Password: “Never give up”. It is what has guided Bruno Gianoglio’s life for the last 30 years. Right right. Because on June 16, 1994, Bruno received the worst phone call a father could expect. The one in which they told him that his eldest son, Roberto, 22 years old at the time, had been found dead in a cabin at the Ariston bathing establishment in Andora. The reported cause of death is peremptory: suicide by hanging.
It is from that precise moment that his father Bruno begins to fight to obtain the truth about his son’s death.
He really doesn’t believe in suicide. Before he does he asks for an autopsy to be performed on his son’s body, but it will never be granted by the Prosecutor’s Office. Then he asks to have all the scant documents and photographs of the discovery of the body and for this too he will have to insist for a long time.
Having seen the photos and, above all, shown them to an expert forensic pathologist, he returns to the office to ask for the opening of an investigation, convinced as he has always been that his son was killed. But even in this case he was never satisfied.
Until a few days ago, when, after countless letters and requests to the Prosecutor’s Office, to the President of the Republic, to the Minister of Justice, after appeals in local and national newspapers and, years ago, participation in the Maurizio Costanzo Show, there arrived the phone call he expected 30 years ago. «They called me from the Savona court and asked me to bring down the entire file regarding my son’s death. They couldn’t find it anymore, it was probably destroyed – explains Bruno Gianoglio – but I had kept everything and they made a copy of it. I hope that prosecutor Ferro finally reopens the case and finds whoever took Roberto’s life.”
Bruno is now 76 years old, he is ill and has demanding family responsibilities. But he never gave up on giving justice to Roberto.
«My son had already worked for a year and a half in that factory which also had a hotel, campsite and bungalows – he recalls – he had returned home for a few months in the winter and then they called him again. He shared a caravan made available to the owner with a colleague who was never heard from. I had spoken to Roberto a few hours before he died and he was happy with the job, just a little worried because they didn’t pay him. He did not suffer from depression or anxiety.”
But not only. «Near the cabin where he was found dead, under the windshield wiper of his car they found a suicide note, but that wasn’t his handwriting and it contained too many grammatical errors compared to how he wrote, yet even that was never confirmed. made an investigation.”
It is the lack of an autopsy that raises the father’s greatest doubts.
«From the external examination of the doctor who intervened to declare the death, the only one who briefly analyzed the body, it appears that my son had an intact neck bone despite the hanging and the sign of the slipknot was not compatible with a death by strangulation. And, to top it off, even the chair he would have used to reach the rope was in an unnatural position for a suicide scene.”
Bruno Gianoglio does not make direct accusations and knows that it will not be possible to carry out an autopsy 30 years later but he is counting on a more accurate analysis of the photos taken at the time. Roberto will continue to rest in peace in the Casabianca cemetery, but his father suggests, for example, hearing testimony from the colleague who shared the caravan with him, now in prison for killing the owner of the establishment, a former police commissioner, owner of Roberto at the time of his death.
“I’m exhausted, 30 years to ask for justice is a long time and it was a battle that I carried out completely alone.”
