Posted by On July 10, 1955, on the shore of Lake Albano in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the naked, beheaded body of a woman was found. She was Antonietta Longo, a Sicilian maid of almost 30 working in Rome, probably killed on July 5 after writing to her family that she was about to get married. Her head was never found and the killer has never been identified. Her watch is kept at the Criminology Museum in Rome.
Antonietta Longo was a 30-year-old woman found completely naked and beheaded on the shore of the lake at Castel Gandolfo. To this day no one knows who committed this brutal murder.
Antonietta Longo
Antonietta Longo was born on July 25, 1925 in Mascalucia, in the province of Catania, Sicily, but had moved to Rome to find work and save some money.
For several years she had worked as a maid in the home of Dr. Cesare Gasparri. Her sisters and acquaintances remember her as a quiet, dreamy girl, who spent her free Sundays in the meeting places of maids, students and soldiers. Her friends described her as a decent person, but said that in recent months she had been acting strangely and claimed to have money problems.
A few months before she disappeared she had withdrawn all her savings, 331,000 lire, a large sum at the time.
On April 4 she had left a suitcase in a locker at Rome’s Termini station. On June 24 she bought another suitcase, clothes and linen, and on the 26th asked her employers for a month’s leave. On June 30 she collected a letter held at the post office. On July 1 she left the house with a train ticket to Sicily, but never went to the station: instead she spent a few nights in a guesthouse.
On July 4 she left the second suitcase at the Termini left-luggage office and on July 5, at 6 pm, she posted a letter to her family in Rome. She wrote that she had found love and was about to get married. Sadly, though, a few hours after sending the letter Antonietta would not find love, but death.
The discovery of the body
On July 10, 1955 Antonio Solazzi and Luigi Barboni decided to take a boat trip on Lake Albano. They stopped on the shore in an isolated spot, near Acqua Acetosa.
Solazzi saw the naked body of a woman, beheaded, badly decomposed and with several stab wounds. The only thing she was wearing was a wristwatch. The upper part of the body was covered with a copy of Il Messaggero dated July 5.
The two were so frightened that they only informed the authorities two days later, on July 12. The Carabinieri established that the woman, aged between twenty-five and thirty, had been stabbed several times in the abdomen and back and finally beheaded.
The autopsy revealed that she had had an abortion shortly before her death. According to the medical examiner, moreover, the head had been removed with a technique that only a doctor or an anatomy expert would know, so it was thought the killer was a doctor.
Forensic tests showed that she had been beheaded right where she was found, because the ground beneath her was soaked with blood to a depth of 12 centimeters.
All the newspapers covered the discovery, but the victim’s identity remained a mystery. The decomposition made it hard even to take fingerprints. Self-styled mediums and fortune tellers joined the investigation too, without any result.
The identification
The only real clue was the wristwatch: a very unusual Zeus model, made in only 150 pieces. The Carabinieri went around the jewelers of Rome and the surrounding area and cross-checked the information with missing person reports. That led them to a maid who had never returned to the Gasparri home.
Her sisters recognized her from some details of her hands and feet, and a comparison with fingerprints taken at the Gasparri home confirmed that the body was indeed Antonietta Longo’s.
The investigation
It emerged that between July 4 and 5 Antonietta had met a man and that, a few days earlier, she had asked a bar cashier to phone a certain Antonio. She had also been to a tailor with a man to order a dress, and years earlier she had been engaged to a clerk at the Air Ministry. Other suitors and men she had been involved with were identified, some of them shady, but there was no trace of the man she was supposed to marry.
The owner of a trattoria said that on July 5 he had rented a boat to a couple who never came back to the jetty. The next day the boat was found in the reeds, with only one oar.
Investigators suspected a married man who had seduced her to swindle her and then killed her. Her suitcases, full of a bridal trousseau, were found at the Termini depot, but there was no trace of the money. The alleged fiancé, Antonio, was also questioned, but there was not enough evidence to charge him. The case was soon closed and Antonietta was buried in the cemetery of Mascalucia.
Later leads
Two years later an inmate at Regina Coeli prison accused his brother-in-law, Giuseppe Bucceri, claiming he was used to swindling women by promising to marry them and had once threatened to cut off a woman’s head. But this lead also proved unreliable.
In 1971 some anonymous letters arrived, one at the Gasparri home and two to the Attorney General of the Rome Court of Appeal. According to them, Antonietta had bled to death during an abortion forced on her by her fiancé, a civil pilot at the head of a smuggling ring, who was already married.
The abdominal wounds were supposedly meant to hide the traces of the procedure, while the head had been cut off and dissolved in acid to prevent identification. The alleged fiancé was tracked down, but once again there was no proof and the case was closed for good.
The head has never been found. In 1987 a fisherman found a human skull in the lake and it was thought that, after 32 years, it might finally be Antonietta’s, but tests showed it belonged to a man.
The case caused such a stir that street singers told the story in verse, and the 1958 film Il marito by Nanni Loy and Gianni Puccini, starring Alberto Sordi, refers to it. The watch and other objects found at the crime scene are still kept at the Criminology Museum in Rome. Antonietta Longo’s murder remains one of the greatest mysteries in Italian crime history.
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