A case report of a dismembered body found in the Po river Valley (Northern Italy)

The occurrence of cases of dismembered corpses is infrequent. Usually the practice of dismemberment is correlated to the needs of the murderer(s) to hide or more easily transport their victim. The thanato-chronological evaluation of such cases is complicated by the profound transformations induced in the body, and by the fact that algor, livor and rigor mortis cannot be assessed. However, in such a case forensic entomology could be helpful for the pathologist in estimating the PMI. The following presentation is about, a case recovering a dismembered body, which occurred in early spring of 2011. The body was dismembered into four pieces (the naked trunk with the upper limbs, the pelvis with the thighs wearing pants, and the two legs wearing socks) and left in proximity of a river in the Po Valley, in northern Italy. The pieces, were in close proximity of each other and were colonized only in the surface cuts and only Diptera eggs were found. This may indicate that the body segments were left at the scene a short period of time before discovery. A more exact calculation of the time that the body may have been exposed has been difficult to ascertain, due to the nature of the entomological findings. The problem is estimating the short interval between egg deposition and the recovery of the body. In this paper we discuss an attempt to correlate the ethological reproductive needs of the recovered species to the environment and the exposed body pieces in order to obtain the best estimate of the moment when the body parts were left at the scene.