The information seemed reliable. The police were not giving away too much, but a pithy statement intimated that they had every reason to believe that Elisa Claps was alive and in Albania, travelling with a male companion.
The reported sighting reputedly came from an Italian tourist in Albania who had seen photographs of the missing girl.
An Italian TV crew immediately flew to Albania. The TV journalists and their camera-team were only a few hours behind the officers of Italy’s élite Anti-Mafia Unit, operating out of Salerno.
The location of the purported sighting, Albania, had touched a nerve among those determined to diminish the influence of the Mafia, hence the kneejerk reaction by the crack squad that had been formed to hunt down mobsters and to methodically and inexorably shrink their criminal activities.
Bear in mind that for months the general consensus throughout Italy was that the Mafia was heavily involved in Elisa’s disappearance. If the mobsters had not themselves harmed her, they were covering for the person – or persons – who had. That had become a given. But why should they do that? The Mafia was not a charitable organisation. It had always been mercenary, introspective and ruthless. If it was protecting someone outside the Camorra, then it would be doing so only for its own benefit.
In view of all that was happening at that time in Italy with organised crime, the sighting in Albania made sense. For the Mafia-hunters, Albania fitted perfectly into the criminal food chain; it was a link that helped to complete the circle.
In her book, Crime Without Frontiers (Little Brown), Claire Sterling explored the elaborate route through which the Camorra’s contraband tobacco was moved. Switzerland, Belgium and Holland were the countries where there were clandestine production facilities. From those countries, the outlawed goods were transported to Camorra storage depots in Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey. From the depots, the consignments were shifted to Yugoslavia and Albania, the final staging-posts before the illicit cargoes were shipped across the Adriatic to Italy. This was the ‘Balkan Run’ in reverse, the route for three-quarters of the black-market heroin into Western Europe. The ‘Balkan Run’ had also become infamous for the seizure of the largest convoy of bootleg weapons.
So the sighting of Elisa Claps in Albania, taken in context, was a natural trigger for the ‘A’ team to swing into action.
Elisa apparently had been seen setting off into the mountains. The TV crew interviewed anyone and everyone who had a story to tell. They recruited professional mountain-trackers; they hired a helicopter and an Albanian pilot; they showed hundreds of people photographs of Elisa. A few nodded, ‘Yes, yes,’ but the vast majority shook their heads. The trek turned into a comic tragedy, with as many different sightings and possible locations as there were people prepared to offer an opinion.
‘We never really believed Elisa was in Albania,’ said Gildo, speaking on behalf of the whole family. ‘The TV people wanted to believe because it was in their interests to do so. They wanted to find her and bring her back and make world news. We wanted her back, too, of course, but we didn’t allow our hopes to be falsely raised. We saw it for what it was.’
And what was that?
‘To draw the spotlight away from Potenza,’ asserted Gildo. In other words, someone was desperate for the world’s attention to be drawn away from Potenza. In retrospect, it was probably far more specific and tighter focused than that. It is reasonable now to presuppose that it was the focus on the Most Holy Trinity Church that someone was conspiring to have deflected. Certainly it defied logic to imagine that the Camorra would deliberately draw attention to its contraband rat-run through Albania. The belief had to be that Elisa was being utilised as some kind of ‘mule’ by the Camorra and that must have taken some believing, even for a police force with virtually nothing else to go on.
It came as no surprise to the Claps family when the TV crew and the Italian police Mafia-hunters returned empty-handed from Albania. Back to square one … though not quite. Not back to the Most Holy Trinity Church, where the mystery began. The police were even more convinced now that the case would be resolved on the streets – either of Potenza or Naples.
The Claps family by this time was in no doubt that Elisa had been murdered.
The police, however, would accept no more than that she was a missing person and refused to raise the status level of the investigation, which meant that resources were kept to a minimum.
‘There is not one shred of evidence to point to Elisa Claps having been harmed,’ said a Potenza police spokesperson.
Too simplistic, criminologists in the UK and USA were saying. So many negatives in a case such as this must amount to a positive – no contact, no confirmed sighting, no cash withdrawals or plastic transactions, no apparent means of living, just a sudden full-stop. And to any experienced investigator, that had to imply a drastic and very unpleasant end. Unusually in this case, if anyone was in denial, it was the police and not the family of the missing teenager.
Complaints continued to come in about random cutting of hair, always while the victims were on buses or trains. A few of them were able to provide fairly detailed descriptions. With the help of two or three women, a police artist produced a drawing of the suspect. One officer noticed the likeness to Restivo.
The women were shown a photograph of Restivo and two of them were sure that he was the cutter. The two agreed to attend an ID parade, but Restivo travelled a lot and it was a few days before he returned to Potenza, by which time the women had changed their minds. They were no longer so sure; they had been ‘hasty’ with their initial identification, and they declined to try to identify the cutter in a line-up.
Then came the e-mail that was to break a mother’s heart.
* * *
Filomena will never forget the day of the e-mail – it was addressed to her and the sender was claiming to be her missing daughter, Elisa.
The year was 1998. Elisa had been gone for half a decade. Years earlier, the Claps family had abandoned all hope of ever seeing Elisa alive again. And now this.
Without any overture or the slightest hint from the police, Elisa had surfaced, through the magic of modern technology. She had come home without making an appearance. Like a ghost, she had slipped into the house without passing through a door or window.
An e-mail is so different from a letter that drops on to the doormat. The presence of a letter is almost as good as having the sender momentarily with you as you read it. It is physical. You hold it. If the letter has been handwritten, you can connect with the flow of the thoughts and the heart. A letter, especially from a loved one, is so personal. But an e-mail simply announces its electronic, disembodied existence from the depths of a machine. Posted and delivered, almost simultaneously, with the press of a button.
Just visualise the scene that day. Heavy-hearted and sleep-deprived, as usual, Filomena slumped in front of the family computer – a new addition to her life that she was still coming to terms with – and logged in. Surfing the Internet had now become a daily habit of hers, like saying her prayers morning and night, but only in the hope of coming across a development in the case of her missing Elisa, something the police might possibly have overlooked, or forgotten to inform her about. But despite her willingness to embrace the latest technology, she had far more faith in the power of prayer than in the abilities of the police or the press.
Whenever there had been anything on the Internet reporting a new lead, it had never come to anything. ‘Just reporters dreaming up something on a quiet day,’ Gildo would say dismissively, and his mother would nod in agreement, eyes moist.
Filomena still cried every day. Her emotions were never completely in check. The heartache remained as insistent as it was the Sunday Elisa went to church and did not come home.
It had been a long time since anything of substance had been written about Elisa. She was old news; a cold case. Hers was also a statistic that embarrassed the police because there was still no explanation, only speculation.
On certain anniversaries, the media would rekindle interest, fleshing out the story with dubious new angles and the same old quotes from the police – ‘This is not a closed file. We are still very active on the case. Any day now there could be a breakthrough. We’re waiting for just one phone call, one tip-off …’
So Filomena was not anticipating any reference to Elisa on the Internet as she began her daily browse, and there was none, so she clicked distractedly on to her e-mail. There was a new one, identified in bold. Subject: ‘Elisa’.
Her hand shaking, she manoeuvred the mouse and clicked again. She was so shaky that it took her several attempts to open the message, which began, ‘Dear Mummy …’
Dear Mummy! Instead of reading from the beginning, Filomena scrolled frantically to see which of her children had sent the missive. It was Elisa. Impossible!
Desperately trying to steady her hand, she steered the cursor back to the beginning of the message. Almost immediately, her hand shot to her mouth, as if to stifle a scream. Elisa, apparently, was safe and well. She was sorry she had caused so much grief to her family, but she just had to get away. Life within such a big family was claustrophobic, intolerable for her. She had been so unhappy, but she had not wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings, so her solution had been to run away. Right away. As far away as possible.
Now she was living in Brazil, and everything was so different. She would never return. She pleaded with her mother to forgive and to forget her. She loved her family, but could not live with them. She had made a new life for herself on the opposite side of the world and she had made contact to put her mother’s mind at rest. She regretted not having done this earlier, but warned, ‘You won’t hear from me again. This is hello and goodbye … for ever.’ She also stressed that she would not respond to any reply.
Hysterical and traumatised, her heart beating wildly, Filomena summoned her family around her for an emotional gathering. ‘She’s alive! She’s alive!’ Filomena gasped to each one of her large, extended family as they assembled to hear the news.
‘Whatever did we do to deserve this?’ she sobbed. ‘Has she lost her mind? Perhaps she’s had a nervous breakdown.’
One by one, they all read the e-mail.
Gildo, always a calming influence, was instantly sceptical. He told them all to ‘look at this objectively’. He sneered at the ‘this is hello and goodbye’ line. ‘It’s so phoney,’ he said. ‘Does that sound like Elisa? It’s something corny from a magazine. Would Elisa behave this way? Would she write this way to her mother?’ All these questions were rhetorical. ‘You could not have found a mother and daughter who were closer if you scoured the universe,’ he said.
The problem for Filomena was that she wanted to believe; well, at least half of it. She prayed that Elisa was indeed alive, but did not wish to believe that her daughter had been driven away by herself and others in her close-knit family.
‘What are you saying?’ she said.
‘I’m saying there’s no proof that this e-mail is from our Elisa. How did she get to Brazil? How did she get into that country, without passport and papers, when every border authority had been primed to be on the look-out for her?’
One member of the family speculated that Elisa might have eloped with a Brazilian or had been kidnapped by the Camorra and sold to a tycoon in South America who had bribed immigration to issue her with legitimate domicile status. Bribery was rife in South America, it was argued. Protection from prosecution for any crime, even murder, could be bought. Riches could put any man or woman above the law.
Gildo was appalled when the Italian police seemed to be content to accept the e-mail at face value. ‘It lets them off the hook,’ he protested. ‘They’re able to say, “There you are, she has run off. She is a missing person, just as we suspected from the very beginning, and nothing more.” It saves them a lot of work. They don’t have to do anything. They say if we want to pursue the matter further, then we must take it up ourselves with the Brazilian authorities.’
Gildo was not prepared to be stonewalled. The Claps family was not wealthy, but Gildo had a friend who was a private investigator. A smart operator, too. The PI took on the case.
The Italian police in those days did not have a specialist, high-tech fraud unit. The PI consulted experts and quickly learned, what we all know today, that an electronic or computer trail is as trackable as any other – as visible as a vapour trail in the sky on a cloudless day.
It was not long before the PI had proved that the e-mail had been sent, not from Brazil, but from an Internet café in Potenza – just a few hundred yards from the Church of the Most Holy Trinity.
‘But is it possible to establish who sent the e-mail?’ Gildo asked his friend.
‘Sure,’ was the emphatic answer. A false identity could have been created, but ultimately there was no hiding place. However sophisticated the scams to conceal the true identity, a skilled cyber-tracker would be able to penetrate the mask.
‘Trust me,’ said the PI. And Gildo did. ‘Remember this, whoever did send the e-mail wants you all to accept that Elisa is alive and well, living happily thousands of miles away,’ the PI reminded Gildo.
‘And we should stop looking for her?’ said Gildo. ‘We should just roll over?’
‘Exactly,’ said his friend.
All these quotes are as recalled and have been translated from the original Italian.
Within another week, they had conclusive proof that the e-mail had been sent from Potenza.