On February 5, 1995, the police receive an anonymous call: "There is a lifeless girl in the Tuvixeddu ravine."
Tuvixeddu is the name of a hill and a necropolis located in the heart of the city of Cagliari. There, the police find the body of Manuela Murgia, 16, at the foot of a 30-meter-high cliff. The girl had been missing since the day before.
An acquaintance claims to have seen her on February 4, 1995, shortly after 12:00, getting into a blue metallic car, driven by a man. This is the last contact before her body was found the next day.
Enrico Astero, Manuela's boyfriend, 8 years older than her, is questioned. He claims that he had not seen the girl for about ten days, because they had broken off their relationship. No further investigations are carried out against him and no other leads are identified. For the investigators, the cause remains unclear and several hypotheses are considered: suicide, accidental death or murder by hiding the body. In the absence of new elements, in 1997 the Prosecutor's Office decides to close the case as suicide.
But something is wrong.
The hypothesis is that Manuela was thrown from the cliff. But her clothes are intact, although there are cuts on her back. There are no wounds on her face, although the body was found face down, and there are numerous marks on her neck. There are no serious fractures either. How is this possible after a 30-meter fall? The Murgia family has never accepted the suicide version.
In 2023, the Murgia family, with the help of their lawyers, manages to get their hands on the complete file of Manuela's case. A new expertise raises the suspicion that Manuela was raped, then hit by a car and finally her body was dragged towards the Tuvixeddu cliff. This new reconstruction brings attention back to Manuela's then-boyfriend, Enrico Astero, now 54 years old. In May 2025, Astero was officially registered as a suspect for premeditated murder. Meanwhile, the hypothesis of rape before murder is supported by a crucial development: the discovery of Manuela's clothes. The analyses have revealed many traces, in particular traces of male DNA on her underwear.
The investigation is still ongoing. The next step is to verify whether or not the male DNA found on the clothes belongs to Enrico Astero. The family hopes that, after 30 years, the truth about Manuela Murgia's death will finally be revealed./Fanpage.it
