The mystery thickens over the disappearance of Edoardo Galli, the 17-year-old student who disappeared on Thursday 21 March from Colico, in the Lecco area. The boy, this is now certain, passed through the Milan station where he was filmed by the video surveillance cameras. Where he was headed, however, no one can say, but in the last few hours new elements have emerged which strengthen the idea of an escape that had been planned for days, perhaps weeks.
Edoardo’s journey and the note left to his friend
Let’s retrace the story from the beginning. On the morning of his disappearance, Edoardo was accompanied to the station by his mother and took the 6.58 train that would take him to Morbegno where he attended high school. As reconstructed by “Who has seen it?”, the teenager actually gets off the train in Morbegno, a small village in Valtellina in the province of Sondrio. At 7.30 the young man is filmed by the cameras of the Morbegno station and three minutes later he turns off his cell phone which will no longer be reachable.
Edoardo, however, does not take the usual route to go to school. He goes in the opposite direction, towards a friend’s house. He doesn’t use the intercom, he simply leaves a 20 euro note in the mailbox. A small debt to pay off. On the banknote he also writes a phrase: “Never stop dreaming”. A bad sign according to the young man’s father, interviewed by the Rai3 correspondent. “Evidently – he explains – he had in mind to go who knows where, not to return”. Before leaving Edoardo didn’t want to leave anything unfinished. “This is the thing that really worries us.”
The mystery of the double folder
Then the young man returns to the station and according to investigators gets on the train headed towards Lecco and Milan. At Milano Centrale he is filmed again by the cameras. It’s 9.50 in the morning. Edoardo, say the parents who have seen the videos, is alone. “Exactly as we saw it in the Morbegno clip.” The teenager appears lucid and in good health. However, there is something anomalous in the image taken in Morbegno. In his right hand Edoardo has two white folders. A detail that that morning, before the boy left the house, his mother had already noticed. “I need them for a course we do after school” the young man replied.
The hypothesis of the planned escape
Edoardo would also have brought with him a sleeping bag that his parents can no longer find. He would have put it in his backpack, instead of books. A planned escape, perhaps. But where to go? Edward was an idealist. And he loved the mountains. “He has never had strange behavior, he has never drunk, he is passionate about cooking, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. He is the classic golden boy”, said the father.
Nothing suggested any discomfort or imminent escape, even though Edoardo confided to his classmates that he wanted to go “sooner or later to a desert island”, because “I like places where you can meditate”. Nothing particularly unusual for a teenager. However, the father confirmed that in the weeks before his disappearance the young man had searched the internet for information on how to survive in the mountains, how to build survival shelters, how to feed himself and how many days one can go without eating or drinking. The 17-year-old had seen “Into the Wild”, the famous film by Sean Penn, and was impressed by it.
The Russian track
But the hypothesis of an escape to the mountains seems to have lost substance in the last few hours. The other hypothesis is that the boy may have gone to Russia, his mother’s birthplace. Recently the teenager, a convinced pacifist, continued to update himself on developments in the war in Ukraine, even though his father said he didn’t talk about it much at home. With him Edoardo would have brought a double passport, both Italian and Russian. The mother’s fear is that she chatted on Telegram with someone from the East, not a relative or even a friend. However, her profile no longer exists. “He didn’t take much stuff at home,” says the father in front of the Rai3 cameras. “Our fear is that he went to recruit himself somewhere, he probably already had agreements with someone.”
His parents discovered that on March 1st, twenty days before vanishing into thin air, Edoardo had not gone to school. That day he would have taken a train to Milan to go to the consulate. He also showed a photo to his classmates.
The mystery of the boy who disappeared in the same hours
It’s not all. The investigations revealed that on March 21, the day of Edoardo’s disappearance, another boy, also 17, had disappeared in the same area. The young man would have taken a train from a small village in Valtellina to get off in Colico. From there he would disappear into thin air and then reappear 48 hours later in Bologna where his sister lives. He is now at home and doing well. The two teenagers attended nearby schools “and as far as we understood – says the father – there were some friendships in common. It’s a very strange coincidence”. “Who has seen?” reached the mother of the second boy who disappeared (and was later found) by telephone: the 17-year-old assured that he and Edoardo did not know each other.
