The murder of Tommaso Onofri is a crime that occurred on 2 March 2006 in , a hamlet in the municipality of the Parma, Italy. Tommaso Onofri, a 16-month old baby, was kidnapped from his family home in order to obtain a ransom, in the mistaken belief that his parents had access to significant economic resources; however, the kidnappers killed the child a few minutes after the kidnapping, likely fearing that they were already being hunted by law enforcement. The brutality of the crime was reported across Italy and internationally.
The true nature of the crime emerged about a month later, when bricklayer Mario Alessi, who had previously worked at the Onofri house, and his accomplice Salvatore Raimondi, confessed to the crime and indicated to police the place where the body had been hidden. Together with Alessi and Raimondi, the bricklayer's partner, Antonella Conserva, was also sentenced.
History
Crime In September 2005, the Onofri family (composed of the spouses Paolo Onofri and Paola Pellinghelli, aged 46 and 43, employed at the Italian Post Office, and their children Sebastiano, aged 8, and Tommaso, aged 17 months) left their apartment on the outskirts of Parma to move into a renovated farmhouse at number 27 in the rural hamlet of , on the border with Sorbolo.
At around 7.45 pm on 2 March 2006, the electricity went out in the farmhouse. The family were sat down eating dinner. After five minutes Paolo Onofri went out into the courtyard to check the electric meter and was attacked by two men with their faces covered by helmets and balaclavas, who threatened him with knives and pistols and forced the door to be opened. Once inside, they shouted robbery, pointing the gun at Tommaso and ordering the couple to hand over the money. Paola gave them her wallet with 150 euros in cash, after which the two assailants made the parents and their eldest son, Sebastiano, lie down on the floor, tying them up and gagging them roughly with packing tape. After around ten minutes, the perpetrators fled, and when the Onofris managed to free themselves, they saw that Tommaso was no longer in his high chair.
The alarm was immediately raised with the police; the parents told the investigators that the two criminals were short and spoke with a marked southern accent, perhaps Calabrese or Sicilian. Their son Sebastiano, also questioned in a protected hearing, said that before the break-in no noise had been heard coming from outside the house and that the two kidnappers had brought a lot of dirt into the house; he also highlighted the different attitude of the two, the man with the helmet was calm, while the one with the balaclava was agitated and brutal in his manner. The searches around the town began immediately, but there was no trace of the child.
Investigations The investigations were entrusted to deputy Lucia Musti and Silverio Piro. A file was also opened at the Bologna . The case of the disappearance immediately became the focus of the Italian media. On the very night of 2 March the first reports were made and the following day various television crews and correspondents from the major newspapers arrived in Casalbaroncolo. At the same time various actions of solidarity were promoted towards the little boy's family and various appeals were made to the kidnappers to free the child. They started with those launched on 3 March from the stage of the Ariston theatre in Sanremo by Sanremo Music Festival host Giorgio Panariello, on 7 March by Pope Benedict XVI, and on 9 March by the wife of the President of the Italian Republic Franca Ciampi.
On 4 March 2006, the magistrate Gerardo Laguardia declared to TG1 that the family had not yet received any news from the kidnappers. The same report broadcast a public appeal to the kidnappers by the parents, who said they were willing to negotiate to bring their son home safe and sound, pointing out that Tommaso suffered from epilepsy and therefore had to take Tegretol twice a day in precise dosages, in addition to having had a fever in the days preceding the kidnapping and therefore requiring Tachipirina. The declaration was also supported by the priest Don Giacomo Spini, who had baptized the child on 2 April 2005 and married the couple three years earlier, who made himself available to act as an intermediary with the kidnappers. The educational priest also came forward with the same intention, but the Onofri family refused.
The investigations were complicated by the continuing lack of evidence from the kidnappers, despite the fact that the Prosecutor's Office had issued 250 orders for telephone and environmental interceptions, and by the difficulty in identifying a possible motive. In fact, in the previous months, some robberies had taken place in the area around Casalbaroncolo, but apart from the theft and the assault on the homeowners, none of them had gone as far as such a brazen act as kidnapping a child. Moreover, apart from the 150 euros spontaneously handed over by Paola Pellinghelli, no other valuables had been stolen from the farmhouse; however, the Onofris were not well-off, they had recently taken out a mortgage to purchase the property in Casalbaroncolo and it seemed unlikely that anyone would ask them for a ransom, if not for the mistaken belief that their work at the Post Office (in particular that of their father Paolo, who was director of the Parma Sud Montebello post office) put them in a position to draw on the funds of the postal institution. The police actually received some requests for money, but none of them were found to be truthful. Further critical issues arose from media pressure: on 8 March, the magistrates following the case had to ask for three days of . This was done to avoid misdirection, such as the one that occurred when the Rai 3 programme Chi l'ha visto? received a false report of the discovery on the riverbed of clothes and medicines mendaciously identified as belonging to the child.
A revengeful action was also hypothesized, with reference to alleged conflicts with colleagues at the workplace, to a robbery perpetrated in 2001 in the post office where Paola Pellinghelli worked. Another hypothesis was even linked to the previous marriage of Paolo Onofri, which had ended in 1993 and from which a son was born. It emerged that his ex-wife had been having an affair with an inmate in the Vigevano prison that was suspected of voluntary homicide and this aroused some investigative interest. The investigators also evaluated other clues, such as a footprint left in the mud near the farmhouse and the disappearance of the family dog, which occurred two days before the kidnapping. None of these elements led to concrete results. As for the pet dog, it was found not far from Casalbaroncolo on 22 March.
While the searches continued on without results, the Milanese psychic Costantina Comotari also intervened. She stated that the child had been killed and that the body had been thrown into the waters of the Magra river, near Pontremoli in the Province of Massa-Carrara, almost 100 km from Casalbaroncolo. On 16 March, the divers of the Livorno Fire Brigade inspected the area indicated by the psychic, but the search was unsuccessful. She was later investigated for forgery in relation to the incident. Many other mediums contacted the investigators to give their "solution" to the case; among them there was also Maria Rosa Busi, who had become famous in the previous months for having given a decisive contribution to the finding of another missing person, who instead took the opposite view that Tommaso was still alive. On 26 March, a painted sign appeared on a road near the Onofri house bearing the words "Have you had enough?", which was interpreted by some as a message from the kidnappers and was immediately erased.
Suspicions about Paolo Onofri and the bricklayers The only lead that seemed promising was the spontaneous declaration of Pasquale Gagliostro. He was a former member of the Parrello clan of the 'Ndrangheta and a collaborator of justice, who had been recently released from prison. He stated that in August 2005, he had met in a restaurant in , with a fellow countryman who had proposed that he take part in the "lightning kidnapping" of a young child. The target was the son of two postal workers, who would then have been made to pay a ransom using Poste Italiane money, hopefully within a few hours. Gagliostro, who said he did not remember the name of the person who made the proposal to him, refused to take part.
In parallel, the began to question the bricklayers who had worked on the renovation of the Casalbaroncolo property, starting with the master builder Pasquale Giuseppe Barbera, who had already had business dealings with Paolo Onofri. He said that he had not noticed any disagreements between the owners and the workers during the works, and provided the investigators with a list of the workers employed on the building site. The hearings of the parents also continued, causing the ire of Tommaso's father, who said he felt "under accusation". A report by a manager of the Parma then openly questioned the veracity of what the Onofris had stated and hypothesized that in reality the story of the kidnapping concealed an infanticide that had occurred in the family. The total coincidence and non-contradiction of the accounts of the spouses and their son, Sebastiano, went on to refute this investigative hypothesis.
Further elements considered interesting came from the wiretaps on Barbera's telephone numbers, in particular a phone call between him and Paolo Onofri, in which phrases such as "they know something about me" and "I didn't say anything" were uttered. Another one was between Barbera's wife and Mario Alessi, a 44-year-old bricklayer who had participated in the renovation work at Onofri's house. Speaking to him and his partner, Antonella Conserva, she gave him an account of a search of the house by the police. Barbera, summoned again by the investigators, said that Alessi had involved him in a complex money laundering operation worth 70 million US dollars, obtained from the sale of contraband oil, and that together they had proposed to Paolo Onofri to enter the "system" in exchange for the cancellation of the amount to be paid for the renovation work on the house: the principals (defined as "a gang of Slavs") had considered Barbera and Alessi's commitment unsatisfactory, threatening them with reprisals against them and their families, so Onofri's phone call was used to obtain reassurances that he was not involved in this risk.
On 10 March, an inspection was carried out in a warehouse in Parma owned by Paolo Onofri, where an old computer was found, in whose memory were found various files containing child pornography images and videos downloaded from the Internet. Following the discovery, the father of the kidnapped child was entered in the register of suspects, with the hypothesis that Tommaso's kidnapping could have paedophilic implications, but the investigation did not reveal any connection between the events; the proceedings continued separately and ended with a plea bargain of a sentence of 6 months in prison. Tommaso's father initially declared that he had carried out anti-paedophilia research and that he had kept the material in order to file a complaint with the authorities. Later, in an interview with Panorama, he retracted this version, defining the detention of the incriminating material as "a mistake" that he regretted.
Discovery of the murder