Pisa, disappearance of Krystyna Novak, neighbor arrested for murder thanks to the woman's partner

Pisa, The Pisa State Police, on the orders of the local Public Prosecutor's Office, executed, at dawn this morning, an order for the application of the measure of precautionary custody in prison issued by the investigating judge of the Court of Pisa against Lupino Francesco, alleged perpetrator of the murder of Novak Krystyna, the girl of Ukrainian nationality whose disappearance was reported to the State Police on 9 November 2020, after nine days in which she no longer gave any news about herself to family and friends.

The investigation, tiring and uphill from the beginning due to the time gap between the girl's disappearance and the first intervention, which the Prosecutor's Office and the investigators of the Flying Squad of Pisa, the Central Operational Service of Rome and the Scientific Police of Florence and Rome tried to bridge the gap through extensive investigative activity, which led to the acquisition of serious evidence of crime against the girl's neighbor, a partner in criminal affairs of the victim's partner Gonzalez Airam Negrim.

The story that will lead to the tragic epilogue of the killing of the young girl starts from the moment of the arrest of her Spanish companion, a well-known local entrepreneur in the leather sector.

And in fact the man, on the evening of 31 October 2020, was arrested following a "tip-off" made by Lupino Francesco to the Pontedera Police who, upon reporting from the same, caught Gonzalez on his return from a trip with Novak is with his younger son and subjects him to a search, finding him in possession of two pistols and narcotic substances in his home.

What emerged from the continuation of the investigations concerning both that proceeding and the proceeding opened following the disappearance of the girl is that, who made those weapons and substances available to Gonzalez, it was Lupino himself, two days earlier at his arrest. That Gonzalez had been involved by Lupino in his criminal affairs emerged from the Spaniard's statements, supported by the forensic examination of the chats contained in the cell phone used by him.

The reason for this denunciation made by Lupino towards his partner derives from an altercation that occurred between the two neighbors two days before Gonzalez's arrest, determined by Gonzalez's desire, at the express request of Novak, to withdraw from the business drug dealing criminals in which he had been involved by Lupino, as well as to fulfill his partner's wish, also because the Spaniard had realized that Lupino was secretly taking sums of money from common illicit takings.

Lupino, in addition to being the neighbor, was also Gonzalez's tenant and precisely as part of that argument, Gonzalez also ordered the release of the property. In response, Lupino himself allegedly threatened the Spaniard with a Tanfoglio brand semi-automatic pistol, illegally held by the same man that the man usually carried with him.

To close the criminal relationship and get Gonzalez back from the initial investment, Lupino would have given Gonzalez the drugs and the two guns that day, which would then have been found during the search and the consequent arrest of the Spaniard on the evening of October 31, 2020.

On the evening of October 31, 2020, Krythina Novak returned from the police station following the arrest of her partner with Gonzalez's son, accompanied by the latter's mother and was dropped off at the house around 22.30 pm.

According to the historical reconstruction, which took place through both the execution of the forensic examination of the victim's I cloud and the examination of several witnesses among the victim's friends, on the morning of 1.1.2020 the girl communicated normally with family members and friends, she spoke by phone via WhatsApp call with a friend called Julia, resident in Ukraine, telling her about her partner's arrest which had occurred the day before, expressing her displeasure, she chatted with her other friends via Instagram. During the phone call with Julia, around 9.30 in the morning of 1.11.2020, Novak received a call on the intercom of the house in via delle Fontine 62, from Lupino Francesco, who had gone to the house to to hear from him and to find out if he needed anything. On that occasion the girl looked out and seeing that it was Lupino, first told him that she didn't need anything and then, given his insistence in presenting this request for availability, Novak made a gesture as if to send him " to that country."

Another neighbor also witnessed the scene, who noticed Lupino leaving in a nervous manner following the gesture, skidding her car.

Krystyna spends the afternoon and evening of 1.11.2020 in an ordinary way: she chats with her friends, albeit in a disconsolate manner due to the episode that occurred with her partner, she speaks again with her friend Julia to whom she reports that she wants to stay in home to wait for her boyfriend Airam to return also because a policeman, upon arrest, had reassured her that, given that her partner had a clean criminal record, he would be released from prison within a couple of days at most. She was confident, she had expressed her intent to wait for him at home. In the evening, after this conversation which took place around 22.00 pm Italian time, the girl would have searched for a love film on Google at 22.35 pm on her cell phone, with the probable intention of watching it.

From that moment, there is no further news of other activities carried out through Novak's mobile phone, which on the morning of the 2nd at 8.44 am, stops reproducing the signal, until 9.41 am on 3.11.2020, when after having connected some cells it turns off definitively at 9.55.

Concerned by Ukraine for the lack of contact with the girl, Krystyna's mother asks some of her compatriots to go and look for her daughter to understand if something had happened to her. The girls go to the Nardi court on two occasions that day and, after repeatedly calling the girl, they climb over the gate. They entered through the rear entrance, which they found open and with a key inserted from the outside of the door. Inside the house they did not find their compatriot, but only the dog from which the girl never separated. After searching in vain for Krystyna, they climbed back over the gate, taking little Kasper away.

After this step, Gonzalez's ex-wife arrived at the house on November 4, 2020, with the intention of taking some personal effects for her detained ex-husband. She didn't find the girl in the house either, she took her ex-husband's personal effects and left.

Following the complaint presented on the 9th by a lawyer appointed by Novak, the Police carried out an initial inspection. Inside the house, although dirty, it appears tidy, Novak's house keys, the keys to Gonzalez's car, and all of the girl's identity documents are found on a cabinet.

Since the presence of the documents inside the house appears unusual and incompatible with a plausible voluntary removal of the girl, investigations are immediately started and the Prosecutor's Office opens a case for kidnapping.

Investigations are launched at 360 degrees and no resources, both human and instrumental, are spared.

Civil protection searches begin and the environments adjacent to Gonzalez and Novak are searched: the place where Novak worked and where she had met Gonzalez, her fellow Ukrainians, the neighborhood.

Right from the start, Gonzalez himself offered an important investigative contribution and high level of collaboration to the investigations. When questioned several times in prison, he always provided coherent information which was subsequently verified.

Having learned of his partner's disappearance, the man immediately made himself available to the investigators, describing his relationships with neighbors and with anyone who may have had any cause for resentment towards the girl and the couple.

He narrated the relationship with Lupino Francesco of the relationship that began in February 2020, first between mere landlords and managers of properties, then, taking advantage of a story that ended badly between Gonzalez and another ex-girlfriend in July 2020, Lupino entered progressively becoming more and more part of the Spaniard's life, until the proposal, made by the Florentine, to enter the illicit business. In fact, Lupino also has previous convictions in the field of international drug trafficking, as well as for injuries and mistreatment of his ex-wife. He is described as a violent type, who has access to firearms and who, with a gun that he almost always carries with him, would also have killed, in July 2020, one of Gonzalez's dogs by shooting it in the head, a scene which he would have witnessed even Gonzalez's ex-girlfriend herself.

According to Gonzalez, Lupino was a man who harbored a high level of resentment towards himself, but also towards Krystyna who, as a new partner, had entered Airam's life in August 2020. After almost two months of living together, Krystyna, who as Gonzalez's partner was aware of the illicit dealings between her partner and Lupino, did not look favorably on the latter, to the point of convincing Gonzalez to get out of those dealings.

Lupino, according to what Gonzalez reported and found in the WhatsApp chats, had access to the keys to the Spaniard's villa, where the illicit trafficking took place.

The activities conducted by the investigators of the Pisa Flying Squad were aimed at verifying the narratives provided by Gonzalez and, with the help of the Central Operational Service and the Scientific Police of Florence and Rome, as well as the ballistics and IT consultants appointed by the Public Prosecutor, to the analysis of technical and scientific data.

Inspections of the house were carried out, one of which even included Gonzalez himself in detention, the Spaniard's dog was disinterred, declared to have been executed by Lupino with a gunshot to the head, in whose carcass an ogive was found .

The examination of the house, which apparently did not seem to indicate a crime had been committed, through instrumental examinations conducted by the Scientific Police Service of Florence and Rome, through exaltation of latent traces, revealed the presence of evident traces of deletions of blood substance from the walls of the entrance corridor of the rear door. Traces of blood and Krystyna Novak's DNA were found hidden under the hinge of the rear door jamb, precisely at the points where the erasures of traces were evident. Also at that point in the corridor, thanks to the victim's companion, the absence of a doormat from that entrance was detected and a scratch was then found in the wall with a metal fragment inside. The product analysis conducted on this object led to defining this metallic substance found inside as a composite alloy of lead, copper and zinc.

The fragment was compared with the bullet extracted from Gonzalez's dog, according to his statements confirmed by his ex-girlfriend, killed by Lupino with a Tanfoglio brand gun. The comparison, carried out in the laboratories of the Scientific Police of Rome, led to the conclusion of the high compatibility of that material with the impact of a bullet of the type found inside the dog. In the place where the dog was killed, a cartridge case was found which, analyzed by the ballistics consultant appointed by the Public Prosecutor, due to its characteristics and signs, appears to have been ejected from an oscillating barrel pistol, typical of the Tanfoglio.

The fact that Lupino had that very gun at his disposal was ascertained, in addition to the statements made by Gonzalez and another witness familiar with Lupino, by an image taken in August 2020 with Lupino's mobile phone and found inside the itself, in which Lupino's 9-year-old daughter is immortalized who, while in the atrium of the house, is holding in her hand while aiming what clearly appears to be a Tanfoglio Limited.

Given the meticulousness of the circumstantial framework collected, and the almost confirmed demise of Novak, the position of Lupino Francesco was placed under the magnifying glass, with particular reference to his conduct in the days in which the murder was allegedly committed and in the following days. .

Lupino and his partner, since the preliminary stages of the investigation activities conducted in the Orentano area, would have carried out activities aimed at diverting the investigations. In order to ward off suspicion, they provided versions of how they spent those days, which were later disavowed by the investigative investigations carried out. Firstly, the cohabitants declared that they had always been together in those three days and that they had conducted ordinary days, highlighting that the couple was in the habit of always being together and never separating. In reality, from the examination of the couple's cell phones it emerged that, as early as the evening of the first, things had gone differently from what was reported. In reality, it is worth highlighting that Lupino completely deleted the chat with his partner and that this operation would have taken place between the evening of 1 and the evening of 3 November 2020. Analyzing the chat with his partner, it emerged that there was a message sent at 20.34pm and read at 20.54pm by Lupino, a symptom of the fact that the two might not have been together at that time.

Analyzing Lupino's cell phone in comparison with Novak's cell phone, they appear to connect cells compatible with the Corte Nardi area, at the time in which the crime was committed, to be traced back to between the evening of November 2020st and the night of two November XNUMX.

Similarly, the statements of the two are also contradicted with reference to what happened on the evening of the 3nd and the night of 2020 November 23.15. And in fact, between Lupino and his partner, but also with his son, there are several telephone interactions via WhatsApp, but also voice traffic, demonstrating that Lupino Francesco, between 2pm on the 1.15nd and 3am on the XNUMXrd, the man was not with his family unit as declared.

But the element that aroused the greatest investigative interest in terms of circumstantiality towards Lupino Francesco is what was reconstructed on the morning of November 3, 2020. The couple, who in life work as tattoo artists in an annex overlooking their home, declared that on the morning of November 3 they would have given a boy a tattoo, that they would have gone together to tattoo him and that afterwards, according to his partner's declaration, Lupino would have tattooed him. The investigators arrived at the subject's identity and, having heard brief information, the customer reported that he had been accompanied to the tattoo studio by the couple around a quarter past 9 on the third, but that his partner would then carry out the tattoo. of Lupino and not Lupino as agreed. While his partner was busy getting the tattoo, the customer would have noticed Lupino taking away some black bags from his home towards the place where he had parked the car, only to see him return around 11 am.

The time slot is particularly crucial, because it is the moment in which Novak's cell phone, whose signal appears absent from the records for approximately 25 hours, returns to expressing cell traffic. After about 7 minutes from that switch on, on the other hand, Lupino's cell phone stops producing traffic, while Novak's, after a minute, begins to connect to various cells, even those not compatible with the connection, and then turns off again.

In order to verify the transits of those minutes, the images of two video surveillance cameras located in the Municipality of Orentano were analysed, one located at a crossroads 1,63 km from Lupino's home and one in the center of Orentano. Both immortalize the passage of a white Fiat Freemont compatible in terms of features and options with the one owned and used by the Lupino with a male on board, dressed as the Lupino was described by the customer.

By comparing the cell traffic of Novak's cell phone with the transit of that vehicle filmed by the camera, a compatibility emerged between the cell connected to Novak and the route traveled by that vehicle.

Lupino's intent, according to what was reconstructed in the investigations, and confirmed by the investigating judge, would have been to implement a misdirection aimed at simulating the voluntary removal of the girl, as confirmed indirectly by an environmental interception in which, speaking with a neighbor home, Lupino states how Novak should have handled her cell phone to cover her tracks in the event of a hypothetical escape. Still in the context of another wiretap, Lupino talks to his partner about how to organize his own defense, saying that it must be built first, in anticipation that something might happen, evidently alluding to the possibility of being indicted and arrested.

These elements together with others, collected so far, have led to the conclusion on the existence of serious indications of a crime against Lupino who, according to the investigative reconstruction adopted by the investigating judge, killed Novak between the evening of the 1st and the night of the second using the gun whose possession was proven, the event would have taken place inside Gonzalez's home, to then suppress the body and erase (not completely) the traces of the crime between the same evening and the following evening (the between two and three) and, in order to implement a misdirection to simulate her voluntary removal, he would have completed his plan by simulating Novak's departure using her cell phone, to mislead and thus direct the investigations definitively towards a voluntary removal of the girl.