AN ILLEGITIMATE SON
Police found 532 woman who were possible lovers
The only explanation the police could come up with was Giuseppe had fathered an illegitimate son, so the investigation took an interesting turn. Rather than looking for a male murderer, officers were now in search of the middle-aged woman he’d had an affair with.
They investigated places he had holidayed abroad alone and spoke to other bus drivers he’d worked with, looking into a total of 532 women who could have possibly had a sexual relationship with Giuseppe.
Eventually, they were given a name: Ester Arzuffi.
She had been a neighbour of Giuseppe’s in the Sixties and, despite being married to the same man since she was 19, her DNA proved that she was indeed the mother of Yara’s killer. The twins she’d given birth to in 1970, a boy and girl, were not in fact her husband’s, but her lover Giuseppe’s.
The boy, Massimo Bossetti, was then 42, married with three children – and, tellingly, living in Mapello – the hamlet tracker dogs had followed Yara’s scent to in those first few days when she went missing.
Unwilling to alert him too early, Ruggeri set up a fake roadblock and started breathalysing drivers. When it was Bossetti’s turn, they pretended the first test had failed, so they had two good samples of DNA. Tests came back as a match – the police finally had their man.
On 16 June 2014, Bossetti was arrested and charged with the murder of Yara Gambirasio.
Despite his protestations of innocence, after a yearlong trial, he was found guilty of killing Yara and dumping her body on 1 July 2016. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Catching the right man had involved testing over 18,000 DNA samples and unearthing affairs and illegitimate children. Finally, however, Yara’s family knew that justice had been served and her killer was behind bars. ‘Now we know who it was, even if we know that no one will bring Yara back to us,’ they said in a statement through their lawyers. A sad but undeniable ending to a case that had taken over five years to crack.