The fundamental mistake, not realised until years later, was for the Potenza police to invest their time and energy in trying to pick up a scent of Elisa Claps from the moment she must have left the Most Holy Trinity Church in the town’s bustling main square, the focal point of local social, commercial and religious interests.
If people leave home voluntarily, there is always a trail that can be followed by professional tracers. It is extremely difficult simply to vanish into the ether without leaving a trail of some sort. There are so many different footprints to be followed: debit or credit card transactions; cash withdrawals from ATMs; payments by cheque; calls via mobile phones; and literally millions of daily CCTV images as we go about our lives, oblivious to surveillance cameras as we shop, queue for buses, hail cabs, catch trains or planes, or simply stroll through a park or plaza towards a café, hand-in-hand with a loved one.
Modern life has become one, long, global documentary – reality TV for those with a licence to snoop, from the police to councils and government departments. In today’s cities, it is hard to move more than 100 metres without catching the eye of at least one CCTV lens.
Within a few days of Sunday, 12 September 1993, the obvious question for Potenza police and the Claps family was: if Elisa has run away, how is she surviving? Of course, as far as Filomena Claps was concerned, the concept of Elisa simply taking off was unthinkable.
‘Elisa hasn’t gone anywhere voluntarily,’ Elisa’s sister-in-law, Irena Nardiello, stated categorically. ‘Wherever she is, it is against her will.’
The possibility of Elisa being held prisoner somewhere, perhaps even being shipped out of the country by the Camorra, who regularly sold young ‘virgins’ into prostitution and other forms of sexual slavery, figured prominently in the Claps’s fear, although for the routine-obsessed Potenza police, this was a little too far-fetched to be taken seriously.
However, speculation was one thing, hard evidence was something else – and was the only currency of any legitimacy to the investigators.
Posters bearing a beautiful, smiling photo of Elisa were plastered all over town. Appeals were made on local radio, TV and in the regional newspapers. Daily special prayers were said in all Potenza churches. Filomena attended Mass daily with members of the family. More candles were lit. Rosaries were worked round the clock. Gildo embarked on countless treks to Naples, frequenting neighbourhoods of the seething city he would normally have avoided at all costs. In every bar and on every street corner, he showed people a photo of Elisa. Every response was identical – a shake of the head, followed by ‘Sorry.’
The investigating officers searched Restivo’s residence. They found not a single item to link him with Elisa. Certainly she was not staying there. Not a single possession of hers was on the premises, and there was no sign of bloodstains, a fight or damage to property. Neighbours were interviewed, and they described a strange loner who seemed to ‘come and go’ at all hours. No one had ever seen Elisa with him there; he was not one for entertaining. Women had visited a few times, but no one had taken much notice. There had never been any noise from his place to complain about – no loud music, riotous parties or arguments.
A couple of detectives watched Restivo for a few days, tailing him wherever he went, but when it became obvious that he was not in contact with Elisa, they were assigned to other duties.
Meanwhile, various police departments in the region were sifting through complaints filed with them by women whose hair had been clipped in public. Of course, there was no reason for these incidents to be cross-referenced with the Elisa Claps case. For a start, they were given a much lower priority. Indeed, many of the women ‘victims’ were semi-amused by their experience.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said one incredulous newlywed. ‘There I was, sitting on the bus, reading a magazine, and I felt as if a few strands of my hair at the back were being touched and played with. Then I heard a snipping sound. Just the one snip. I turned my head sideways and saw some loose hairs on my shoulder. They looked like mine and I swung right round. A young guy was sitting behind me, staring out of the window, hands in pockets, as if he’d no idea what was going on. “Did you just cut my hair?” I said.
‘“Me?” he said, all innocent-like. “What are you talking about?”
‘I didn’t know what was going on. “You just messed with my hair,” I said.
‘“You’re crazy,” he said.
‘I got off the bus at the next stop, even though I was going further. He freaked me out. When I got indoors, I went straight to my bedroom and examined the back of my head with a hand-held mirror and the dressing-table mirror. To my astonishment, a whole chunk of hair had been cut away.’
This was a statement made to the police in Naples by a woman aged 23 who worked as a secretary. According to this woman, who spoke to a reporter on her local community newspaper, the police more or less asked her, ‘So what do you expect us to do?’
‘I think they thought it was funny, a bit of a joke,’ she said. The police had asked her if she knew the man.
‘Never seen him before,’ she had replied.
‘So he’s not an ex-boyfriend?’ she was asked.
‘If he had been, I’d have clawed out his eyes,’ she had answered.
Her feistiness had ebbed, however, when asked for a description of her molester. ‘Youngish, ordinary, wearing sunglasses,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get much of a look at him.’
This answer did not, apparently, much impress the interviewing officer because he wrote an exclamation mark in a side-column on his report sheet, next to the witness’s comment. He also wrote, ‘Yet he was sitting right behind her and she turned to face him!’
The witness concluded her statement: ‘He kept looking out the window most of the time, even when I was talking to him. I wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible.’
When asked if she would be able to identify him in a line-up or from a rogues’ gallery photograph, she replied, ‘I couldn’t honestly say.’
She spent an hour thumbing through mug shots of convicted, small-time sex-pests, but it proved a fruitless exercise.
The report went into a folder and into the bottom drawer in a filing cabinet … to gather dust.
* * *
There were incidents reported in Rome, Milan and Turin of women having their locks shorn from behind by a stranger while using public transport. Unknown to the Italian police, similar allegations were being made in Madrid, Malaga and Paris; also in the South American countries of Brazil, Peru and Venezuela, plus the North American cities of Miami and New Orleans. But there was no big picture; that was the problem, the critical linking of apparently random events into a meaningful pattern. There was no joined-up reporting, no worldwide cohesion between law enforcement agencies. Each complaint was treated as a one-off. There was no cross-matching and nonexistent collaboration – not even in Italy, let alone between different countries and across continents.
‘And why should there have been?’ was the response of a spokesman for the Miami Police Department. ‘To be frank, it would be like expecting us to share with Scotland Yard every time we had a complaint of someone pissing against a wall in public.’
That officer had a point. In the great scheme of things, someone snipping a few locks of hair as a prank or odd-ball trophy-hunting was small beer. There were serial killers to be caught, suicide bombers to be thwarted, drug-traffickers and people-smugglers to be nailed. Amid all the world’s criminal mayhem and anarchy, the antics of a slightly weird but apparently harmless hair-cutter did not come close to inclusion on the international police-sharing network.
Like the Sicilian and American Mafia, the Camorra relied hugely on freelancers, known euphemistically as ‘friends’. These ‘friends’ would be sub-contracted work according to needs and ability. Politicians, police officers and influential journalists – ‘respected’ commentators and opinion-shapers – were always required on the payroll. Of course, from the moment they accepted their first ‘rotten’ lira, they were fettered to the ‘family’ for life.
The previous year, Italy’s Finance Minister took the extraordinary step of banning Philip Morris cigarettes. Since the Second World War, the Camorra had basked in a black market monopoly in Italy of Philip Morris tobacco to the tune of a £6 billion turnover per annum. Nearly half a million Italians earned a living selling those cigarettes. Several million smokers in Italy were only too delighted to avoid paying the government’s 65 per cent tax on their favourite Marlboros. The number of smugglers flooding the market in the cigarettes via speedboats and trucks was estimated at 25,000.
Restivo always had boxes of Philip Morris cigarettes. Marlboros were a favourite smoke among the women, especially those in café society, so, to a certain extent, Restivo was able to ingratiate himself with some of the smart set. He once bragged in a bar that a college girl, convent-educated, had gone to bed with him just for a packet of Marlboros. If the story is true, he failed to see that it was an anecdote which didn’t necessarily flatter him.
The Finance Minister even offered a government job for life to any Camorra tobacco-trader who would ‘come clean’ and ‘grass’ on the illegal traffickers. In Brussels, the European Commission declared the Italian Government in ‘contravention of free trade’ for its attempted ban on the Camorra’s tobacco-smuggling racket.
The frustration of the Claps family was understandable, and tensions rose steadily as the days, and then weeks, dragged on without progress. Even the press started to wonder what the police were doing.
Mimmo Sammartino, friend of Gildo and editor in Potenza of the newspaper La Gazetta del Mezzogiorno, said, ‘How is it possible that someone can disappear in broad daylight on a busy Sunday morning when people are going to church and no one saw what happened? It’s beyond belief.’ Mimmo added, ‘Someone knows. There’s a cover-up involved here, but that’s nothing new. The usual suspects are in the frame, but what is missing, apart from Elisa, is the reason behind whatever’s happened. Where has she gone? Who took her? What did she see or hear that was so important to protect? As a newspaper, we shall campaign to get to the bottom of this. As a friend, my heart goes out to the family.’
Crusading, fearless newspaper editors are to be admired, but in southern Italy and Sicily they tend to be regarded as foolhardy cannon-fodder. And their lives, and those of their loved ones, are significantly compromised.
Tearfully reminiscing about Elisa, Filomena said, ‘She is the youngest of my family. I miss her sitting at the table. I miss her hugs. She was always so happy, always so loving. I often talk with her. We have conversations, in my head, as if she’s in the room with me. In fact, she is here; I know it, which makes me sad because it means she can be here only as a spirit and will never walk through that door again.
‘I’m lost without her. She’s my first and last thought every day. I lay awake night after night thinking about her, wondering what she’d look like now. I never sleep. I’ve never slept since that Sunday. Lots of things happen in this town that are not good. You know about bad things, but you can’t do anything about it, so you just get on with your own little world. Then suddenly it touches you and you can’t ignore it any more.
‘Elisa must have seen or heard something. She must have known something too much. Knowledge in these parts can be a dangerous thing. She was so young. She wouldn’t recognise danger signs. Here, in Potenza, you have to think of life as a series of traffic lights. When they’re on green, it’s OK to keep going. When they’re red, you look away, you stop, you turn around, you most definitely don’t carry on. In between, you tread carefully, very cautiously.
‘In Naples, there is shooting all the time. You hear gunfire day and night; in the hills, in the city, everywhere. I warned Elisa about Naples. It’s the Devil’s city. Elisa wouldn’t go there, not on her own, not by choice. I would never put one foot inside that city; Potenza’s bad enough.
‘My family tell me to keep my mouth shut for fear that something nasty will happen to me. I don’t care. I kept my mouth shut all my life and look at my reward – I’ve lost my little one. They can do what they like to me now. I don’t care about myself.
‘The police aren’t doing all that they could; not from day one. And we all know the reason why that is. We all know who’s really in charge and who runs the town. Most of the priests are good men. They believe in God, like I do. But the Church is part of the system, part of the politics. It’s how it’s been since I have ever known it, and my parents, and their parents, and so on.
‘I’m a simple person and I ask for simple answers. But there’s nothing simple about how this region is run.
‘Now, as soon as possible, I want to be able to close the book on Elisa and have somewhere to take flowers and to sit beside her, and smile, and hold her hand because, even if I can’t see it, I know it’ll be there. She needs a resting place. And then God can call me whenever he wants. I am ready to go. There is too much grieving here. I’m ready for a better place; I’m sure, in my heart of hearts, that Elisa has found it, though far, far too soon.
‘The mysterious ways of God are too mysterious for me.’
Elisa’s sister-in-law, Irena Nardiello, said, ‘We have to accept there will be no happy ending. There’s going to be a lot more anguish to go through.’
Then, suddenly, everything changed.