

However, in July, during a fourth interrogation and pressured by investigators, he changed the version of events and also put Busetto at the scene of the crime. First, you said you found her at home when you came in. Then he said the woman surprised her while stabbing the victim and would have helped her.

The Court of Appeal ended up relying on DNA evidence and held the conviction. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has defined the sentence in 25 years in prison.   

However, the scientific community itself began to raise doubts and the first geneticist to analyze the case, Luciana Caenazzo, found no trace of DNA on the necklace. 

In fact, the traces were only identified in a second analysis, carried out in the laboratory of the Scientific Police of Rome by Daniela Scimmi, but in a small amount.

Monica Busetto’s defense had already argued that “there was contamination with other evidence that was filled with blood.”.

It took several years to get the opinion of the Venetian geneticist Lucia Bartoloni, who called into question the chain of conservation of evidence and the decontamination of the laboratory in Rome, and a decisive contribution from the television programme Le Iene.

The Italian newspaper says that an investigation was able to find, along with some of Taffi Pamio's relatives, photographs of the woman taken in the 1980s, in which the necklace seemed to be longer than the one found in the house of his alleged murderer.

“It’s not the same piece of jewellery. It is a family necklace, in which ended up the victim's DNA ", defended the lawyers.

This Friday, the judges of the Trento Court of Appeal decided to release Monica Busetto, giving reason to the second request for review of the case submitted by the defense.

“ It was over after 13 years, it was over...”, said the woman after the release.