In June 2004, the year of Restivo’s marriage, the enigmatic Italian from sleepy Potenza was arrested at his home in Bournemouth by the senior officers investigating Heather Barnett’s murder.
In a stereotypical dawn raid, a fleet of police cars swooped on a slumbering Chatsworth Road. Wearing just a white shirt and slacks, Danilo Restivo was bundled into the rear of the lead car and driven to Poole Police Station. He was aged 29 then and appeared totally unfazed and sanguine as he was taken into custody. He told detectives that he had nothing to hide and was happy to be interviewed. He was not a man with a burden on his conscience, he stressed. He would do all he could to assist them because, by doing so, he would clear his name and prove, once and for all, that he was a law-abiding citizen, proud to be living and working in the UK.
For three days, he was interrogated relentlessly but fairly under caution and in the presence of an interpreter. The questioning also included details of the disappearance of Elisa Claps. Old issues were revisited remorselessly. Yes, he did go to church for a secret meeting with Elisa Claps. No, he had not been with Elisa for long on the Sunday she vanished. No, he had not touched or seduced her that day, let alone harmed her. Yes, there was a special relationship between them, but nothing sordid or sexual. She was an unhappy, solitary girl and he had befriended her – was that unlawful? Were Good Samaritans deemed to be criminals these days? He had become someone she could trust, someone who wanted to keep her out of trouble and somehow to improve the quality of her life. Of course he was distressed by her disappearance, but how could he be expected to pinpoint her whereabouts if the police could not? No, he had not knowingly kept the company of underworld figures in Italy. He was hoping for a career as a dental technician within the health service, and was not someone who destroyed other people’s lives.
As for Heather Barnett, he hardly knew her. He had been given Heather’s name and address when he wanted a job done. He had been in her home only to have work done for him; that was all. Meetings with her had been trivial, not memorable. Why should they be? Who can remember everything about when they go to the shops? Of course he had not harmed her. What reason had he for doing that? She was a friendly, mumsy lady; nothing more to him. He had never been attracted to her sexually. He could never contemplate doing dreadful things to her.
Such as what he had read in the newspapers, he answered.
What had he read? The police were hoping he would refer to something that they had not so far released into the public domain. But he astutely avoided all the investigative traps, sticking rigidly to his story. He had not been near Heather’s house on the morning of her murder.
If he had been to Heather’s home and committed such abhorrent acts, he could not have avoided leaving forensic identification. Where was that evidence? They were as bad as the Potenza police – all hot air, full of accusations, but offering nothing with which to back them up. He had been completely frank with everyone. For example, he had not tried to hide the fact that he and Elisa had been alone for a few minutes in church but, when they parted amicably, she had been alive and well. Was there any evidence to the contrary? No. Could anyone say for sure that she was not still alive and well? No. He was being persecuted because he was a soft target. He was being hounded in Britain and Italy because the police in both countries were bereft of ideas. They had no other suspects, so they kept pestering him to justify their existence and to keep the cases in the public eye. He was being exploited for propaganda purposes, but they were wasting their time. In 20 years, they would be no nearer to closing the cases if they did not learn to think laterally and to widen their net. They were stuck on a treadmill. They were welcome to search his house and to examine his clothes, as long as they refrained from planting anything incriminating. He knew all about corruption in certain police forces.
He had no history of violence; no criminal record of a sexual nature. It was inconceivable that someone with such a clean sheet could go, in one leap, to being a sadistic monster. It flew in the face of all personality-profiling logic.
He was taunting them. They called his bluff and searched his home and garden. They questioned him further. Time was running out. They would have to charge him or let him go.
Supt James and his colleagues conferred. In truth, they had nothing substantial, nothing to secure the go-ahead from the Crown Prosecution Service. Even the circumstantial evidence was flimsy. Everything else could be dismissed as a series of coincidences. All right, there was no such thing as a ‘coincidence’ as far as the police were concerned, but that carried no weight in court.
One of the matters he was specifically quizzed about was the trainers that he had scrubbed with bleach. His explanation was that he had decided to wash the trainers ‘in disinfectant’ because they ‘smelt horrible’ due to the plastic. And when asked to explain his alleged suspicious behaviour in May at Throop Mill, which was videoed by undercover officers, he made no comment.
So, after three days in custody, Restivo walked out a free man. The police were hoping that the pressure was unnerving him and, sooner or later, he would cave in. Instead, he seemed more steeled. They had locked him up in Italy, accusing him of being a liar and perjurer. And in Bournemouth, he had been equally stoic and mentally resilient, soaking up all the accusations without weakening in the slightest. He became even more emboldened and this was probably a true reflection of his self-esteem. He had grown in stature, rather than being diminished. If the police were counting on his doing something silly, like panicking and decamping, they had misjudged him completely.
As one detective said, ‘I reckon he must have had his nerves extracted when he lost his milk-teeth. On a scale of nought to ten, I never saw fear in his eyes rise above zero.’
After being released from custody, he picked up the thread and rhythm of his life as if he had simply been away on a relaxing mini-break. And while this may not have been the investigators’ intention at the time, their prime suspect’s new-found sense of superiority and complacency could well have proved to be his undoing.
* * *
As the authorities became gradually more and more concerned over the similarities between the cases of Heather Barnett and Elisa Claps, so a bond developed between the two families.
Gildo, Elisa’s brother, travelled to Bournemouth. ‘Somehow I felt that if I knew as much as possible about what happened to Heather in England, I might understand more of what had become of Elisa,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to explain, I know, and doesn’t seem very logical, but in Bournemouth I experienced a closeness with Elisa.
‘I don’t know what I expected to find to find in Bournemouth. Perhaps a feeling of getting nearer to the truth. Perhaps a feeling that Bournemouth was the place where the truth now rested. Our whole family had come to terms with the fact that there would be no peace of mind for us until we had the truth. The search for the truth had become our holy grail. Our quest.
‘My mother’s biggest fear was that she would die before Elisa had been found. She prayed on her Rosary until her fingers were raw. We have a simple faith. We believe that goodness and righteousness will prevail and eventually be rewarded. I have to admit that a part of me thought that I might find Elisa in Bournemouth. Of course, it was a forlorn hope and not based on any rational reasoning. There was nothing to suggest that Elisa had run away to Bournemouth.
‘Long ago, we, the whole family, had resigned ourselves to the fact that Elisa was dead. Having her body for a proper Christian burial was the most we could hope for. And yet … yes, in a deep repository of our souls there was a little candle of hope flickering.
‘I had a need to meet Heather’s family. There’s therapy in the sharing of suffering and grief. They understood what we were going through. We appreciated their pain, their loss.
‘I knew, of course, about a suspect in Bournemouth. I knew that if he had killed Heather, he almost certainly had taken Elisa from us. I knew also where he lived. There had been much publicity. I had an urge to go to his house, bang on his door … But the police warned me to stay away. They said I would do more harm than good and that it would hinder any progress, rather than speed it up. They were right, of course, and I didn’t do anything stupid. We are passive people, not aggressive.
‘Before I set out, my mother made me promise not to let down the family. I gave my word. In Italian families, the mother rules; she’s the boss. Mamma says do something, you do it. Mamma says don’t do something, you don’t do it.
‘The one thing I could do in Bournemouth that was constructive was help to generate publicity. Get the public thinking about what they’d seen and heard. The hair-clipping fetish seemed to be the biggest clue the police had. It could have happened to many women who hadn’t yet come forward. Maybe they were too shy or embarrassed. But one of them could possibly know exactly who did it and would identify him for the police. It could be the woman whose hair had ended up in Heather’s hand in death.’
By now there were so many reports of women having had their hair shorn by a stranger in public places, usually on a bus or train, on numerous continents, that it was not feasible for one perpetrator to have been responsible. There had to be copycats. The police were having to consider the possibility of an international network, such as seen among paedophiles, rings of hair-snipping ‘bandits’ who might exchange locks of women’s hair. Could it be that there was more than one killer indulging this hair-snipping fetish? Bizarre as it seemed, it had to be seriously tested.
After all, the circumstances of the two cases were already bizarre beyond belief. But if there was such networking, as with paedophiles, they would have to be communicating with each other via the Internet. And here the FBI led the world in cyber-surveillance. They had an entire unit dedicated to electronic ‘tailing’– assessing, identifying and then logging suspect messages and images that were despatched, with a touch of a button, from one country to another.
The ‘copycat’ possibility spawned another fear – any copying of the hair-snipping could lead to copying of the murder. The police feared the worst, but hoped that they would find a breakthrough before things became much, much worse.
Daily, new reports were filed of other hair-clipping incidents on public transport, but Restivo could not have been the culprit – he was being closely watched. The FBI went to work with their techniques for interception, but were unable to uncover any organised network, and certainly nothing appeared to suggest any traffic on Restivo’s personal computer to incriminate him.
While in Bournemouth, Gildo talked a lot about his mother and how she was finding the strength to ‘journey through each heartbreaking day’. He explained, ‘She desperately wants a resting place for Elisa, somewhere to take flowers and to sit and talk to my sister. Elisa may be dead, but not in our hearts and memories.’
In Potenza, Gildo had displayed throughout the town more than 100 posters bearing photographs of his sister and Heather Barnett, with the emotional caption underneath, ‘We will remember them’.
Talking of the moment she first heard of the Heather Barnett case, Gildo’s mother said, ‘My immediate thought was for her children. I understand how they must feel. I wish I could meet them because they have lost a loved one, too. I want to make them believe that their mother is still with them. I still have Elisa, but not physically, not so that I can hug her, something I miss so terribly. Heather’s children must feel the same about their mother. They must miss their daily hug. The emotional cord between a mother and her children is never broken.’
* * *
The cooperation between the police in Dorset and Potenza was spontaneous. Once begun, the two-way transfer of information resembled a shuttle service.
The killer had been fiendishly clever in Bournemouth on 12 November 2002, but there was good reason to believe that he had not been so smart back in 1993 in Potenza. For a start, DNA profiling and matching had come a long way since then. A cautious, premeditated killer, such as a professional hit man, would have been careful not to leave fingerprints, footprints or samples of his blood, but he would have seen no danger in saliva, fibres or particles left from clothing. And, of course, he would have been right at that time. But by 2002, forensic science had progressed by leaps and bounds, something Heather Barnett’s murderer obviously knew all about, hence his meticulous removal of all DNA material at the crime scene in Capstone Road, Bournemouth. However, there was nothing the killer could do retrospectively about any clues lying dormant in the Most Holy Trinity Church, Potenza. He could only hope that the body of Elisa Claps would remain undetected, as it had done already for so many years.
The British DNA database was initiated in 1995. By the year 2000, the database held 750,000 DNA profiles of people with specific criminal convictions. But the year 2000 was an important milestone, seeing the launch of an expansion programme that would include the entire British criminal population on the database.
Until 2001, any suspects who were not prosecuted or who stood trial and were acquitted would have their profiles wiped and all DNA samples destroyed. Just prior to 2001, a rapist and a murderer won their cases at the Court of Appeal because their profiles had been retained on the database from previous crimes. The reversal of the verdicts was based on a technicality, a loophole that had to be closed. The retained DNA samples had clearly linked them to the serious crimes with which they had been charged and convicted. However, from 2001 it became legal for all DNA samples to be stored indefinitely and, to date, there are almost 4 million names on the database and profiles from 300,000 crime scenes.
A further change in the law came two years later, with the Criminal Justice Act decreeing that everyone arrested for a ‘recordable offence’ must allow a DNA sample to be taken and kept for posterity. If a defendant refused, a sample could be obtained by force, usually by cutting off a few strands of hair. Soon Britain was the world leader in DNA technology relating to crime detection.
Most people – probably wrongly – assumed that the UK’s national DNA database was housed in Scotland Yard; if not, then certainly somewhere within the metropolis. In fact, the headquarters were in the unlikely setting of an unprepossessing industrial estate in the West Midlands. The building was nondescript; red-bricked with nothing on the outside to give an inkling of the cutting-edge practices within its walls. The database expanded at the rate of 2,000 profiles every day and comprises more than five per cent of the UK population at the time of writing.
Most people by now know that DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid – is a chemical that is present in every human body cell, and stores all the information about our genetic make-up and history, everything that determines our physical appearance, including the colour of our eyes, hair and skin. Like fingerprints, no two DNA patterns are exactly the same, except in the case of identical twins.
A DNA sample becomes a profile by an automated scientific process, producing a unique string of numbers, which are then fed into the database. So sophisticated has the science become that a single bead of sweat would be enough for a complete DNA profile. The relevance of this is that the tiniest amount of dried sweat – perhaps from a perspiring, murderous hand, left unwittingly by the killer of Elisa Claps, all those years ago in the Most Holy Trinity Church, if indeed that was her fate – could be sufficient to identify and then convict an abductor or killer.
Of course, most of those ground-breaking scientific techniques were still a world apart from remote police departments such as those in Potenza. But this was to become the major area of focus for the Dorset Police and their Italian counterparts. If Elisa Claps’s body had been found quickly in 1993, vital evidence – microscopic, perhaps, and invisible to the naked eye – might well have been destroyed or unknowingly disposed of. The delay, although distressing to Elisa’s mother and the rest of her family, was, in fact, a disguised blessing for the investigators, who now had so much advanced technology at their fingertips, thanks to the British investigation team.
Naturally, there was still some professional and territorial jockeying for position. The Potenza authorities were eager to maintain their grip on the Claps case, while not wishing to spurn the foreign assistance that could prove invaluable in bringing closure to one of Italy’s most tantalising missing person’s cases. Equally, the main motive for the Dorset Police helping to solve the Potenza crime was to establish the connection with Heather Barnett’s death, resulting in an arrest and conviction in the UK. In a way, a race was developing between the British and Italian investigation teams to see who got the same man into court first.
But while some might argue that healthy completion was probably a hugely beneficial motivating factor, both police forces ultimately wanted the same thing – and they were to make use of evidence harvested many years earlier to get what they wanted.
Once the technology had been developed to identify almost ‘perfect’ DNA matches, police forces in the UK quickly saw the potential in the advancement of DNA profiling in bringing successful closure to many ‘cold cases’. Some forces were a lot quicker than others in utilising this new crime-solving tool. Dorset had been at the cutting edge of the latest technology right from the early days of DNA profiling, something that proved to be a lucky break for the Italian police and Elisa Claps’s family. From the moment the police started to investigate whether or not there was a link between the murder of Heather Barnett and Elisa Claps, the Dorset Police made all their expertise and technological resources available to the Potenza investigators. It was an offer that was too good to be refused.
Despite the lapse of time, there had not been one day when the Heather Barnett investigation was consigned to the back burner. Supt James regularly went public to reiterate that the investigation remained current and ongoing. Progress was being made, but by small increments. This case had matured into a game of patience, a perfect example of a modern police team combining the best practice of old-fashioned door-to-door enquiries and pounding the beat with ground-breaking, high-tech laboratory techniques that just a few years previously would have belonged to the world of science-fiction.
In contrast with the Heather Barnett file, Elisa Claps’s vanishing act was very much a ‘cold case’ in terms of proactive initiatives. Until the involvement of Dorset’s detectives, the Potenza police were still refusing to upgrade Elisa’s disappearance from that of a purely missing person – a probable runaway – to that of a murder hunt. They were stuck in a time-warp – no corpse, no case.
The ‘Dorset deal’ was unique – their technology could unravel a foreign ‘cold case’ that, in return, could lead to solving a more recent British murder: symbiosis at its best and most practical. British journalist David James Smith gave a remarkable insight into DNA forensic procedures in an article he researched and compiled for the Daily Telegraph. ‘The Forensic Science Service (FSS) routinely kept all the crime-scene stains submitted for examination, an untold number of files and microscopic slides, warehoused at room temperature and largely not degraded by time,’ he wrote.
DNA samples, it seemed, could even outlive the memory of the crime. Dorset Police received funding from the influential Police Standards Unit (PSU), initiated by the Home Office, which published a manual of good practice for ‘cold case’ reviews. A single search on the DNA database could cost a force £5,000. Smith reported that half of the UK’s 43 police forces had established ‘cold case’ units.
On a technical note, he further wrote, ‘The process of storing crime-scene stains was unchanged over the years; they were transferred on to glass microscope slides and fixed and protected with a cover. In that way, now, as in the past, undetected cases were preserved in readiness for future scientific advances.’
The Potenza police were ‘sold’ on Britain’s forensic trailblazing by the outcome of one case in particular that underscored the ability of British detective scientists to bring to justice the perpetrators of old crimes that had become dimmed by the passage of time. In the 1990s, a particularly violent assailant had been dubbed the ‘Dearne Valley Shoe Rapist’. He had attacked and raped at least six women near Rotherham in South Yorkshire and had stolen their shoes – that was his trademark. The shoe fetish, of course, was the hook that inevitably made headline news.
South Yorkshire’s police had even deployed one of its women officers, Sue Hickman, as a decoy. She would walk the streets at night wearing colourful shoes with stiletto heels, hoping to entice the rapist into choosing her as his next victim. She was wired and back-up was never far away. It was the kind of honeytrap that might work successfully in Hollywood movies. The ‘Dearne Valley Shoe Rapist’, though, spoiled the plot by not following the police script. Hickman walked and walked until her feet were so sore that she was blistered and limping, but the bait did not produce a catch.
The last rape in the series was in 1986. Hickman was promoted to Detective Sergeant and the ‘shoe file’ gathered dust, although she and other officers refused to allow it to disappear completely from their radar.
Then, in 2001, they submitted their samples from the case to the Forensic Science Service (FSS) at Wetherby. Three matching profiles came up from the assaults, proving that all the rapes had been committed by one man. Unfortunately, there was no match on the database, hence no suspect. But a year later, the BBC’s Crimewatch programme featured the ‘shoe rapist’ case. An e-fit was shown, which bore a striking resemblance to the actual perpetrator, James Lloyd, a pillar of respectable society and a high-ranking Freemason. But no one identified Lloyd. The TV programme refreshed people’s memories, but did nothing to bring about an arrest.
Another year elapsed and then Hickman and her colleagues heard about a new forensic search tool: ‘Familial DNA’. The basis of the technique was that the DNA of relatives was more similar than that of strangers; not exactly rocket science. But applied to crime detection, it had special significance. For example, the ‘shoe rapist’ might himself not have been on the DNA database, but if a relative was, it could lead the police to the offender they were looking for.
A further three years went by before Hickman had a ‘shortlist’ of 43 names of possible sibling matches. It was still a long shot. There was no guarantee that any of them was a relative of the rapist. But as luck would have it, James Lloyd’s sister was on the database, although, initially, there was no indication that she had a brother. But after revealing the existence of James Lloyd he was in custody within hours, after he had tried to hang himself, knowing that the net was closing in.
Later, in a statement to the police, he said, ‘I was a bastard 20 years ago.’ He had a collection of 124 women’s shoes – many of them ‘trophies’ from his victims – hidden at his place of work. All but one of his victims was in court in Sheffield to hear him sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum 15-year tariff.
The Dorset detectives were able to convince the Potenza police that a body in their town could be instrumental in solving a murder in Bournemouth and vice versa. Britain’s history in leading the world in DNA profiling provided a learning curve for the Italians, and their support was quickly won over.
With this new-found international collaboration, both investigative teams believed that their respective cases now had a very good chance of being solved – and soon.