Olesya Rostova, the russian girl that could have been Denise Pipitone, fooled us all

Mythomaniac and jackals are a big issue for a private detective committed to the finding of a disappeared person.

Mythomaniac and jackals are a big issue for a private detective committed to the finding of a disappeared person.

Olesya Rostova, the Russian girl that could have been Denise Pipitone, fooled us all. Roman, ā€œLet them talkā€ showā€™s presenter broadcast on the first Russian channel, firstly exaggerated the case to increase the audience of his show and then abandoned Rostova, stating that heā€™s been cheated too. Thanks to the lawyer Giacomo Frattizza the hideous sideshow stopped without even a call for the DNA: the blood type was enough.

Having dealt with missing peopleā€™s tracing for 40 years, firstly as collaborator of investigative agencies and then as freelancer with my own investigative agency Octopus, I know that the media uproar on the disappearance of someone brings pros and cons: on one side it can be useful to find honest witnesses and true warnings, but on the other side it leads to false alarms and red herrings due to errors committed in good faith or mythomaniac and jackals.

In the eventuality of missing people in nature areas, like the one of the little Denise which disappeared in the woods 16 years ago, the detectives of my investigation agency Octopus strictly stick to two paramount rules:

  • Prompt and proper use of man trailing dogs

When I had just started my detective agency Octopus in Bergamo there was no such thing as man trailing tradition in Italy and I had to turn to Swiss or German specialists. In 10 years, man trailing has spread here in Italy too, but itā€™s still not mature and moreover finding specialists up to it can be a challenge.

  • Employment of 30 people well balanced and coordinate among each other and guided by a friend acquainted with inch-by-inch open air research.

In Italy this type of research is carried out involving an exaggerated amount of people belonging to different units and associations and clumsily organized among themselves. As a matter of fact, recently few corpseā€™s recoveries had place in areas that had just been scanned.

As I wrote in my book ā€œGuide for the tracing of missing peopleā€: <<The tracing suffers from the pass of time and from the inaccuracies of the detective more than any other inquire, its outcome is uncertain because the chased can constantly leverage the errors committed by the chaser. If the missing is due to a tragic event, itā€™s often puzzling and cruel>>. Puzzling and cruel events, unfortunately, are particularly frequent when the missing person is either very young or very old.