A mystery solved after 33 years. It is not true that unsolved crimes always remain unsolved: sometimes the truth comes out, even if it takes decades. And not just in movies. It is the evening of February 25, 1991. We are in Veneto. Exactly a Vicenzaagainst Torretti. Pierangelo Fioretto, a well-known civil lawyer who was 59 years old at the time, is returning home. It’s around 8.15pm when he finds two men in front of the front door. There an argument starts, followed by a scuffle. A woman resident in the building says she saw a man putting on green surgical gloves. Another hears screams, looks out the window, sees two people arguing, coming to blows with her, then, as she goes back into the house to call for help, she still hears those screams and those shots.
Foil is cold with four gunshots: toy guns tampered with, replacing the original alloy barrel with other hand-made steel ones, capable of exploding 7.65 caliber bullets and therefore becoming lethal. He was hit in the chest, back and ear level. Her wife, Mafalda Begnozzi, then 52 years old, heard her screams and the shots, ran down into the courtyard to help her husband, but was also hit. Both ended with the classic final blow to the back of the head, which exploded when both were already on the ground. When the Vicenza police arrive they find the husband and wife lying on the ground in a pool of blood, lying in opposite directions, their bodies pierced by a volley of bullets. A real execution.
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Yesterday the alleged murderer was arrested. It’s about Umberto Pietrolungo58 years old, considered affiliated with the gang of ‘ndrangheta Muto, operating in Cetraro, in the province of Cosenza. Evidently he was a novice killer at the time. It was the Nineties, the years in which the mafia challenged the State and the State resisted and even reacted. But here in Veneto such an execution had never been seen. The Vicenza community was profoundly shaken by the affair.
It was the nineties, in fact, and the investigative techniques that we have today. Fingerprints were taken from the two weapons, but only on the silencer of the gun found as B were three fragments of thumbprints found. Sent to the central anti-crime police directorate of Rome, in a report dated 23 April 1991, we read that the fingerprints – given the techniques of the time – were not useful for comparison “due to their smallness”. So the Vicenza court dismissed everything on 3 December 1996.
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And we come to 2012 when the scientific police of Padua reopened the investigation and that of Rome found a leather glove genetic profiles attributable to a male subject. This is also thanks to the work of the team created by the Ministry of the Interior specifically to investigate unsolved crimes. The investigations continue. In 2023, the scientific police, with a note, reports that the profile found on the leather glove found in Vicenza has a “first level positive concordance” with another profile acquired on 8 January 2022 at the site of a shooting in Cirella di Diamante , in Calabria, inside a hotel. «A comparison was made – explain sources a Free – between the 2012 profile and the 2022 profile, and the coincidence of the profiles is affirmed on the basis of the best genetic science and experience”. Yesterday Umberto Pietrolungo, who is currently detained in Cosenza prison for extortion aggravated by the mafia method, was notified of the measure of precautionary custody for that double murder, which remained unsolved for 33 years. Today the interrogation.
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