Nazzareno Venanzi is unconcerned by the blanket of thick fog and the chilly wind whistling across the mountains in Italy’s central Marche region.

The 85-year-old building surveyor has just driven 22 kilometres up a winding road from his home in the medieval town of Sarnano, Macerata, to a place he would rather forget.

He has come to the edge of dense woodland in the Sibillini Mountains for the first time in 40 years to reveal the location of one of Italy’s enduring mysteries.

“This is where the bones were found,” says Venanzi, staring down a steep gully through a kaleidoscope of brilliant autumn foliage. “Just down there.”

A roadside memorial marks the spot where Jeanette Bishop May, the 41-year-old once married to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild from the international banking dynasty, was found with her secretary, Gabriella Guerin, long after they disappeared in a snowstorm on November 29, 1980.

“There’s no explanation for why they went into the mountains that day or why they came here,” Venanzi adds as he photographed the memorial. “It’s a mystery.”

For the next four decades, speculation has swirled around what happened to the British socialite and her 39-year-old Italian companion.

Conspiracy theories have flourished about possible links to the mafia, a Rome art theft, a Brazilian gem dealer and the death of a Vatican banker in London.

Initially, police determined the death of the women was an accident and the cause was hypothermia.

Subsequent investigations were hampered by conflicting testimony and inconclusive forensic evidence; an open verdict was finally declared in 1989 saying they were victims of a double-murder by unknown perpetrators.

But questions continued to be raised about whether they were victims of misfortune or malevolence. Now Italian authorities have launched a fresh inquiry into the cold case and announced it is a murder investigation.

Venanzi was one of a dozen witnesses summoned by police and prosecutors for interrogation last week, as he was one of the last people to see the two victims alive.

He had met both women in Sarnano on the day they disappeared because May had seen a gate that she wanted to replicate for the cottage she had bought just outside the town. They shared an aperitivo at the surveyor’s home with him and his wife before lunch.

“She asked me if I could go to the mountains with her,” Venanzi remembers. “I told her I couldn’t because I had too many deadlines. From that moment on, we knew nothing more. When I learnt they did not return to their hotel, I was worried and notified the police.”

‘I’ve never been convinced that it was an accident and I hope they can solve the case.’

General Carlo Felice Corsetti

May missed a scheduled appointment with the previous owner of her home in the early afternoon that Saturday. Instead, she and her secretary drove up the mountain and stopped at the Hotel Sibilla Parco, where the owner, Ortelio Valori, now 82, served them refreshments. By now it was around 4pm and already getting dark.

“I saw a car outside, a man waiting for them in a car,” Valori says. A key witness in this case, he also testified before police and prosecutors this week.

But what happened to the women after they left the hotel is still unclear. Police feared the women had been kidnapped when their Peugeot 104 sedan was found three weeks after their disappearance, showing no mechanical faults or sign of forced entry, about 13 kilometres up the mountain from Sarnano.

Investigators found a scarf and other belongings in the car but were baffled when a ransom demand never arrived.

There were also signs the women had sought refuge from the snowstorm in an abandoned farm house nearby, where burnt firewood and dirty plates had been left behind. Media reports at the time suggested a man’s fingerprints had been found inside their Peugeot.

Despite a massive search involving 500 police supported by helicopters and dog squads, it would be another 14 months before hunters discovered the women’s corpses in woodland near Lake Fiastra in January 1982.

Ravaged by wild boars and wolves, their skeletal remains were found lying side by side in the woods nearly 12 kilometres from where they had left their vehicle.

Dubbed the “murder mystery of the century”, the case provoked a media frenzy in the UK and Italy. Scotland Yard detectives joined the investigation as newspaper headlines screamed of foul play and experts theorised about whether it was the “perfect crime”.

Now local residents are once again wondering what led the women to drive up a mountain on a day when there was already light snow on the mountains and dark clouds were closing in.

“No one around here ever thought it was an accident or misfortune,” says Roberta, a barista in a cafe in the tiny town of Fiastra. “After 40 years, there is something else, something is unclear.”

Corrado Ermini lives in a hamlet on the opposite side of Lake Fiastra about five kilometres from where the bodies were found.

Now 82, he was one of the three local hunters who discovered the women’s bones while he and his friends were on the hunt for wild boar just two weeks after May’s second husband, Stephen, offered a reward for any news.

‘As a child, my parents used to tell me to avoid the mountains if it snowed or I would end up like Lady De Rothschild.’

Fabio Fantegrossi, the 36-year-old mayor of Sarnano

Ermini is still haunted by what he saw that day.

“It was really shocking,” he recalls, in an interview at his home. “I saw the bodies laid out on the grass, they had been there a long time. It was as if they had been laid on the earth in a position of repose.”

May was found wearing a Cartier bracelet that her husband had given her as a gift, and the women’s identity papers were inside the handbags found beside the bodies. But little else remained.

“They were still in their clothes, but you couldn’t recognise them,” Ermini says. “I found a detached boot with the remains of a tibia bone inside, you could see a little flesh but most of it had been taken away. Who knows what happened to them.”

Last week the silver-haired hunter was asked to share his memories with a new generation of investigators. “I’m surprised that this is happening after all these years, everyone is surprised,” he adds.

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Colonel Raffaele Ruocco, the newly appointed provincial commander of the Carabinieri police in Macerata, believes a review of the cold case had suggested there were aspects worthy of further inquiry. Unlike previous investigations, he stressed the focus was local.

“We want to gain further information and insights, conduct analysis and hear from witnesses to determine whether there is enough evidence to continue with criminal proceedings,” he says.

“We want to hear from those who may have seen something, those who stayed at the hotel where the women stayed, hunters, railway workers and road maintenance workers.”

The regional chief prosecutor, Giovanni Fabrizio Narbone, confirmed a double-murder investigation was under way. As many of the key witnesses are now elderly, he said time was running out.

“We are working in the hope of getting a result,” he told Italian media. “We thought this could be the last chance to try and get to the truth.”

Jeanette Bishop May was a newcomer to the Marche and probably knew little about the unpredictable mountain landscape where sunny clouds can suddenly dissolve into ominous grey clouds and dense fog. Snowstorms can isolate communities for days in the winter and earthquakes are common.

Born in London, the British woman had a successful modelling career, before marrying Sir Evelyn De Rothschild, the prominent banker who served as financial adviser to the late Queen Elizabeth II. After her divorce she started an antique business before marrying her second husband, Stephen May, in 1977.

Known for her elegance and ease, Jeanette May seemed to charm everyone she met in Sarnano while continuing to mix with designers and art dealers in the international jet-set in London and Rome. British writer Raymond Flower, and Gianni Bulgari, from the wealthy jewellery dynasty, were reportedly among her friends.

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Days after the women’s disappearance, investigators began looking at May’s connections to the art world when a telegram was delivered to her hotel in her name with a Rome address linked to a jewellery robbery at Christie’s in Piazza Navona. At the same time, Scotland Yard was looking into the death of Sergio Vaccari, a Roman antique dealer, who was stabbed to death in Holland Park in London in September 1982. Bishop mixed in the same circles as Vaccari who reportedly had connections to Roberto Calvi, nicknamed “God’s Banker” because of his close association with the Vatican, who was murdered in London the same year that Vaccari was killed.

Retired police investigators, General Carlo Felice Corsetti and General Giacomo Battaglia, spent several years trying to unravel what happened to May and her secretary during the 1980s, but today they remain divided about the cause of their deaths.

General Battaglia believes the snowstorm was responsible, while General Corsetti is adamant they were killed.

“I’ve never been convinced that it was an accident and I hope they can solve the case,” General Corsetti says, speaking in Rome. “I was really thrilled to hear the news that the cold case had been reopened.”

General Corsetti, now aged 77, travelled to Innsbruck, Zurich, London and even Brazil to pursue various leads in the case without ever solving the mystery. The two officers also conferred with Scotland Yard to see if any of their lines of inquiry merged.

“I invested a lot of time in this case, several years,” he adds. “At a certain point, our inquiries concentrated on a gemologist, Jose Rodriquez May. He looked like the man who was seen speaking animatedly to Mrs May on the afternoon of the disappearance. We arrested him but he was released and everything ended there.”

In Sarnano,0 speculation continues about what happened that fateful day in November 1980. Fabio Fantegrossi, the 36-year-old mayor of Sarnano, was born long after the case made international headlines and put his tiny town on the map. He said it’s had a lasting impact on the 3000 inhabitants who live there.

“As a child, my parents used to tell me to avoid the mountains if it snowed, or I would end up like Lady De Rothschild,” he says.

“Whether someone killed them, or they died from the cold, this mystery has almost become a local legend because it is 44 years old and still no one really knows what happened.”

The Telegraph, London

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