The Scandal of the Century Read online

  “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.”

  DOCTORESA PASSARELLI

  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.

  SAVED BY A THREAD

  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.

  “FROM HERE TO ETERNITY”

  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.

  The Reader Should Know

  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.

  THE TIME OF DEATH

  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.

  HERE THE ERROR BEGAN

  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?

  Twenty-Four Lost Hours in Wilma’s Life

  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 REVEALING CARMINE

  The autopsy by the new experts made it clear that the cadav
er 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.

  BY WAY OF EXAMPLE: A BUTTON

  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.

  FURTHERMORE

  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.

  SUICIDE TAKES NOTHING

  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.

  BIG GAME STEPS

  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.

  “LET’S GO THIS WAY”

  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.

  They Threw Her, Unconscious, into the Sea

  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.

  THERE WAS NO CARNAL VIOLENCE

  In consideration of her particular situation and the absence of other characteristi
c 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.

  THE VISCERA ARE NOT ENOUGH

  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.