Ruggeri called in tracker dogs: a breed of bloodhound, Segugio Italiano, with short, brown and black hair, long ears, doleful eyes and a keen sense of smell. A few people said they’d seen two men – possibly in conversation with Yara, standing near a red car – but there was little more to go on than that. Besides the large sports hall there was a running track, a swimming pool, and various courts. The gym was part of a large sports complex, a garish building with many entrances and exits. The police quickly established that the last known contact with Yara was a text message she had sent to a friend, Martina, at 6.44pm, agreeing to meet at 8am the following Sunday. Yara’s gym instructor confirmed that she had seen the teenager earlier that day and that she had done some light training before heading off. Within minutes she had dispatched both state police officers and carabinieri, military police, to Brembate di Sopra. She had been a magistrate for almost 15 years, and knew what needed to be done. The magistrate on duty was Letizia Ruggeri, 45, a tough former policewoman who had earned her stripes fighting Cosa Nostra in Sicily. The call was put through to the public prosecutor’s office, in the centre of the provincial capital Bergamo, a city 11km east of Brembate di Sopra. Twenty minutes later, Yara’s father called the police. At 7.11pm, Yara’s mother phoned her daughter, but the call went straight to voicemail. From its quiet streets, lined with poplars and cypresses, you can see the wooded mountains in the distance, the peaks turning blue-grey. An hour north of Milan, and just south of the Bergamo Alps, it has a population of 8,000. The town where they lived, Brembate di Sopra, was a sedate place, on the so-called “Bergamask island” between the rivers Brembo and Adda.

She said goodbye to her family, who knew where she was going, and left the house.īy 7pm, Yara had still not come home and her parents were becoming increasingly anxious. All she needed to do was drop off a stereo with her instructor. Yara, who was 13 and wore train-track braces, was preparing for her rhythmic gymnastics display the following Sunday.

On Friday 26 November 2010, at 5.15pm, she left home to go to the gym, just a few hundred metres from her home. Y ara Gambirasio should only have been gone a short while.

Sold girl town purple