Nicholas Shakespeare is gripped by Tobias Jones's Blood on the Altar: In Search of a Serial Killer

Tobias Jones.

A parent is only as happy as their most miserable child. A child’s disappearance annihilates families and fractures communities. We need the body in order to mourn it, as well as to mark that a person has lived. It is why the names of Suzy Lamplugh and Madeleine McCann continue to resonate. And it is why Tobias Jones became obsessed with a 16-year-old Italian girl who went missing in a church in Potenza in 1993. “That carefree face kept me up at night,” he said.

Blood on the Altar tells how a tragedy from south Italy became national and then international, with the discovery nine years later of another body in Bournemouth. It is the hair-raising and affecting story of how a single criminal case evolved, in the words of one of Jones’s interviewees, into “a problem that belongs to everyone”.

Jones is no impartial moderator. He is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy, now breeding pigs in Somerset, who in the late Nineties moved to Lucania. This sad and yet invigorating mountain region “feels,” he writes, “like my spiritual home”.

Sold as Lucania Felix, the “happy island” is a slow-moving place of earthquakes and brigands, where nothing is so suspicious as the obvious. Its people are loyal, hospitable and famous for a patience that they can violently lose – as happened to Elisa Chaps on Sunday September 12, 1993.

She was the adored daughter of a humble tobacconist and his wife. Elisa had gone to Mass before joining them and her two brothers for a family lunch. An hour went but she never turned up. The last person she spoke to in church was Danilo Restivo, a soft-voiced young hypochondriac with bulbous eyes, a spooky smile and ambitions to be a dentist. Restivo had harassed Elisa before. His bloodstained jeans and known predilection for snipping off girls’ hair in buses ought to have alerted the authorities.

The impediment was Danilo’s father Maurizio, a director of the National Library, author of a book about knife-happy female brigands, and organiser of an exhibition on guillotines. Maurizio was a bene, one of Potenza’s great and good – and a symbol of what Jones calls “the ludicrous overlaps of power”. As a result of Maurizio’s obstructionism, the case, according to Elisa’s brother Gildo, one of the book’s heroes, became “a manual for all the things that shouldn’t happen when someone goes missing”.

The priest in charge of the church, Don Mimi, forbade a search of the church; an equivalent in local government stopped the police from taking away Danilo’s bloodstained clothes; and the husband of the magistrate in charge of the investigation accepted one million lire from Maurizio “to take the heat off” his son. Maurizio insisted that Elisa had run away from home. Not for another 17 agonising years was her body discovered – in the garret of the church – and Danilo charged with her gruesome murder.

Although he can sound at times as though he is clearing his throat to sing opera, Jones paints a rich portrait of Basilicata and its history. He is less sure-footed on his home turf, where justice is meted out. He describes Winchester, inadequately, as “one of those old towns that seems soaked in history”. His truest and most involving note is his raw bellow for justice.

Blood on the Altar: In Search of a Serial Killer   by Tobias Jones   308pp, Faber & Faber, £16.99 t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £16.99, ebook £9.31)

More than his credentials as a travel writer, Jones’s faithful obsession to know what happened to Elisa, and to link it to the wider corruption of Silvio Berlusconi’s regime, is what raises his book almost to the same shelf as Peter Robb’s magnificent Midnight in Sicily and Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. It is a terribly good, terribly sad story that probably only Jones, with a foothold in both countries, could have written.

The most potent of all myths remains that of Antigone who was forbidden to bury her dead brother. After Danilo was sentenced to life in prison, Elisa’s mother said that she would have forgiven him “if he had let me find the body, if he had let me touch it”. Jones’s recreation of how Elisa’s body was found, and how Danilo was tracked down, are among the most gripping sections of Blood on the Altar.

A few years after leaving Italy, Jones was sitting in a café in Dorchester when he read about the murder of a seamstress in Bournemouth and how her two children, on discovering her mutilated body, had rushed for comfort into the arms of their neighbour opposite: Danilo Restivo. There was a photograph. “His eyes appeared more bulbous than ever.” For Jones, the hunt was on, the start of “an incredible, melancholy and uplifting journey”.