Eva Mikula - Loose End

However, I felt an unbearable anguish that threatened to undermine everything I had been able to build up to that moment. I also went to the doctor, who prescribed me some anxiolytics and, for a couple of times, I underwent sessions by a psychologist. I feared that all these events would jeopardize the achievement of my full integration into civil society. Once again, however, I found the solution within myself, it could not be external interventions, pharmacological or psychoanalytic, the tool to resume the right path of my path. The right medicine was inner strength, the one I had trained by bearing the enormous weight of the past on my shoulders.

I thought about what I had managed to accomplish by believing only in myself. Difficult episodes can happen to anyone at any time, always when you least expect them. Public opinion had crystallized a distorted image of my person, it could neither be erased, nor modified, nor colored, because many, too many, lies had been told about me from the very beginning.

When I thought about it, I felt small and squashed, tiny and helpless. I was afraid that all prejudices, in addition to annihilating me, could fall on my children. This heavy gray cloud hung over my head, and as time went by it grew darker and darker. “But, mind you”, I mentally repeated to myself “You can say anything you want about me, so it's all false. But stay away from my children, don't even try to touch them. They have nothing to do with it”. My anxieties and my sleepless nights pushed me to write, wondering what was the origin of so much bitterness towards me, of the falsehoods that concerned me publicly exposed in the press. So I got the idea of sending a letter of release, strengthened by my full awareness of the reality that surrounded me, a letter written to the Association of the victims of the White One. Gang.

The letter to the Association:

To the White One Victims Association at the President of the Ms Zecchi Association

I turn to you again, despite having received no response to my 2005 letters.

Reading in the newspapers, you hold me forever morally guilty and you are indignant at my every attempt to approach. It has now been 20 years since light was shed on the misdeeds of the “White One”. Surely you remember the details of those moments: the first news in the newspapers, how they were captured, because I entered the judicial and media limelight. I remember everything as if it were yesterday, I was between life and death as in the previous 2 years of living together, beaten and segregated in the hands of killer policemen.

I am attaching some of the first articles, and who better than inspector Luciano Baglioni and superintendent Pietro Costanza can confirm you, as they were the first to record my first statements, a flood that lasted 48 hours with the arrival of 3 Public Ministries from various prosecutors even at 3 am.

In what psychological conditions did they find me? A little girl, clandestine, threatened and terrified of death. I started helping to shed some light on the affair, when Roberto Savi, just arrested, was about to be released as there was not enough evidence against him. The other components were on the loose while the investigators were only at the beginning of the reconstruction of the crimes to be attributed to the gang. There were 4 people in prison: “the Santagata”, already convicted, who had been serving a sentence for years for crimes not attributable to them and released immediately after my confessions.

I was taken away and placed under protection by the State in a distant and secret place, watched for 8 months waiting for everything to be clarified based on my confessions, looking for other people involved that I was not aware of. Once the investigation of the gang was over and the Savi were charged with their crimes, I was accused by them of complicity in murder and other serious crimes in revenge, which charges were later retracted.

Meanwhile, I have undergone 7 trials in various degrees of judgment and I was fully acquitted. I was forced to do television appearances to pay my lawyers, to defend myself. I fought alone against everyone, I had only God, my 19 years and a clear conscience as a guide towards a justice that then came for everyone. I have never sought acknowledgments and thanks from anyone, I have put aside the controversy, leaving vent to your unquestionable pain. I was consoled by the satisfaction and sadness that enveloped me every time I followed your commemoration. I wanted to be present, in the last row, but to be there. Unfortunately, in fact, this never happened; but the worst did.

Public opinion has been subtly led to discredit me, to discriminate me to the point of making me an icon of crime, a character to be trampled on who only makes headlines in the crime news as it happened in June 18, 2010, when my name was used to give relevance to the arrest of a person unknown to everyone, even me, as divorced for 10 years when he was cleansed, I no longer knew anything about him and his life choices.

The news took off on all national news and newspapers. My requests for correction were not even considered. No body contacted me, no one corrected the news that, as a result, it only had a strong discriminatory pressure on me and my family. I am clean, without pending charges and lead a normal, modest and honest life as well as a mother of 2 children. To date, some people in my workplace, after reading the news featured on the web, driven by a strong prejudice, have insulted and defamed me in public, considering me a person involved in crimes, prejudiced and guilty of frequenting criminal environments.

Despite myself, I had to file a lawsuit. They will have to pay penalties and damages as per law, whose victims are they?... it is not an isolated case.

For 20 years I have remained in the shadows and at the mercy of the media but always in support of the truth and close to your thoughts and pain. The Savi are serving life sentences as confirmed recently, largely thanks to me, for my timely, assiduous and precious collaboration. Otherwise, I would have died before seeing Fabio Savi's handcuffs on his wrists. With your permission and understanding, I would appreciate you allowing me to join the White One Victims Association or, please, at least accept my silent and heartfelt presence at the commemorations of October 13th as a surviving victim of a fierce, absurd and unforgettable story. Waiting for your in-depth evaluation and understandable response, I renew my best regards.

Eva Mikula. Rome, January 28, 2015

The response from Mrs. Zecchi, president of the Association, was not long in coming: “It is a request that does not stand, I do not know on what basis you can make such a request”.

I was still of the opinion that at least those who had been closely touched by this story of the White One knew the truth about the capture of the gang. I was wrong, I realized, however, that this was not the case at all. No less angry was the reply of Valter Giovannini of the public prosecutor of Bologna, which no one had called into question in the letter, but evidently he felt compelled to put his seal with the reply: “Silence is enough to respect the victims”, as if to say to be silent so as not to raise questions already closed and sedimented in the procedural truths.

I felt more and more alone and marginalized, I was not yet ready to face and publicly reveal the truth about the dynamics of the gang capture. My daughter was still small, my energies were used to manage a life full of responsibility and I still had a step, a pawn to put in her place: to tell the story of her life, of her destiny, why she does not have a dad. But for all this I had to wait until she was at least 9 years old, as the child psychologist suggested to me that followed me in the single-parent education path.