The Via Poma Murder

Who Simonetta Cesaroni was

Simonetta Cesaroni was a 20-year-old bookkeeper from Rome. In the summer of 1990 she was doing accounting work in the offices of the Italian youth hostels association (AIAG) on Via Carlo Poma, in the city's Prati district. Italian reporting describes her as working for Reli Sas, an accounting firm that counted the association among its clients. Her sister Paola remains one of the most prominent voices calling for the case to be solved.

What happened on 7 August 1990

On 7 August 1990 Simonetta was alone in the association's office at Via Carlo Poma 2. That night, shortly before midnight, she was found dead there by her sister Paola, her boyfriend and her employer, Salvatore Volponi. She had been stabbed many times. The weapon was never recovered, and investigators found that some of her clothing, jewellery and the office keys had been taken and never turned up. Reports also note that someone had partly cleaned the scene, which investigators read as an attempt to cover up the crime.

Rome reporting also recalls that in 1984 an elderly woman, Renata Moscatelli, had been found dead in the same building with no sign of forced entry, a case that also remains unsolved.

Early suspects

Federico Valle was the first person to come under suspicion, and he was cleared. The building's caretaker, Pietrino Vanacore, was detained three days after the killing and held for close to a month before being released; he too was cleared. In 2010, a few days before he was due to testify at the trial of Raniero Busco, Vanacore took his own life in his home region of Puglia. Simonetta's former employer was also looked at for a time and then ruled out.

The Busco trials

The case appeared to move toward a resolution two decades later, when Raniero Busco, who had been Simonetta's boyfriend in 1990, was put on trial. In 2011 a first-instance court convicted him and sentenced him to 24 years in prison. In 2012 an appeals court acquitted him, and in 2014 Italy's Court of Cassation confirmed the acquittal, making it final. Busco is therefore legally innocent of the crime, and no one has ever been definitively convicted of killing Simonetta Cesaroni.

The reopened investigation

Rome prosecutors later asked for the file to be closed, but in December 2024 the judge for preliminary investigations, Giulia Arcieri, rejected that request and ordered further work. Her instructions included new analysis of biological traces from the office, a review of all photographic material and the questioning of witnesses who had never been heard or needed to be heard again. In the summer of 2025, Italian media reported that the renewed inquiry involved four urgent searches, seizures and a list of 26 people to be questioned, among them a deputy chief of the State Police and the officer who led Rome's homicide section in 1990.

One line of inquiry concerns the possibility that Italian intelligence services had an interest in the offices, because sensitive papers may have been kept there. According to Dire, the judge described this hypothesis as entirely plausible, and the theory includes the possibility that the crime scene was altered early on. An office attendance register for the day of the killing, long missing, was handed to prosecutors by Simonetta's father after it resurfaced. None of this has led to charges.

In June 2026, DNA tests on a group of people close to those who worked in the offices, none of whom had been investigated before, all came back negative when compared with profiles taken from evidence. Reports differ on the size of the group: Quotidiano.net counts eight people, five women and three men, while other Italian reports referred to seven. The file is still formally open against unknown persons, so no one is currently a named suspect. In September 2026 Paola Cesaroni published a book on the open investigation with journalist Igor Patruno and said DNA had been requested from about 70 more people whose samples had not yet been compared.

Why the case matters

The Via Poma murder is one of Italy's best-known unsolved killings, and it shows how a case can travel through every level of the Italian justice system without producing a final answer. Busco's path, from a 24-year sentence to a definitive acquittal, illustrates that in Italy a first-instance conviction is not final until the appeal stages, up to the Court of Cassation, are complete. The December 2024 ruling also shows the role of the preliminary investigations judge, who can refuse a prosecutor's request to close a file and order more work. The sources reviewed do not tie the case to a specific change in Italian law.