This young woman named Tiziana Cantone found dead at her home on the outskirts of Naples five years ago is to be exhumed after new evidence indicates she was murdered.

The tragic story of her suspected suicide from a revenge porn incident has taken a new twist after an expert hired by her family has ruled out suicide and said she was strangled, and the crime scene was staged.

Her death took place in the commune of Mugnano di Napoli, near the city of Naples in southern Italy, on 13th September 2016 when the 31-year-old woman was found dead at her home, and now an expert who worked on the Meredith Kercher case in Perugia has weighed in.

Cantone had recently been the victim of revenge porn, and her subsequent death was ruled a suicide as a result of the fact intimate images were shared online.

However, almost five years after her death, the North Naples Prosecutor’s Office reopened the case after male DNA was found on the scarf that she allegedly used to hang herself.

Investigators now speculate that she may have been murdered and at the beginning of June, and they have ordered her body be exhumed for analysis.

The victim’s mother, represented by the Emme Team law firm, requested an expert opinion from Professor Mariano Cingolani, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Macerata, the very same expert who worked on the Meredith Kercher case in Perugia.

The expert, in a three-page report, immediately ruled out suicide. Focusing on photographic evidence of the victim’s neck taken by investigators shortly after her death, the expert believes that the markings on her neck are consistent with being strangled by another person.

He also argued that it was possible that the scene of the crime had been staged to look like suicide.

According to the report, Cingolani came to these two conclusions because a discontinuous and oblique groove can be seen in a first lesion and in a second lesion, located a little below the first lesion, a transverse and uniform groove can be seen.

The expert’s report said: “The second lesion has typical characteristics of a strangulation groove, with a uniformity of depth, continuity and transversal course.”

The expert added: “The hanging had the purpose of concealing, confusing or making the first harmful modality more difficult to perceive”, adding that it was made to look like suicide.

The investigation is ongoing.