CORPSE FOUND IN AN ABANDONED FACTORY

MILAN – He killed with a sneer of pleasure. Cold blooded. He killed in order “to send a signal to the entire art and design movement”. This is how Carlo Maria Pelagallo justified his actions in the letter that showed up in our newsroom. Italian designer and murderer on the loose. The body of the young chair was found in the crumbling building which once housed the glorious main office Innocenti.

Although there was no furious attack on the corpse, the investigative nucleus which is investigating the case that Carlo Maria Pelagallo “is a highly dangerous subject for the entire system and could, if not found in time, strike again”. Only one lesion was found on the corpse. A deep wound. Provoked by a kitchen knife that, at the time of the discovery, was still stuck in the victim’s back.

No signs of a struggle were found. The chair probably trusted its butcher. It let itself be studied, modeled. Then, according to the investigators’ reconstruction, it got in a car with Pelagallo and, without suspecting anything, got out with him in the warehouses of Via Rubattino, in the immediate outskirts of Milan. They were separated by the rubble and there, they were united. The chair shows no signs of bruises, scratches or any other signs of resistance and this fact confirms the hypothesis that the sitting was consensual.

In the letter which Pelagallo later sent to our offices, it seems clear that the deadly blow hadn’t been dealt after a fit of rage. That madness was lucid, premeditated. Planned with attention to every detail.

The corpse was found by reporter Manfredi Gioacchini. He sounded the alarm at approximately 15:00 hours, only after photographing the chair several times. This detail raised more than few suspicions with the investigators which suspect that the he was himself a direct accomplice in this unsettling ordeal.

But the only name which appears on the list of suspects remains that of Pelagallo, the mastermind and agent of this crime. In fact, the photographer was released after three hours of interrogation. He told police that he happened upon the scene by chance. He wanted to immortalize “the end of a certain industrial process in which design was closely tied to manual labor” and wanted to find “an object which could communicate directly with the emotions of the user”. Certainly, in the decadence of those enormous abandoned spaces, he found what he was looking for. But this series of statements seem to follow the philosophy that pushed Pelagallo to commit homicide. The entire story has therefore been covered by an air of a thriller.

Article by Matteo Cecchini