Natalino Mele, the six-and-a-half-year-old boy who escaped the murderous fury of those who killed his mother Barbara Locci and her lover Antonio Lo Bianco in Signa in the summer of 1968 , was not the biological son of Stefano Mele, the woman's husband and convicted of that double homicide .
This is what emerged from a recent genetic test, which strengthens the Sardinian lead in the crime and revealed the true identity of the survivor's father : Giovanni Vinci, the eldest of the Vinci brothers from Villacidro and a member of the Sardinian "clan" that has been the focus of the investigation since 1982. The name of Vinci, brother of Francesco and Salvatore, now emerges for the first time. The man, linked to Locci by a relationship, had, however, never been officially implicated in the investigation.
The discovery of the DNA leads to a rewriting of the story of what happened on the day of the murder. Did the killer know who Natalino's father was on the night of the Signa crime? Why spare the little boy? The magistrates were provided with the new truth by geneticist Ugo Ricci, a cold case specialist known for the Garlasco case : he is credited with identifying Andrea Sempio's DNA under Chiara Poggi's fingernails. The investigative insight dates back to 2018 , during the subsequently closed investigation that included former Prato legionary Giampiero Vigilanti among the suspects. In that context, the Carabinieri of the ROS special operations unit were tasked with secretly collecting two DNA samples: one from a son of Salvatore Vinci, useful for linking the Sardinian to a rag found after the Vicchio crime in 1984—near another piece of cloth, now missing, with traces of blood and gunpowder—and the other from Natalino. To confirm the discovery, geneticist Ugo Ricci also used the genetic profile obtained from the recent exhumation of Francesco Vinci's body.
(Unioneonline)
