The Villa Pamphili murder mystery, mother and daughter the victims. The autopsy of the child requires further investigation

Further histological investigations will be necessary to clarify the cause of death of the newborn girl found lifeless yesterday afternoon at Villa Pamphili, in Rome. This is what emerged at the end of the autopsy performed today at the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Catholic University, directed by Professor Antonio Oliva. DNA samples were also taken for examination. The comparison, entrusted to the scientific police, will take a few days to provide useful results for the investigation. Small pieces of a complex puzzle. The murder mystery - the discovery, a few hours apart, of the bodies of a baby girl of about six months and a woman of about 40 - is a real puzzle for investigators, who are trying to give an identity to the two victims and identify the author, or authors, of what the public prosecutor's office currently considers an aggravated double murder. The autopsy has been brought forward to Sunday to provide answers as soon as possible: the first is that no injuries were found on the woman's body. A longer wait instead for the results of the toxicological analysis.

The investigation therefore continues on two tracks: on the one hand the identification of the victims, on the other the search for the alleged perpetrator. With regard to the first element, the woman's fingerprints were not matched: this means that she had never been photographed before. In the last few hours, several reports have come in: some witnesses report having seen, on Saturday, a person wandering around the green area with a sort of 'bundle' in his arms. A lead still to be verified. At the moment, none of the witnesses recognised the victims in the photographs shown by the investigators. Initial verifications have shown that the sack containing the woman's body would not have been dragged - there is a lack of signs that can be attributed to this hypothesis - but rather laid down near some oleanders, not far from one of the entrances on Via Olimpica. This detail would make it unlikely that the operation could have been carried out by a single person.

The main hypothesis is that there is a family relationship between the two victims: mother and daughter, who died at different times. An assessment suggested by the state of the woman's body, in advanced decomposition and perhaps already some time since the spot where it was found. Notwithstanding the sultry heat of the last few days, investigators believe that the death dates back to a few days before that of the newborn girl, found Saturday afternoon around 4pm near a hedge, inside the large park in the capital, about 200 metres from the body of the presumed mother. Answers to the identity and, above all, the cause of death will come from autopsy examinations. Initially, it emerged that the public prosecutor Antonio Verdi, in charge of the file, had entrusted the task of autopsy to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Policlinico Gemelli, which was supposed to carry it out on Tuesday. Subsequently, there was a change of plan: examinations were brought forward to yesterday evening and entrusted to the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Catholic University directed by Professor Antonio Oliva. If an initial external examination showed no obvious signs of violence - neither gunshot nor stab wounds - on either body, the figure for the woman was also confirmed by the autopsy. One of the hypotheses in the field - but we will have to wait for the results of the toxicological examination - is that the death may be drug-related.

At the same time, DNA samples were also taken to try to name the victims. The somatic features of the woman and the girl, both of light complexion, would suggest a provenance from Eastern Europe. Investigators are cross-referencing the data with lists of missing persons, both in Italy and abroad. The samples will be forwarded to laboratories specialised in comparing data: the results should arrive and be communicated to the investigators within 24 hours. At the same time, investigators are trying to reconstruct the hours before the discovery through the analysis of images recorded by surveillance cameras in the area, particularly between Via Olimpica and Via Aurelia Antica. Testimonies are also being collected to verify whether the woman and the girl gravitated to the Villa Pamphili area, which is also frequented by homeless people, including drug addicts, who often spend the night in makeshift beds, in a context marked by degradation. Also to verify this aspect, on Sunday investigators returned to the site for an extensive inspection that covered a large part of the park area. Rubbish bins were also checked, from which some documents were allegedly recovered, which are now being examined by investigators.