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The beheaded woman of Castelgandolfo
MURDERER: unknown
VICTIM: Antonietta Longo
PLACE AND DATE: Castelgandolfo, July 1955
MATERIAL EVIDENCE: victim’s personal effects
PROVENANCE: Velletri, Public Prosecutor’s Office, 1964
On the morning of 10 July 1955, the headless body of a woman was found on the shore of Lake Castelgandolfo. The police doctor established that before being decapitated the woman had been stabbed repeatedly in the stomach, chest and back. Her head, which was never found, was also cut off by the same expert hand.
The body was that of a woman of between 25 and 30 years old, around 5 ft 4 ins tall, shapely, tanned, with red nail varnish on her fingers and toes. On her right wrist she was wearing a white gold Zeus watch. Next to the body the Carabinieri found a key ring, a triangular earring, and part of a photo of a man and a woman arm-in-arm. The description of the body found on the shore of the lake matched that of a housemaid who had been reported missing by her employers, the Gasparri family, at the end of June.
A comparison between the fingerprints found at the Gasparri home and those of the victim and the measurements supplied by the young woman’s dressmaker allowed the police to identify the headless body. The victim was Antonietta Longo, born in Mascaluccia, in the province of Catania, on 25 July 1925. The murder squad reconstructed the last few days of the victim’s life: a couple of months earlier, after withdrawing all her money from her post office savings book, she had left two suitcases containing clothes at Termini station in Rome, and had then asked her employers for a month’s holiday. On 30 June she had collected a letter from the poste restante, and the following day she had disappeared. The key to the mystery may have lain in the contents of the letter, which was, however, never found. On the evening of 1 July, Antonietta had gone out at 8.30 with a ticket for Mascaluccia in her pocket, but instead of going to the station she had spent a few nights in a pension. On 5 July, presumably the day she was murdered, she posted a letter addressed to her family with the news that she would soon be married. The motive of Antonietta Longo’s death and the murderer’s identity remained a mystery, but she was long remembered as the “Beheaded Woman of Castelgandolfo”. Her body was buried in the cemetery at Mascaluccia.
