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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.
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.
Lorena and her husband, Delfino Covezzi, were members of a cult that brought the children of Massa to local cemeteries at night in order to rape them, sell them to a band of pedophiles, and make them participate in human sacrifices. A horror story for the ages in a land where it seemed like nothing bad could ever happen.
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.
“My children weren’t the only ones to be taken away,” she told me. “Between 1997 and 1998, in Massa Finalese and Mirandola, social services took away fourteen . . . no, wait, fifteen . . . actually, sixteen children. All from families accused of the same things.”
“Finding the bad guy restores peace of mind,” Giuliana Mazzoni told me. She is a world-renowned professor of psychology who specializes in mass psychosis. “It restores the ability to live with oneself and not have to say, ‘It’s my fault.’”
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. This phenomenon has been studied for a long time in the rest of the world, but it remains underestimated, especially among psychologists who aren’t familiar with the research on the mnemonic functions of the brain.
