The Murder of Elisa Claps

Elisa Claps

Elisa Claps was a 16-year-old student from Potenza, the capital of the southern Italian region of Basilicata. On 12 September 1993 she went out in the city centre and never came home. For almost seventeen years her mother, Filomena Iemma, and her brother Gildo kept her case in the public eye, refusing to accept that she had simply vanished. Their persistence would eventually make the Claps case one of the best-known examples in Italy of a family's long struggle for the truth.

The day she disappeared

According to friends, Elisa had arranged to meet Danilo Restivo, a young man she knew, and the two went to the Santissima Trinità church in the historic centre. Restivo later went to a hospital emergency room with a cut to his hand, which he attributed to a fall at a building site. Reporting by Il Post later described how early opportunities were missed: a police officer raised the possibility of an abduction within a day, but Restivo's clothing was not seized and neither his home nor the church was searched. Restivo first denied seeing Elisa that day and later changed his account; he received a light sentence for giving false testimony and eventually moved to Bournemouth in England.

A discovery seventeen years later

On 17 March 2010, Elisa's remains were found in the attic of the Santissima Trinità church, hidden under rubble and debris, after two women hired to clean the building raised the alarm. The location stunned the city: she had been lying, for all those years, in a church a short walk from where she was last seen. Il Post reported that investigators later established the body had in fact been seen months before it was officially reported, a finding that deepened the family's conviction that some people had kept silent. The family has long linked the case to what it sees as silence and cover-up within local church circles; those claims have not resulted in any other conviction.

Two murders, two countries

By the time Elisa was found, Restivo was already under scrutiny in England. In November 2002 his neighbour in Bournemouth, Heather Barnett, had been found dead in her home. He was arrested by British police in May 2010 and in 2011 Winchester Crown Court sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 40 years for her murder. In Italy, prosecutors charged him with killing Elisa. On 11 November 2011 a preliminary hearing judge in Salerno, ruling under the fast-track abbreviated procedure, sentenced him in his absence to 30 years in prison. Under Italian law, choosing that procedure reduces the penalty, and Il Fatto Quotidiano noted that it spared him a life term. Italy's Court of Cassation rejected his final appeal on 23 October 2014, making the sentence definitive. Restivo has always maintained his innocence, and he remains in prison in England, and reporting in 2023 noted that his Italian sentence had not yet begun.

The church and the reopened inquiry

The Santissima Trinità church stayed closed from 2010 until 24 August 2023, when it reopened after renovation work, a decision Elisa's family had always opposed. In July 2026 Gildo Claps revealed on the television programme Chi l'ha visto? that the Potenza prosecutor's office had quietly reopened the investigation about two years earlier. Judicial sources confirmed that the file concerns possible complicity in the murder by persons still unidentified. Chief prosecutor Camillo Falvo neither confirmed nor denied the report, while carabinieri forensic specialists have reportedly carried out new tests, including in the church attic. No new suspect has been publicly named.

Why the case matters

The Claps case is often cited in Italy as a study in how investigative failures can let a suspect slip away: had Restivo been examined more thoroughly in 1993, the family argues, Heather Barnett might still be alive. It also highlights features of the Italian system, such as the sentence reduction granted by the abbreviated trial and the challenge of enforcing a domestic sentence against someone imprisoned abroad. For Potenza and Basilicata, the case remains an open wound, and the family's decades-long campaign is still shaping how it is investigated.