The Assize Court of Palermo

sentenced

Pietro Morreale, 21 years old, from Caccamo (Pa), to life imprisonment for premeditated murder aggravated by cruelty and corpse concealment.

He is accused of having murdered

his girlfriend Roberta Siragusa, aged only 17

, on the night between 23 and 24 January 2020. The crime was committed in Caccamo. 

According to the accusation,

Pietro, who did not resign himself to the girl's will to leave him

, allegedly quarreled with the victim during a dinner with friends.

The couple would drive away and reach the sports field area.

The boy would have hit her Roberta with a stone knocking her out, then

he would have set her on fire with some gasoline she had in the car and watched it burn for a few minutes

.

He would then load her body into the car and throw it into a ditch.

Against the accused

, who was not present today at the reading of the verdict,

dozens of clues: from 33 violent episodes committed against the victim during the months of their relationship

, to a

video that filmed the burning corpse 

and Pietro's car a short distance away. , to the keys and to Roberta's blood found near the sports field, where the body was set on fire, to the bloodstains discovered in the car.

The day after the murder, Pietro Morreale

went to the carabinieri telling an incredible story: Roberta, after the dispute, would set herself on fire 

and fall into the cliff.

A version that, in addition to being unlikely, contrasts with the fact that the defendant on the night of the crime, after receiving the phone call from Roberta's parents, alarmed because her daughter had not returned, had sent messages to the victim's cell phone pretending to not knowing where she had gone and saying he was worried. 

At the trial, Roberta's parents, brother, grandmother and two anti-violence associations filed a civil action.

Dozens of friends of the murdered girl attended the reading of the device. 

The lawyers of the victim's family, Simona La Verde, Sergio Burgio, Giovanni Castronovo and Giuseppe Canzone,

asked the court to transmit the documents for any hypothesis of perjury 

against various witnesses: according to the criminal lawyers, some depositions would be contradictory and hide complicity in the crime.

Pietro Morreale,

they say, did not act alone

.