The suspect had been surprised in the entrance, just beyond the door, standing next to Rosa Demaggi. She was moaning weakly semi-unconscious, and was lying on the ground with a bloody hematoma on the nape of the neck, obviously the consequence of having fallen against a console, to the left entering, which had a blood stain on it. Rosa Demaggi had died a few seconds after the officers had entered. Considering him guilty of assaulting the woman, the man in overalls had been handcuffed. The patrol chief had said to him: "You came in here with the intention of killing her and it took you just a few seconds to hit her on the head: she was in the entrance waiting for you, she trusted you because she had left the doot open. But you, unexpectedly, without giving her time to escape, slammed her head hard against the furniture to kill her. You were counting on getting away immediately afterwards, in fact you hadnt closed the door when you came in, so as not to waste time reopening it as you went out: you would have pulled it behind you as soon as you were outside and toodle-loo, who knows who and when the body would be found. You hadn't imagined that we would arrive: you wanted to make it look like an accident, but it went wrong."
The officer had assumed that the individual had killed with premeditation for reasons related to the black market, perhaps becauase of his own direct interest, perhaps on behalf of third parties. That it was voluntary murder was supported by the fact that the man was wearing wool gloves even though it was already warm: so as not to leave prints, it had been spontaneous to think. At the time the suspect, in full mental reshuffle because of the unexpected intervention of the police officer, had not known what to say.
Since up close you could see that not only was he wearing workmans clothes, but that they were worn and rather dirty, the corporal was convinced that he could not be one of the womans sex clients, and besides, the man had no money on him as he had ascertained by frisking him. He did not even have an identity card, but he did have a driving license which showed he was born in Naples forty-two years earlier, lived in Vicolo Santa Luciella and was called Gennaro Esposito, name and surname, however, that were very common in Campania and especially in Naples, which could have been false, as too could the driving licence. It was in fact well-known in Police Headquarters that the delinquency, and in particular the camorra, availed themselves of printers who were very skilled in forgeries. The patrol leader had not given much weight to the document.
He had called the operations room of the Station with the trucks radio and reported the incident. The Violent Crimes Section had telephoned the switchboard of the morgue to alert them, asking them to send the anatomopathologist on duty to the victims home, for the initial investigations. Dr. Giovampaolo Palombella was on duty, a sixty-year-old with long thick gray hair which was always disheveled, tall, wiry and a little stooped, perhaps due to bending over the corpses to be dissected for more than thirty years.
At the same time a warrant officer had been sent to the victim's home. It was Bruno Branduardi, a short, obese and quiet man close to retirement and he was to carry out an inspection, listen to the patrol officers and the doctor, write everything down in his notebook and report to the superior on duty upon his return,
The non-commissioned officer had arrived in Piazzetta del Nilo on his slow motorbike, The Little Italian2 which, small as it was, looked as if it could barely support the heavy weight of that enormous man. First of all he had first listened to what the officers had to say, then the coroner who had arrived a little after him, in a van for the transport of the corpses, with two orderlies. The anatomopathologist had ruled out suicide, he had considered an accident possible, since at first glance the blow did not seem to him to have been very violent. He had not ruled out murder, however, reserving the right to be more precise after the autopsy. The warrant officer had taken note of it, adding a comment in his notebook that in his opinion it was not misfortune but murder and that the arrested man, in his view, was the murderer.
In reality, he had simply aligned himself with what the corporal had assumed and reported to him. The corpse had been removed and loaded onto the van to be taken to the morgue for the autopsy. Branduardi, on his part, after having quickly inspected the apartment and found that there was no one there, had ordered the officers to affix the seals on the front door, to take the arrested man to the Police Headquarters and put him in the holding cell, while waiting to be handed over to a commissioner for interrogation. At that time the law did not call for the intervention of a magistrate neither at the scene of the crime, nor during the police officers investigative interview with the suspect, which took place without the presence of his lawyer. The investigating judge took over if the investigating commissioner, using the autopsy report and having questioned the suspect, had considered it to be murder and had sent a report to the Public Prosecutor's Office. In the event of misfortune, the dossier, endorsed by the Deputy Commissioner, was simply archived without judicial follow-up.