Sensational breakthrough in the investigation into the disappearance of Salvatore Legari, a 54-year-old construction contractor of whom there has been no news since July 2023. The complex investigation of the Prosecutor’s Office carried out by the Carabinieri of the Operations Department – Investigative Unit and of the Modena Company – NOR Operational Section, in fact, this morning it led to the arrest of a 38-year-old from Modena, seriously suspected of the crimes of voluntary homicide and concealment of the body.
The man has been at the Modena district prison since this morning awaiting his interrogation by the Judge for preliminary investigations. This is Alex Oliva, who commissioned the renovation work on the house in Lesignana where the entrepreneur had gone to collect a loan, before – it is hypothesized – being killed.
The complaint and the research
The criminal proceedings, initially registered on the hypothesis of kidnapping by unknown persons, with investigations initially carried out without excluding the possibility of voluntary removal, originated from the report of Legari’s disappearance presented on 14.7.2023 by his partner to the Carabinieri of Modena, given that he had no longer heard from the man since the previous day. Legari had gone on the morning of 13.7.2023 to a construction site in Lesignana, on whose property Oliva had commissioned him to carry out building renovation works and that afternoon, at the end of the activity, he had given no further news of himself, not answering the telephone which, the next day, it had stopped working.
Legari’s van, containing some clothing and personal effects including his credit cards, was found in Sassuolo on the following 22 July, abandoned with the keys inside. The precautionary measure was issued following a detailed, complex and prolonged investigation activity directed and coordinated by this Prosecutor’s Office and supported by multiple search operations in the area ordered by the Prefecture of Modena with activation of the Provincial Person Search Plan disappeared.
The investigations and reconstruction of the crime
The investigations, conducted with technical activities, examinations of video surveillance footage and street, municipal and private cameras and with numerous testimonial contributions, allowed the investigators to acquire serious indications of guilt against the 38-year-old. The motive for the murder is considered by the Prosecutor’s Office to be of an economic nature, as the victim boasted an important debt towards Oliva, accrued from previous work services and which had to be collected by Legari on the day of his disappearance.
The careful inspection of the public and private video surveillance systems, and the analysis of the traffic records of the users in use by the victim until it was switched off, made it possible to reconstruct – with coincidence of times and locations of the route – the route taken by the van from the Lesignana construction site, where it was in the company of the suspect, to the place where the vehicle was abandoned in Sassuolo.
It is assumed that the entrepreneur had already been killed and that his body was loaded onto the van: Oliva would then have gotten behind the wheel of the vehicle after wearing Legari’s t-shirt, to simulate that it was the victim who was driving the vehicle, in intent to remove suspicions regarding the fate of the missing person and the murder from himself and his property. The photo-anthropometric consultancy ordered by the Prosecutor’s Office would have in fact attested that the man filmed driving the van was objectively compatible and identifiable with the suspect and could not, with the same degree of certainty, be Salvatore Legari.
According to the prosecution’s reconstruction, the suspect also had the hard disk of the video surveillance system of the construction site replaced in order to evade and nullify the acquisition of images prejudicial to him by the judicial police. The victim’s body was never found.
