“YOU have to understand the capacity of Danilo Restivo for lying. So quiet, so inoffensive, but a criminal who is very able, very clever, very careful.”

That’s the view of Italian observer Pierangelo Maurizio who has studied Restivo at close quarters.

“He takes the view that he can kill and then play a game with the police. Catch me if you can.”

It was Elisa Claps’ misfortune that at the age of ten, Restivo moved to Potenza – an unremarkable town of high rise apartments and factories about 100km east of Naples.

It’s surrounded by mountains in the middle of nowhere and not much happens, even though the area is encircled by some of the most serious and entrenched criminal activity in the whole of Italy.

From September 12, 1993, the town was gripped by just one story, the disappearance of 16-year-old schoolgirl Elisa Claps. Then in the summer of 2004, the citizens had something else to talk about.

The link between Elisa’s disappearance and the brutal murder of a single mother of two in England in 2002. That link was Danilo Restivo.

For Italian journalists who had been covering the Elisa Claps case, this was always their version of Maddie McCann or Suzy Lamplugh.

When Elisa’s body was eventually found on March 17 last year, rolled into the corner of the loft of the Most Holy Trinity Church, it reignited media interest in the Heather Barnett story and in Danilo Restivo.

A succession of Italian print and broadcast journalists made their way to Bournemouth in the following weeks as the pressure on police to make an arrest grew ever more intense.

One of the closest followers has been Pierangelo Maurizio of TG5 – Italy’s equivalent of ITV.

“The Elisa Claps case has always been a very compelling, very strange and very dark one," he says.

“There are still many unanswered questions about the investigation and about the nature of Danilo Restivo.”

Restivo was born on April 3, 1972, in Trapini in Southern Sicily.

He then lived in Cagliari, Sardinia, before the family moved to Potenza where his father had secured a highly regarded public position.

He was a loner and considered strange. People knew about his hair cutting fetish.

In 1986, he tied a boy and girl to a tree and threatened one of them with a pen knife.

Restivo was not convicted of any offence for this as it was settled between Restivo’s parents and those of the other two young people involved.

In the autumn of 1992, he was convicted of harassing five young girls who lived opposite his family home in Potenza.

He would make regular phone calls to their house and play music from an Italian psycho thriller. He also threatened them.

He was socially awkward. Elisa Claps was one of the few young people who would talk to him and he developed a crush on her.

But Restivo was also very intelligent in the way he carried out his crimes. He was very “forensically aware” and able to cover his tracks.

Everyone knew that Restivo was one of the last people to see Elisa alive at the church. But he always maintained she was fine when he left.

Restivo’s whereabouts for the next 90 minutes or so could not be corroborated by anybody and he sustained a mysterious cut to his hand that day, which he said he got on a building site nearby.

But magistrates were not satisfied with his explanations and in 1996 he was formally charged with giving false evidence to the police.

Although he was the prime suspect, Restivo was never charged with Elisa’s disappearance or murder he was sentenced to two years in prison for the false testimony but did not actually serve any of it.

Pierangelo Maurizio says Restivo’s family never understood him but they protected him “more than would be normal in this situation”. They have continued to back him financially.

Restivo’s father, Maurizio, was an influential figure in Potenza, the Director of the National Library and well connected in the community.

Though not especially rich, the Restivo family was part of the ‘Potenza Bene’ – the powerful.

Pierangelo still does not know whether mistakes in the early days of the Claps investigation, like the failure to seize Restivo’s clothes before they were washed or to conduct a thorough search of the church, were down to incompetence by police or prosecutors or to conspiracy.

The one group of people who did know Restivo had a serious problem was the military.

He was medically examined at the point of joining the military for his national service.

Army doctors said he had strange attitudes towards sexual behaviour. He was turned down for service.

Restivo arrived in the UK in 2002 to find work and to recover from an unsuccessful thyroid operation which resulted in him partially losing his voice. And probably to get away from the Claps issue.

It was Heather Barnett’s terrible misfortune – just like Elisa’s before her, that he ended up in Bournemouth in the house across the road.