Danilo Restivo has been convicted of two murders committed nine years apart in two countries. On September 12, 1993, he met 16-year-old Elisa Claps at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Potenza, in southern Italy. She was never seen alive again. On November 12, 2002, in Bournemouth on the south coast of England, he killed Heather Barnett, a 48-year-old seamstress who lived across the road from him, and mutilated her body. Her two children, aged 14 and 11, found her when they came home from school.
For years neither case could be proved. Italian investigators suspected him from the first day but had no body. Dorset Police made him their main suspect within months but could not gather enough evidence to charge him, and watched him instead. The change came in March 2010, when workmen repairing the roof of the Potenza church found Elisa's remains in a small space above the building. The way her body had been left matched the way Heather Barnett's body had been left in Bournemouth, down to locks of cut hair placed with each woman. Restivo was charged in England two months later.
A jury at Winchester Crown Court convicted him of Heather Barnett's murder in June 2011. The judge imposed a whole life order, which the Court of Appeal replaced in 2012 with a minimum term of 40 years. An Italian court convicted him of Elisa's murder in his absence in November 2011 and sentenced him to 30 years, a verdict made final by Italy's highest court in October 2014. He has always denied both killings.
Restivo was born on April 3, 1972, in Sicily. The Court of Appeal gives the date; the Bournemouth Echo, in a 2011 profile, places his birth in the province of Trapani and says the family lived in Cagliari, Sardinia, before settling in Potenza when he was about 10. His father had been appointed to run the national library in Potenza, a respected public post, and the family was well connected in the city.
He was regarded locally as a loner and as odd. The Echo profile, drawing on the Italian journalist Pierangelo Maurizio of TG5, reported that in 1986, as a teenager, he tied up two younger children and threatened one of them with a small knife, and that the matter was settled between the families without any conviction. The Guardian, in a 2011 article by the writer Tobias Jones, gave a similar account of an incident in the courtyard of the library when Restivo was 14, also settled privately. The two accounts differ on details and are reports, not court findings.
He did have convictions in Italy before 1993. According to the Echo, in the autumn of 1992 he was convicted of harassing young women who lived opposite his family's home in Potenza, after months of anonymous telephone calls in which he played music from a horror film. The Court of Appeal in England, summarizing evidence placed before it in 2014, referred to an Italian conviction for harassing female students. The Echo also reported that army doctors who examined him for national service rejected him.
In Potenza he was known for something else as well. Women on buses and in a cinema found that locks of their hair had been cut off without their knowledge. Restivo later told the Winchester jury that he first cut a girl's hair at about 15, as a bet among schoolmates, and kept doing it because he liked the touch and smell of hair. A psychiatrist's report quoted by the Court of Appeal recorded that he admitted voyeurism and that from the age of 15 he liked to touch and smell women's hair and began to cut it secretly. He told the jury he had seen psychologists because he could not stop.
Elisa Claps was 16 in September 1993 and a student at the classical high school in Potenza. She was the youngest child in her family. Her mother, Filomena, and her brothers, Gildo and Luciano, would spend the next 17 years looking for her. ANSA described her as an honor student and a devout Catholic who hoped to become a surgeon and to work with Doctors Without Borders.
In a 2004 interview with the Bournemouth Echo, her mother said she missed Elisa sitting at the family table and missed her hugs, and that her daughter was her first and last thought every day. The Echo later described her as a happy, easygoing teenager who was the pride of her family.
Restivo was 21 and wanted a relationship with her. She had turned him down. He told the Winchester jury that he declared his feelings to her in July 1993 and that she rejected him. According to ANSA, Elisa wrote in her diary that she felt sorry for him; he had pressed her to meet, using the pretext of a romance with one of her friends, and she agreed despite her doubts. Other reports say he had promised her a small gift. The Bournemouth Echo's 2011 profile said she was one of the few young people in Potenza who would talk to him.
On Sunday, September 12, 1993, Elisa told her family she was going to Mass. The plan, Sky TG24 later reported, was to attend with a friend and then join the family at their country house in Tito, outside the city. She met Restivo at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity, in the center of Potenza, late in the morning, around the time Mass was ending. She did not arrive in Tito.
Restivo's account, given to Italian investigators and repeated in court in England, was that they talked for about 10 minutes behind the altar, that Elisa left first, and that he stayed to pray. He said that on his way home he went to look at a building site where new escalators were being built, slipped, and cut his hand on a piece of sheet metal. He went to a hospital emergency room that day with a wound to his hand. His jacket was bloodstained.
The Claps family phoned him when Elisa did not come home, and he told her brother Gildo that she had left the church safe and well. Gildo searched the church that day. He told the BBC that a locked door stopped him from climbing to the space above the roof, where, it later emerged, his sister's body lay.
The Italian investigation quickly focused on Restivo, but it was handled in ways that would later be criticized in both countries. A police inspector who examined the building site on September 13 wrote in an internal note that Restivo's account of his fall was extremely implausible, that there were no traces of blood or metal at the spot, and that he could be hiding far more serious facts about Elisa. Avvenire published the note in 2010. According to Il Post, another officer asked a magistrate for permission to seize the clothes Restivo had worn that day; the request was not signed, and neither his home nor the church was searched.
The parish priest of the Most Holy Trinity, Don Mimì Sabia, closed the church and left the city for a period of treatment the day after Elisa disappeared. He later told police he knew Restivo only by sight. Photographs that emerged years later showed the priest at Restivo's 18th birthday party, and Il Post reported that Restivo had keys to the parish youth rooms. Don Mimì kept the upper parts of the church closed until his death in 2008.
The case became one of the best known in Italy. There were false sightings of Elisa across the country and abroad, theories that she had run away, and claims that she had been taken to Albania. Tobias Jones reported in the Guardian that an email sent to the family's website, claiming that Elisa was alive in Brazil, was traced to an internet cafe in Potenza that Restivo had just left. Because of suspicions of a cover-up, the investigation was moved from Potenza to prosecutors in Salerno.
Restivo was prosecuted for giving false information about the day Elisa vanished. A court found him guilty on March 7, 1995, according to evidence given at his English trial. The sentence was reported differently: a community sentence (Bournemouth Echo, from the trial), two years (Echo profile), and two years and eight months (Avvenire). All sources agree he did not serve prison time for it. The English Court of Appeal later described this as a conviction for lying to an inquiry into Elisa's disappearance.
For 17 years Elisa's family refused to let the case close. Gildo Claps repeatedly named Restivo as the man responsible and accused people around the church of protecting him, often with little support. He set up a website to gather information. The family, a private investigator who worked for them without charge, and the team of the Rai television program "Chi l'ha visto?", which appeals for help with missing persons, became convinced that the truth was being hidden.
"Chi l'ha visto?" stayed with the case for decades. Its appeals later helped the English inquiry: Dorset Police used the program, as well as the BBC's Crimewatch, to ask women who had had their hair cut in unexplained circumstances to come forward, and a man whose fiancee had had her hair cut in a Potenza cinema contacted the program after one such appeal.
Elisa's mother told the Echo in 2004 that discovering what had happened was what kept her going. "When I have found out what happened to Elisa I can close the book and I can have somewhere to take flowers for her," she said.
Restivo moved to Bournemouth in 2002, the Guardian timeline says in May, to live with a woman he had met in an internet chat room. They married in 2004. He was recovering from thyroid surgery that had partly damaged his voice, and he did not speak much English. Their home in Chatsworth Road, Charminster, stood directly opposite the ground floor flat where Heather Barnett lived with her children.
In and around Bournemouth, the pattern seen in Potenza began again. Schoolgirls and young women on buses felt a tug at their hair and later found that a lock had been cut. At the trial the prosecution said there were 15 such reports in the Bournemouth area and nine in Italy. Under cross-examination Restivo admitted cutting the hair of six girls in England.
Heather Barnett was born in August 1954 and grew up in Dorset. Friends knew her as Bunny and remembered her as feisty and fun-loving as a girl. She worked from home as a seamstress, in a workroom in her flat, and she was a single mother to a son, born in 1987, and a daughter, born in 1991. Her sister, Denise Le Voir, described her after the verdict as a hard-working woman and a loving mother. The Bournemouth Echo wrote that she devoted her life to her two children.
About a week before she died, Restivo called at her flat and asked her to make curtains for his partner as a surprise Christmas present. After that visit Heather told friends she believed he had taken her door key; her son told police the day after the murder that her keys had gone missing following the visit of an Italian man. She also told her older sister that she was uneasy about the man across the road.
On the morning of Tuesday, November 12, 2002, Heather drove her children to school at about 8:30 a.m. CCTV showed her car turning back into her road minutes later, and she parked at about 8:40 a.m. There was no forced entry into the flat. The Court of Appeal found that the attack took place in her workroom, beside the patio door, sometime between 8:30 and 10:56 that morning.
She died from repeated blows to the head with a weapon such as a hammer. The killer then mutilated her body, cut her throat and moved her into the bathroom. He cut some of her hair and placed it under her left hand, and put a lock of another person's hair, about 9 centimeters long, in her right hand. Her clothing was disarranged in a particular way. The weapons were never found.
Her son and daughter came home from school at about 4 p.m. The flat was silent. Her daughter opened the bathroom door and found her mother. Her son called 999 and told the operator his mother had been murdered. The two children ran into the street, where Restivo and his partner, arriving home, comforted them and took them into their house until police arrived.
Detectives did not at first see Restivo as a likely killer. Retired Detective Superintendent Phil James, who led the inquiry until 2007, told the BBC that he was initially regarded as a harmless local figure, and he had an alibi: he said he had been at a computer course that morning. But the scene showed careful planning. The killer had come with his own hammer and knife and with the lock of hair, had worn gloves, and had changed his shoes before leaving, so that a trail of bloody footprints stopped before the front door.
Four days after the murder, during house-to-house inquiries, officers asked Restivo which shoes he had been wearing on November 12. He showed them a pair of Nike trainers soaking in his bath in liquid that smelled of bleach. The trainers were seized. He later said he had not known the liquid was bleach.
Detective Superintendent Mark Cooper, the senior investigating officer, said Restivo was on the police list from the first day, and that by early 2003 he had become the sole focus of the inquiry. That year officers searching the internet found that he had been linked in Italy to Elisa's disappearance. Restivo attended Heather's funeral and the wake in February 2003, her brother Ben Barnett later said; police had asked the family whether they could watch the mourners because they thought the killer might come.
From March 2004 Dorset Police placed Restivo under surveillance, at times around the clock. Officers watched him drive to Throop Mill car park and to paths near Pig Shoot Lane, on the edge of Bournemouth, where he spent hours watching women walking alone. On some days he wore dark clothing with his hood drawn tight around his face despite warm weather, and he changed his clothes in the car.
On May 12, 2004, uniformed officers stopped him in the car park, using a story about thefts from vehicles. He was sweating and agitated. In a bag they found a large filleting knife and a packet of tissues; in the jacket pockets were gloves and a balaclava; two pairs of scissors were in the driver's door. He told the officers he was there for walking. At trial he said he had found the knife and meant to hand it in, and that he used the bag and tissues to collect insects for his pet reptiles.
Cooper said Restivo was considered an immediate and real danger to women. Phil James said he told Restivo directly that the police were following him and would continue to do so. Foreign students staying at the house were warned they were at risk, the BBC reported, and hospitals where he applied for work were alerted. The Bournemouth Echo reported that formal warnings were given to his partner and her household.
In June 2004 he was arrested and questioned, and a schoolgirl whose hair had been cut on a bus in March 2003 picked him out at an identification parade. He was released. In November 2006 he was arrested again and his home searched; officers found a lock of hair tied with green cotton, which he said had been planted.
The lock of hair in Heather Barnett's right hand was never identified. In 2007 Dr. Stuart Black of the University of Reading analyzed its chemistry and isotopes and concluded that it came from a UK resident who, in the months before it was cut, had visited eastern Spain or the south of France and then Tampa, Florida. Appeals produced no owner. Phil James said one theory was that it came from someone the killer knew.
In 2008 scientists re-examining tapings from a green towel found in Heather's flat recovered a DNA profile that matched Restivo's. The prosecution later put the chance that it came from someone else unrelated to him at one in 57,000. It was still not judged enough to charge him. A digital forensics expert also examined the computer Restivo said he had used at the course that morning and found no user activity between 9:08 and 10:10 a.m., removing his alibi.
On March 17, 2010, workmen called to repair a leaking roof at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity climbed to a cramped space near the bell tower and found human remains under old roof tiles. They were Elisa's. Her glasses, watch, earrings, sandals and the remains of her clothes were with her. She had been stabbed many times. Her hair had been cut after death and placed with her body, and her clothing had been cut and arranged in the same way as Heather Barnett's. A panel of experts from the Carabinieri scientific unit, appointed by a judge in Salerno, later reported that DNA matching Restivo's profile was on her top.
In Italy the discovery caused anger and disbelief that Elisa had lain for 17 years in the building where she was last seen. People left flowers and messages outside the closed church. The Salerno investigating judge issued a European Arrest Warrant accusing Restivo of killing Elisa with a bladed weapon on the day she disappeared, and he was served with it in England on June 1, 2010.
For Dorset Police, the discovery supplied what had been missing. In May 2010 Restivo was charged with Heather Barnett's murder. On November 8, 2010, he pleaded not guilty at Winchester Crown Court.
The trial opened in May 2011 before Mr. Justice Burnett and a jury of seven men and five women, and lasted seven weeks. Elisa's mother sat in court a few feet from Restivo as the prosecution opened its case. Michael Bowes QC, prosecuting, told the jury that the killings of Heather Barnett and Elisa Claps were so strikingly similar that they amounted to a hallmark and must have been the work of one person. The judge had ruled before trial that the Italian evidence could be heard for that reason.
The jury heard Heather's son's recorded police interview describing the moment he and his sister found their mother. Witnesses from Bournemouth described having their hair cut on buses; one said she later found a sticky substance in her hair. Witnesses from Potenza, by live link, described the same thing happening in a cinema in the early 1990s. Surveillance officers described the events at Throop. The jury visited the street, the flat and the places where Restivo had been watched.
Restivo gave evidence through an interpreter. "I have never killed anybody," he told the court. He admitted cutting women's hair but denied stalking anyone. He said the green towel carried his DNA because he had taken it to Heather's flat as a color sample for the curtains, an explanation he had not given before. Asked whether comforting her children had been a repulsive charade, he said his concern had been sincere. Asked about Elisa, he admitted meeting her at the church but said they parted after a short talk. Confronted with the evidence that his DNA was on her clothing close to a stab wound in her back, he said he could give no explanation.
The judge told the jury that only an Italian court could try Restivo for Elisa's murder, and that they could convict him of Heather Barnett's murder even if they were not sure he had killed Elisa. A psychiatric report prepared for the defense, which the Court of Appeal later summarized, found that he had a severely disordered personality and raised a possible defense of diminished responsibility. Restivo chose not to use it; his case was that he was innocent.
On June 29, 2011, after about five hours of deliberation, the jury found Restivo guilty of murder. Heather's daughter, who had sat through every day of the trial, wept as the verdict was read. All 12 jurors returned the next day to hear the sentence.
In a statement read to the court, Heather's daughter, then 19, said her life and her brother's had changed forever. She described years of flashbacks, a fear of bathrooms, and the help she eventually accepted from a child psychologist. Her brother had become her protector, she said. She had first come face to face with her mother's killer when he took the witness stand, and he had shown no emotion and no remorse. "I still do not have any explanation for why this happened to mum," she said. "What did she do wrong? Why was mum his victim?"
On June 30, 2011, Mr. Justice Burnett imposed a life sentence with a whole life order. He called the murder one of inhuman depravity, carefully planned with a prepared alibi, and committed to satisfy a sadistic sexual appetite. He said Restivo knew that an 11-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy would come home and find their mother. He said the evidence showed without doubt that Restivo had killed Elisa Claps; he was not sentencing him for that killing, but he approached the sentence on the basis that Restivo had killed before.
Outside court, Heather's sister Denise Le Voir said her sister would have been horrified at the callous way Restivo had designed the murder so that her children would find her. She praised the police for continuing to watch him. She also criticized the Italian investigation, saying she could not understand why the church where Elisa was last seen had not been searched from top to bottom years earlier.
Heather's brother, Ben Barnett, said the family had always feared that someone else would be harmed. "If the investigation had been carried out properly and they proved Restivo murdered Elisa, then my sister would still be alive today," he said. Gildo Claps had said the same thing to the BBC: "Those two children would still have their mother."
The two families came together. Elisa's mother had wanted to meet Heather's children since learning how their mother died, and at Winchester she met Heather's daughter and told her she reminded her of Elisa. She said she felt a bond with the children.
On July 2, 2011, two days after the sentence, Elisa Claps was buried in Potenza after an open-air funeral in Piazza Don Bosco attended by as many as 5,000 people. Her family had asked that the service be held outdoors because they did not want her taken back into a church.
Restivo sought to appeal against his conviction, arguing that the Italian evidence should not have been admitted. Permission was refused, and on July 24, 2012, the full Court of Appeal refused his renewed application ([2012] EWCA Crim 1848). He was given permission to challenge the sentence.
His sentence appeal was heard on October 10, 2012, by a five-judge court led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, together with appeals by other prisoners serving whole life orders. On November 21, 2012, the court quashed his whole life order and set a minimum term of 40 years. The judges did not question the evidence about Elisa. Their reason was a principle of sentencing: a judge may not increase a sentence because he believes the defendant committed a separate, serious crime that was not charged, was denied, and was not proved by a verdict. Restivo could not be charged in England with a murder committed in Italy, and when he was sentenced he had not been convicted of it.
The court said it would be problematic to rely on his later Italian conviction, reached in his absence and not yet final under Italian law, to restore the whole life order. On the facts of the Bournemouth murder alone, the planning, the measures to avoid detection, the mutilation he knew the children would find, and his false concern for them afterward required a very long term. The judges added that they thought it highly improbable that it would ever be safe to release him. Heather's brother said the family was disappointed and believed the original sentence had been just.
The ruling has since been cited by English courts as authority on the point, including in the Court of Appeal's 2014 sentencing decision in the case of Max Clifford.
The European Arrest Warrant was expected to send Restivo to Italy for trial after the English verdict. His appeal against the English conviction halted those procedures, and the Italian case went ahead without him. In Salerno, before the preliminary hearing judge Elisabetta Boccassini, he was tried under the abbreviated procedure, a form of trial that reduces the sentence. On November 11, 2011, she convicted him of Elisa's murder and sentenced him to 30 years. Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that the abbreviated procedure spared him a life sentence and that a kidnapping charge had expired under the statute of limitations. After 18 years it could not be established whether Elisa had also been sexually assaulted. Sky TG24 later reported that the sentence also included a lifetime ban from public office, three years of supervision after release and compensation to the Claps family.
Elisa's mother said that justice had been done but that she would go on seeking the truth about the church. The family's lawyer, Giuliana Scarpetta, said a life sentence could not be obtained because of the church's conduct. Restivo's longtime lawyer said he believed his client innocent and would appeal.
For his appeal, Restivo went to Italy in person. In March 2013 he was transferred under a temporary surrender arrangement, with a guarantee that he would be returned to England to continue serving his life sentence whatever the outcome. The appeal hearing before the Salerno Court of Assize of Appeal opened on March 20, 2013. Elisa's mother said he brought a letter of condolence addressed to her. She called him unworthy and kept a photograph of Elisa in the courtroom so that he would always remember her. On April 24, 2013, the appeal court confirmed the 30-year sentence.
On October 23, 2014, the First Criminal Section of the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court, rejected his final appeal, making the conviction and the 30-year sentence final. Sky TG24 reported that the court described the crime as one of extraordinary gravity and called the defense theory of an unknown attacker purely conjectural.
Restivo stayed in English custody. The Home Secretary decided in 2014 to make a deportation order against him, with the aim of asking Italy to accept him to serve his English sentence in an Italian prison under the European Union framework for transferring sentenced prisoners. He appealed, arguing that the move would damage his family life with his wife, who lived in Bournemouth and was in poor health, and that Italian prison conditions would breach his human rights. A First-tier Tribunal allowed his appeal in 2014.
The Home Secretary challenged that decision. In September 2016 the Upper Tribunal set it aside, ruling that the tribunal had confused a decision to make a deportation order with a decision to transfer a prisoner, and that a person serving a long sentence can still be a present threat to society even while in prison. The ruling was reported as Restivo (EEA, prisoner transfer) [2016] UKUT 449 (IAC), and in 2024 the Court of Appeal called it rightly decided. At a resumed hearing, Upper Tribunal Judge Kopieczek dismissed Restivo's appeal in a decision promulgated on January 24, 2017.
That decision recorded that Restivo was a Category A prisoner, the highest security category, and that a 2016 assessment rated him a high risk of harm to the public, to children and to a known adult. He had refused to take part in sentence planning or work with prison psychologists because he denied his offenses. He was 44 at the time; his parents were then living in Sicily.
The Bournemouth Echo reported in 2014 that Restivo was held in a prison in Yorkshire. Italian reports in February 2026 and July 2026 describe him as serving his sentence in England, and none says he has been transferred to Italy. Under his English sentence he cannot be considered for release by the Parole Board until the 40-year minimum term has passed, which on the reported dates will not be before about 2050. His Italian sentence of 30 years has not been served.
In July 2026, Gildo Claps announced on "Chi l'ha visto?" that prosecutors in Potenza had reopened the investigation into Elisa's death about two years earlier, to examine whether anyone acted together with Restivo. ANSA reported that the case is against unknown persons and that the Carabinieri scientific unit had carried out new tests, including in the church roof space. The chief prosecutor, Camillo Falvo, neither confirmed nor denied the report, saying some cases deserve the full truth out of respect for victims and their families. No one has been charged.
The Church of the Most Holy Trinity remained closed for 13 years after Elisa was found. In 2023 Pope Francis wrote to the Archbishop of Potenza and to the Claps family, and that August the archdiocese reopened the church as a place of silent prayer. Gildo Claps accused the archdiocese of acting furtively and urged people not to enter. A Mass celebrated there in November 2023 drew protests.
In October and November 2023, Rai 1 broadcast "Per Elisa: Il caso Claps," a drama series about the case, with the actor Gianmarco Saurino as Gildo. The writer Tobias Jones, who interviewed the family for years, published a book on the case, Blood on the Altar, in 2012.
The following are claims, reports or theories. None has led to a charge.
The 2002 killing of Jong-Ok Shin. Jong-Ok Shin, a 26-year-old South Korean language student known as Oki, had arrived in England in November 2001 to study in Bournemouth. At about 2:50 a.m. on July 12, 2002, she was stabbed three times in the back as she walked home from a night out, on Malmesbury Park Road, a few streets from Restivo's home. Before she died she told police and medical staff that a masked man had attacked her from behind. Omar Benguit was convicted of her murder at his third trial, in January 2005, after two juries failed to agree, and was given a minimum term of 20 years. A co-defendant was acquitted. Benguit has always said he is innocent, and his family has campaigned for him for two decades.
After Restivo's 2011 conviction, Benguit's lawyers argued that Restivo might have killed Oki. They pointed to the date (the 12th of the month), the knife, the attack from behind, a clump of hair found near where she fell, Restivo's arrest with a balaclava and knife in 2004, and a reported remark by Restivo about the size of the knife. The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the case to the Court of Appeal in December 2012. On April 9, 2014, the court dismissed the appeal. It found the murder of Oki very different from the other two: Restivo knew Elisa and Heather but there was no evidence he knew Oki; those killings were planned, took place indoors in daylight and involved the distinctive cutting of hair and clothing, while Oki was attacked on a street at night and her clothing was untouched. The court held that Restivo should not be regarded as even arguably a candidate for her killing, and treated the other similarities as coincidence or too remote.
The claim has continued. In February 2026, BBC Panorama reported new evidence that, it said, suggested Benguit was framed by police: 13 prosecution witnesses told the BBC they had been pressured to embellish statements or lie, CCTV and phone records were said to undermine the main witness and to support an alibi, and 135 CCTV tapes from the original inquiry were found by the CCRC to be missing. Panorama also reported that a woman had told police she heard Restivo discuss undisclosed details of Oki's murder, that Italian police had warned Dorset Police about him, and that a grainy CCTV image of a cyclist near the scene minutes before the attack could be him. Restivo did not respond to Panorama. Dorset Police said its investigation had been thorough, that the Court of Appeal had dismissed Benguit's claims, and that any concerns were a matter for the CCRC and the courts. As of February 2026 the CCRC was considering a further application by Benguit, which the Justice Gap reported it had held for five years. No decision on it was found when this was checked in October 2026. Restivo has never been charged with Oki's death, and Benguit's conviction stands.
Other killings. In 2011 British papers reported that Restivo might be questioned about unsolved murders of women in southern France and Spain in the late 1990s. None of those inquiries is known to have led to a charge.
Restivo's teenage violence and military rejection. These rest on Italian press accounts reported by the Bournemouth Echo and the Guardian, not on court findings, and the accounts differ in detail.
How Elisa's body was found. Tobias Jones in the Guardian and Il Post reported claims that two cleaning women had seen the body in January 2010 and told an assistant priest, two months before the official discovery, and that the roof repair was a pretext. The assistant priest was reported to have said he tried to reach the archbishop and then forgot about it. Prosecutors in Salerno opened an inquiry into possible cover-ups after the 2011 verdict, Il Fatto Quotidiano and LaPresse reported, but no one is known to have been convicted over the concealment.
The red button. A red button found under Elisa's body was linked in the press to the cassock of Don Mimì Sabia, who died in 2008. Jones reported that it was found not to match. The priest was never charged with any offense.
The roles of others. The Claps family has long argued that people in Potenza helped hide what happened. The reopened inquiry for complicity, reported in July 2026, is against unknown persons, and no one has been named as a suspect.
April 3, 1972: Danilo Restivo born in Sicily.
About 1982: Family settles in Potenza, where his father directs the national library.
Autumn 1992: Convicted of harassing young women living opposite his family's home (Echo).
September 12, 1993: Elisa Claps, 16, meets Restivo at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity and disappears. He goes to a hospital with a cut hand.
March 7, 1995: Convicted in Potenza of giving false information to prosecutors.
May 2002: Moves to Bournemouth, opposite Heather Barnett's flat.
July 12, 2002: Jong-Ok Shin is fatally stabbed in Bournemouth; Omar Benguit is later convicted.
November 6, 2002 (about): Restivo visits Heather Barnett to ask about curtains; she later believes her key was taken.
November 12, 2002: Heather Barnett, 48, is killed at home; her children find her.
November 2002: Police find Restivo's trainers soaking in bleach.
Early 2003: He becomes the sole focus of the Dorset inquiry.
March to May 2004: Surveillance; on May 12 he is stopped with a knife, balaclava, gloves and scissors.
June 2004: Arrested and questioned; a hair-cutting witness identifies him.
November 2006: Arrested again; home searched.
2007: Isotope analysis of the unidentified hair.
2008: DNA matching Restivo found on a towel from Heather's flat.
March 17, 2010: Elisa's remains found in the church roof space.
May 2010: Charged with Heather Barnett's murder.
June 1, 2010: Served with the Italian European Arrest Warrant.
November 8, 2010: Pleads not guilty.
May 2011: Trial opens at Winchester Crown Court.
June 29, 2011: Convicted of murder.
June 30, 2011: Life sentence with a whole life order.
July 2, 2011: Elisa Claps's funeral in Potenza.
September 2011: His appeal halts extradition proceedings.
November 11, 2011: Convicted in Salerno, in his absence, of Elisa's murder; 30 years.
July 24, 2012: Court of Appeal refuses leave to appeal against the English conviction.
November 21, 2012: Court of Appeal replaces the whole life order with a 40-year minimum term.
March 2013: Temporarily surrendered to Italy for his appeal.
April 24, 2013: Salerno appeal court confirms 30 years.
April 9, 2014: Court of Appeal dismisses Omar Benguit's appeal, rejecting the claim against Restivo.
2014: Home Secretary decides to deport him; tribunal allows his appeal.
October 23, 2014: Court of Cassation makes the Italian conviction final.
September 2016: Upper Tribunal sets aside the tribunal decision.
January 24, 2017: Upper Tribunal dismisses his deportation appeal.
August 2023: Church of the Most Holy Trinity reopens.
October to November 2023: Rai 1 broadcasts "Per Elisa: Il caso Claps."
February 16, 2026: BBC Panorama reports new evidence in the Benguit case.
July 2026: Reopened Potenza inquiry into possible accomplices reported.