“I don’t know, I don’t remember.” The reconstruction that Laura Casagrande, the schoolmate, investigated by the Rome prosecutor’s office for false statements to the prosecutor, makes of that last day in which she saw Emanuela Orlandi is a succession of silences and contradictions. Heard as a person informed on the facts in 2024, she returned to the judicial offices on Friday, but this time in a different capacity and accompanied by her lawyer. Because evident contradictions have emerged from the latest investigative documents by the Carabinieri. And not only with what was declared in ’83, when the then young girl had provided conflicting versions, but also with what was declared to the same investigators last year.
Even before the parliamentary commission investigating the Orlandi case, Casagrande provided explanations on the contradictory accounts given to the police and carabinieri. Yet she was the last person to see the fifteen-year-old who then disappeared. The members of the commission, who have secreted part of the report and intend to hear her no longer in the form of a hearing, but as a witness under oath, say that “there are concrete elements that lead to supporting it”. According to the latest version, given to parliamentarians, Emanuela would not have seen her leave the music school that day.
Memory lapses
Casagrande said she was mortified by his silence and explained: «I was and am a very emotional person and I learned as a technique, as you will have seen, to remove in order to move forward. I have had several nervous breakdowns throughout my life. My story didn’t end that day. Unfortunately, a technique that I use very often, otherwise I won’t move forward, is to put it aside, because there are too many new things to deal with. I really apologize, but I no longer remember many things.” Yet the prosecutor Stefano Luciani who coordinates the new investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance did not believe her. It was at her house that the phone call from a man with a Middle Eastern accent arrived in July 1983: he asked his mother if they wanted to collaborate and, while the lady was unable to write due to stress, it was she who picked up the phone and wrote the long message that she and her mother had delivered to Ansa. Casagrande, “a little girl”, as she herself underlines several times, also asked that man how he had gotten his telephone number.
The contradictions
Immediately after the events, Casagrande declared on record to the flying squad that he had seen Emanuela at the stop of buses 70 and 26. Then he told the police: “I remember seeing her from afar, while she was hastily walking towards the bus, because she had to leave in a hurry.” Every now and then he turned and saw her, but then he never saw her again. But in the commission last year, he changed his story again: «The memory I have of that day is that he didn’t come to the choir lesson. I was waiting for her, because she was one of the girls with whom I had bonded most. I didn’t see her arrive or she arrived very late after class had started. Then, I didn’t see the exit. We didn’t go out together, I would have remembered. However, I remember this thing about being late or leaving class early.”
It was the deputy Roberto Morassut who stigmatized the contradictions: “The two statements, made a short distance from each other, do not coincide – he observed – And now he tells us, essentially, that he hasn’t seen it.” Casagrande reiterates: «I have a total void. I don’t remember seeing her, I don’t have that image she read to me about. I remember it arrived late, but that’s the only thing I kept.” But the woman does not even remember having declared that she and Emanuela had been introduced by a third person, nor the other girls at the school, nor having received a call from Sister Dolores, who ran the institute, at 5 in the morning and then at 11. Even on that occasion she had responded vaguely to the nun’s questions.
The other holes
Not even left in her memory is the fact that the nun, in the following days, had shown her photos of other girls, to understand who Emanuela was with, and she was unable to indicate who the friends Emanuela would have been with were. And it is the president of the commission, Andrea De Priamo, who criticizes: «You understand well that, for a parliamentary commission, it is difficult to digest such a response. On leaving, did Emanuela tell her that she was in a hurry and had to leave early because someone had offered her a job? The famous story of the flyers. It appears from the documents that she said she was in a hurry, that she had to leave early because she had found a job and they had to give her some flyers to distribute. This he said to her, according to the documents. Do you remember this circumstance? But once again the answer is the same: «Was that day there? The last day? Morassut also insists: «With respect to this, I don’t think that you cannot have fixed in your memory the day of Emanuela’s disappearance. I believe that, even though many years have passed, it is an event that now belongs to the history of Italy.”
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