2 weeks Ago By The Telegraph
Italian investigators have launched a fresh inquiry into whether a British baroness and her secretary were murdered in a case dating back more than four decades. Baroness De Rothschild, Jeannette Bishop May, the former model, and Gabriella Guerin, her secretary, disappeared in a freak snowstorm in the rugged Marche region in November 1980. Following an intense police search, which involved police helicopters and sniffer dogs, the women’s badly decomposed bodies were discovered by hunters fourteen months later near Lake Fiastra in the Sibillini mountains.
The corpses had reportedly been ravaged by wild boars. Their tragic demise has baffled Italians for years and provoked wild speculation about links to the mafia, an art theft in Rome and the murder of an Italian antique dealer and the , a Vatican banker, in London in 1982. Prosecutors in the town of Macerata have now reopened the investigation into the cold case, and police will begin hearing testimony this week from a dozen witnesses, who knew the women at the time they disappeared.
Fabrizio Narbone, chief prosecutor, has declined to disclose details about what had motivated the fresh inquiry but confirmed a double murder investigation into the women’s deaths had been reopened. “We reread all the records, to see if there were any glimmers to assess the existence of contradictions, and we felt that there was a chance of getting to the bottom of it,” Mr Narbone told local media. “The more time passes, the more people who might have been involved in this story, or who had knowledge of it, are bound to disappear.
” The striking baroness cut a glamorous figure as a member of the international jetset and , British financier and member of the famous banking family. The couple divorced in 1971 and she then married Stephen May, a businessman. At the time of her disappearance, the baroness had been in the Marche region organising renovations for a home she had purchased in the village of Schito.
She and her secretary were last seen driving a Peugeot up a remote mountain road in poor weather. The car was found three weeks after their disappearance and investigators found no sign of a struggle or force. The bodies were not found until fourteen months later.
Nazzareno Venanzi, a surveyor, was one of the last people to see the baroness alive. “In the morning she showed me a gate she liked for the cottage she was renovating,” he told the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera. “We drank an aperitif before lunch, then she asked me if I wanted to accompany them both in the mountains that evening, but I declined because I was busy.
When I learned they did not come back to their hotel, I was worried and notified the police. “She was enchanting, a former model with fine manners,” he said. “It was only after her death that I learned she was well-known in England, the former wife of the banker, Rothschild.
” In December 1982, Alessandro Iacoboni, a Macerata prosecutor, investigated the case as a possible murder. An initial inquiry found the cause of the women’s deaths was hypothermia. At the same time, Scotland Yard was investigating the death of Sergio Vaccari, a Roman antique dealer, who was stabbed to death in Holland Park in September 1982.
Bishop was reportedly one of his contacts. In September 1989, the investigating prosecutor found the women were victims of a double murder by unknown perpetrators, using unknown means..
