Daniela Ferrari, 66, was rushed to hospital in Vigevano after an excess of tranquillisers. Her son’s defence team is calling for the media campaign around the Garlasco case to be toned down.
Daniela Ferrari, the mother of Andrea Sempio — the man under investigation by the Pavia Public Prosecutor’s Office in the renewed inquiry into the 2007 murder of Chiara Poggi at Garlasco — was taken to hospital by emergency services on Wednesday after suffering a drug overdose.
Ferrari, 66, was attended to at her home in Garlasco at lunchtime by paramedics and transferred to the accident and emergency department at Vigevano hospital. There she underwent gastric lavage. She was subsequently admitted to the intensive care unit but is reported to be out of danger.
The news was disclosed publicly by her son’s defence lawyer, Liborio Cataliotti, during an interview with journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi on the Canale 5 programme Dentro la notizia. Cataliotti confirmed the hospitalisation was due to “an excess of tranquilliser medication”. Earlier today, they officially confirmed she had attempted suicide.
A plea to calm coverage over the case
The defence team made clear that the disclosure was deliberate, intended to illustrate the toll the Garlasco media storm has taken on a woman who has no formal role in the proceedings.
“She is not under investigation and is not involved,” Cataliotti said. “Her only fault is that her son is subject to these proceedings, and perhaps this wake-up call tells us that it is time for everyone to tone things down.”
Cataliotti said the entire defence team had sent a message to Sempio urging him to stay close to his mother and reassure her. “We will redouble our efforts to help her put the social media attacks, the letters she receives and the emails behind her, to switch it all off,” he said.
Ferrari has previously suffered a health episode connected to the case: in April 2025 she was taken ill at the Milan carabinieri command, where she had been summoned as a witness. In a television appearance on Quarto Grado last month, she spoke of the anonymous abuse the family had been receiving, including messages telling her to take her own life.
Background: The Garlasco Case Reopened
Chiara Poggi, 26, was found murdered at her home in Garlasco on 13 August 2007. Her then-boyfriend Alberto Stasi was convicted of the killing and was released on probation this week. The Pavia Public Prosecutor’s Office has subsequently opened a new line of investigation focusing on Andrea Sempio, a former acquaintance of Poggi’s brother, and prosecutors are expected to request that he be committed to trial.
Ferrari’s husband Giuseppe Sempio is separately under investigation in a parallel strand of the case coordinated by the Brescia Public Prosecutor’s Office, accused of having paid up to nearly €60,000 to secure the shelving of an earlier investigation into his son in 2016–2017.
