Man Guilty Of Mum's 'Hair Fetish' Murder

An Italian man has been found guilty of the hair-in-the-hand murder of Heather Barnett at her Bournemouth home in 2002.

A jury of seven men and five women decided that 39-year-old Danilo Restivo was the person who killed the mother-of-two.

Ms Barnett's body was badly mutilated - her throat was cut from ear-to-ear and her breasts removed and placed on either side of her head.

Winchester Crown Court heard how Restivo, who had a fetish for secretly cutting women's hair, killed Ms Barnett by hitting her over the head with a blunt object, possibly a hammer.

Bizarrely, some hair snipped from her own head was found below her left hand and a clump of hair belonging to an unknown person was left in her right hand.

Ms Barnett's two children - Terry, then 14, and Caitlin, then 11 - found their mother's body in the bathroom of the family's ground floor flat in Bournemouth, Dorset, in 2002.

Restivo lived opposite the Barnett household and was informally questioned during house-to-house inquiries following her death.

On one occasion a police officer found a pair of trainers in his house that had been soaked in a bath of bleach.

Restivo claimed he was just cleaning them to stop them smelling but the prosecution suggested he was trying to eradicate all traces of blood.

Forensic tests were also carried out on a green towel found at the murder scene.

The tests found traces of Restivo's DNA on it, but the Italian claimed he had taken the towel over to the seamstress' house to provide a colour sample for a pair of curtains she was making for him.

Although Dorset Police did not initially have sufficient evidence to charge him, they suspected Restivo of the murder for many years.

They carried out covert operations to keep the Italian under extensive observation, including bugging his house and car.

He was finally arrested on May 19 last year, shortly after the discovery of a body identified as that of Elisa Claps - an Italian girl missing since 1993.

Her body was found in the loft of a church in Potenza, Italy.

Restivo knew the 16-year-old girl and admitted to Italian investigators at the time that he loved her, but she had rejected him.

He was also the last person to see her alive.

The prosecution argued there were "striking and dramatic" similarities between Elisa's murder and the killing of Ms Barnett.

Strands of hair were also found by both victim's bodies.

Prosecutor Michael Bowes QC told the jury in his closing speech that although Restivo had an obsession with cutting hair, he did not actually care about women.

He also said the Italian was forensically savvy and the murder of his neighbour, Ms Barnett was not a spur of the moment act of violence but a pre-meditated killing.

Restivo will be sentenced at a later date.