Rimini, 7 June 2024 – Eight months later the register of suspects for the murder of Pierina Paganelli. The ink reads: Louis Dassilva. The neighbour, a 35-year-old Senegalese metalworker, received personal notification from the Prosecutor’s Office yesterday afternoon, after being summoned to the police station in Rimini. He crossed the threshold of the police offices as a person informed about the facts and came out as a suspect for the murder of Pierina, Louis, on whom the investigators’ spotlights are focused. Now more than ever.
According to the Rimini Prosecutor’s Office, in the person of the prosecutor Daniele Paciit just might have been DassilvaPierina’s neighbor, who brandished the 15 centimeter long kitchen knife (never found) which he struck and killed that evening of 3 October Pierina Paganelli while the 78-year-old pensioner was returning home to Via del Ciclamino 31 after a prayer meeting with Jehovah’s Witnesses. A death by knife and of mystery that left Pierina lying on the cold floor of the basement of Via del Ciclamino until the next morning, when her daughter-in-law was Manuela Bianchi to find her now dead, with 29 gashes drawn on her body and her clothes out of place, but her purse there, next to her.
While Dassilva is in the offices of preccint, all eight months of investigations resurface, of continuous investigations, interrogations and of a frenetic and incessant coming and going of journalists and policemen up and down the flights of stairs that lead from Via del Ciclamino to the humid cellars in which Pierina was killed. In which Louis Dassilva he might have killed her.
For eight months the investigation by the Flying Squad, directed by Dario Virgili before and by the chief commissioner Marco Masia now, he has plumbed the secrets of those stone walls. Probed the souls and secrets of the suspects, from daughter-in-law Manuela Bianchi to Louis himself – with whom Bianchi had had an extramarital affair according to the investigators -, trying to glean any connections with the almost fatal accident that happened to her son Giuliano a few months earlier of the crime and find the truth behind the terrible death of Pierina.
And now, perhaps the joker emerged from the deck of cards in the hands of the investigator: Dassilva’s name placed at the top of the pile of suspects and formally converted into a suspect, to also allow those unrepeatable tests to be carried out on the DNA traces found by the forensic team on the Pierina’s body and at the crime scene last October.
In short, to insert the missing piece into the mosaic of investigation and scrape the veil of mystery to check whether underneath there really is the Dassilva’s face. Behind the hand that killed Pierina on the evening of October 3rd. With Louis yesterday afternoon, his partner was also summoned to the police station a few hours earlier Valeria Bartolucci, as a person informed of the facts, but no notification followed for her. Only Dassilva, in fact, appears on the register of suspects, following an act that could truly mark the turning point in the long investigation to discover Pierina Paganelli’s murderer.
