The broken seat belt is consistent with a fall from a high altitude, while the possibility that Manuela Murgia was hit and dragged to the bottom of the Tuvixeddu canyon, where she was found dead thirty-one years ago, on February 5, 1995, appears to have been ruled out. A few days before the preliminary hearing before Cagliari Court Judge Giorgio Altieri, the first leaks are emerging regarding the expert witnesses' and consultants' examination of the 16-year-old's clothing for biological traces.
Evidentiary incident
The first to be called to answer questions from Public Prosecutor Guido Pani, the case's lead, was Lieutenant Colonel Marco Palanca of the RIS. He and his colleague Andrea Berti had been assigned by the investigating judge to examine the clothing and then compare any biological traces recovered. The DNA comparison revealed that there was not even one profile compatible with that of the ex-boyfriend, Enrico Astero, 54, the only person being investigated under the purely investigative hypothesis of aggravated voluntary manslaughter. After reading the report, the Public Prosecutor asked the expert from the Scientific Investigations Unit to clarify the hypotheses that emerged regarding the breakage of the belt and buckle that the 16-year-old was wearing on the day of the tragedy. And Colonel Palanca appears to have had no doubts: the violent fall of the body from several meters, with the sudden curling of the legs towards the torso, would have released a radial force that would have caused the belt to snap. The RIS colonel, then, examining the jeans and other clothes, ruled out the possibility that the woman had been hit by a car and that the body had been dragged to the place where it was found.
The clothing, he argued, lacked all the marks present when a person is hit by a car or motorcycle, just as the pants lacked the abrasions or stains that appear when a body is dragged. The only lacerations (with the exception of one found on a button) were inside the duffel coat the young woman was wearing, thus not consistent with any violent impact with any type of vehicle. There was also the presence, on the sweater, of a tiny fragment of rubber (compatible with a tire), which, however, the RIS expert attributed to the fact that the Tuvixeddu area was used as a landfill and therefore contaminated. In other words, the piece of rubber (just a few millimeters) could have easily been present in the ground before ending up in the sweater. In short, based on the clothing, the experts seem to rule out the possibility that the young woman was hit (no traces of tires on the clothes) and abandoned in the canyon, but they favor a fall from several meters.
Manuela Murgia, la perizia del Ris: nessuna traccia biologica dell’ex fidanzato
The contradictory
Lieutenant Colonel Palancaca then answered all the questions from the Murgia family's lawyers (Bachisio Mele, Giulia Lai, and Maria Filomena Marras), reiterating the results of his investigations. His colleague Andrea Berti also confirmed the biological traces, which ruled out the DNA of her ex-boyfriend, represented by Marco Fuasto Piras, on the 16-year-old's clothes. A brown male hair found in Manuela Murgia's boots could date to the time of her death, but the RIS (Italian Investigative Police) did not deem it unlikely that the hair (approximately 10 centimeters long) could be the result of involuntary contamination, having somehow ended up in the boots after they were found. The fall hypothesis, which would rule out a collision, deduced by the RIS from the examination of the clothing, was later disputed by coroner Roberto Demontis. Hence the hypothesis that, very soon, the prosecutor Pani may ask the investigating judge for a new expert opinion to determine once and for all how the girl died.