Liliana Resinovich case, the body will be exhumed

Almost two years after the discovery of Liliana Resinovich's body, the case is reopened: the deputy prosecutor Maddalena Chergia has ordered «with the non-repeatable technical assessment procedure the assignment, to a board of consultants, of thetask of exhuming the body».

This was announced by the chief prosecutor of Trieste, Antonio De Nicolo, in a note. The forensic anthropologist Cristina Cattaneo, to whom the Prosecutor's Office had given the task of drawing up a medico-legal report to clarify the death of Liliana Resinovich, considers the exhumation “appropriate”. The prosecutor decided “for a date towards the end of this month” to convene the experts “called to carry out these delicate operations, giving due notice to the deceased's next of kin and their respective defenders”. Last June the investigating judge of the Court of Trieste had ordered new investigations into the woman's death, after the Prosecutor's Office had requested that it be dismissed.

Liliana Resinovich, a 63-year-old from Trieste who passed away on 14 December 2021, had been found dead on January 5, 2022 in the grove of the former San Giovanni psychiatric hospital. In the radiological-forensic and medical-legal consultation, it is written that the woman had died “at most within 48 hours of being found”, therefore around January 3 or 4.

There is no explanation for the three-week “gap” between the day of the disappearance and the day the body was found. Had the woman been hiding in those twenty days? Had she been hosted or segregated by anyone? Liliana Resinovich was found on the ground curled up, in a fetal position, with her hands crossed. Around his head they were wrapped two transparent food bags, one inside the other, tight – but not too much – at the throat. The rest of the body was instead closed in two large bags of those used for waste, one inserted from above, one from below.

The clothes the woman was wearing were “clean” and the bags in which the body was stuffed were “intact”. Liliana Resinovich was also hairless and had no regrowth. Autopsy and toxicological examination found only the remains of coffee and a raisin, perhaps from a panettone, in the body. All these elements have also led to the suggestion of the possibility that the woman's body may have been hidden and frozen.

In this case, the death would have occurred in a different place from that of the discovery, «with corpse preserved and then theoretically frozen“, to then be “moved to the place of discovery in January”. But the consultancy specifies that “there are, at present, no specific elements to demonstrate post-fatal freezing of the corpse”.

According to the experts, the woman's death was caused by carbon dioxide coming from her own breathing. «It is not necessary for the confined space to be hermetically closed, the lack of adequate air exchange being sufficient. It seems clear that just a few breaths are enough to reach a concentration of carbon dioxide such as to induce loss of consciousness and be incompatible with life in a short time.” No traces of drugs or sleeping pills were found and, on the body, no signs of violence or gestures that could be attributable to coercion or transportation. The CT scan also found no signs of violence.

According to the investigators' reconstruction, that morning Liliana, married to Sebastiano Visintin, she was headed to the house of an old friend, Claudio Sterpin, 82 years old. A relationship that her husband knew nothing about. The woman, at 8.22am, had written to Sterpin to inform him that she was late, because she would have to “go to a Tim store first”.

Liliana Resinovich had been with Visintin for 32 years, even though the couple only got married in 2005. And, although he has always reiterated that he had a peaceful relationship with the woman, some acquaintances have reported a deep crisis between the two.

With Claudio Sterpin, Liliana Resinovich had a relationship 41 years ago, and ten years later she met Sebastiano Visintin, to whom she never spoke about her friendship with her ex. With Sterpin, the woman was supposed to leave for a weekend around December 19, the anniversary of the day on which the first meeting with her ex took place.