The documentary on the death of Yara Gambirasio, released a few days ago, is just the latest in a long series. The true crime genre has in fact become very popular in recent years and various broadcasters, streaming, but also television, are competing to get their hands on the most compelling content. As the years go by, however, the unsolved crime cases are fewer and fewer: the development of new technologies, both tracking (cameras, GPS, etc.) and related to forensic science, make it very difficult to escape the truth.

Give the floor to the executioner

So what happens? That we cling morbidly, obsessively, to past cases. Those about which there are still doubts, or at least, on which it is easier to speculate and build compelling stories completely based on nothing. But the old stories have already been heard and re-heard, so we need to add something new, a scoop. Here is the twist: we give the executioner the floor. We did it for Stasi, on Discovery, for the femicide of Garlasco, and now we have also done it on Netflix with Massimo Bossetti. To go from monster to martyr, a few minutes, a few tears and a few rambling words are enough. Even in one passage of the documentary, Bossetti takes a dig at the Gambirasio family; the height of shame.

Yara’s parents rightly decided not to participate in this farce, which in fact aims to humanize and rehabilitate in the eyes of the general public a man who committed a heinous crime, without ever having found the courage to admit his guilt. A pathological liar, who seems to have inherited this psychological trait from his mother, who is also capable of lying shamelessly and without shame, denying what DNA incontrovertibly establishes, namely that her son Massimo was born from an extramarital affair. And yet, when a person lies so repeatedly and convincingly, there is always someone who falls for it. After all, manipulators exist because those who can be manipulated exist, otherwise who could they fool? Bossetti was sentenced to life imprisonment by three degrees of judgment, beyond any reasonable doubt, with all due respect to the director.

A documentary, not a trial

And if someone disagrees, they will have to prove it in a court of law, not in a documentary which by definition is constructed with the aim of telling a story, not THE story. As the pathologist Cristina Cattaneo rightly says during the filming: “I will not repeat a trial in a documentary”, perhaps only realizing at that moment the trap she had naively walked into. So even common sense and morality bend to the millionaire business of true crime, which does not offer any useful service to the community, as they often want us to believe, but simply speculates without any criteria, feeding an audience increasingly dependent on the adrenaline of violence and mystery. Let’s remember, however, that we are not talking about fiction: behind these stories there are devastated families, who have the right to live their lives without a new morbid investigation into the death of a loved one coming out every one or two years.

Yara’s parents should sue the streaming multinationals and so should all those who see their lives transformed into an endless show. So maybe one day they will have justice from this point of view too.