All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

Her three oldest children confirmed their cousin’s account, accusing Lorena of psychological violence, kidnapping, rape, and murder in cemeteries, where she and her husband forced the children to watch and actively participate in all manner of crimes.

He was impulsive, agitated, erratic. He often turned around suddenly, without paying attention, hitting whoever was near him with his backpack. He paired sentences that had no logical connection to each other. His classmates started to give him a wide berth. He became distracted in class or interrupted lessons, forcing teachers to move him to the front row. Rita Spinardi, one of his teachers, often had to snap him to attention. They called him a little straminato, a Mantuan dialect term used to describe

someone with their head in the clouds.

But then he changed his mind. Giorgio One, the mayor in the tunic, the sadistic rapist at the helm of the band of pedophiles, was none other than Don Giorgio Govoni. It had to be him. The monster. Everything made sense to the investigators. That’s why the priest was so kind to those dunces, who didn’t even deserve welfare assistance, who didn’t even go to church, and who resold donated food in order to buy cigarettes while their children roamed the streets in rags. Something in that family must have caught his eye: a little boy.

According to him, those sixteen children were taken away because of a witch hunt that rivaled the Inquisition of the fifteenth century, though with a different goal in mind, that of proving that the values imparted by the family—the most sacred Christian institution—are inferior and less effective than those taught by the state. I wasn’t convinced. 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. I didn’t know all the details of the case yet, but I expected that the logic behind it would either be simpler and more linear, or much more complex and multifaceted, than what I was hearing from this elderly priest in black garb, with a kind expression.

According to expert witnesses, the boy didn’t have much of an imagination. He also had “no psychopathological signs,” and while his stories were littered with gaps, hesitations, and reconsiderations, prosecutor Andrea Claudiani managed to convince the judges that he was credible.

“They’re Everywhere, Let’s Find Them!”

They weren’t children. They were cattle for the slaughter. Someone told her that they were the Satanists’ children. They probably weren’t registered and were raised in isolation so they could be abused and sacrificed without anyone noticing their absence.

I couldn’t believe it. If anyone in that area might have seen something happen there at night, it would have been her. Why hadn’t anyone taken the time to knock on her door? Hadn’t Margherita identified the area as the sect’s epicenter? When she went there with Dr. Donati and investigators, she’d pointed to the precise spots she remembered being taken to by Santo and the Satanists.

A psychologist from the center immediately warned Viola’s wife that this was a case of sexual abuse, probably by the father. The woman needed to leave her husband right away and move the girl to a protected location, otherwise she’d be considered an accomplice and risk losing her daughter. The woman knew her husband was innocent, but she panicked and followed the psychologist’s instructions.

What the actual fuck??

It asked parents not to discuss the case with anyone outside their family circle. But the parents spoke to their children and to each other, starting a domino effect. A rumor started to circulate that in Manhattan Beach alone, which at the time had only around thirty thousand residents, 1,200 children were victims of satanic ritual abuse.

The Kellers were convicted in 1992 after a six-day trial. They received forty-eight years in prison. The truth came out much later, in 2009. The young psychologist who’d examined “patient zero” and confirmed the suspicions of his mother and the police, told the Austin Chronicle that he’d been wrong. At the time, he didn’t have enough experience to recognize what was in fact a perfectly normal clinical profile.

Lanning concluded his report by asking, “Are we making up for centuries of denial by now blindly accepting any allegation of child

abuse no matter how absurd or unlikely?”

“Why don’t I ever see you? What’s your name?” “Monti.” “What’s your first name? What is it?” “Ines.” Soon after, Dario accused her, too. He’d seen her in the cemeteries in Massa Finalese. She’d even threatened him once. And a man with a goatee and longish hair with gray streaks had particularly agitated Dario.

This was his version of events. He’d only ever tickled Barbara. Nothing else. Everything Dario had said had come from his imagination. Or from someone else’s.

What all these experts seemed to overlook was that the children’s stories could have been contaminated in some way. Someone could have planted a seed in their memories. It then blossomed and grew over time until it devoured their real experiences, substituting them with something that was partially or completely artificial.

“Eyewitnesses who point their finger at innocent defendants are not liars, for they genuinely believe in the truth of their testimony . . . That’s the frightening part—the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts,

is not necessarily the truth.”

Professor Loftus had been impressed by a survey where 22 percent of therapists claimed they encouraged their patients to “let the imagination run wild” in order to recover memories of past trauma.

One side urged caution, preferring the use of interview techniques that prevented the risk of creating false memories—questions that were open rather than suggestive. The other argued that this approach tended to favor the abusers at the expense of the victims.

CISMAI responded to these accusations in kind. They weren’t the real threat to children. The real threat were the psychologists who put the rights of adult abusers and potential pedophiles above the rights of children. From their point of view, the Carta di Noto didn’t guarantee the safety of the victims.

Ziroldi admonished him. “The beach is getting further away, buddy . . .” This made Dario seek reassurance. “So, when I’m done with everything, I can go?” “Yes, you can go, you can go to the beach then.” Their urgency was palpable. As was their frustration whenever Dario became distracted. “The faster you tell us, the sooner you

can go to the beach, got it?” continued Ziroldi. Dr. Cavallini tried to prod him. “The sea is so blue there!” she said. And then Ziroldi added, “But first, you have to help me out, buddy, or else . . .”

Scum.

“Patient zero,” the voice that launched a

thousand hurricanes, was questioning himself and doubting what he’d said. It was the last thing we were expecting to hear. Now

that Dario could look at the past with the eyes of an adult, he seemed to hav...

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The monstrous mouth of that emotionally and psychologically unstable woman had launched police squadrons upon entire families, violently tearing them apart. Dario’s words were used to divert and devastate the lives of others. Even his parents had been turned inside out as the police searched for clues.

Here they were again. The insinuations. Suggestive questions. Dr. Farci was seeking confirmation, overlooking all the absurdities coming out of the girl’s mouth—for example, that satanic rituals in cemeteries occurred “sometimes in the afternoon”—just so she could validate the thesis the psychologists had decided on beforehand.

Margherita had talked about touching. But the psychologist insisted. It couldn’t have been just that. They must have done more. In the end, Margherita gave in. They raped her. Questions like these showed that there was a diabolical mechanism at play, which explained a lot.

Seven, eight, ten years of life undone in the time it takes to go from breakfast to dinner. A world where there was nothing to hang on to, a world devoid of any reference points. Where had their family gone? Why weren’t their parents looking for them? Why weren’t they coming to get them? Their place had been taken by a woman. A doctor. Who, from the very first minutes of meeting her, used such strange and scary words. Problems. Safety. Protection. Veronica, Lorena’s daughter, put it nicely when she told the judge how Dr. Donati had justified taking her away from her family. “They immediately told me, ‘You’re safe. Now we have to understand from what,’ because I hadn’t said anything yet.”

Dr. Donati had recommended separating the four Covezzi children, claiming that it would be impossible to find a foster family that could look after them all and “also maintain a high level of protection,” especially after a sudden, urgent removal of minors on whom “we didn’t have any information.”

Dr. Donati, Dr. Gemelli, and social worker Maria Teresa Mambrini subjected the children to an intense schedule of meetings. But for four months, none of them accused their parents of anything. None of them remembered anything serious or traumatic happening at home. But the doctors insisted.

This blatantly contradicted everything her cousin Cristina and the other children had said about nighttime rituals. But soon after, Veronica’s memories returned. Yes, she’d also been late at night. They also did the Black Masses in the middle of the afternoon, “toward four thirty p.m., five p.m.,” right after school.

But the game of tall tales was gradually altering his perception of reality, transforming it into a grotesque horror movie where he was the main character and everyone wanted to kill him. He slid into a spiral of anxiety and paranoia. He had to be repeatedly reassured that the police were standing outside the door.

She moved quickly through friendships, telling people many different things about herself, some true and common among her peers, some dark and probably untrue. This led her classmates to distance themselves from her.

Translated into the words of Chiara Brillanti, a legal psychologist who worked as an expert witness in the Modena trials, “The psychologist must be the psychologist. They cannot be the police officer. They should not push the children to talk. They have to be a neutral figure.

Oddina Paltrinieri thought it was all about the money. She said it often. People had profited from those children—the foster families and especially the social workers and their superiors at AUSL. They were so certain they’d discovered the case of the century. They built an entire network around it, generating a ton of work, from consultancies with prosecutors and judges to training courses and research grants.

I never understood the mental mechanisms that led so many experts on this case to see what was invisible or unimaginable and completely miss everything that was right in front of their faces. Maybe I never will. They never questioned their assumptions. They carried on believing that this story went in only one direction despite the mountain of clues and warnings that pointed the opposite way. They focused on the words coming out of the mouths of babes. But after having run the gamut of the same experts, these children all gave similar versions of a story, and they all developed strong paranoia and anxiety even though they’d been promised that talking would free them of the weight they were carrying. How did this happen? I’ll probably never find out. But after years of research, Alessia and I came to the conclusion that once the assumption of guilt had been established, it would have been very difficult to backtrack and admit even the smallest error.

I was baffled. This man had put a young and inexperienced psychologist on a case that required specialized knowledge and a high level of professionalism. He validated her work. He was present during the majority of the removals.

If I hadn’t been looking at her throughout our meeting, if Marta had only been a voice, I would have thought she was telling me someone else’s story. I detected no trace of pain in her tone. She was completely detached, as if her past had become a little dot in the universe, a star that was light years away from her. No hesitations, no anger. She was the same girl who, twenty years before, sitting in front of a psychologist, wearing a red sweater, had talked about being abused as if she were going through her homework.

It was the effect of the powerful benzodiazepines she took in the evenings before going to bed. The chemicals induced an artificial sleep that helped her get through the night. Otherwise, she’d wake up with a start and find herself sobbing into the pillows three or four hours before her alarm was set to go off.