Massimo Bossetti is serving a life sentence in Italy for the murder of Yara Gambirasio, a girl from the village of Brembate di Sopra in the province of Bergamo, on November 26, 2010. He was a builder from the neighboring town of Mapello when the Carabinieri arrested him on June 16, 2014. On July 1, 2016 the Corte d'Assise di Bergamo convicted him of murder, with other charges, and sentenced him to ergastolo, life imprisonment. The Corte d'Assise d'Appello di Brescia upheld the verdict in July 2017, and on October 12, 2018 the Corte di Cassazione made it final.
He has never admitted the crime. In the days after his arrest he told the prosecutor who questioned him that he was innocent and did not know how investigators had come to him, and he has said the same in every courtroom since. The conviction rested principally on genetic evidence that the defense contested at trial, on appeal and before the supreme court, and that his lawyers have continued to contest in the years since the sentence became final. Since 2019 the case has moved through a long second life in the courts of Bergamo, Rome and Venice, as the defense pressed for access to the exhibits, a supreme court ruled for and against it in turn, and a prosecutor who had led the original inquiry was herself investigated and then cleared. In October 2026 the Bergamo court refused the defense's latest request for new tests.
Bossetti was born in 1970. Before his arrest he lived in the Piana di Mapello, in the province of Bergamo. He worked in construction, as a muratore, or mason, and as a carpenter and building craftsman. He was 43 when he was arrested, and he had no criminal record.
The victim lived in Brembate di Sopra. The courts found that she died on the evening of November 26, 2010.
For three and a half years no one was charged. When the Cassazione later reviewed the case, it pointed out that three years had passed before the defendant was accused, years the court described as spent in an anxious hunt for the real culprit, and it used that fact to reject the defense argument that the case against him had been built to hand the public a guilty man.
The Carabinieri arrested Bossetti on Monday, June 16, 2014. Three days later, on June 19, he was questioned by the Bergamo deputy prosecutor in charge of the inquiry. He gave a one-word answer to the accusation, "Innocente," and told her that he did not know how investigators had come to him. Years later he put it another way: he did not have the courage, he said, to kill even a cat.
He was held in custody in Italy from the day of his arrest. In January 2016, while the trial was under way, his lawyers asked a court in Brescia to place him under house arrest instead; he remained in custody.
On April 27, 2015 a judge in Bergamo committed Bossetti for trial before the Corte d'Assise, the court that hears the gravest crimes in the Italian system. He faced two charges. The first was the aggravated murder of the victim. The second was calunnia, the offense of falsely accusing another person of a crime: the prosecution alleged that he had tried to steer the investigation toward a work colleague. That colleague joined the proceedings as a civil party, as did the victim's parents and her siblings.
The trial opened on July 3, 2015 and ran to 45 hearings over a year. At the outset the defense asked to call about 700 witnesses, a list the court cut down. The court sat without television cameras after two threatening letters addressed to the court and to the prosecutor were intercepted.
On March 11, 2016 Bossetti took the stand and was examined by the prosecutor. He declared his innocence again and offered his own explanation: the victim, he said, had been killed to get him into trouble. On April 22, 2016 the court refused a series of defense requests for further testing and other evidence, ruling that they were not essential to its decision.
Closing arguments filled the late spring. On May 13, 2016 the prosecutor asked for a life sentence with six months of isolamento diurno, daytime solitary confinement. On June 10 the defense asked for an acquittal, arguing that in law the defendant would already be acquitted.
Before the court retired, Bossetti made a spontaneous statement from the dock. He asked the judges to order the contested testing repeated and told them that he was not a murderer.
The Corte d'Assise di Bergamo delivered its verdict on Friday, July 1, 2016. It found Bossetti guilty of the murder and sentenced him to ergastolo. On the second charge, the calunnia against his colleague, it acquitted him with the formula "il fatto non sussiste," the offense did not exist. The court awarded damages of 400,000 euros to each of the victim's parents and 150,000 euros to each of her two siblings.
The written reasons, 158 pages long, were filed in September 2016. They upheld the aggravated charge in full. On the central question of identity, the judges held that the defense had not disproved the evidence that tied Bossetti to the crime. He had said throughout, and said again after the reasons were published, that he had no idea how that evidence could have been his.
Both sides appealed. Bossetti's lawyers challenged the conviction, and the prosecutor general's office in Brescia challenged the acquittal on the charge of calunnia. The case went to the Corte d'Assise d'Appello di Brescia, the appeal court for the district.
The defense asked the appeal court for an acquittal, or failing that for a new expert examination that would repeat the contested analysis. Its lawyers argued that a conviction demands certainty, and that if doubts remained the judges had to acquit. The prosecutor general asked the court to confirm the life sentence, describing the first court's reconstruction of the evidence as well made and the defendant's responsibility as complete and logical. Motive, he told the court, was not something to speculate about; only Bossetti could explain what had happened.
The judges retired for about 15 hours. Their verdict, delivered late on July 17, 2017, confirmed the life sentence in full. The reasons, 380 pages, were filed on October 16, 2017. The appeal court held that the evidence had been gathered without breaching the adversarial principle or the rights of the defense, and that the guilty verdict rested on that evidence together with a set of circumstantial elements that, taken together, established responsibility. It refused the new expert examination, finding that it was not necessary, that it could amount to no more than a technical check on documents and on work already done, and that no material remained in sufficient quantity for the analysis to be repeated. It confirmed that the murder was aggravated and held that the defendant's conduct before and after the crime ruled out the general mitigating circumstances, the attenuanti generiche.
The last appeal went to the Corte di Cassazione in Rome. The defense filed some twenty grounds of appeal. The prosecutor general at the Cassazione asked the court to confirm the conviction, telling the judges that the inquiry had been without precedent and that the contested evidence was only one part of the case.
The First Criminal Section heard the case on October 12, 2018 and deliberated for about four hours. It declared the defense appeal inadmissible and ordered Bossetti to pay the costs of the proceedings, which left the life sentence final. It also declared inadmissible the Brescia prosecutor general's appeal against the acquittal on the charge of calunnia, so that acquittal stood. Across the three levels of judgment, the lawyer for the victim's parents said afterward, 39 magistrates had found Bossetti guilty. Bossetti's lawyer said the decision had to be respected and that the defense would read the reasons, but that it continued to believe Massimo was innocent.
The reasons, more than 150 pages, were filed on November 23, 2018. The court rejected the defense's alternative account of the case, which it treated as a conspiracy theory, observing that the long years of investigation before Bossetti was accused were hard to square with any claim that the authorities had simply needed a culprit. It also criticized what it called repeated attempts to distort the facts.
The final verdict did not end the litigation. Bossetti's lawyers set out to build a request for revisione, the Italian procedure for reopening a final conviction, and to do that they needed access to the physical exhibits of the case and to the material preserved from them. The fight over that access has run for seven years, through the Corte d'Assise di Bergamo sitting as giudice dell'esecuzione, the court that oversees the enforcement of a final sentence, and through repeated appeals to the Cassazione.
On November 27, 2019 the Bergamo court authorized the defense to examine the exhibits, and the defense asked the next morning that they be preserved. On December 2, 2019 the court's president clarified that the authorization covered only a "mera ricognizione dei corpi di reato," a simple viewing of the exhibits in the presence of the police, with no sampling or analysis. The same day the preserved material was moved to the exhibits office of the Bergamo courthouse. Requests about the timing and methods of the viewing were then turned down one after another.
On January 13, 2021 the Cassazione allowed a defense appeal and annulled, with referral back to Bergamo, the orders in which the president of the Corte d'Assise had declared the defense request for access inadmissible. The Bergamo court took the matter up again. At a hearing on May 19, 2021 it was established that the principal trial material was "sostanzialmente esaurita," substantially used up, and that the original test could no longer be repeated. On June 3, 2021 the court rejected the defense request in full: the lawyers could not see the exhibits, the photographic record compiled by the Carabinieri's scientific unit, or the records of the original laboratory work. At the request of the Bergamo chief prosecutor, who had accused the defense lawyers of misconduct, the court sent the file to prosecutors in Venice, who are responsible for investigating magistrates of the Brescia appeal district.
Further rulings followed. The Cassazione again sent the question back to Bergamo in 2021, and on November 21, 2022 the Corte d'Assise, acting as giudice dell'esecuzione, issued another refusal. On May 19, 2023 the First Criminal Section of the Cassazione annulled that order and referred the matter back once more. It instructed the Bergamo court to allow the defense a ricognizione of the exhibits within the limits already authorized, to set precautions protecting their integrity, and, if the defense then made a new and specific request, to assess "la concreta possibilità di nuovi accertamenti tecnici" and "la loro non manifesta inutilità," the concrete possibility of new technical tests and whether they would be plainly useless. The Cassazione described the 2019 authorization as "irrevocabile, valida, vigente, intangibile," while confirming that it covered viewing only. The defense lawyer said he was very satisfied.
The defense then tried to go further. It filed an extraordinary appeal for material or factual error, arguing that the Cassazione had misread the 2019 order, which in its view had authorized analysis and not merely viewing, and that the clarifying note of December 2019 had never been sent to the defense. On February 16, 2024 the Fifth Criminal Section of the Cassazione declared the extraordinary appeal inadmissible. The defense lawyer called the ruling "di una gravità assoluta."
A complaint filed by Bossetti's lawyers led to a separate proceeding in Venice. It concerned the decision, taken after the conviction became final, to move preserved trial material from storage in Milan to the exhibits office of the Bergamo courthouse. The defense argued that the move had damaged material that could have been tested again.
Venice prosecutors asked for the complaint to be dismissed, and the defense opposed the request. On December 29, 2022, at the end of the hearing on that opposition, the preliminary investigations judge in Venice ordered that the Bergamo deputy prosecutor who had led the original inquiry be entered in the register of suspects for "frode processuale e depistaggio," procedural fraud and obstruction of an investigation. The Bergamo chief prosecutor said he was frankly surprised.
The Venice prosecutors again asked for the case to be closed. At a hearing on July 24, 2024 a Venice deputy chief prosecutor told the judge that the Bergamo prosecutor had acted correctly and with no wish to destroy anything, and described the transfer as a precaution taken after the verdict. The defense spoke against dismissal for about two and a half hours and asked that the prosecutor be sent for trial. In September 2024 the judge dismissed the case. Moving the material, he wrote, "non è affatto un comportamento illegittimo o anomalo o deviante," was in no way unlawful, anomalous or deviant conduct. Bossetti's lawyers answered that the dismissal ruled out intent but did not erase the historical fact of the transfer, and that it would not affect any request for revisione.
In 2019, at his lawyers' request, he was transferred to another prison in Italy.
The access dispute moved forward in 2024 and 2025. After the Cassazione's rulings, the defense was allowed to view the exhibits, and a first hearing was held in Bergamo in October 2024, with Bossetti following by video link and a further hearing set for December. On June 17, 2025 the Tribunale di Bergamo gave effect to the Corte d'Assise order of November 2019 and released to the defense, for the first time and almost six years after its first request, documents and high-resolution photographs from the original analyses that had never been placed in the trial file. The court regarded the material as potentially new and relevant evidence. The order did not extend to direct access to the exhibits. Bossetti's lawyer called it the first real step toward a request for revisione, not a revisione in itself.
On June 25, 2026 the defense asked the Corte d'Assise di Bergamo, as giudice dell'esecuzione, to authorize new technical and scientific tests on the material that still exists. The lawyers said the grounds for the request had emerged only from the viewing the court had allowed and from the photographs released in 2025. They stated that it was not a request for revisione and did not prejudge the merits of the final conviction.
The court heard the request in chambers on Monday, October 5, 2026. Bossetti followed by video link. A few hours after the hearing, the court refused to authorize the new tests. Its reasons were not made public that day.
Murder in Italy is tried before the Corte d'Assise, which sits with two professional judges and six giudici popolari, lay judges drawn at random from lists compiled by the municipalities. Unlike an Anglo-American jury, the lay judges and the professional judges form a single panel, and each vote counts equally; where there is no unanimity, the outcome more favorable to the defendant prevails. A professional judge writes the reasons. The same mixed composition applies on appeal, in the Corte d'Assise d'Appello. Bossetti was convicted by such a panel in Bergamo and again in Brescia, and the Cassazione confirmed both.
Because the conviction is final, only the procedure of revisione under article 630 of the code of criminal procedure can reopen it. A request may rest on new evidence that, alone or with evidence already weighed, shows that the convicted person should be acquitted; on proof that the conviction resulted from false documents or testimony or from another crime; or, since 2011, on a final judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. Evidence that existed before trial but was never admitted can count as new. The only outcome a revisione can seek is acquittal. A court of appeal first decides whether the request is admissible, and only then does a new trial follow, which can itself end with the conviction upheld. Every defense step since 2019, from the viewing of the exhibits to the request for new tests, has been aimed at assembling grounds of that kind.
Bossetti has denied the murder at every stage. His defense has argued since 2014 that the central evidence against him was flawed, and it has never accepted that the remaining material could not be tested again. Every court that has ruled on the merits, at first instance, on appeal and in the Cassazione, rejected those arguments, and the 2026 request for new tests was refused.
The handling of the preserved material after the verdict is disputed. The defense maintains that its transfer in 2019 destroyed the possibility of a fresh analysis. The Venice judge found the transfer lawful and dismissed the case against the Bergamo prosecutor; the defense accepts that the dismissal excludes intent but not that the transfer took place.
The charge of calunnia, that Bossetti tried to divert suspicion onto a work colleague, ended in acquittal, and the acquittal stood after the Cassazione declared the prosecution's appeal inadmissible.
His lawyers have said they do not rule out an application to the European Court of Human Rights. No such application has been decided.
1970: Massimo Giuseppe Bossetti is born.
November 26, 2010: Yara Gambirasio, of Brembate di Sopra, dies.
June 16, 2014: Bossetti is arrested by the Carabinieri.
June 19, 2014: He is questioned by the Bergamo prosecutor and declares himself innocent.
April 27, 2015: He is committed for trial before the Corte d'Assise di Bergamo.
July 3, 2015: The trial opens.
March 11, 2016: Bossetti is examined in court and again denies the charge.
July 1, 2016: The Corte d'Assise di Bergamo convicts him of murder and sentences him to life; he is acquitted of calunnia.
July 17, 2017: The Corte d'Assise d'Appello di Brescia confirms the life sentence.
October 16, 2017: The appeal court files its reasons.
October 12, 2018: The Corte di Cassazione declares the defense appeal inadmissible; the conviction is final.
November 23, 2018: The Cassazione files its reasons.
November 27, 2019: The Bergamo court authorizes the defense to examine the exhibits; on December 2 it limits this to viewing.
January 13, 2021: The Cassazione annuls Bergamo orders refusing access and refers the matter back.
June 3, 2021: The Corte d'Assise di Bergamo refuses the defense access.
November 21, 2022: Bergamo issues a further refusal.
December 29, 2022: A Venice judge orders the Bergamo prosecutor entered in the register of suspects.
May 19, 2023: The Cassazione annuls the November 2022 refusal and orders a viewing of the exhibits.
February 16, 2024: The Cassazione declares the defense's extraordinary appeal inadmissible.
September 2024: The Venice judge dismisses the case against the Bergamo prosecutor.
June 17, 2025: The Tribunale di Bergamo releases records and photographs from the original analyses to the defense.
June 25, 2026: The defense asks the Bergamo court to authorize new tests.
October 5, 2026: The Corte d'Assise di Bergamo refuses the request.