The night of Thursday, April 9, 1953, the carpenter Rodolfo Montesi was waiting for his daughter Wilma to come home. The carpenter lived with his wife, Petti María, with his seventeen-year-old son, Sergio, and with another unmarried daughter, Wanda, who was twenty-five, at number 76 Vía Tagliamento, in Rome. It is an enormous three-story residence, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, with four hundred apartments constructed around a beautiful circular courtyard, full of flowers and with a small fountain in the center. There is only one entrance to the building: a gigantic gate with an archway of broken and dusty little windows. To the left of the entrance is the concierge’s room, and above her door, an image of the Heart of Jesus, illuminated by an electric lightbulb. From six in the morning until eleven at night the concierge keeps a rigorous eye on access to the building.
Rodolfo Montesi waited for his twenty-one-year-old daughter Wilma until 8:30. Her prolonged absence was alarming, because the girl had been out since the afternoon. Tired of waiting, the carpenter headed first to the nearby general hospital, where there was no news of any accidents that day. Later, on foot, he headed to the Lungotevere, where he looked for his daughter for two hours along the banks of the Tiber. At 10:30, tired of his fruitless search and fearing a calamity, Rodolfo Montesi went to the police station on Vía Salaria, a few blocks from his house, to ask for help in locating Wilma.
The carpenter told the officer on duty, Andrea Lomanto, that after lunch that day, at approximately one o’clock, he had returned as usual to his carpentry workshop, located at number 16 Vía de Sebino. He said his whole family had been home when he left, and when he came back, his wife and his daughter Wanda had told him that Wilma had not yet returned. According to the carpenter, the two women told him they had gone to the Excelsior Theater, on nearby Viale Liegi, to see a movie called The Golden Coach. They left the house at 4:30, but Wilma did not want to go with them because, as she said, she didn’t like that kind of picture.
At 5:30—according to what Rodolfo Montesi said at the police station—the concierge saw Wilma leave, alone, with a black leather purse. Unusually, Wilma was not wearing the pearl earrings and necklace her fiancé had given her a few months earlier. Wilma’s fiancé was Angelo Giuliani, a police officer in Potenza.
Since his daughter had gone out without fixing herself up, contrary to her habits, and also without any money or her identification documents, Rodolfo Montesi came up with the hypothesis at the police station that Wilma had committed suicide. The girl had, according to her father, a motive for suicide: she was in despair at the prospect of having to abandon her family and move to Potenza, after her imminent marriage to the police officer.
However, Wanda, Wilma’s sister, had a different opinion: she thought the girl had gone out without fixing herself up simply because she hadn’t had time. Maybe, she thought, she’d had to leave the house in a rush, after an urgent telephone call.
However, there was a third hypothesis: Wilma had run away with her fiancé and had traveled to Potenza that very night. To establish that, Rodolfo Montesi phoned Giuliani, Friday, April 10, at seven in the morning. But the disconcerted carpenter got nothing but the astonished reply of his future son-in-law. Giuliani had no news of Wilma, except for a letter that had arrived the previous afternoon. That letter offered no clues. It was just a conventional love letter.
Worried about his fiancée’s disappearance, Giuliani prepared to travel to Rome immediately. But he needed an urgent excuse to give to his superiors. So he told Rodolfo Montesi to send him a telegram. And at noon Rodolfo Montesi sent him a dramatic telegram. In four words, he said that Wilma had committed suicide.
During the night of the 10th, the Montesi family and the Rome police force continued their search. It was a futile search, which Wilma’s fiancé joined after midnight, as soon as he arrived from Potenza. Nothing had been discovered by seven o’clock in the morning of the following day, Saturday, when a bricklayer, Fortunato Bettini, arrived by bicycle at a police station, to say there was a dead woman on Torvaianica beach, twenty-five miles from Rome.
Bettini told the police that when he was on his way to work he had seen the body on the beach, almost parallel to the water’s edge, with her head resting on her right shoulder, and that same arm raised and her hand beside her chin. The left arm was stretched down along her side. The body was missing her skirt, shoes, and stockings. She was wearing only an ivory-colored slip, a tight-fitting pair of white piqué underpants with embroidered edges, and a light sweater. Around her neck, held by a single button, she had a coat with green hexagons on a dark yellow background. The jacket was almost completely covered in sand, and open like a wing in the direction of the waves.
Bettini’s revelation was given to the agent on duty, Andreozzi Gino. At 9:30 in the morning, Carabinieri Amadeo Tondi, Sergeant Alessandro Carducci, and the local doctor, Agostino di Giorgio, met at the place of the macabre discovery. They discovered that the corpse was not in the same position in which the bricklayer said he’d found it: it was almost perpendicular to the shore, head toward the sea and feet toward the beach. But they did not think the bricklayer had lied, but rather that the waves had moved it from its earlier position.
After a brief examination of the cadaver, Dr. Di Giorgio verified:
That it was in the early stages of rigor mortis.
That external appearances suggested death had been caused by drowning, and had occurred approximately eighteen hours before discovery.
That the condition of the clothing and external appearance of the corpse ruled out a long period of time in the water.
At 11:30 Sergeant Carducci sent a telegram to the attorney general of the Republic, announcing the find. But at seven that night, having received no response, he decided to make a telephone call. Half an hour later the order was given to remove the cadaver and transport it to the Rome mortuary. It arrived there at midnight.
The next day, Sunday, at ten in the morning, Rodolfo Montesi and Angelo Giuliani went to the mortuary to see the corpse. Recognition was instantaneous: it was the body of Wilma Montesi.
That the concierge saw Wilma leave at 5:30, as she revealed to Rodolfo Montesi, who in turn reported it the police.
That on the night of April 9 nobody in the Montesi family home mentioned a probable visit to Ostia on the part of the girl.
That Wanda Montesi spoke of a mysterious telephone call.
In his report on April 12, Sergeant Carducci expressed the opinion, based on Dr. Di Giorgio’s conclusions, that Wilma Montesi’s death had been caused by asphyxiation due to drowning and there were no lesions caused by acts of violence. He also declared that, based on the same report, three hypotheses could be established: accident, suicide, or homicide. He also expressed the belief that the cadaver, from the area of Ostia, had been swept away by the sea and returned to the beach in the early hours of April 10. The same informant declared that on the night of April 10 a violent storm had raged in the area, and that the sea had afterward remained in a state of agitation, due to the effects of the wind that continued to blow in a northeasterly direction.
On April 14, the Salaria police station produced its own report on the Montesi family. According to that report, the carpenter’s family enjoyed a good reputation. Wilma was known to be a serious, reserved young woman without friends, who was officially engaged, since September 1952, to Officer Giuliani, who had been transferred, a few months before the death of his fiancée, from Marino to Potenza.
According to that report, Wilma’s behavior toward her family had always been excellent. She wrote to her fiancé often, and the last of those letters, dated April 8, which she had copied out in a notebook seized by the police, revealed a serene and calm affection.
The building’s concierge, according to the same report, agreed with Rodolfo Montesi on every point except one: she said she’d seen Wilma leave at five o’clock. Rodolfo Montesi said it had been 5:30.
That half-hour difference was crucial, because in Italy trains are very punctual. And Doctoresa Passarelli, a serious and reliable employee at the War Ministry, said she’d seen Wilma Montesi the afternoon of April 9 on the train to Ostia. And on April 9 the train to Ostia left at exactly 5:30.
After seeing photos of Wilma Montesi and reading about her death in the newspapers, Doctoresa Passarelli turned up on Monday the 13th, very early, at the family’s apartment, to tell them what she had seen on the Thursday. She said that Wilma had been in the same compartment of the train to Ostia as she, and that the girl had been traveling alone. Nobody had approached her or talked to her during the trip. According to Passarelli, Wilma got off the train at Ostia Lido, without haste, as soon as the train stopped.
The police established with the family what other garments Wilma was wearing when she left home, apart from those found on the body. She had been wearing stockings and high-heeled, deerskin shoes. She was also wearing a short, wool skirt, of the same material as the coat found on the body, and elastic garters. The family confirmed that when she went out she had left behind not only all the gold jewelry her fiancé had given her, but also his photograph. They also confirmed what the concierge had said: Wilma was carrying a square black leather purse, with a gold-colored metal handle. Inside the purse she had a little white comb, a small mirror, and a white handkerchief. She also had a key to their apartment.
This first police report declared that they hadn’t been able to establish any reason for suicide. Moreover, in the letter she had written to her fiancé the previous day, there was no indication that she would have made such a decision. It was also established that no member of the family, neither on the mother’s side nor on the father’s, had suffered mental disturbances. Wilma was in very good health. But it supplied a piece of information that could be of extraordinary importance in the investigation: on April 9 Wilma had just finished her menstrual cycle.
Despite numerous investigations, it could not be established that Wilma’s family had any knowledge of a possible trip to Ostia she might have planned. Her father had looked for her insistently along the Lungotevere, believing she had thrown herself in the river, but he could give no explanation other than a premonition. It was clearly established that the family had no idea if the girl knew anyone in Ostia. They assured the police that they didn’t even know the way or the bus or streetcar connections they’d need to take to get to San Pablo station, where the trains leave for Ostia.
On the afternoon of April 14, at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Rome, Professors Frache and Carella performed an autopsy on Wilma Montesi. The police presented the experts with a questionnaire, with the aim of establishing the precise time and cause of death. And they specifically wanted them to determine whether it had been the result of drowning or if the girl was already dead when she was thrown into the water. They should also establish the nature of any anatomical irregularities discovered in the cadaver, and the eventual presence in the intestines of any poisonous or narcotic substances.
The experts were also requested to specify if death had really been caused by drowning, and the distance from the beach that Wilma fell into the water. They were asked to establish at the same time if the death could have been a consequence of special physiological conditions, or from the state of her digestion. This investigation was important, for it could be related to the fact that Wilma had wanted to dip her feet in the sea during the process of digestion.
On October 2, 1953, the experts returned the questionnaire with the following answers:
The death of Wilma Montesi had occurred on the “ninth of April,” between four and six hours after her final meal. According to the examination, her last meal (which must have been lunch at home) had been verified at between 2 and 3:30 in the afternoon. So the death must have occurred between 6 and 8 that night, for the digestive process was completely concluded. The team of specialists established that shortly before she died, Wilma Montesi had eaten ice cream.
Death had been occasioned by the asphyxia of total immersion and not by syncope in the water. No traces of any poisonous or sedative substances were found in the viscera.
At the moment of death, Montesi was in an immediate postmenstrual phase, that is to say, in circumstances of greater sensitivity to an unexpected immersion of her lower extremities in cold water.
The presence of sand in the lungs, in the gastrointestinal tract, should be interpreted as proof that the asphyxia had occurred in proximity of the beach, where the seawater has a notable quantity of sand in suspension. But at the same time, the ferruginous content of that sand was not consistent with the sand at Torvaianica beach, but rather with the sand from another nearby beach.
They observed, among other things, the presence of small ecchymosis, almost round in shape, on the lateral surface of the right thigh and on the upper third of the upper face of the left leg. They considered that those small bruises had been caused before death, but they were not deemed to have any forensic significance.
They did not find any elements that would allow them to determine if death resulted from “an accidental misfortune,” suicide, or homicide. The hypothesis of an accident was founded exclusively on the possibility that Wilma Montesi had suffered from a fainting spell while wading in the sea in the special physiological conditions she was in that day.
Four days after the cadaver of Wilma Montesi was identified—on April 16—the investigation was considered definitively concluded, described as “an unfortunate accident.” The victim’s family, which on the day of the disappearance presented the police with sufficient arguments to sustain the hypothesis of suicide, contributed to the destruction of that hypothesis in the days following the identification of the corpse.
Contradicting everything she had said on the first day, Wanda Montesi declared before the investigating magistrates that her dead sister had invited her to go to Ostia on the morning of the 9th, “just” for a footbath in the sea. She wanted, according to what Wanda said, to submit an irritation on her heels caused by her shoes to the action of the seawater. To confirm that statement, Wanda remembered at the last minute that on that morning she’d gone to her father’s workshop, at Wilma’s request, to get a more comfortable pair of shoes. She said previously that both of them suffered from the same irritation and had tried to cure it with tincture of iodine. Later, methylated spirits having proved useless, they had resolved to travel “one of these days” to the beach at Ostia, in the hope that the natural iodine of seawater would bring them the longed-for improvement. But they had not spoken again about that trip. Only on the morning of the 9th, according to Wanda, her sister had remembered the trip again. But Wanda declined, because she was interested in seeing The Golden Coach.
After her refusal, Wanda said that Wilma did not mention the trip to Ostia again but said that she’d rather stay home while her mother and sister went to the cinema. And unlike what she’d said the first time, Wanda explained to the police that her sister had left her gold jewelry at home because her mother had repeatedly begged her to do so, to prevent them from getting lost or deteriorating. She also declared that she had not taken her fiancé’s portrait with her because she was not in the habit of taking it outside. Finally, she offered two important pieces of information to rule out the suicide hypothesis: In the first place, Wilma had seemed very serene on the morning of the 9th. And in the second place, before leaving she had washed her undergarments, after changing the ones she’d been wearing, for a clean set.
In the inquiry carried out among Wilma’s relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances, another important truth was established: Wilma did not know how to swim. That’s why the previous year, when she was in Ostia with her family during the summer vacations, she had only sunbathed on the beach in her bathing suit or waded up to her ankles in the sea.
Wilma’s father also took back his original version that the girl had committed suicide. Rodolfo Montesi justified his first impression that Wilma had taken her own life with a very comfortable explanation: he said when he went out to look for her, on the night of the 9th, he did not know she’d invited her sister to travel to Ostia to take a footbath. And he explained that the dramatic telegram he had sent to Giuliani had been suggested by him during the telephone call: only with this shocking news could he get quick permission to travel to Rome that very night.
One thing still needed to be established: Rodolfo Montesi’s opinion on the fact that his daughter’s body had been found without her garter, which is intimate apparel, and which does not need to be removed for a footbath. Rodolfo Montesi explained: Wilma was an exuberantly shapely girl and did not enjoy sufficient freedom of movement when submitted to the pressure of garter belts.
Signora Montesi also ruled out the hypothesis that her daughter had committed suicide. And she set out a strong argument: Wilma had taken her house keys with her, which demonstrated that she intended to return. However, she did not agree with the accident hypothesis, but instead tried to reinforce that of homicide. According to Signora Montesi, her daughter had been the victim of a seducer, who had found it necessary to remove her garters to carry out his brutal intentions. And to demonstrate how difficult it is to take a woman’s garter off, she showed the investigator one of Wanda’s garters, similar to the one Wilma was wearing and which was not found on the corpse. It was a black satin garter, eight inches high on the front side, decreasing toward the back, with a metal fastening of hooks and eyes. And she made the police realize that not only her skirt and shoes had disappeared but her black leather purse had disappeared as well.
That the notebook in which Wilma copied the letter she’d sent to her fiancé had been impounded as evidence.
That the Salaria police station’s report affirmed that the concierge saw Wilma leave at 5:00 p.m., and not at 5:30, as Rodolfo Montesi had said.
That the experts observed small bruises, but did not suggest the hypothesis that Wilma had been forcibly grabbed.
That the analysis to establish the presence of poisonous or sedative substances had only been done on the viscera.
Doctoresa Passarelli’s declaration.
On that occasion, Signora Montesi enriched the inventory of her daughter’s clothing with other objects. According to her, Wilma was wearing a pair of black musketeer’s gloves and a gold-plated wristwatch.
However, Signora Montesi’s arguments were not given sufficient weight, and more importance was attributed to the reasons stated by Wanda to rule out the homicide hypothesis. Wanda explained that, when she told the police that her sister had left after an urgent telephone call, she’d forgotten two things: the conversation about the trip to Ostia, and the fact that there was nothing in Wilma’s life she didn’t know about. And incidentally, she remembered a recent case, five days before the death. Wilma told her that a young man had followed her in his automobile from Plaza Quadrata to her building, but without saying a word to her. According to Wanda, her sister had not seen her silent admirer again, for she surely would have told her.
After that investigation, rushed through in four days, the police reached the conclusion that Wilma was an exceptionally serious and reserved girl, who had not had any love in her life for anyone but Giuliani. It was accepted that she only went out in the company of her mother and her sister, in spite of these two admitting that in recent months—after her fiancé was transferred to Potenza—Wilma had acquired the habit of going out alone almost every day, and always at the same time: from 5:30 to 6:30 in the evening.
The building’s concierge, Adalgisa Roscini, remembered in turn never having received a bouquet of flowers for Wilma. And she assured the investigators that the girl had never received a letter from anyone except her fiancé.
On the basis of these declarations it was concluded—in a report dated April 16—that, since there were no reasons to doubt the Montesi family’s declarations, it should be taken as certain that, in fact, Wilma had gone to Ostia to take a footbath. It was supposed that the girl had chosen a part of the beach that she knew from having been there the year before and had begun to take her clothes off, sure that she couldn’t be seen by anyone. The girl had lost her balance due to a hollow in the sandy bottom, and had drowned accidentally. The report finished by saying that death must have occurred between 6:15 and 6:30, since Wilma—who never arrived home later than 8 at night—should have taken the 7:30 train.
That would have been the melancholy ending to the Montesi case, if there had not been newspapers in the streets telling people there was much more to it than met the eye. It started on the very day the body was identified, when Angelo Giuliani, Wilma’s fiancé, observed the small bruises that the newspapers would later talk about, without conferring any importance to them. When he left the morgue, Giuliani told a journalist of his observation and declared his certainty that Wilma had been murdered.
While the police considered that Wilma Montesi had died by accident, the press kept demanding justice. On May 4 Il Roma, a newspaper based in Naples, dropped the dynamite bomb that would set off “the scandal of the century.” According to an article published by that paper, Wilma Montesi’s missing garments had been left at Rome’s central police station, where they had been destroyed. They had been taken there by a young man in whose company Wilma Montesi had been seen in the first half of March, in an automobile that got stuck in the sand, near the Ostia beach. The name of the young man was published: Gian Piero Piccioni. He was none other than the son of Italy’s minister of foreign relations.
The spectacular news published in Il Roma, a rabidly monarchic newspaper, was picked up, prettied up, and augmented by every paper in the country. But the police were going in another direction. On May 15, the Ostia Lido police produced a report on the only indications they’d found to establish Wilma Montesi’s presence in Ostia, on the afternoon of April 9. These were the declarations of a nursemaid, Giovanna Capra, and of a manager of a newspaper kiosk in Ostia station, Pierina Schiano.
According to the nursemaid, at six o’clock on the evening of April 9, she had seen a girl who looked like Wilma Montesi, according to the pictures in the papers, heading toward the Marechiaro establishment. But she hadn’t noticed the color of her coat.
The manager of the newspaper kiosk told the police, without hesitating, that Wilma Montesi had bought a postcard in Ostia station, had written it there and then, and mailed it. Later, according to this declaration, Wilma had gone, alone the entire time, toward the marshland canal. The card Wilma had written had been addressed to “a soldier in Potenza.”
The investigators questioned the two witnesses and dismissed both statements. But while the first did not remember any of the personal characteristics of the girl she saw on the beach at Ostia, the second declared with no hesitation that she was wearing a white sweater. The manager of the newspaper kiosk confirmed that the postcard was addressed to “a soldier in Potenza,” but could not supply any detail of the address.
In a later interrogation of Giuliani, the police confirmed that he had not received any postcards. And Wilma’s mother and sister verified that the girl did not have a pen in her purse. Finally it was established that the place where the nursemaid said she saw Wilma at 6:00 is more than two miles away from the Ostia station newspaper kiosk.
But while the police went on destroying testimonies, the newspapers continued stirring up the scandal. And it was discovered that on April 14, two days after the discovery of Wilma’s corpse, a mechanic from Ostia had gone to the police post to tell the story of the automobile stuck in the sand that Il Roma had mentioned in its sensational article. The mechanic’s name was Mario Piccini. And he told the police that in early March, when he was working for the Ostia railway station, he had been summoned by a young man, shortly before dawn, to help him tow his automobile. Piccini says he went with pleasure, and that during the maneuver he noticed the presence of a girl aboard a bogged-down automobile. That girl looked very much like the pictures of Wilma Montesi published by the newspapers.
The Rome police did not show the slightest interest in the mechanic’s spontaneous declaration. But the judicial police did a quick investigation and discovered something different. They discovered that at six o’clock on the evening of the 9th or 10th of April an automobile had passed by that same place driven by a well-known young Italian aristocrat, Prince Maurizio D’Assia. According to that investigation, the distinguished gentleman was accompanied by a girl, who was not Wilma Montesi. The aforementioned automobile was seen by the guard Anastasia Lilli, Carabinieri Lituri, and a worker called Ziliante Triffelli.
The Ostia police officially abandoned their search for the items of clothing the corpse was missing. A lawyer called Scapucci and one of his sons, who were walking near Castelporziano on April 30, found a pair of women’s shoes. Believing they were Wilma Montesi’s, they took them to the police. But the victim’s relatives declared that they were not the shoes the girl had been wearing the last time she left her house.
In light of the fact that there was nothing to be done, the attorney general of the Republic prepared to close the case, confirming the hypothesis of accidental death. That was when the modest and scandalous monthly magazine Attualità, in its October issue, put another stick of dynamite under the investigation. Under the byline of its editor in chief, the magazine published a sensational chronicle: “The Truth About the Death of Wilma Montesi.”
The editor of Attualità was Silvano Muto, an audacious thirty-year-old journalist, with the face of a movie star, who dressed like a movie star, with a silk scarf and dark sunglasses. His magazine, it is said, was the least read in all of Italy—therefore, the poorest. Muto wrote it from the first page to the last. He himself sold advertising space and kept it afloat by the skin of his teeth, simply out of the desire to have a magazine.
But after the October 1953 issue, Attualità turned into an enormous monster. Readers punched each other every month at the doors of its offices to get a copy.
That unexpected popularity was due to the scandalous article on the Montesi case, which was the first firm step public opinion took toward finding out the truth.
That Wanda Montesi did not remember that Wilma had invited her to Ostia until several days after her disappearance.
That the police did not interrogate the mechanic Mario Piccini.
The testimony of Carabinieri Lituri relative to the sighting of Prince D’Assia’s automobile.
The name Andrea Bisaccia.
In his article, Muto affirmed:
The person responsible for Wilma Montesi’s death was a young musician from Italian radio, son of a prominent political personality.
Due to political influences, the investigation had gone forward in such a way that little by little silence would fall over it.
He highlighted the reserve maintained around the results of the autopsy.
He accused the authorities of not wanting to identify the culprit.
He related Wilma Montesi’s death with the trafficking of narcotics, to which he found it linked; he also talked about orgies in the area, in Castelporziano and Capacotta, with drug abuse, during one of which Montesi had died, not being a habitual user of narcotics.
The people present at the party moved the body to the neighboring beach of Torvaianica, to avoid a scandal.
On October 24, 1953, Silvano Muto was summoned by the Roman district attorney’s office to be held to account for his article. Muto calmly declared that it was all lies, that he’d written the article only to increase circulation of his magazine, and he admitted to having proceeded flippantly. In view of that overwhelming retraction, Muto was charged with “spreading false and tendentious news and for disrupting public order.” And the brief of the Montesi case was shelved in January 1954, by order of the attorney general’s office.
However, when Silvano Muto showed up in court to answer for his scandalous article, he again said what he’d written and added new details. And for the first time he gave proper names; he said the material for his article had been supplied by Orlando Triffelli, according to whom his brother had recognized Montesi in an automobile stuck in the sand on the 9th or 10th of April 1953, in front of the Capacotta security guard’s hut. Furthermore, he said he had received confidential revelations from two of those present at the epic orgies of liquor and drugs: Andrea Bisaccia and the television actress Anna María Caglio.
Andrea Bisaccia was summoned to testify. In an alarming state of nervousness, she denied having said anything to Silvano Muto. She said that it was a fantastical story, invented with the aim of destroying her intimate friendship with Gian Piero Piccioni, son of the minister of foreign relations and well-known composer of popular music. She finished off by saying that Silvano Muto’s idiotic scheme had made such an impression on her that on the 9th of January she had attempted suicide.
The only place left for Muto was jail, and for the Montesi dossier a definitive stay in the dusty judicial archives of Rome. But on February 6, Anna María Caglio turned up at a police station and very serenely, in her professional announcer’s voice, told the dramatic story of her life.
Anna María Caglio was the lover of Ugo Montagna, an affluent gentleman, friend of notable personalities, and famous for his romantic adventures. He called himself “the Marchese of Montagna,” and he was known and treated as a marchese in all circles. Anna María Caglio told the police that she didn’t know Wilma Montesi. But she had seen her picture in the papers and identified her as the dark-haired, well-built, and elegant young woman who, on the evening of January 7, 1953, had come out of one of Montagna’s apartments in Rome, accompanied by him. Both got into an automobile driven by the marchese.
That night, Anna María Caglio—according to what she told the police—had been involved in a violent jealous scene when her lover returned home.
When Anna María Caglio read the article in Attualità, she believed that the Signor X mentioned in that article was her own lover, the Marchese of Montagna. That’s why she approached the journalist, and told him that everything in his article was true. The night of October 26 she was with her lover, in an automobile. She asked him for an explanation, as she told the police. And the marchese, who was irritated, and a little nervous, threatened to throw her out of the car.
To calm her lover, Anna María Caglio suggested they go home, to read Muto’s article in peace; Montagna read Muto’s article and didn’t say anything. But when Anna María Caglio went to put the magazine in the drawer of the nightstand, she saw a packet with two golden cigarettes and an ashtray made of precious gems. That discovery reinforced her suspicion that her lover was connected to some band of narcotics traffickers.
Caglio insisted to the police that she had gone to Milan, her hometown, on April 7, and returned on the 10th. When she arrived in Rome, her lover was visibly nervous and upset by her unexpected return. Nevertheless, he took her home, where that night Montagna received a call from the son of the minister of foreign relations, Gian Piero Piccioni, who was preparing for a trip.
Later, Anna María Caglio found out that in November of the previous year, a certain “Gioben Jo” had lost thirteen million lire playing cards in Capacotta with Montagna, Piccioni, and a high-ranking police official.
Anna María Caglio was dining with her lover in his luxurious apartment and getting ready to go to see a movie at Supercinema. A few days earlier, Caglio says that Montagna had told her that Piccioni was “a poor boy he had to help, because he’d got himself into a mess.” That night, when she was putting her coat on to leave, Anna María Caglio realized that Piccioni called Montagna on the telephone and told him he should go immediately to speak to the chief of police. Montagna rushed out and met Piccioni at the Ministry of the Interior.
Anna María Caglio’s declaration that Montagna and Piccioni had visited the Ministry of the Interior on April 29, 1953.
The slip of paper that says, “I’m going to the Capacotta and I’ll spend the night there. How will I end up?”
“The certain Gioben Jo,” who lost thirteen million lire at cards.
An hour and a half later, when Montagna returned to the automobile where Ana María Caglio was waiting for him, he said he had been trying to stop the investigation into the death of Wilma Montesi. Anna María Caglio told him that was despicable, since whoever committed the crime should pay for it, even if he were a minister’s son. Montagna told her that Piccioni was innocent, since the day of the crime he had been in Amalfi. Then the girl asked Montagna:
“And when did Piccioni return to Rome?”
Montagna was indignant, and did not answer her question. He looked her in the eye and said:
“Girlie, you know too much. You better get a change of scene.”
In effect, Anna María Caglio demonstrated that the next day she’d been sent back to Milan, with a special letter for the director of the television station. She returned to Rome on the 22nd of the same month, to celebrate her first anniversary of meeting Montagna. On July 27 they moved into separate homes, but continued to see each other in the apartment on Vía Gennargentu. At the end of November they broke up definitively, after the incidents caused by Muto’s article.
Anna María Caglio told the police she had felt terror during those days. Her lover was becoming more and more mysterious. He received strange telephone calls and seemed to be involved in shady business deals. One night, exhausted by the nervous tension, Anna María Caglio says she asked her lover a question related to his businesses and Montagna answered her in a threatening tone:
“If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll throw you in the sea.”
Anna María Caglio, in her dramatic tale to the police, said that since that night she’d been harboring the certainty that she would be murdered. On November 22, after having dinner with Montagna at the Matriciana restaurant, on Vía Gracchi, she had the sensation she’d been poisoned. Alone in her apartment, she remembered that her lover had gone to the kitchen personally, to collaborate in the preparation of the meal.
Terrorized, Anna María Caglio left the next day for Milan. Her nerves were shattered. She didn’t know what to do, but she was sure she had to do something. That’s why she went to visit the Jesuit Father Dall’Olio and told him the whole story of her life with Montagna. The priest, tremendously shocked by the girl’s tale, repeated the story to the minister of the interior. Anna María Caglio, tormented by a feeling of persecution, took refuge in the convent on Vía Lucchesi. But there was something she had not told the police: before she left for Milan, she gave her landlady in Rome a sealed letter with the following instructions: “In the case of my death, deliver this letter to the Attorney General of the Republic.”
The landlady, Adelmira Biaggioni, in whose hands Anna María Caglio had left the letter, was called to make a statement. She went to see the police with three letters, written in Caglio’s handwriting, and a little piece of paper the girl had slipped under her door before going out on October 29, 1953. The paper said, “I’m going to the Capacotta Estate and I’ll spend the night there. How will I end up?”
Adelmira Biaggioni revealed that the night Anna María Caglio thought Montagna had poisoned her, she wrote a will that she presented to her the next day, before leaving for Milan, with the task of taking it to the attorney general if she turned up dead. The landlady held on to the letter for several days. Then, not wanting to bear that responsibility, she put it in another envelope and addressed it to Anna María Caglio, at the convent where she’d taken refuge.
The police ordered the seizure of that letter and called Anna María Caglio again, to identify it as hers. Among many other things, the letter said, “I want everyone to know that I have never been aware of the business dealings of Ugo Montagna […] But I am otherwise convinced that the one responsible is Ugo Montagna (with the collaboration of many women […]) He is the brains behind the organization, while Piero Piccioni is the murderer.”
Anna María Caglio’s dramatic will started an earthquake in public opinion. The press, and especially the opposition newspapers, began a barrage of heavy artillery fire against the judicial establishment, against the police, against everything that had anything to do with the government. Between the blasts, Ugo Montagna and Gian Piero Piccioni were summoned to testify.
Well dressed, in a dark pinstriped suit and with a smiling seriousness, Ugo Montagna responded to the inquiry. He said he had never met Wilma Montesi. He denied that she was the lady Anna María Caglio said she’d seen him with on January 7, 1953, in his car and at the door of his apartment building. He emphatically denied that “pleasure parties” had taken place at his Capacotta estate. He said it was not true that Piccioni would have telephoned him on the night of April 10. He ended by saying, without losing his cool, in a sure and convincing voice, that he did not remember having attended an interview with Rome’s chief of police at the Ministry of the Interior, as Anna María Caglio had said, and that it was absolutely false that he had ever been in contact with any narcotics traffickers. He also made the observation that Piccioni and the chief of police were old friends and it was neither necessary nor reasonable, therefore, that he should have had to serve as an intermediary between them.
Less serene than Montagna, dressed a little sportily, and in a sonorous Italian with a Roman accent, Gian Piero Piccioni declared himself to be an absolute stranger to the Montesi case. On the day of her death, he said, he was taking a short break in Amalfi, returning from there to Rome, by automobile, at 3:30 on the afternoon of April 10. He later declared that same afternoon he had to take to his bed with a bad case of tonsillitis. To prove it, he promised to show them the prescription from Professor Di Filippo, the doctor who had visited him that afternoon.
As far as his supposed visit to Rome’s chief of police in Montagna’s company, Piccioni declared that it had not been carried out in the malicious way Anna María Caglio told it. Several times, he said, he had visited him alone or with Montagna, but only in order to request his intervention in the way the press was compromising his name in the Montesi case. “Those attacks from the press,” he said, “have no other aim than a political one: to harm my father’s prestige.”
In light of the charges not offering any new perspective or seeming sufficiently valid to rule out the hypothesis of accidental death while taking a footbath, the Wilma Montesi case was shelved for the second time on March 2, 1954. But the press did not shelve their campaign. The trial of the journalist Muto proceeded, and each time someone showed up to testify, the Montesi case was stirred up again.
The date on which Piero Piccioni said he returned from Amalfi.
The prescription from Professor Di Filippo, which Piero Piccioni promised to show the police.
Among many others summoned to declare, Franccimei, a painter, said he had lived for a week with Andrea Bisaccia, one of the two women who Muto named as his sources of information. Franccimei told the police an intense story. Andrea Bisaccia—he said—suffered from nightmares. She talked in distressed tones while she slept. In one of those nightmares, she began to shout in terror: “Water…! No…I don’t want to drown…No, I don’t want to die the same way…Let me go!”
While the painter was making his dramatic declaration, a woman driven mad by the abuse of narcotics threw herself off a third-story balcony of a hotel in Alessandría. In her purse, the police found, written down on a little piece of paper, two telephone numbers that were not listed in Rome’s telephone directory. Both were private numbers. One belonged to Ugo Montagna. The other to Piero Piccioni.
The woman who jumped from the third floor was Corinna Versolatto, an adventurer who in less than a year had practiced all sorts of trades. She was a nurse in a respectable clinic; a coat-check girl at the Piccolo Slam nightclub, later closed by the police; and in her leisure time, a clandestine prostitute.
At the moment of her suicide attempt, Corinna Versolatto was the private secretary of Mario Amelotti, a Venezuelan who was fond of traveling and suspected of involvement in narcotics trafficking and the white slave trade. In a moment of lucidity, Corinna told journalists, in the presence of the doctor at the clinic she’d been driven to and an Alessandrian police officer, that in recent months she had fallen out of favor with Amelotti, her boss, because she had refused to collaborate in his illicit undertakings. She said, “That’s all I can say. Mario is an unscrupulous man. He has bought off the police and he is a friend to many influential people.”
Finally, Corinna revealed that her boss was a friend of someone who smoked marijuana cigarettes. And that together with a photographer friend of his, he ran a studio that made and sold pornographic postcards.
While this was going on, the press continued shouting. And the police carried on receiving anonymous tips. When Wilma Montesi’s case was shelved for the second time, they received more than six hundred anonymous tips. One of them, signed Gianna la Rossa, said, “I am in the know about the events that occurred in April 1953, concerning the death of Wilma Montesi. I am terrified at the cruelty of Montagna and Piccioni, who tried to put her in contact with narcotics traffickers in the province of Parma, specifically in Traversetolo. I made a corresponding denunciation to the Parma police, in good time. But they buried it. A few months ago, I deposited a second letter for safekeeping at the office of the parish priest, in a little village in the region of Traversetolo. I sent that letter because I was convinced that I would suffer the same fate as Wilma Montesi. The priest will hand that letter over to whoever presents the attached half ticket. The other half is in his hands.”
Gianna la Rossa went on in her letter explaining the reasons she preferred to shelter behind a pseudonym. The letter ended: “My hide is worth nothing, but it happens to be all I have.”
The police conducted a swift investigation of the two previous cases. In relation to the background of the woman who attempted suicide, they established that in Rome she frequented the Victor club and in the hotel where she lived she organized loud kinky parties, attended by notable personalities and two movie actresses. One of them was Alida Valli.
The hotel where Corinna lived in Alessandria, and where she’d jumped out the window, was searched by the police. In the suicidal woman’s room they found two press cuttings. One was the news of the closure of Piccolo Slam. The other was about the Montesi case.
In relation to the letter from Gianna la Rossa, the police discovered that the parish priest was Tonnino Onnis, curate of Bannone di Traversetolo and an engineering student. And along they went to his parish, with the half ticket included in the letter, a fifty-lire entry ticket to the Ministry of Education’s general headquarters of antiquities and fine arts. The parish priest showed them the letter, on the envelope of which he had written: “Deposited into my safekeeping on May 16, 1953, to be handed over only to whomever presents the other half of the attached ticket, which must have the number A.N.629190.” On the back of the envelope he had made a second explanation: “Sealed by me. I do not know the name or address of the person who wrote it.”
The letter was opened and its sensational text read.
The letter handed over by the parish priest to the police was dated May 16 and said, among other things, “If you are reading this letter, I am dead. But I want it to be known that I did not die a natural death. I have been finished off by the Marchese Montagna and Piero Piccioni…I have lived my last months under the nightmare of suffering the same death as Wilma Montesi…I am putting into practice a plan to unmask the band of narcotics traffickers…If this plan fails, I will meet the same fate as Wilma…
“This letter will only be handed over to whomever is in possession of a special password…”
Father Onnis was not satisfied with merely showing this letter to the police, but took the opportunity to tell a story that sounded like a bandit movie. He said that in August or September 1953, on a Friday, when he was getting ready to leave Parma on his motorcycle, two individuals approached him who had just gotten out of a car with French license plates. With simulated foreign accents, through which the parish priest believed he detected the accent of southern Italy, the two individuals begged him to take a package. He refused, started up his motorcycle, and took off at full speed. But when he reached the village he was arrested by the police and taken to the precinct. The officers on duty searched the package that the priest had on his back seat. It was a radio to repair.
Then the police showed him an anonymous note they’d received a few hours earlier with the license plate number of his motorcycle, the time he would pass through the village, and the accusation that Father Onnis was in contact with a gang of drug traffickers.
The investigators made something very important immediately clear: the letter presented by Father Onnis was dated May 16, when the name Piero Piccioni had not yet been associated with that of Montagna. Ana María Caglio’s declarations were made in October.
Around the same time, the newspapers were insisting on another important event in the Montesi case: the telephone call the actress Alida Valli made from Venice to Piero Piccioni, with whom she had an intimate friendship. Alida Valli had been with Piccioni in Amalfi during the trip he told the police about to defend himself. Later the actress traveled to Venice to work filming the movie The Stranger’s Hand. Two days after Alida Valli arrived in Venice, the Montesi scandal broke at. A journalist, an actor, a film director, and a parliamentary deputy all declared that the actress had phoned Piccioni from a Venetian tobacconist shop. The actress denied the conversation had taken place.
According to the witnesses, Alida Valli, obviously quite worked up, said to Piccioni:
“What the hell have you done? What happened to that girl?”
The actress carried on the conversation in a loud voice, because it was a long-distance call. It was a public place. When she hung up, she was in such a state of agitation that she said out loud, as if she were still calling long distance, “You’ll see what a mess that imbecile’s got himself into.”
The telephone call Alida Valli made to Piero Piccioni from Venice.
The results of the first autopsy performed on Wilma Montesi, published in the second installment of this series.
Wilma Montesi’s family’s declarations, after her body was found on Torvaianica beach.
The items of clothing found on the body.
The organ of the Italian Communist Party, L’Unità, reported on the scandal of the telephone call. According to that newspaper, the call had been placed on April 29, 1953. The actress wrote a letter to the editors protesting the ease with which they spread “fantastical and tendentious news.” And she stated that on April 29 she had been in Rome. But the police had seized her telephone book and established that, in effect, the call had been made.
Another declaration was heard at the trial of the journalist Muto: that of Gioben Jo, who according to Ana María Caglio had lost thirteen million lire playing cards at Capacotta, with Montagna, Piccioni, and a high-ranking police official. Gioben Jo declared that an acquaintance of hers, Gianni Cortesse, who had emigrated to Brazil, and written from there to say that he was “very well settled in,” had been “ship’s purser” in Genoa several years ago, and a notorious narcotics dealer. She said that the aforementioned Cortesse supplied a dentist friend with large quantities of cocaine. That friend, according to Gioben Jo, had introduced her to Montagna, who was a close friend.
Another witness finally declared that several years before he had been a guest of Montagna. There had been a lawyer, a friend of both, known for his fondness for drugs, who even suffered attacks of delirium tremens due to his abuse of narcotics. In April or June of 1947, according to the witness, Montagna, the lawyer friend, and a woman came into his room, completely naked, and had woken him up with vulgar phrases and dark words.
The journalist Muto’s trial really turned into a many-legged creature. Each time someone was summoned to testify, more witnesses had to be called, to establish the truth of the testimonies. It was like a game of da que te vienen dando (give as good as you get). New names kept coming up. And the press, for its part, conducted spontaneous investigations, and every day dawned on new revelations. Among the people testifying at Muto’s trial was Vittorio Feroldi de Rosa, who said he had driven, in July or August of 1953, from Rome to Ostia, along with several people, one of whom was Andrea Bisaccia. According to Feroldi, Bisaccia had told her travel companion that narcotics were trafficked along the Ostia-Torva coast; that she had met Wilma Montesi; that she had participated in some of the “pleasure meetings” at Castelporziano, and that she had seen Montesi’s garter “in someone’s hands.”
The other occupants of the automobile were summoned to testify, and one of them, Silvana Isola, declared that she hadn’t heard anything, because she was fast asleep for the whole trip. But another of the travelers, Gastone Prettenati, admitted that, in fact, Andrea Bisaccia had revealed some confidences during that trip. She had told them, among other things, that Montesi, on “a pleasure outing” she’d attended and during which she’d smoked “certain cigarettes,” had suffered a collapse. Then she’d been left on the beach, because the others there thought she was dead.
Another witness, Franco Marramei, declared finally that one night he’d found himself in a small bar on Vía del Balbuino and had heard Andrea Bisaccia say in a loud voice, “The Montesi girl couldn’t have died by accident, because I knew her very well.”
Faced with the tremendous uproar in the press and public opinion’s evident disapproval, Rome’s Court of Appeals demanded that the attorney general reopen the twice-closed case. On March 29, 1954—almost a year after Montesi’s death—the examining office took charge of the confusing and hefty dossier and began the formal proceedings of the Montesi case.
For a year, the voluminous and smiley presiding magistrate, Rafaelle Sepe, working day and night, put that chilling mountain of contradictions, errors, and false testimonies in order. He had to start over again from the beginning. Wilma Montesi’s cadaver was exhumed for a new autopsy. What Magistrate Sepe did was put the deck in order, with the cards facedown.
Since he was starting from scratch, Magistrate Sepe began by trying to establish the precise hour that Wilma Montesi left her house on the afternoon of April 9. Up until that moment there were two different testimonies: that of the victim’s father, who on the night of the 9th told the police that the concierge Adalgisa Roscini had said that Wilma left at 5:30; and that of the Salaria police department, which in their first report on Tuesday, April 14, declared that the concierge herself had said another time: five o’clock on the dot.
The investigating magistrate called Adalgisa Roscini directly and she declared without hesitation that Wilma had not left the house before 5:15. The concierge had a reason for that categorical statement. During the days when the events occurred, a group of laborers were working on the building and stopped at exactly five o’clock. Then they went to wash up at the fountain in the courtyard and took no less than ten minutes. When the laborers finished their work on April 9, Wilma had not yet gone out. When they finished washing up and left the building, she still hadn’t gone out. Adalgisa Roscini saw her leave a few minutes after the laborers. Shortly after 5:15.
In this investigation, the concierge of number 76 Tagliamento made another revelation that cast shadows of doubt onto the Montesi family’s behavior. In reality, the attitude of the victim’s relatives had changed fundamentally since the day her body was identified. Adalgisa Roscini declared that a few days after Wilma’s death, her mother had pressed her to modify her earlier declaration that the girl had left at 5:30. The concierge refused. And then Wilma’s mother said to her:
“Then how did Doctoresa Passarelli manage to travel on the train with her at that very time?”
The concierge says she replied:
“She must have seen the clock wrong.”
And then, feeling indignant at the pressure they were trying to put on her, she exclaimed:
“You’ve come upon a tough nut to crack, because I’m not changing the time.”
To start right at the beginning, Doctoresa Passarelli was summoned again. She showed up in a state of worrying agitation. This time she didn’t seem so sure of having seen Wilma Montesi on the train. “I thought I saw her,” was all she said. And she described the girl again. She was a young woman between twenty-eight and thirty years of age. Her hair was styled “high above her forehead, tight on the sides, and with a large bun in the back.” She wasn’t wearing gloves. She was wearing loafers and a coat the predominant color of which was green.
However, Wilma had just turned twenty-one a few months before, and according to the testimony of many people who knew her she looked younger than she was. Furthermore, on the afternoon she left her house for the last time she wasn’t wearing loafers, but very eye-catching shoes, of gold fabric. Her hairstyle was not as Passarelli described it, because Wilma had had short hair for the last several months.
The investigator showed Doctoresa Passarelli the coat found on the body. When she saw it, the doctoresa seemed disconcerted. It was a yellow coat, eye-catching and unmistakable. She turned it over, as if to see if it was green on the other side. Then she roundly denied that this was the coat the girl on the train had been wearing.
Magistrate Sepe demonstrated that the doctoresa had not been shown the body of Wilma Montesi. The identification had been limited to the examination of a few pieces of clothing. However, he considered it necessary to investigate the woman’s conduct. He established that she was a humanities graduate, employed by the Ministry of Defense, daughter of a high-ranking army official, and belonging to a distinguished Roman family. But at the same time he established that she suffered from mild nearsightedness but did not wear glasses, and had an impulsive, not very reflexive, temperament with a tendency toward fantasy. She was saved by a thread: she managed to prove where she got the money to buy, a few days after her first spontaneous declaration, an apartment that cost 5,600,000 lire.
Once Passarelli’s testimony was demolished, the investigating magistrate proposed to establish how long it takes a person to get from number 76 Vía Tagliamento to the Ostia train station. The police, the urban transport management, and the Ministry of Defense collaborated in this investigation.
Starting with this installment, the reader will find in the text the answers to the points that “the readers should remember,” which were published in the previous installments.
From this moment on, it will be established in strict order:
Wilma Montesi’s alleged trip to Ostia.
The time and place of her death.
Cause of death and judicial definition of the deed.
The real habits, morality, and family atmosphere of Wilma Montesi’s life.
Narcotics trafficking.
Gatherings at Capacotta.
Accusations against Prince D’Assia.
Facts against Ugo Montagna and Piero Piccioni and against the ex-chief of police of Rome, Severo Polito.
There are 3.9 miles from number 76 Vía Tagliamento to the door of the station, by the shortest route. To cover that distance, in ideal transit conditions and not considering possible red lights, a taxi would take exactly thirteen minutes. On foot, at a normal pace, it would take between an hour and a quarter and an hour and twenty-one minutes. At a fast pace, fifty minutes. The journey is covered by a streetcar route (the rápido B), which normally takes twenty-four minutes. Supposing that Wilma Montesi had used that means of transport, we would have to add at least three minutes, which was the time the girl would have needed to walk from her door to the bus stop, 220 yards away.
And that’s still without counting the time to buy a ticket at the station and get to the train, on a platform more than 300 yards from the ticket office. It was an important conclusion: Wilma Montesi did not travel to Ostia on the 5:30 train. She very probably could not have done so even if she had actually left the house at 5:00.
Those who produced the first reports did not realize something essential: Dr. Di Giorgio, the first doctor to examine the corpse on the Torvaianica beach, declared that it was in the early stages of rigor mortis. After a certain time, a cadaver begins to stiffen: this is the period of the cadaveric rigidity. Subsequently, the contrary phenomenon comes into operation. Dr. Di Giorgio established that Wilma Montesi’s body was “partially rigid.” But he had a reason for stating that it was in the process “of progressive stiffening”: the rigidity presented in the jaw, the neck, and the upper extremities. Nysten’s law, duly proven, explains: “Rigor mortis begins in the muscles of mastication; continues to those of the neck and upper extremities.” Based on this law, Dr. Di Giorgio prepared his report: death must have occurred approximately eighteen hours before the examination. And the examination was verified on Saturday, April 11, at 9:30 in the morning.
The corpse was exposed to the sun for the whole day, while waiting for instructions from Rome. Those instructions arrived after dark. A few hours later, the cadaver was transported to the autopsy room. When Rodolfo Montesi and Angelo Giuliani entered to identify it, more than twenty-four hours had gone by since the find. When the postmortem was done and the report prepared, it said death had occurred on the night of April 9, because the cadaver presented a first point of putrefaction and due to the phenomenon of “anserine skin.” A year after her death, a group of professors from the Faculty of Medicine prepared a new expert opinion, after a careful examination of the cadaver, and established that the incursion of putrefaction could have been precipitated by the corpse’s long exposure to the sun and humidity on the Torvaianica beach, during the whole day of April 11.
In relation to the phenomenon of the “anserine skin,” they demonstrated that this phenomenon is common in the bodies of drowning victims, but it can even present before death, due to terror or prolonged agony. But in the case of Wilma Montesi, it could also have been caused by the long time the corpse was kept in cold storage before the autopsy was carried out. All in all, the first report, that of Dr. Di Giorgio, was fundamental: the rigidity was partial. And the conclusion was indisputable: Wilma Montesi had died on the night of April 10, twenty-four hours after the concierge Adalgisa Roscini saw her leave her home.
What did she do in those twenty-four hours?
Another important truth needed to be established: the place Wilma Montesi died. For it had been accepted as true that the girl had gone to the beach at Ostia to bathe her feet when she suffered a collapse and then, once she’d drowned, was carried by the waves to Torvaianica beach, twelve miles away.
To reinforce this hypothesis the Ostia police reported that on the night of April 10 a violent storm had raged in that region, with strong northwesterly winds. The investigator in charge of the proceedings, Magistrate Sepe, turned to the meteorology professors at the meteorological institute to verify that fact. The report, with weather bulletins from the entire month of April 1953, said that the Ostia-Torvaianica sector did not register any such storm. The most notable phenomenon had occurred on April 11 at the exact time Wilma Montesi’s body was found: a northeasterly wind of eight miles per hour.
The autopsy by the new experts made it clear that the cadaver had no bite marks from marine animals or insects, which are abundant on Torvaianica beach. The magistrate drew the conclusion, from this information, that the corpse had not spent much time in the water, and not much time on the beach, either, before being found. The first deduction was already a principle of certainty to rule out the hypothesis that the body had been carried twelve miles by the waves.
But they found more important evidence. Wilma Montesi’s crimson nail polish was intact. The experts confirmed that the substance was resistant to seawater. But they investigated the density of sand in suspension in the water between Ostia and Torvaianica. And they concluded that it would have been difficult for her nail polish to stand up to the friction of the sand on a long and fast twelve-mile journey.
Magistrate Sepe was the only one to take any interest in the coat that was buttoned around the corpse’s neck. When Wilma Montesi’s body was found on the beach, Carabinieri Augusto Tondi understood that this coat would be an obstacle to transporting the body, so he pulled the button and removed it without much difficulty.
Magistrate Sepe counted the threads used to sew the button on: there were seventeen. The experts demonstrated that those seventeen threads would not have withstood the marine journey, the coat battered by the waves, if a carabinieri had needed only a tug to pull it off.
These conclusions and others of an indigestible scientific nature allowed him to rule out the hypothesis of the corpse’s long sea journey from the beach at Ostia to that of Torvaianica. New experts demonstrated that the ferruginous density of the sand found in the lungs of the cadaver was not conclusive proof to establish the place where the victim lost her life. Wilma Montesi drowned a few feet from the place where her body was found.
However, fifteen feet out from the beach at Torvaianica the water is not even a foot and a half deep. It’s true that Wilma did not know how to swim. But it is not likely that a person who doesn’t know how to swim will drown, just because she doesn’t know how to swim, in a foot and a half of water. There must be other causes. And Magistrate Sepe resolved to discover them.
Super expert advice was called for. A doctor of irreproachable conduct and five university professors of forensic medicine duly investigated studying the presence of sand and plankton in the lungs and intestines of the corpse. Due to the quantity and profundity, they concluded that death had not occurred in normal circumstances. From the first swallow of water until the moment of death, four minutes elapsed, at most.
The new expert advice demonstrated that Wilma Montesi died in a slow and prolonged drowning, between ten and twenty minutes after her first contact with the water. That’s how they explained how she had drowned in a foot and a half of water: Wilma Montesi was exhausted when she began to drown.
Once this important conclusion was obtained, Magistrate Sepe resolved to analyze the three hypotheses:
Suicide.
Accident.
Homicide.
The only time Wilma’s possible suicide was mentioned was on the night of April 9, when her father went to look for her in the Tiber and later, when he went to the police and when he sent the telegram to Giuliani. Rodolfo Montesi said that his daughter wanted to commit suicide due to the imminence of her wedding and resulting separation from her family, by moving to Potenza, where her fiancé was working. But Wilma’s marriage had not been imposed by her family. She enjoyed enough independence, had reached the age of majority, and could have canceled her engagement to Giuliani whenever she wanted. It was a weak explanation.
Her mother’s argument had carried a lot of weight in destroying the suicide hypothesis: Wilma had taken her house keys with her, which she didn’t always do. And her sister’s argument: before going out, Wilma left her underwear that she’d just changed out of soaking in soapy water in the bathroom sink. Finally, someone who examined the true circumstances in which Wilma Montesi died stated, “It would have necessitated violating her instinct of self-preservation to superhuman extremes to keep drowning herself for a quarter of an hour, in such shallow water.” Suicide doesn’t take such hard work.
Magistrate Sepe discarded suicide and began to study accidental death. He accepted as valid the first autopsy’s explanation: Wilma did not die from having gone into the water while in the process of digestion, because that process was finished. And even if that had not been the case, it was not very likely that she would have suffered a collapse from dipping her feet in the water after lunch.
The circumstance that Wilma was in the immediate postmenstrual phase was not considered valid to explain a collapse either. Any upset she might have suffered, owing to that particular circumstance, would not have prevented her from dragging herself back onto the beach, according to the experts. They also ruled out, after the new autopsy, any other kind of disorder: Wilma had been in good health. But her heart was small in relation to her height, as was the capacity of her aorta.
On the other hand, Magistrate Sepe considered it advisable to establish the precise origin of the foot-bathing hypothesis. It arose many days after the death, when Wanda Montesi “remembered” that her sister had spoken to her of a trip to Ostia. That was after the funeral, when the whole family began to look for an explanation for the death. The attitude was considered suspicious: Wilma Montesi’s family always demonstrated an excessive interest in giving credit to Wanda’s version. Based on her declaration, the case was shelved for the first time, with the definition of “accidental death.” However, all the elements contributed to an admission of the truth: Wilma’s family had no news of any trip to Ostia, or any supposed footbath.
The experts did establish, though, that Wilma Montesi had no lesions, irritation, or eczema on her heels. She had no signs of hardened or peeling skin caused by her shoes. That suspicious attitude on the part of her family was meticulously analyzed by the magistrate. Wilma’s father, who inexplicably took charge of the accidental death hypothesis, explained that the girl had taken her garter belt off for more freedom of movement while wading in the sea. And yet she did not take off her coat. And it has to be imagined that a person who wants freedom of movement while bathing her feet would be more likely to take off her coat before her garters. She might even take off her coat in order to have more freedom of movement to take off her garter.
Finally, it is inconceivable that in order to bathe her feet Wilma Montesi would have walked twelve miles from the Ostia train station to Torvaianica beach, when the sea was a few yards away from the station. Magistrate Sepe was not taken in by the accidental death while foot-bathing idea and carried on investigating. Now he had a more important piece of information in hand: the size of Wilma Montesi’s heart. That could have something to do with narcotics.
When Angelo Giuliani saw the corpse of his fiancée, he observed certain marks on her arms and legs, which made him think of homicide. He was the one who told a journalist, on his way out of the mortuary. The first autopsy confirmed the existence of those five small bruises, but did not attribute any medical or legal importance to them.
The consultation ordered by Magistrate Sepe, to reexamine the cadaver, meticulously, and even to carry out a detailed radiographic exploration, demonstrated that there were no broken bones. Some superficial scratches were observed on the face, especially on the nose and brows: results of the body’s friction against the sand. However, the examination confirmed that the five small bruises had occurred before death. The experts considered that they could have happened any time between the beginning of her death throes and five or six hours before death.
In consideration of her particular situation and the absence of other characteristic signs, the hypothesis that the five bruises were the product of an act of sexual violence was ruled out. There were two on her left arm and two on her left thigh and one on her right leg. Those bruises, according to the specialists, due to their location, quantity, and superficiality, had the characteristics of a “grasping” of an inert body.
They were not signs of struggle or force, for it could be clearly established that when they were produced the body offered no resistance. In an act of carnal violence, the characteristics would have been different. The quantity would have been different and the location very different.
As will be recalled, after the first autopsy a chemical examination of the viscera was executed, to check for the presence of narcotics. The result of that examination was negative. One year later, the forensic specialists affirmed that the “state of unconsciousness preexistent to death was not incompatible with the absence of traces of narcotics in the viscera.” The original investigation had been incomplete, as it did not check for the presence of narcotics in the blood, the brain, or the spinal cord. Consequently, the negative of the chemical examination of the intestines could not be considered absolute. Wilma Montesi could have been the victim of narcotics, even though the chemical exam of her viscera did not reveal their presence.
Furthermore, it could have been an alkaloid that left no trace in the stomach. That could have occurred through elimination, while the body was still alive or after death, or due to transformations occurred after dying. That assertion is much more valid in cases of volatile substances or those that break down rapidly.
Faced with these circumstances, the superior magistrates considered that it had not been established forensically whether or not Wilma Montesi had utilized some dose of narcotics. Therefore, the exam was not negative, but rather useless, since it had only checked to make sure there were no traces of narcotics in the stomach at the time of investigation. Those traces could have been found in other organs, and even in the stomach itself, at a previous moment.
Magistrate Sepe was struck by the small size of Wilma Montesi’s heart. He asked the specialists if that circumstance could have provoked a fainting spell when the girl was bathing her feet. The experts said no: the hypothesis was absolutely indemonstrable that Wilma’s particular physiological condition could have caused a collapse due to the small size of her heart.
However, they said something else: “The small size of her heart could have produced a collapse, given the provision of narcotics.”
The detailed examination of the body allowed it to be established that Wilma had a lower than normal sexual sensitivity. Magistrate Sepe considered that this could be an explanation for the provision of narcotics, for anyone might have put that resource in practice to provoke an arousal that would not have occurred in normal circumstances. Or to break down the victim’s resistance.
They had to definitively discard the hypothesis that the sea had removed Wilma’s garments. In order for that to have occured the body would have had to be submitted to violent wave action, which the seventeen threads of the coat’s single button would not have withstood. However, the corpse was not wearing a garter, an item so tightly attached to her body that a former servant of the Montesi family declared that on several occasions, to remove it or put it on, Wilma had requested her help.
It was necessary to accept that someone other than Wilma had removed her clothes, probably by force, or probably when she was under the effect of narcotics. However, the coat continued to be an enigma: it is strange that they would have taken off her garter but not the easiest garment to remove—her coat.
Why not think of something more logical? For example: Wilma was completely undressed when she suffered the collapse. In his nervousness, her unknown companion, trying to destroy the traces of his action, had tried to hurriedly dress her. That’s why the coat was there. Because it was the easiest item to take off, but also the easiest to put back on. And that’s why the garter belt was gone.
Magistrate Sepe, having examined these and other details, not all of which are indispensable, arrived at the conclusion that the state of unconsciousness Wilma Montesi was in before her death was the result of a culpable act, or a malicious act. Those were the alternatives. Culpable homicide would have to prove that the person responsible did not know Wilma was still alive when he abandoned her body on the beach. Curiously, one of the first to give a statement had said that Wilma had participated in a pleasure party, had suffered a collapse because of the drugs, and had been abandoned on the beach.
Faced with such an alternative, there is a principle in Italian law called favor rei, the king’s favor. This means that, in the case of doubt between a serious crime and a less serious one, the suspect must be tried for the less serious crime. The first part of article 83 of the Italian penal code says: “If through an error in the use of the means of execution of the crime, or for another cause, an event different from that desired is occasioned [concealment of an alleged corpse, in this case], the guilty party responds, by way of guilt, for the undesired event, when the event has been provided for by the law as a culpable crime.” On the basis of that article, Magistrate Sepe defined the death of Wilma Montesi as a culpable homicide. Who committed that homicide?
For the time being, Magistrate Sepe could not mention any names. But there were some important things: from the five bruises, it could be deduced that the positioning of the body in the water, on Torvaianica beach, could have happened when Wilma was unconscious. That is, the accident had occurred somewhere else and the victim had been transported to the deserted spot. In that place, the seashore is more than forty feet away from the paved road, where the car that was carrying Wilma Montesi must have stopped. Between the road and the sea there is a sandy area, difficult to cross. In consideration of the victim’s weight and the location of the five bruises, Sepe concluded that Wilma Montesi was carried from the car to the beach by at least two individuals.
“Who are those two individuals?” Sepe must have asked himself, scratching his bald and shiny head. Until now, he only had one clue: the possibility that Wilma Montesi had been in contact with drug traffickers. That was when the investigator, perhaps jumping up out of his chair as detectives do in the movies, asked himself the surprising question that nobody had asked up till then: “Who was Wilma Montesi?”
From the very first police reports the public was given the impression that the Montesi family was an example of modesty, tact, and innocence. The newspapers themselves contributed to creating that impression, devising the ideal image of Wilma Montesi: an ingenuous girl, free of malice or guilt, victim of the monstrous drug traffickers. There was, however, a bulging contradiction: it was inconceivable that a girl adorned with such exalted attributes would have had any connection to that class of people or would have participated, as was said, in a “pleasure party” that cost her her life.
Sepe realized the character was badly constructed and arranged to verify it with an in-depth investigation into the true family atmosphere and into Wilma Montesi’s secret life.
“Wilma’s mother,” wrote the magistrate once his investigation was completed, “did not enjoy a good reputation in the neighborhood and had imparted to her daughter, from the early years of her childhood, a not very strict upbringing, accustoming her to not washing and to dressing with a luxury disproportionate to her economic and social condition.” Wilma Montesi’s image as a poor, ingenuous girl, victim of drug traffickers, began to crumble before the onslaught of a cold and impartial investigation. Wilma Montesi’s own mother set a bad example at home of pompous elegance and bad taste. “She was,” says the summary, “authoritarian with her husband, despotic toward the whole family, and even violent to her own mother, uttering vulgar words and coarse expressions during the frequent scenes of domestic strife.”
That behavior influenced Wilma’s upbringing to such an extent that in an altercation she recently had with a neighbor, she used a string of unpublishable swearwords, literally transcribed in the summary. Shortly after her death, the proprietor of the Di Crema department store, on Vía Nazionale, heard that two girls who knew Wilma, but not later identified, said, referring to the victim, “It was to be expected, the life she lived couldn’t have ended any other way.”
Rodolfo Montesi’s daily earnings were no more than fifteen hundred lire. However, in the final days of Wilma Montesi’s life she owned a genuine crocodile-skin purse, estimated by experts to be worth eighty thousand lire. It was not possible to establish the origin of that purse.
One of the first things the police had proven seemed to have been forgotten: after her fiancé was transferred to Potenza the girl acquired the habit of going out every day, in the afternoon. She never returned home later than half past seven, it was claimed. But an unidentified doctor, who lived in the last building of number 76 Tagliamento, told a pharmacist on Vía Sebazio, who in turn revealed to the police, that he had, on occasion, opened the main door for Wilma after midnight.
For five months, Annunciata Gionni worked as a servant for the Montesi family household. The maid revealed to the police the exact opposite of what the family had told them: loud arguments were frequent in Rodolfo Montesi’s absence, and sometimes Wilma’s mother had shouted at her using very strong expressive words, which slightly toned down might be translated as “whore” and “wretch.”
It was also said that every morning, around eight, once their father had left the house, the two sisters would go out, until two in the afternoon. The former maid confirmed that fact, but said she hadn’t thought it important because she imagined the two girls must have jobs.
In the afternoons, even after her engagement to Giuliani, Wilma Montesi received numerous telephone calls. Before answering, she closed the door of the room and spoke in a low and cautious voice. But nobody was in a position to say whether it was always the same caller, or whether they were long-distance calls. If this were the case, they couldn’t have been from Giuliani, in the last months, because at the time Wilma Montesi died there was not yet direct telephone communication between Rome and Potenza.
As for the behavior of the family after Wilma’s death, the magistrate verifies, by tapping their telephone, that Wilma’s mother took advantage of the publicity the newspapers gave to her daughter’s death. She herself charged several hundred lire for information and “on a certain occasion,” says the brief, “deplored the scanty fee and urged the journalists to write a spicier article.” From this and other inquiries, the investigating magistrate reached the conclusion that Wilma Montesi had led “a double life.” Used to luxury beyond the means of her social position from an early age, raised in a family environment not exactly characterized by excessive severity in its habits and customs, Wilma dreamed of a better future and enjoyed total freedom to go out when she wanted, morning or afternoon.
It was therefore not implausible that this real Wilma Montesi—so different from the one constructed by the newspapers—should have been in contact with drug traffickers and might have participated in a “pleasure party.”
The magistrate then looked back and remembered Wanda Montesi’s first declaration, later amended: “Wilma had gone out without fixing herself up, simply because she hadn’t had time. Maybe she’d had to run out after an urgent telephone call.” That declaration leads us to think that Wanda was sure that her sister could receive urgent telephone calls and rush out without previous plans and that she even had secret relationships, never revealed by the family to the police.
Rodolfo Montesi, the only person who could have imposed an atmosphere of severity in his home, did not have time to attend to such obligations. His work absorbed almost all his hours and he barely had time to go home for lunch.
But before going any further, one testimony must be analyzed: someone declared that they’d seen Prince D’Assia in a light-colored automobile in the company of a girl, on the afternoon of April 9, near the area where the crime was committed. A lawyer heard about this and told the lawyer representing Ugo Montagna, who stirred up a huge scandal: he spoke to the witness, who confirmed the testimony. When the witness’s wife learned that he had spoken, she exclaimed, “Idiot. I told you to keep your mouth shut. That girl was Wilma Montesi.”
Prince Mauricio D’Assia, a young Italian aristocrat, over six feet tall and as thin as a rake, was called to make a statement. He denied that his companion had been Wilma Montesi. But he also refused to reveal the girl’s name, because Prince D’Assia is a total gentleman.
However, chivalry must be set to one side, for Magistrate Sepe does not accept such alibis as valid. He revealed the name of a distinguished young lady of Roman high society, who was called to make a statement, and confirmed the prince’s version of his trip to the Capacotta estate on April 9. Furthermore, the gasoline receipt demonstrated that the prince had bought five gallons of fuel that afternoon for the trip.
The allegations against Prince D’Assia turned out to be inconsistent. But there were other concrete allegations that it was necessary to examine: those against Ugo Montagna and Piero Piccioni. But before going any further it is time to inform the reader of something he has undoubtedly been wanting to know for several days, but only now is it appropriate to reveal: Wilma Montesi was a virgin.
The magistrate for the Montesi case established the following facts about the life of Piero Piccioni: He had a bachelor’s apartment on Vía Acherusio, at number 20, for his exclusive use, at which he organized parties in the company of friends and women. That apartment was not registered with the building’s concierge. The actress Alida Valli admitted having been to that place several times “to listen to records.”
According to various testimonies, Piero Piccioni is a man “of refined taste in love.” They revealed that he resorted to the use of narcotics as stimulants.
It was demonstrated that, in Montagna’s company, he frequented a small bar on Vía del Babuino, where, as will be recalled, someone heard Andrea Bisaccia say, “Wilma Montesi could not have died by accident, because I knew her very well.” That establishment was closed by the police, owing to the fact that “young existentialists, and people who used narcotics or were at least of dubious morality, congregated there.”
Regarding the life of Ugo Montagna, known as the Marchese of San Bartolomeo, an elegant and well-connected man, it was established, according to the terms of the pretrial brief:
“Born in Grotte, in the province of Palermo, on November 16, 1910, into a family of very modest social and economic position, some of whom had prison or police records. His father, Diego, was arrested on the first of April 1931, ‘on the orders of a higher court,’ in Pistoia, and banished on the 27th of the same month. One of his brothers was condemned to several years in prison for fraud and concealment.
“In 1930, Ugo Montagna left his hometown and moved to Pistoia, and later returned to Palermo, where he was arrested for the first time for falsifying bills of exchange. Released from prison, with provisional liberty, on May 23, 1936, he was banished to Rome on the 28th of the same month.”
“Ugo Montagna”—the brief went on—“married Elsa Anibaldi in Rome, in 1935. Imprisoned again, he was freed, by an amnesty, in 1937, when he was serving a sentence for the usurpation of the title of a chartered accountant.
“After a brief period of cohabitation with his wife, with whom he had a son, he separated from her for reasons of jealousy and interests and, especially, because, dissipating all his earning on women of easy virtue and pleasure trips, he did not even provide her with the basic means of subsistence.
“In May of 1941, due to a neighbor’s complaints, he was advised by police to abstain from holding the nocturnal parties that, with dancing, singing, and commotion, took place in his residence, in the Flaminio area, and went on past midnight, to entertain his numerous string of guests of both sexes.” Currently he is a multimillionaire.
The mechanic Piccini, who a year before had rushed to declare to the police his certainty that Wilma Montesi had been with a man, in an automobile stuck in the sand near the Capacotta estate, in the first half of March, was now summoned to make a formal statement. Piccini stated what he had seen: the man was approximately the same height as himself, five foot nine, balding, elegant, hatless, who spoke proper Italian, with a slight Roman accent.
However, this time it was revealed that Piccini had not gone alone to help the stranger. He’d gone with a workmate whose surname was De Francesco, who agreed with everything, except that the man spoke Italian properly. According to De Francesco, the man in the car had a slight foreign accent. The two witnesses confronted each other. Piccini remained firm and in a formal identification picked out Piero Piccioni from among another three individuals with similar physical characteristics. Nevertheless, the fact should be taken into account that Piero Piccioni’s photograph had appeared, by that time, on innumerable occasions in all the newspapers.
Among the things that Piccini said in his declaration, he remembered that the man in the automobile had been in a suspicious hurry to make a telephone call. At that hour it is not frequent for someone to speak on the telephone. The investigator called the administrator of the tobacco kiosk at the Ostia station, Remo Bigliozzi, so he could describe the man who made the telephone call. As far as he could remember, Bigliozzi described a swarthy man, with an oval face, dark hair, receding hairline, and in an incredible hurry to make a call. The witness said that as soon as he saw the photographs of Piero Piccioni, he had recognized him as the man who made the telephone call from his tobacco kiosk, in early March.
To accept that Wilma Montesi was the girl in the car—and the witnesses concurred in their descriptions—would put the Montesi family’s assertions in doubt, according to which Wilma was never away from home very late. But the real behavior of that family, perfectly verified by the investigator, and the not forgotten circumstance that the mother of the Montesi family tried to induce the concierge to modify her statement, allows us to think that they knew something, a secret link their daughter had that they wanted to keep hidden at any cost. That’s why their statements were not taken into account, to rule out the possibility that the girl in the automobile was Wilma Montesi.
Moreover, the investigator resolved to call some people to give statements who hadn’t been taken into account by the two previous investigations before they were shelved, and who surely had something to say: the eyewitnesses who went to Torvaianica beach to see the corpse. Nobody had remembered them, specifically Anna Salvi and Jale Balleli. Called to make statements, they concurred in having recognized the corpse of Wilma Montesi as a girl who at 5:30 on April 10, 1953, had gone past their houses, in Torvaianica, in a dark-colored automobile in the company of a man. They also concurred in their descriptions of the man. And they stated that they had been on the beach looking at the body, but then they read in the press that the girl had died on the 9th, drowned off the beach at Ostia, and took no more interest in the case.
There were still a confusing number of loose ends. There was the declaration of another man who had seen the corpse on the beach. The previous afternoon, that man and his wife had walked past a black automobile, near Capacotta, and he had taken a long look at the girl who was in the car. His wife said, “You cheeky devil, you’re eyeing up that girl.” The next day, after having been on the beach looking at the corpse, the man went to find his wife and told her, “Guess what? The girl we saw yesterday afternoon turned up dead on the beach this morning.” But his wife did not want to confirm his statements to the investigator. However, Magistrate Sepe did not get demoralized for a single moment. Determined to move his work forward, he prepared to take the next step. A decisive step: a face-to-face meeting between Ana María Caglio and Ugo Montagna.
Ana María Caglio arrived for the confrontation in complete command of herself. She confirmed all the charges laid out in her will. And she added a few new pieces of information, to extend them. She said that due to some publications giving publicity to the black car stuck in the sand in the first half of March (Piccini’s testimony), she had seen an Alfa 1900 outside the door to Piero Piccioni’s room. She said that when she saw that automobile she had remembered the publications she had seen in the press and tried to remember the license plate number, but that Montagna had discovered her aim and prevented her very ably. She remained firm in her charge that Piccioni and Montagna had visited the chief of police while she waited in the car. The charge was denied by Piccioni. But later it was proven that, in fact, that visit had taken place.
After all of Ana María Caglio’s charges had been examined and many of her statements verified, the magistrate reached the following conclusion: “It is necessary to consider Ana María Caglio’s various statements worthy of consideration in the course of the formal investigation, just as those previous to the second closure of the case and those of Muto’s trial, in virtue of the substantial uniformity of her statements, held firm with extreme exuberance, revealing her radical conviction, even in the dramatic face-to-face encounters with Montagna and Piccioni.
“It is true that Miss Caglio,” the magistrate continued, “was inspired by acrimonious feelings toward Montagna, having been abandoned by him after a not inconsiderable period of intimacy, which had provoked and established a profound affection in the girl’s spirits, constantly demonstrated in her correspondence”; but he concluded that this feeling could be the explanation of her behavior, that it should not be considered unfounded fruit of jealousy, or as rash revenge.
The actress Alida Valli summoned to make a statement about her telephone call from Venice, which she’d denied in the press, admitted that, in fact, the call had taken place, but that it had been completely different from the way the witnesses had described it. She said her account of that conversation had come from some newspaper cuttings, which mentioned Piccioni. Those cuttings—the actress said—had been sent to her house by the Milan agency, L’Eco della Stampa. To prove it, she showed the cuttings: one from La Notte, from May 6; another from Milano Sera, with the same date; another from Il Momento Sera, from the 5th, and another from L’Unità, from Milan, with the same date. Nevertheless, Alida Valli had forgotten something fundamental: her telephone call had been made on April 29. A week before the cuttings she presented as an alibi appeared in the press.
Something else still needed to be examined: Piccioni’s Amalfi tonsillitis. As has been said, the young composer of popular music said he’d been in Amalfi, with the actress Alida Valli, and that he’d returned to Rome on April 10. That night, both of them should have attended a get-together. However, it was found that Piccioni had not attended. But he had an explanation: he had been confined to his bed with tonsillitis, that very afternoon, and to prove it he presented Dr. Di Filippo’s prescription, carefully retained for a year. And he also presented a certificate of a urine analysis.
So much time had passed that Dr. Di Filippo did not remember the exact date on which he’d issued the prescription. But the investigator meticulously examined the medical books and found that the consultation did not accord with the date of Piccioni’s prescription.
In light of this suspicious difference, the prescription presented by Piccioni was submitted to a technical exam, and the graphologists agreed that the date on the prescription had been altered.
They then proceeded to investigate the authenticity of the certificate of the urine analysis. A Professor Salvattorelli, in charge of the bacteriological institute that had presumably done the analysis, declared that he did not know who had signed the certificate. Also, he looked in the appointment book and found that Piero Piccioni’s name did not appear in it or in any others related to the analyses the institute conducted. Trying to identify the signature, the handwriting experts attributed it to Dr. Carducci, who worked at the same institute. Dr. Carducci, in effect, recognized the signature as his own, but did not find in his books, or in his memory, any record of a urine analysis for anyone by the name of Piero Piccioni. Voluntarily, Dr. Carducci himself suggested the hypothesis that a false certificate had been written above his signature, on a blank piece of paper, or after erasing an authentic certificate.
Finally, the magistrate paid a visit to the house at Capacotta, where Gioben Jo must have lost, as declared, thirteen million lire. According to numerous testimonies, the famous “pleasure parties” were held in that house. It is a house situated a short distance from the place where Montesi’s body was found.
The investigating magistrate managed to establish that in that house Montagna and some of his friends would get together and occasionally swim in the sea, completely naked, on the neighboring beach. And he established, and wrote in the pretrial brief, that various people had been in that house, for instance, “definitely, more than once, Montagna and Ana María Caglio; at least once, Montagna and Gioben Jo, and on another occasion Montagna himself, a friend of his, and two girls.”
In the arduous task of putting the cards in order, the magistrate then examined one of the most serious charges that had been made in the Montesi case: the destruction of Wilma’s clothing by the police. When the Muto trial was held, the editorial offices of Attualità were searched and a notebook belonging to the journalist Giuseppe Parlato was found. In one of his notes he said that in the course of a conversation with Signor de Duca, the latter revealed that a policeman had told him in May of 1953 that the day Wilma Montesi’s body was found, Piero Piccioni had gone to see the chief of police and handed over the clothing the corpse had been missing. After a painstaking investigation, the magistrate managed to identify a “Signor de Duca.” He was called Natal del Duca.
And Natal del Duca not only confirmed the above, but added something more: Wilma Montesi’s clothing had remained hidden for a while, but was then destroyed with the consent of the Montesi family. Del Duca then revealed the name of the police officer who had made the revelation. The officer was called to make a statement. And in the end, by virtue of the new testimonies, another charge was left floating in the air: not only had the clothes been destroyed, but also the garments found on the corpse were later substituted, with the consent of the family, to suggest that Wilma had not gone out dressed for a date.
At that tremendous charge, the magistrate ordered an analysis of the clothing that he was certain were the clothes found on the corpse. The analysis demonstrated that the content of sodium chloride found in the coat was considerably higher than that found in other garments. And he concluded: with the exception of the coat, none of the other garments had been immersed in seawater, unless they’d been washed or subjected to some other process that had eliminated the sodium chloride. Moreover, they were garments worn from usage, visibly deteriorated and stained in places. The magistrate thought it odd that Wilma Montesi would have changed to go outside, to put on deteriorated undergarments. So he called back the persons who saw the body on the beach and asked them, “What was the clothing like on Wilma Montesi’s corpse?” And they all responded the same way. The descriptions of the clothing seen on the corpse did not coincide with the characteristics of the clothing then in the magistrate’s power and analyzed by the experts.
Magistrate Sepe advanced the hypothesis that the corpse had really been undressed and the clothing substituted, with the agreement of some members of the Montesi family. The police commissioner of Rome, Severo Polito, was summoned to respond to that charge. And later for others.
The ex-commissioner of Rome, Severo Polito, began his defense saying that, actually, he had never paid much attention to the Montesi case. The investigating magistrate reviewed the files of the commissioner’s office and found some things that belied this assertion: among them, a copy of a press bulletin signed by Severo Polito, dated May 5, 1953. In that bulletin, never published by the newspapers, the commissioner said, “The news about the son of an unnamed, but clearly insinuated, high-ranking political personality is devoid of justification.”
On May 5 another communiqué had been given to the press, in which it was stated, “No investigation carried out since the discovery of the cadaver has enough validity to modify the result of the early investigations and verifications done by law.” That was the time when the hypothesis that Wilma Montesi had died accidentally while taking a footbath arose and was defended tooth and nail.
Besides, there was another piece of evidence proving that Severo Polito had taken a personal interest in the case. On April 15 he sent the chief of police a memorandum in which he confirmed once more the footbath hypothesis. In this memo it was taken as given that the girl had left her house at five o’clock sharp and had been seen on the train, where “she behaved like a perfectly calm, normal person.” The disappearance of some of her clothing was explained there: “The girl must have undressed to wade in the water up to her knees, as she had done in the past.” The magistrate demonstrated that the memo had three false statements: “In the past,” Wilma did not remove intimate apparel to bathe her feet; she did so in a swimsuit. She did not walk in water up to her knees; she only got her feet wet at the edge of the beach. And finally, she did not leave her house at five o’clock sharp.
At this stage of the investigation, the journalist Valerio Valeriani, of Il Giornale d’Italia, was summoned to give a statement to demonstrate the authenticity of an interview with Severo Polito, which was published in said newspaper. In that interview, the former police commissioner affirmed:
After the discovery of the body he had personally assumed leadership of the investigation.
The result of that investigation had confirmed the hypothesis of misfortune, based on solid elements.
Montesi suffered from eczema on her heels, which is why she had decided to submerge her feet in seawater.
As for the charges against Piero Piccioni, they were unacceptable, for he had demonstrated that the day the events occurred he had been in Milan.
Interrogated on his relationship to Ugo Montagna, former police commissioner Polito declared that he had met the gentleman after the death of Wilma Montesi. However, various testimonies demonstrated that they had a long-standing friendship. Furthermore, the former police commissioner did not know one thing: at a certain point in time when Montagna’s telephone calls were monitored, he held a conversation with the then police commissioner that was certainly not an indication of a recent friendship. That call was made on July 3, 1953, right after Montagna was summoned to answer questions for the first time. In the course of the conversation, Severo Polito told Montagna, as the brief reports:
“You are a free citizen and can do what you want. You saw that Pompei himself already excluded two things: the question of narcotics and the apartment. You’ll see…”
And then Montagna, maybe more astute than the commissioner, told him:
“Alright, alright. Can we meet tonight at 11? Or no, let’s do it this way: let’s meet at 9 and we’ll have dinner together.”
And Severo Polito responded:
“Splendid.”
Moreover, the magistrate demonstrated that some pages were missing from the notebook impounded by the police in which Wilma Montesi had transcribed the letter she sent to her fiancé on April 8, evidently torn out after the notebook had been confiscated. It was not possible to establish, however, who tore out those pages, or when or with what objective.
Severo Polito could not give any explanation for his statements related to Piccioni’s stay in Milan. Piccioni had not been in Milan, and what’s worse, he had never tried to defend himself by saying he’d been in that city.
“Such original acts,” says the brief, “were followed by many others: serious omissions, false proofs of nonexistent circumstances, distortions of nonexistent circumstances, distortion of serious circumstances, voluntarily invented mistakes, all of them aimed at frustrating the verification of the cause and the true mode of Montesi’s death and removing any suspicion and avoiding any investigation related to the person who from the first moment was indicated and then as the principal author of the crime…”
On June 11, 1955, two years after Wilma Montesi left her house never to return, Piero Piccioni and Ugo Montagna have been summoned to stand trial. The first must answer a charge of culpable homicide. The second, as an accessory. The commissioner, Severo Polito, must answer to the charges previously cited.
But over two years of investigations, obstacles, closures, and reopenings of the case, nine men were added to the list; another twenty persons have been put on trial, most of them for false testimonies.
The arduous task of inquiry by Magistrate Sepe clearly established that Wilma Montesi was away from her home for twenty-four hours. What did she do during those twenty-four hours? That is the great gap in the pretrial brief. In spite of twenty people being tried for giving false witness statements, none of them intended to clear up the mystery; no one spoke of having been or having known of someone who had been with Wilma Montesi during the night of April 9, while her father was looking for her desperately in the Tiber. The next day, when Angelo Giuliani received the telegram saying that his fiancée had committed suicide, Wilma Montesi was still alive. She must have eaten at least twice more before she died. But nobody knows where she ate those meals. Nobody has even dared to insinuate that they saw her on the evening of April 10, eating an ice cream cone. It is possible that next month, during the hearings, we’ll find out the other side of this mystery. But it is also very possible that we will never know.
Series of articles from Rome published on September 17 and 19–30, 1955, El Espectador, Bogotá