Body in Italian church could help solve British murder

By Nick Squires in Rome 329PM GMT eighteen March 2010

The find in a church integument of the "mummified" stays of an Italian schoolgirl who went blank seventeen years ago could yield a consequential lead in the unsolved poser of a British woman"s hideous murder.

Maintenance workers repair a trickle in the roof tiles of the church in southern Italy were frightened to find the droughty physique of 16-year-old Elisa Claps dark at the back of a bricked-up territory of wall in an roughly untouched dilemma of the attic.

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The internal arch of police, Romolo Panico, pronounced the "mummified" physique was in "an modernized theatre of decomposition."

DNA tests will be carried out to endorse the temperament of the body, but the teenager"s mom and hermit pronounced they were certain it was her since military found the clothes, sunglasses, a trinket sequence and a span of sandals that she was wearing when she left on Sunday Sept 12, 1993.

She had left to the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in the locale of Potenza to encounter a internal man, Danilo Restivo, afterwards 21, for a date.

It was the last time she was seen alive.

An hour after Mr Restivo incited up at a internal sanatorium looking diagnosis for an damage to his hand, that he claimed he had incurred after tripping over whilst on foot by a construction site.

He was after found guilty in an Italian justice of perjury, with magistrates observant they were not confident with the reason gave for where he was on the day of the teenager"s disappearance.

He served a short jail sentence.

Shortly afterwards, Mr Restivo changed to England and staid in Bournemouth, Dorset.

He was the budding think in the horrific attempted attempted attempted murder of Englishwoman Heather Barnett in Nov 2002.

The 48-year-old dressmaker was found brutally murdered in the lavatory of her home in Capstone Road, Charminster, Bournemouth by her dual children, afterwards elderly eleven and 14, when they came home from school.

Her physique had been lame and she had been knocked about with a hammer-like weapon.

In her hands, military found 3.5 inch-long strands of hair that belonged to a poser woman.

They referred to that the torpedo might have had a illusion for secretly slicing hair from women, maybe whilst travelling on buses.

Mr Restivo, who lived in a prosaic opposite, was arrested in tie with the attempted attempted attempted murder in 2004 but expelled after being questioned.

He was arrested again in 2006 but again expelled but charge.

Mr Restivo, right away 38, has regularly denied meaningful anything about possibly murder, but in Oct he was sent dual coronet bullet cartridges and a melancholy letter.

His Italian lawyer, Mario Marinelli, pronounced yesterday "Danilo is in England and has been sensitive about the liberation of the human remains. He is utterly ease about it." But Miss Claps" brother, Gildo, 40, pronounced "He is still not revelation the law about what unequivocally happened that Sunday."

Detectives from Dorset military trafficked to Italy to talk some-more than a dozen women who reported carrying their hair snipped off in peculiar circumstances.

The women came brazen after the murders were featured on a radio programme, Chi L"ha Visto, the Italian homogeneous of Crimewatch.