William Serra has confessed: before investigating judge Giorgio Altieri, the thirty-eight-year-old from Carbonia admitted to killing Giovanni Musu, stabbing him thirteen times—one to the throat—and finding him lifeless, his legs engulfed in flames, during the night between Friday 16th and Saturday 17th January in Rosmarino Park.
Serra, assisted by lawyer Fabio Basile, exercised his right to remain silent during the validation hearing but made spontaneous statements: he apologized to the victim's family but, according to leaks, did not provide any useful evidence to establish a motive for the crime. This is something investigators, led by prosecutor Danilo Tronci of the Cagliari Public Prosecutor's Office, will still have to work on.
Serra was also framed thanks to messages he sent to his ex-partner after the crime: he had already admitted to her that he was responsible for the murder.
Ten days of investigation were required to secure the arrest. During this time , the Carabinieri of the Carbonia Company, assisted by their colleagues from the Investigative Unit of the Cagliari Provincial Command, gathered enough evidence to issue a pre-trial detention order against the suspect, who faces extremely serious charges: premeditated murder, aggravated robbery, and attempted destruction of a corpse.
The investigation continued unabated, and it was invaluable to cross-reference Serra and Musu's phone records with the testimonies of several people who had spent the evening with the victim, right up until the phone call from William Serra asking to meet.
The images obtained from private video surveillance systems located in the area around the crime scene were also valuable .
Specifically , Serra was allegedly captured running away from the pine grove, hooded, toward Via Liguria (another park exit, not far from the Via Tirso exit where the murder was allegedly committed). Shortly thereafter, no longer masked, he was reportedly filmed wearing the same clothes by a security camera in Piazza Cagliari, and then, about an hour later, but wearing different clothes, on Via Lazio. The first items, with traces of blood, were seized by the Carabinieri, as were some damp, earth-stained socks: an important detail because, in the hours preceding the murder, he allegedly showed up at his ex-partner's house wearing socks over his shoes, claiming he was on his way to commit a robbery.
He is said to have sent messages to the same woman around three in the morning, describing the stages of the atrocious crime he had committed.
According to investigators' reconstruction, the victim was lured to the park under the pretext of a meeting related to the sale of cocaine , but then, once there, he was attacked with unprecedented violence: at least thirteen stab wounds, as the autopsy revealed, some of which affected vital organs, plus a deep lesion to his throat.
After the murder, the attacker allegedly stole the victim's wallet and cell phone (which were later found by the Carabinieri), thus establishing the crime of robbery, and then attempted to set fire to the body using a garbage bag found in the park. He then fled. It was Marco Atzeni, who was investigated but later found not involved, who first found the burning body and raised the alarm after stopping a passerby and asking to make a phone call. When he was interviewed after the murder, Serra allegedly tried to convince investigators that he had left Musu in the pine forest with Atzeni, but subsequent investigations disproved this reconstruction.