Evil Up Close

A teenage girls disappears on the way to the beach, a TV campaign creates a national obsession: Where is Sarah? One of Italy's best known crime programmes arranges a broadcast linking the viewers to a discussion live from Sarah's family home. And then, in front of millions, Sarah's mother is told the breaking news - the body of her daughter has been found. Amazingly, she is led away in front of the cameras. Italy knew Sarah Scazzi was dead but what they were about to learn was the parts played in her death by her cousin, uncle and aunt. A tragic private family affair was about to be played out in front of an entire country.

Erika was a truculent teenager, her boyfriend, Omar, besotted by her. But everything seemed normal in the home of the De Nardo family in a small town in Northern Italy. Dad worked as an engineer, Mum as an accountant whilst Erika and her little brother, Gianluca, went to school. Nobody could know that Erika and Omar were plotting to slaughter mother, Susanna, and father, Francesco, before setting up home as parents to little Gianluca. But as Susanna returned home one evening, Erika and Omar first knifed Erika's mother to death and then chased Gianluca around the home. As he hid in the locked bathroom, they decided he too had to die. He had seen too much. The double-killers fled the scene claiming a burglary and murder by immigrants. But tell-tale, bloody footprints hinted at the truth of what had happened when Erika and Omar became the teenage killers.

Lea Garofalo wanted out from the world of the Calabrian mob known as the Ndrangheta. The Ndrangehta are perhaps the most unforgiving of the Mobs of Italy. One wrong word from a family-member and they run the risk of the ultimate punishment. That code of honour was to come back to haunt Lea as she turned state's evidence against her partner and father of her daughter, Denise. She hid in witness protection for years feeling imprisoned by her lack of freedom. Naively believing she could persuade her former man, Carlo Cosco, to forgive so both could be parents to her daughter, she agreed to a meeting. Hours later, she had disappeared. Bravely, her daughter refused to back way from getting her mother justice and today she too is in witness protection having testified against her father and the might of the Ndrangehta.

It's the oldest story in the world of murder; the love triangle. This one was played out in front of a crowded commuter platform in Italy's beautiful city of Bologna. Captured on camera, a jealous husband followed his wife, Giuliana, from her train and across the central railway station. Also captured on security cameras, his wife's lover, Alessandro, arriving for the romantic get-together. Neither he nor Giuliana even suspected Sergio Ucciero might be there. Sergio and his wife had been estranged for five years. She felt entitled to a new friendship. In fact, her lover and she were at the start of their relationship when Ucciero, with a knife hidden in a newspaper, pounced to murder on platform one.

His family knew him to be strange. Odd things happened wherever he went. Women found a lock of their hair snipped from them, without warning, by a man sitting nearby. He would then melt into crowd. Danilo Restivo, an ugly man, persuaded a church-regular to meet him after Mass one Sunday in the Italian town of Potenza. Elisa Claps disappeared soon after. Her body was to lie for 14 years in the church belfry as Italy probed the mystery of what happened. Restivo, with his family helping him launder the clothes he had worn the day he met Elisa, left for England and Bournemoth suddenly heard of women complaining of a man who had snipped a lock of their hair. Two children found the horrifically mutilated body of their mother, Heather Barnett. Only then did the truth about the fetishist Restivo begin to unravel.