All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

Five children found the skull on the riverbank. It was midafternoon on a Saturday, and five thirteen-year-olds had gone looking for a place to fish. They found a nice thicket along the left bank of the Panaro River, at the point where it bends, just outside Finale Emilia going toward Modena.

He wrote in his report that it was a morphologically small cranium. The cranial vault had crumbled with the natural contours of the bone and showed no signs of trauma—nothing that could have been caused by a firearm. The lower jaw was missing; it had detached and fallen away during the decaying process. The front teeth had met with a similar fate, and two incisors and two canines were missing. Only the cusps of the remaining teeth, sharp and solid—along with a careful examination of the cheekbones—made it possible to estimate that the subject had been young. Probably female. Probably a child.

Beduschi took two pictures, declassified the skull and added it to the list of unidentified relics that the past, every so often, sends back to taunt the living.

The case of the Panaro River skull was opened and closed almost immediately. Beduschi didn’t give it another thought. But three years later, that human bone found a few hundred feet from the cemetery would turn up again. This time, in a story of anguish, tears, and death.

Signs along the road asked residents to avoid all physical contact, and the smell of euchlorine-based disinfectants filled the hot and humid air.

It was the story of Lorena Morselli, a kindergarten teacher in Massa Finalese, a little town outside Modena. Her life had been shattered by a lengthy trial in which she was accused of ritual satanic abuse and sexual violence against her four children, whom she hadn’t seen since they were little.

She spoke with a strong Bassa Modenese accent. French words dotted her speech when she became distracted: oui, voilà, bon, donc, attendez, alors, d’accord, mais non! Her tale wasn’t always linear. It was like the flight of a butterfly, winding and uneven. At times, she would pause her story and digress to a different scene that had just popped into her head.

To take on such a big story alone would have been too difficult, so I turned to one of my talented colleagues, a young journalist with great instincts named Alessia Rafanelli. Over the next four years, this story became our obsession.

But the old men sitting on the benches outside the Caffè del Teatro furrowed their brows and looked bewildered by my questions. Doesn’t ring a bell. Are you sure this happened here? In Mirandola? they asked. Ahhh, yes, I do remember something. But it was a long time ago. It happened in the Bassa, though, not Mirandola!

I talked to many people who had lived there for many years, but no one seemed to remember this story. It had filled the pages of the local papers week after week, but now it was just a hazy memory of something that had happened “out there” in that land of open fields, of commuter towns where Modenesi and Mirandolesi don’t like to venture, other than to find a good osteria every once in a while.

I arrived from the southwest, driving through a tree-lined, two-lane street flanked by fields and a canal. Right after the welcome sign on the right, I noticed an imposing abandoned building that was three stories tall and as long as a soccer field. Farther on, an extravagant castle in neo-Gothic style from the early 1900s, complete with towers and merlons, stood out from the houses and trees.

A white marble statue stood in the middle, an unknown soldier with his left hand over his heart, his gaze on the horizon beyond the rooftops: In remembrance of their sacrifice, Massa pays tribute to its fallen.

I couldn’t believe that such a monumental story, especially in a town of only four thousand people, had ended up in the dustbin of memory. Did they really not remember? Or were they pretending not to because they didn’t want to talk about it?

When Romano Galliera arrived in the late 1970s, Massa Finalese was a small village bursting with opportunity. The factories near Modena were growing, and they needed laborers. The Bellentani meat processing plant at the edge of town was crawling with workers, and anyone who needed a job could always find someone willing to give them one.

Romano traversed the four corners of Ferrara, Modena, Mantua, and Rovigo in search of honest jobs and unsavory ones alike. The area is known locally as the Bassa, a flat, clay-rich part of the Pianura Padana that runs from the peaks of the Reggiano Apennine Mountains to the Comacchio valleys on the Adriatic Sea. It’s a plain of fields, swamps, Po River tributaries, and farms that from above looks like an immense tapestry of tens of thousands of uneven threads.

A local builder needed manpower to fulfill a series of contracts in Saudi Arabia and Southeast Asia. The desert was suddenly teeming with money—the oil boom of the late 1970s had created a need for roads, bridges, and the workers to build them.

It was a two-story building on a dirt road in rural Massa Finalese, where they shared the bathroom and kitchen with an immigrant family from Albania. The building was old and isolated, impossible to see from the main road. The dense fog of the Bassa could quickly turn any landscape into a spectral vision. It was so thick that for most of the year, residents said it could be cut with a knife.

On the façade above the gate was a red emblem of Saint Francis between two wolves. Fiat pax in virtute tua et abundantia de manibus tuis, it read.

She swung back and forth between the certainty that nothing bad had ever happened to her and the doubt that in some remote corner of her memory, there was a box she wasn’t brave enough to open. A box that contained something bad. And the women who were now taking care of her with so much love were asking her to unburden herself of it.

The main path led to a church similar to the one Dario had mentioned. It contained one large room with a small altar. A modest chandelier was hanging overhead. Pagano noticed an opening along the left side, where the gravedigger’s equipment was stored. It led to a series of interconnected rooms—the charnel house. Inside were an old wooden coffin with a crucifix on its lid and a few caskets.

But these weren’t the main reasons why people liked him above other priests. This was the heart of Emilia Rossa, Red Emilia, a land of hard work and even harder workers, and Don Giorgio was a man of the people. He didn’t just stand behind an altar reciting sermons and blessing souls. He rose at the crack of dawn, climbed into his truck, and earned his living grinding away the miles until nighttime, just like everyone else. The trucker-priest, that’s what they all called him.

Whenever he brought food and second-hand clothing to Igor and Barbara, his volunteers would see him raise his eyes to the heavens. Al dis na vrtà neanc per sbali, he would say of Romano. He doesn’t tell the truth even by accident.

We braved the whipping rain that had suddenly struck the plains and drove to a small church, the longtime headquarters of Finale Emilia’s priest. Don Ettore Rovatti was an older man with a pleasant manner. He knew the case better than anyone. He’d followed it from the start. Meeting him was a real turning point. Don Ettore was the living archive of the trials and of everything that had been done, said, and written about them.

Don Ettore believed that the case was a hoax. The five trials that came of it resulted in several convictions, but they never proved anything except for the existence of an ancient war, now being waged on the backs of children, by the state against the church. Emilia Romagna represented the ideal place for such a clash, according to him, because past Communist administrations had infused an insensitive anticlerical ideology into the region’s welfare and social services systems.

“These people want to destroy the family, just as Communism wanted to destroy private property. These AUSL psychologists and social workers want to prove that God, poor thing, doesn’t know how to do his job. They think they know better than the Lord.”

Reports of sexual abuse, whether true—as prosecutors alleged—or false—as Don Ettore maintained—couldn’t be boiled down to a power struggle between Communists and Catholics, no matter how prominent that struggle had been in the postwar era.

Federico was respectful and cordial, almost to a fault. All our phone calls had started and ended with I’m sorry to have bothered you. It was as if he was afraid to annoy or even hurt someone with his mere presence. Every time we talked, he compulsively raised both his hands and shrugged, as if trying to relieve us of the weight of his words. He’d preface every sentence with If I remember correctly or Please excuse me, but I really don’t remember. He was a man who felt like a burden, always and to everyone.

On April 10, 1998, the prosecution closed the case. Romano, Adriana, and Igor Galliera, Rosa and Fredone, and Federico Scotta were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to thirteen years. Dario’s and Elisa and Nick’s parents lost custody of their children.

Dio boia. Mi a so un putanièr, un làder, ma non so brísa un pedofil, he’d told a friend. Fucking hell. He’d committed plenty of sins in his life, but he’d never laid hands on a child.

Santo and Maria Giacco had moved to the Bassa from the Naples area in 1976. Santo was born in Afragola, Maria in Casavatore, two very poor towns blighted by the Camorra.

After all, they’d been living in an upside-down world where the people who were supposed to love and protect them were actually trying to hurt them. And even though they were old enough to distinguish between right and wrong, they still didn’t have all the intellectual and emotional tools to understand and articulate what had happened.

The key was to insist. Sometimes by asking softly, sometimes more forcefully. But insist nonetheless. The first revelations would be hesitant, almost imperceptible. Then the terrible and shameful tales would pour out. And their parents, who tried to seem so proper in AUSL meetings, would be outed for what they really were. They called it “recovered memory therapy,” and it was widely used by psychologists at the Children’s Institute and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States.

Court experts had evaluated the children’s statements with a method called criteria-based content analysis, which is used to ascertain the reliability and truthfulness of abuse victim testimony. It uses a set of indicators, including logical structure, spontaneous correction, self-deprecation, and quantity of realistic details, like descriptions of physical sensations tied to the abuse. These evaluations also confirmed Dr. Donati’s interpretations.

Just two years before, in February 1996, Belgians had learned about Marc Dutroux, the monster of Marcinelle. He was arrested with his wife for raping six girls, four of whom had died. His case was a worldwide story, and shocking details continued to emerge in the months following his arrest. Dutroux had already been arrested in 1985 for kidnapping and raping five teenagers, and although a court had sentenced him to thirteen years in solitary confinement in 1989, he was released in 1992.

The authorities’ investigations had been so superficial and so lacking as to create the legitimate impression that they were the accomplices and enablers of a homicidal maniac.

“You often talk about the Devil,” she said. “Maybe you saw him somewhere?” Margherita spread her fingers and looked her straight in the eye. “Finally, you get it.”

And if they’d been able to force a child to commit such a vile act, they must have done it themselves, too. Pagano and his colleagues started rooting through missing person archives. But if the victims were foreigners, as it seemed they were, it was going to be very hard to find them.

The old Bellentani meat factory is a complex of buildings as long as a soccer field. It rises along the Provinciale 468, by the southwest entrance to Massa Finalese. It is separated from the two-lane road by a canal. From the ’50s until the end of the ’70s, it provided jobs for hundreds of men and women. “World-famous deli meats,” according to an old midcentury commercial,

I went in with Alessia one morning in February, bypassing the rusty metal fence erected to keep out local miscreants. The complex was unstable, and another tremor could easily cause the floor to cave in or the roof to collapse. Silence reigned over its spare and spectral halls, interrupted only by the sound of the broken glass and plaster under our feet. Mold and rust had long since taken possession of every corner.

After being taken to the cemetery and the abandoned meat processing plant, those poor creatures were cut into pieces and hung from hooks in the ceiling. Probably the same ones under which we were walking. We were in a big room on the ground floor, with a white ceiling illuminated by four windows that gave out onto the canal.

But it was still strange that nobody in town had noticed anything. The Bellentani factory is an imposing structure compared to the other buildings in Massa. And it’s only a few feet from a road where cars and trucks drive by at all hours of the day and night. Whoever met there would have had to light up the rooms with multiple flashlights. And lights bouncing off walls and windows in the dark nights of the Bassa would have drawn attention, even from a distance. Plus, the building is surrounded by houses, mostly single-family homes, all within a few hundred feet of it.

Even though the cemetery is on a tree-lined street that partially blocks the view from afar, the closest houses are a stone’s throw away from the southern wall of the cemetery. Plus, Via Albero is a two-lane road that leads in and out of town. The sidewalk by the cemetery is narrow, and the Devil worshippers would have been forced to form a long line.

And anyway, thirty people coming and going from such a place late at night, multiple nights a week, can’t go completely unnoticed. Especially in a town where rumors abound, and where everyone knows everything about everyone else. After a few days, even I, who’d grown up in Milan, a city of about 1.5 million people, had started to get used to the small-town dynamic.

Whenever I met a parent or relative of one of the removed children, I found that I knew many details about their lives, both true and rumored. Especially the more private ones. No one seemed to have escaped their own community’s cruel and systematic scrutiny, or risen above the perverse pleasure of commenting at the misfortune—disgrassie—of others.

Could it be that the town’s great malicious, prying eye that sees all had missed those bizarre nighttime gatherings?

The Castello delle Rocche is in the old town center and is surrounded by dozens of apartment buildings and businesses—bars, shops, pharmacies, restaurants. The neighborhood topography is typical of any old town, with narrow alleys that make it almost impossible for groups of oddly dressed people to pass unnoticed.

As in Massa, the Finale Emilia cemetery is on the edge of town. It is also not far from the Panaro River. But it is also surrounded by houses. A pink house is clearly visible from the internal courtyard of the cemetery. Its windows look out onto the expanse of tombstones.

Nothing at all. As if whoever went there at night to dig and churn up earth, and to slit human and animal throats, had left everything just as it was before.

The Panaro River flows just six hundred feet from the cemetery. That was where, one Saturday three years before, in 1995, five boys from Finale Emilia had chanced upon a skull while fishing. That skull had meant nothing to the district attorney at the time, but somebody remembered it, and they were going to use it to help connect the dots in this horror story.

Despite long and expensive investigations across the territory and home searches of suspects, no evidence was turned up, at least nothing that seemed relevant to the case. A few pornographic magazines and videos, a pair of boots with heels, an old Polaroid, but never a weapon or a trace of blood or photos or videos that showed acts of pedophilia or snuff films set in cemeteries.