Nicholas Shakespeare is gripped by Tobias Jones's Blood on the Altar: In
Search of a Serial Killer
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Tobias Jones. |
A parent is only as happy as their most miserable child. A child’s
disappearance annihilates families and fractures communities. We need
the body in order to mourn it, as well as to mark that a person has
lived. It is why the names of Suzy Lamplugh and Madeleine McCann
continue to resonate. And it is why Tobias Jones became obsessed with a
16-year-old Italian girl who went missing in a church in Potenza in
1993. “That carefree face kept me up at night,” he said.
Blood on the Altar
tells how a tragedy from south Italy became national and then
international, with the discovery nine years later of another body in
Bournemouth. It is the hair-raising and affecting story of how a single
criminal case evolved, in the words of one of Jones’s interviewees, into
“a problem that belongs to everyone”.
Jones is no impartial moderator. He is the author of The Dark Heart of
Italy, now breeding pigs in Somerset, who in the late Nineties moved to
Lucania. This sad and yet invigorating mountain region “feels,” he
writes, “like my spiritual home”.
Sold as Lucania Felix, the “happy island” is a slow-moving place of
earthquakes and brigands, where nothing is so suspicious as the obvious.
Its people are loyal, hospitable and famous for a patience that they can
violently lose – as happened to Elisa Chaps on Sunday September 12,
1993.
She was the adored daughter of a humble tobacconist and his wife. Elisa
had gone to Mass before joining them and her two brothers for a family
lunch. An hour went but she never turned up. The last person she spoke
to in church was Danilo Restivo, a soft-voiced young hypochondriac with
bulbous eyes, a spooky smile and ambitions to be a dentist. Restivo had
harassed Elisa before. His bloodstained jeans and known predilection for
snipping off girls’ hair in buses ought to have alerted the authorities.
The impediment was Danilo’s father Maurizio, a director of the National
Library, author of a book about knife-happy female brigands, and
organiser of an exhibition on guillotines. Maurizio was a bene, one of
Potenza’s great and good – and a symbol of what Jones calls “the
ludicrous overlaps of power”. As a result of Maurizio’s obstructionism,
the case, according to Elisa’s brother Gildo, one of the book’s heroes,
became “a manual for all the things that shouldn’t happen when someone
goes missing”.
The priest in charge of the church, Don Mimi, forbade a search of the
church; an equivalent in local government stopped the police from taking
away Danilo’s bloodstained clothes; and the husband of the magistrate in
charge of the investigation accepted one million lire from Maurizio “to
take the heat off” his son. Maurizio insisted that Elisa had run away
from home. Not for another 17 agonising years was her body discovered –
in the garret of the church – and Danilo charged with her gruesome
murder.
Although he can sound at times as though he is clearing his throat to
sing opera, Jones paints a rich portrait of Basilicata and its history.
He is less sure-footed on his home turf, where justice is meted out. He
describes Winchester, inadequately, as “one of those old towns that
seems soaked in history”. His truest and most involving note is his raw
bellow for justice.
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Blood on the Altar: In Search of a Serial
Killer
by Tobias Jones
308pp, Faber & Faber, £16.99
t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from
Telegraph Books
(rrp £16.99, ebook £9.31) |
More than his credentials as a travel writer, Jones’s faithful obsession
to know what happened to Elisa, and to link it to the wider corruption
of Silvio Berlusconi’s regime, is what raises his book almost to the
same shelf as Peter Robb’s magnificent Midnight in Sicily and Helen
Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. It is a terribly good, terribly sad
story that probably only Jones, with a foothold in both countries, could
have written.
The most potent of all myths remains that of Antigone who was forbidden
to bury her dead brother. After Danilo was sentenced to life in prison,
Elisa’s mother said that she would have forgiven him “if he had let me
find the body, if he had let me touch it”. Jones’s recreation of how
Elisa’s body was found, and how Danilo was tracked down, are among the
most gripping sections of Blood on the Altar.
A few years after leaving Italy, Jones was sitting in a café in
Dorchester when he read about the murder of a seamstress in Bournemouth
and how her two children, on discovering her mutilated body, had rushed
for comfort into the arms of their neighbour opposite: Danilo Restivo.
There was a photograph. “His eyes appeared more bulbous than ever.” For
Jones, the hunt was on, the start of “an incredible, melancholy and
uplifting journey”. |