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Body found in Sicily during search for missing four-year-old Gioele

Police in Sicily on Wednesday discovered human remains during a desperate search for a four-year-old boy who went missing over two weeks ago in suspicious circumstances.

Published: 19 August 2020 17:38 CEST

Body found in Sicily during search for missing four-year-old Gioele

Emergency services searching the area where Viviani Parisi's body was found. Handout photo: Vigili del Fuoco/AFP

Volunteers have been combing woods near the town of Caronia on Sicily's northern coast for Gioele Mondello, whose mysterious disappearance has gripped Italy.

“(We're) nearly sure it's the body of Gioele,” unnamed police investigators told Il Corriere della Sera daily.

READ ALSO: Italy gripped by desperate race to find missing four-year-old Gioele

“The trunk and a part of femur” uncovered were compatible with a four-year-old boy, police sources told Corriere.

The grim discovery was made by a police officer on leave who was helping others search for the boy.

Gioele's mother, 43-year-old DJ Viviana Parisi, was last seen on the morning of August 3rd climbing over a motorway barrier after a minor collision.

Although cameras showed Gioele in the car earlier, witnesses gave diverging statements on whether Parisi was carrying her son with her when she climbed

over the barrier or not.

Her body was found five days later in a nearby forest close to Caronia, lying at the foot of a high-voltage pylon.

Prosecutor Angelo Cavallo – who has said his team was unable to rule out Parisi's accidental death, suicide or murder – was on the scene of

Wednesday's discovery.

According to the pathologist, Parisi likely died where her body was found. It bore no visible wounds – though one arm was broken in several places –

and the state of decomposition made it impossible to determine whether she was strangled.

Viviana and Gioele disappeared after the DJ told her husband she was going to Messina to buy shoes. She was not spotted shopping but her grey Opel Corsa

was photographed on a slip road entering the motorway.

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Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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