A new lead reopens the case of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder.
The writer and director was killed behind the barracks of the Idroscalo in November 1975: a murder that would not be linked to the clandestine meetings with his Ragazzi di Vita, (gay boys) as claimed in the previous investigations and in the sentences, but to the attempt to recover the stolen films containing the last scenes Of Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, a film he had just made.
This alternative hypothesis on the death of the Roman filmmaker emerges from the final report of the Parliamentary Commission Antimafia of the previous legislature that suggests the possibility that the theft would have been organized by prominent criminal groups and, perhaps, also by neo-fascist groups.
Pasolini may have gone to the beach at the Rome seaside district of Ostia, where he was killed, to try to recover the film, the report said. The commission said “major criminal gangs,” such as the Banda della Magliana, may have been involved in the murder.
Only Pino Pelosi, known as La Rana–who died in 2017–who was seventeen and who had a relationship with the writer at the time of the crime, was ever indicted for the murder. In 2005, the Commission points out, Pelosi had spoken to the magistrates about the stolen film: he had said that he had proposed himself as a mediator to get the films stolen from the director back. An admission that rekindles the spotlight on the murder, of which, “in substance, apart from the presence of Pino Pelosi as bait, those responsible have never been discovered”, writes the Commission.
The investigations focused on the stacks of films stolen from a shed in Cinecittà on August 15th 1975. The murder took place on November 2nd of the same year. The report underlines that there have been investigations by investigative journalism which have “definitively crumbled the initial hypothesis, [of the connection to gay life] unfortunately at the time supported by the media and by some judicial rulings, according to which the murder of the writer was only the tragic outcome of a sexual encounter which resulted in an extemporaneous assault by a single individual, namely Pino Pelosi”.
The Antimafia speaks of “particularly serious omissions” in the immediate investigations, such as “the failure to hear the witnesses who lived in the barracks in the area and who had heard what happened that night, and who would have given account from the beginning of the evidence that the attack was carried out by numerous people”, or “the lack, after the omitted confinement of the area where the crime had occurred, of in-depth reports on the serious injuries sustained by Pasolini”. There is also talk of “clear links with the world of organized crime in Rome at the time.”
The report concluded that it was unlikely that justice would ever be brought to Pasolini ‘s killers but argued that it was still important to get to the truth for the history books.
