Spring.
Since the beginning of May, black clouds full of water have appeared over the sky of Turin almost every day. They fall like long shadows over the city, plunging it into darkness and exploding in a symphony of thunder and lightning. Torrential rain turns the streets into raging rivers that sweep away parked cars, topple trees, and knock out electricity in entire neighborhoods. It seems like today’s history but it’s 1977.
In an internal page of La Stampa on 22 May it is estimated that that month of bad weather, in Turin and its province, caused damage amounting to 12 billion lire at the time just for public works. The damage to private homes, agriculture and industry is incalculable. In the same sheet there is an article dedicated to an event which, due to its gravity, does not look out of place next to the devastation led by Mother Nature.
Mysterious deaths and bad weather in La Stampa of 22 May 1977.
Tell about Mr Giacomo Giangola which is found walking on the hill, in Revigliasco, in Strada Maddalena. It’s the morning of May 21st and, in a ghostly silence, the only noise he hears is a dog barking furiously. Giangola follows the barking and sees that the animal is below road level, on a slope in the middle of the woods: it is attacking a very large plastic casing closed with a few turns of string.
The man doesn’t have time to open the bundle to see what’s inside when one of the ends pops out a woman’s head. You found a body that had been there for a few days, as you testify the face that has been rendered completely unrecognizable by the mice.
The first findings on the body speak of a girl around 27/30 years old dressed in a white skirt, a lilac blouse and a light blue denim jacket. She wore gods long leather boots and no documents were found on her but only a purse with 3500 lire and a metal Madonna.
Think of a prostitute who did not want to satisfy the particular requests of a client and who, for this reason, ended up in that ravine with her skull smashed.
In the absence of concrete clues, witnesses and the identification of the victim, the Carabinieri notice that inside one of the boots he was wearing there is a label with the writing “Alparo”.
Having verified that they had recently been resoled, the investigators began to beat all the shoemakers in the city. The right one is located in via Ormea: “Yes, of course I recognize the boots. Alparo is a girl’s surname, I wrote it. Beautiful, brunette about 15/16 years old, she lives around here”.
After a short search, it turns out that the surname is actually Alparone and that there is a family called that at 124 via Ormea.
The investigators knock on Alparone’s house and, after a few questions, discover that the daughter, Maria Piadisappeared on May 16th.
His parents had reported his disappearance to the police, even though the teenager often left home and returned a few days later.
A student with a turbulent character, she had failed in middle school and was attending a two-year remedial course in a private institute.
For the rest, the typical experience of someone who turned 15 a few months ago: friends, their first cigarettes, a couple of naive crushes. At the sight of the boots, her mother recognizes them but she does not want to believe that the disfigured corpse is her little girl’s. She had read in the newspaper that they had found a thirty-year-old on the hill, perhaps a prostitute or a drug addict, nothing to do with “Mary”.
He is only convinced when he is recognized in the morgue and after a dental examination reveals that the deceased had not yet erupted her wisdom teeth: it is Maria Pia.
The building where he lived was turned upside down and was found in a cellar a large hammer with a blood-stained handle and head. Other dried vermilion stains on the ground and, in addition to several pornographic magazines, also a few meters of twine identical to that used to bundle the body. 13 people living in the building were arrested and the Carabinieri choose to interrogate a young man who had immediately shown suspicion.
He is a 26-year-old mechanic, a big man who spends his days in the courtyard of the building fixing up scooters: his name is Alessandro Valle. Some of Maria Pia’s school friends reported that on the afternoon of May 16 they went with the victim to Valle’s house and that, while they chatted in the kitchen, Alessandro had gone down to the cellar and that Maria Pia had followed him. After twenty minutes, the boy came back up alone and said that his friend had had to leave. When cornered, around 3 in the morning on May 24, Valle confesses. “I’ve always had big problems with women. Mary was young, pretty, always smiling at me. On Monday the 16th she came to me in the afternoon with other friends. They all had scooters because they know I know what I’m about. She’s always next to me , slightly provocative. I went to the cellar to get a wrench to unscrew an engine bolt and she followed me down there in the dark. I only saw her big eyes staring at me. I tried to hug her rejected. So I tried not to let her escape but she just didn’t want to hear of it. She struggled and hit her head against the wall.”
Alessandro Valle
The ending of this deposition is probably even worse: “When I felt the blood dripping onto my hands too I thought he shouldn’t be suffering. I finished it off with a hammer. I covered her with some bags I had in the cellar and immediately went back to her and told her friends that she had come home”. Then he continues: “During the night I took that bundle and put it on my shoulders. I was thinking of going to the Po and knocking it down. When I arrived at the Isabella bridge I glimpsed a citizen of the order. I was afraid. I threw Mary’s body wrapped in plastic bags behind some bushes. I thought about stealing a car. I took a “500”, removed the front seat and went towards the hill. I didn’t have precise ideas. Once I arrived at the “Bastian Contrario” restaurant I left the car and with Mary’s body on my shoulders I walked hundreds of metres. That forest seemed ideal to hide everything. I threw it there”.
Not satisfied, the next day he calls one of Maria Pia’s uncles, trying to imitate his falsetto voice: “I’m Mary. I’m in Milan. Tell my family not to worry but I’m not coming back”. The subsequent events are frenetic.
Having ended up in prison, on May 29th Valle attempted to commit suicide by cutting his wrists. He doesn’t succeed and, when he wakes up in hospital, he changes his story: “I was threatened with death by two hooded individuals who forced me to go down to the cellar where Mary’s lifeless body was. They forced me to pack up her body, take it up the hill and throw it down. I confessed because in the barracks a man in plain clothes told me that by doing this I would get away quicker”.
The identity of all these people, of course, remained unknown.
Indicted for voluntary homicide aggravated by kidnapping for the purpose of lust, in January 1980 Valle was sentenced, thanks to his semi-insanity, to 27 years. In the reasons for the sentence we read about a boy linked to his mother by a childhood relationship and who had known the victim for a while.
He had wanted to have an approach with her for a long time and this was the only time he had found himself close to her with no one around. He tried to rape her, she resisted but that 125kg giant overpowered her. He killed her to prevent her from speaking and committed a murder born not from a fit, but from a “repugnant rationalism”.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
