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[Assistant] And where you can say there's motive for murder, you can also say there's motive for him to end his life. He had just lost a ton of money.


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[Assistant] According to Nana at least. And she was losing his...


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[Assistant] Thank you to Dave because Dave is the one that found this one. Oh man. It was interesting.


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[Assistant] Almost positive he shot that gun because of the gunpowder residue.


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[Assistant] And I just don't know if he meant to kill himself, or if he meant to kill Nan, or if he meant to kill both of them.


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[Assistant] I just don't know. I don't know. But what a story, huh?


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[Assistant] That's a wild tale. And with that, we hope you keep listening. And we hope you keep it weird. But not so weird that you lie about a bunch of stuff in the press because like, ew, that's annoying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My friends. Yeah, Elena is back and better than ever. You never really went anywhere. Thank you. Uh, but you know, this is, uh, a little far away from the spooky season, um, silliness of it all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I would say, uh, cause you know, like spooky season we got, you know, we like to go a little more haunted, a little more...


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[Assistant] You know, you want to hear the real stuff too and I'm going to get very real on you today. Oh god. Uh, we're going to be talking about the story of Leonardo Cianciulli. Hmm.


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[Assistant] Who is also referred to as the soap maker of Correggio.


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[Assistant] I don't know how I personally feel about that. Yes, and whatever your first thoughts were when I said that. Yup.


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[Assistant] Yep, correct. Uh, also I'd like to just give a quick little trigger warning here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She has a very tragic story, as does her mother. So like traumatic upbringing. And uh, there's some sexual assault in here, there's some like trauma, it's...


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[Assistant] The whole beginning is pretty rough. There's also going to be some talk of, um, uh, pregnancy loss. Okay. And, you know, that, that kind of thing. So just if that's not really your, your bag, then I think you can skip a little ways through and we'll get through all that and then you can get into even more horrible things. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeaah, this is gonna be a rough one, so just everybody sit tight. So, Leonardo Cianciulli, her story begins tragically with her mom's story, to be honest. Uhm, her mother, Amelia Denolfi,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, she was born in Montella Avellino, which is a small village in the south of Italy.


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[Assistant] Uhm, Amelia grew up as the teenage daughter of one of the wealthier families in the region. Uh, she grew up


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[Assistant] Very well off, had everything she needed, very easy life relatively at the time.


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[Assistant] Uhm, she grew up to be an attractive girl, she was kind, she was well-liked by her neighbors and her friends, like really just kinda had it all grown up. Yeah. And in the summer of 1893, as Amelia was coming into adulthood,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, she again came from a wealthy family, high social status, so there was an understanding in that time that she was only really going to be entertaining


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[Assistant] Yeah, so this kept certain men out of the running. Certain men like Mariano Cianciulli.


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[Assistant] Uh, unlike Amelia, Mariano was older, middle-aged. Uh, he was very impoverished at the time, and he was known around the village for his cruel, nasty, pigish nature. Fantastic! I did notice his last name though, and I'm nervous now. But...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He really liked Amelia. I don't like that. Uh, they had never met. He just liked how she looked. But he just knew her by sight and by reputation. That year, Mariano developed


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and again, they had a very large age gap. He was middle age, she was just coming into like, adulthood, which means like 17, 18. I was gonna say, right? Yeah.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and he knew very well that he had no chance in this whole courting of her. Cause he's impoverished. Exactly, he was impoverished, he was older, he was just totally out of everything. Uhm, but he took this as an opportunity to let his true piggish nature out.


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[Assistant] Because Ryan Green, the author of The Curse, a shocking true story of superstition, human sacrifice, and cannibalism.


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[Assistant] So one summer evening, Mariana, Mariano, remember, he's like stalking her, he's obsessed with her.


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[Assistant] He followed Amelia to a party she was attending with one of her suitors, and he waited outside this estate that she was in.


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[Assistant] Uh, he just lurked in the shadows, he drank and drank and drank. Oh no. And after several hours she came out of this huge estate, she said goodbye to her hosts, and apparently she started down the path alone, which I was kind of shocked to read that her suitor was not bringing her home. Yeah. But he was not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and she started down the path, I think it was pretty close by her house, I don't know if that had anything to do with it. She was being followed and she had no idea. Right. At first Amelia thought she was being robbed and she told whoever was attacking her that she had no money on her, but then she quickly realized...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It wasn't money that he was looking for. And he ended up brutally raping her outside in the dark.


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[Assistant] That is horrific. Yeah. When he was done with the assault, he just got up and walked away. What? Leaving her completely confused.


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[Assistant] Now Amelia at the time was, um, had a Catholic upbringing. And again, high social status, Catholic girl in the 1800s. This comes with a lot of stuff.


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[Assistant] At the time, she knew nothing of sex, other than that it was what two people did after they were married, and even then, you did it to procreate. That was it. So, she had no context for what had even just happened. Like, this was just so...


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[Assistant] This was so traumatic. It's traumatic anyways. And then there was all this confusion along with it. Right. That's the thing. Cause when that happens, like people have something


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[Assistant] You don't even know what this is. But you can feel inside of you that that's wrong. Yeah. And she also, because of this whole upbringing, she had come to believe that she committed a terrible sin. Oh god. This was her fault. She did it.


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[Assistant] And then they were, she felt it every time she had to walk around in the market or anywhere else in the village and see him.


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[Assistant] Cause she didn't say anything at first, cause she was feeling so much shame.


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[Assistant] And so scared and confused, so her feelings of shame only became heightened.


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[Assistant] They didn't respond how loving parents should respond, instead they immediately quote, threatened to go house to house visiting all of her suitors until they found the one who defiled her. Oh god. So she was terrified because uhm, who wants to do that?


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[Assistant] And now you're just having that shame that she's feeling spread around the entire town.


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[Assistant] So she came forward and said, oh, I know who did this. And this is how it happened.


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[Assistant] So in response, her parents had Mariano brought to the house and they confronted him. And as far as Amelia's parents were concerned, there was one option here. Marriage. He was gonna marry their daughter. Dude, that is...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And her parents immediately made arrangements for a priest to be brought to the house. They were married in a secret ceremony. And at this point,


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[Assistant] Amelia and Mariano had never spoken a word to each other. Of course not. Until he raped her in the dark.


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[Assistant] And now they're being forced to get married, and she's having his child. And she's gonna move into his home, I'm assuming? Yep, because after that wedding, she was sent to live in what he basically had a shack in like the worst part of the village.


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[Assistant] The home was completely unfurnished and quote, the bathroom was outside and shared with the others on the row of houses.


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[Assistant] So she, this is completely just like, turn, turn your lifestyle on its head. Talk about, so she's this confident, happy, loving,


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[Assistant] Well known in the community, well liked, wealthy, you know, of privilege and is walking around being courted by these men of similar status and then she goes through the most traumatizing thing you can imagine and her parents forced her to be


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he had no prospects of work. And instead he just ordered Amelia around at work, physically abused her, verbally abused her.


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[Assistant] Whenever she'd and also continued forcing himself on her. This is such a nightmare. This is beyond nightmare.


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[Assistant] Now, remember, she's pregnant. Right. Leonardo Cianciulli was born April 18th, 1894, and she was born after a long, very painful, very traumatic birth. Okay. That took a very large toll on Amelia.


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[Assistant] Uh, she lost consciousness on more than one occasion during the birth, like it was bad.


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[Assistant] Now from the moment that Leonardo was born, she was very unwanted.


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[Assistant] Uh, Amelia was still dealing with, she's a young girl and she's dealing with the aftermath of the trauma of sexual assault and still is being raped.


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[Assistant] And beaten. By this man. And dealing with courts to live with them.


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[Assistant] And so, she could not, she could not connect. And she didn't want to connect. She just...


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[Assistant] And it only got worse as Leonardo got older because again, her mother would ignore her completely, Amelia.


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[Assistant] Uh, but it was honestly preferable to the times that she paid attention to her because later Leonardo would say that she was frequently physically and verbally abused by her mother.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and her, and Amelia would criticize her all the time. Anything Leonardo did was criticized. And that took a big toll on her later.


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[Assistant] Because she would criticize and brutalize her for the smallest mistake.


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[Assistant] And the physical and emotional abuse that she suffered at the hands of her mother led to years of...


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[Assistant] I mean, loneliness, isolation, she had horrible self-esteem. And by the time she reached 13, and this is a trigger warning for suicide and suicidal thoughts.


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[Assistant] Uhm, she attempted to kill herself at home.


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[Assistant] Wow. Uhm, and she was found and stopped, but instead of looking at this and expressing sympathy or trying to, you know, empathize with her or anything,


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[Assistant] Oh my god. Which is literally unthinkable. That is, that's inexcusable.


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[Assistant] I can't, reading that my brain like wouldn't even take in the words. Wow. And a few years later she actually attempted again.


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[Assistant] And this time she attempted by swallowing glass. Oh god, Jesus. And it was, um, it was stopped again. It didn't, it was not, uh, it did not happen.


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[Assistant] Uh, so she was suffering, very much so, with her mother. And her father, Mariano, was basically nowhere to be found. He just, like, not that he would have been helpful. No, of course not. Um, he basically spent most of his time drinking with friends and would turn, return home in the middle of the night if at all. Anytime he was, he just was nowhere. And one evening,


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[Assistant] They actually, Amelia and Leonardo had to go out looking for him because they couldn't find him. And they found him passed out in one of his usual drinking spots, but he was totally unconscious and they could not wake him up.


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[Assistant] So, they didn't call the doctor, they just carried his body back to the house and put it in an empty room and he died there. Oh.


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[Assistant] So, not long after that happened, Amelia married again. This time she did marry a more respectable and kinder man. Oh wow. And she hoped that this whole thing was going to change how her


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[Assistant] Uhm, so, you know, she couldn't get back in her parents' good graces, couldn't get that social standing that Amelia was used to having and wanted back.


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[Assistant] You know, she figured she wasn't going to use her own skills. She wasn't going to use her own.


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[Assistant] Right. She was like taking, cause she wanted to get the fuck out of there. And so she eventually met this man named Raffaele Pensardi. Leonardo met this man. And eventually like fell in love with him. They had like an actual relationship. Okay.


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[Assistant] And he was a little older than her, nothing crazy. And he had what at the time would be considered a low status job. He was a registry clerk.


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[Assistant] And he proposed marriage, she happily said yes, and this meant that she was gonna get the fuck out of there, be free of her mother, but remember, she wrecked Amelia's plan. Uh oh.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so, she was pissed, and when she heard of the engagement, Amelia, quote, told her daughter that she had placed a curse on her in Pansardi for ruining her life for a second time.


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[Assistant] Had been abused her entire life and had been criticized. She had had her self esteem slammed down at every turn. So hearing this from her mother imprinted inside her and she left.


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[Assistant] With the thinking, I've been cursed and I'm going to live a life of tragedy because I did this. Jesus. So it turned out that when she left her mother's house to marry Raffaele, Leonardo would never see her mom again, which is for the best. Uh, but it didn't turn out well for anybody. Right. Uhm, you know,


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[Assistant] Emilia had done so much psychological damage, even though she never contacted her again and never saw her again to let her inflict more. It was in her. That influence was gonna be felt for the rest of her life. She had changed her fundamentally. And although Raffaele was, by all accounts that we could find,


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[Assistant] A very kind man who treated Leonardo very well, was patient, was loving. They had a very loving relationship. Yeah.


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[Assistant] A lifetime of abuse had left her waiting for the abuse to start.


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[Assistant] And so she was constantly paranoid about disappointing or irritating everybody.


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[Assistant] So she was just always on edge and always worried all the time. She probably had so much anxiety. And the abuse never came with Raffaelli. He never abused her, but she was always waiting for it.


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[Assistant] And it only grew as she got further into married life. She was just not able to accept this gentler environment and a partner that didn't criticize her.


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[Assistant] Exactly, and she would fall into emotional turmoil.


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[Assistant] Uhm, but he did do his best to be supportive and sympathetic. He did not turn on her. Like he, you know, he was there.


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[Assistant] And all of this was also exasperated by the fact that she was now having seizures.


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[Assistant] And she was physically abused. These could have been a result of that. Definitely.


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[Assistant] Yep, and she was, you know, through that lens, the various negative parts of her life, like the, you know, the negative emotions, all the crying, the anxiety, the seizures, the paranoia, uh, it all kind of made sense to her because she was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as far as she could tell, the curse was affecting her husband as well, because given her low social status, Raffaele's marriage to Leonardo was looked upon pretty poorly.


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[Assistant] Uh, get a promotion at work. He was always passed over because they had married her. They used that against her. That's so fucked up. Regardless of how long he had worked at a place.


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[Assistant] So desperate for any kind of guidance or any, anything here, Leonardo turned to the Romani community hoping that the things she had heard about them being able to, you know,


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[Assistant] Help you with these kind of things, like take the negative portions of your life and like help you turn them around, like tell you, tell you your future, help you manifest, all that good stuff. She was hoping it was all true. And she was like, I just need some guidance here. So one fall afternoon, she went to a local fair and she seeked out, uhm, a fortune teller who could help her. She, so,


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[Assistant] She had been feeling, you know, dealing with the seizures, dealing, she had headaches, she had crippling depression, anxiety, all this awful shit happening to her for months and months.


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[Assistant] And she was honestly at this point convinced that she was dying.


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[Assistant] And she just wanted someone to tell her, no, you're not. Right. And so she located this woman and the woman literally was walking her into the tent and Leonardo said, am I going to die? Is that what the curse is going to do? That's the first thing she said.


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[Assistant] And so the lady looked at Leonardo's palm and told her, no, you're not going to die. At least not anytime soon. Okay. And she said,


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[Assistant] If that was any relief, it was definitely short lived because you said you're gonna live a long life, but it will be a life full of sadness. You're going to outlive every one of your children.


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[Assistant] Oh god. Now this was in early 20th century Italy.


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[Assistant] It was pretty understood that she was going to want and eventually have many children. Yeah. That was part of the whole deal here. And this seemed like a very cruel premonition.


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[Assistant] of this curse that her mother has placed on her and now she's hearing this and she's going


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[Assistant] Oh shit, this is the curse. This woman's nervous system, I can't even imagine. I can't even fathom.


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[Assistant] And so after three years of trying, Leonardo became pregnant in 1920.


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[Assistant] Uhm, unfortunately, it was an immediate source of anxiety because of that.


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[Assistant] Lingering thoughts. And she's already got so much anxiety anyway.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and eventually the seizures returned because her anxiety got so bad and she had some falls, some accidental injuries because of the seizures. Right. And three months into the pregnancy she had a seizure that caused a fall and she had severe abdominal pain and bleeding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of her things was she wanted to be the exact opposite of her mother. And to be able to get that opportunity and see it through.


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[Assistant] Um, Raphaeli wanted to be supportive, so he was like, you know what?


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[Assistant] Nothing's keeping us here in Montello where we are. Let's relocate, let's put all this bullshit behind us, let's start somewhere new. So they packed up the things they had and they moved, they left Montello and they kind of bounced around to a couple of towns looking for work and somewhere to settle.


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[Assistant] And they finally went back to Raffaele's hometown of Loria Potenza in 1921. Okay.


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[Assistant] And, uh, they had had some temporary jobs that were along the way, so they had some money saved.


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[Assistant] And they were able to save enough to buy a small house in Loria. And they both found work.


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[Assistant] And they settled down and it seemed like it was a new start for them. Like then.


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[Assistant] But just a few months into starting their new life, her anxiety was starting to, you know, slip away. It was getting better. It felt like it was like, okay. The seizures were lessening because she wasn't as anxious. And soon after, she was like, you know what? Maybe he's right. Like, maybe this curse is bullshit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe we just needed a fresh start. We had to get the hell away from my mom. Mhm. And you know, like, maybe I don't need to worry about fate so much. Maybe I need to like, just create my own shit. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. A year later in 1922,


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[Assistant] She devoted every waking moment to this child, his health, his happiness.


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[Assistant] But she kept hearing that curse in the back of her mind and along with the premonition told to her by that fortune teller.


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[Assistant] And so she now had a whole host of new anxieties to start rolling around in her brain here because, I mean, any new parent


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[Assistant] The new anxieties that come with that are indescribable and aplenty.


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[Assistant] So for someone who is already suffering from


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[Assistant] A monumental amount of trauma and anxieties and depression and paranormal and fear.


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[Assistant] This is just unthinkable. A recipe for disaster. And it caused her to be hypervigilant and overprotective of Giuseppe.


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[Assistant] And so they were getting by on only Raffaele's paycheck and she didn't, even though she didn't want to be away from her son, she wanted to find a job because


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[Assistant] But the problem was that Leonardo didn't have a lot of marketable skills at the time and also she was a woman at the time. Uh, so she was at a pretty big disadvantage and so she was, she just took whatever job she could and she eventually found one as an after hours cleaner at a local tavern. Now when she was at work, she was just


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Plagued with fear and worry about what might happen to Giuseppe while she was away from him. And when she was home, she spent all her time just obsessing, micromanaging her son in order to protect him. And initially he was just like, oh, you know, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a lot of psychological issues happening here. Very much so. Obviously, that's going on that I'm not going to sit here and diagnose because I'm not a doctor, but like clearly there's other things going on here that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That abuse has played into, that all kinds of manner of things have played into. Definitely. And it's, now it's like, even though she's going a totally different route than her mother went. It's not a great route. It's also not a positive thing. It's like we're going, the pendulum's swinging too far the other way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but despite the fears and stress that motherhood brought and the physical demands of her work now, Leonardo and Raffaelli wanted more children. And unfortunately their attempts to have more children


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're kind of thwarted for a while because they had a lot of miscarriages over the next few years.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and they had multiple in a row, and finally...


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[Assistant] After some heartbreaks, she gave birth to two girls in a very short period of time, back to back.


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[Assistant] And then after that, a son came again. So now she's got two sons, two daughters.


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[Assistant] And each time she was like, you know what? Like, I'm that cur smurfs. Like, this is gonna be fine.


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[Assistant] But within a few years of them being born, the children began getting sick.


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[Assistant] And first her son, the youngest son, the one that was born more recently, not Giuseppe, was getting rashes.


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[Assistant] And they would get very severe and then one of the girls got a terrible cough.


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[Assistant] And this one daughter, her lungs were filling with fluid and she was coughing anytime she was laid down. So Leonardo would sit upright every single night holding her up so that she could sleep.


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[Assistant] That's also not helping with her mental health. Because now she's not getting sleep, she's so fearful that all this is gonna happen.


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[Assistant] And she did everything she could, and I'm sure Raphaeli did too, but she ended up passing away. Little girl. Uhm, just a few months later...


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[Assistant] In the era in which they died, there wasn't an autopsy or anything, you know, to say what happened to these children, because this was unfortunately a little common.


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[Assistant] This is tragic. She's lost two children in a very short period of time.


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[Assistant] The death of any child is incomprehensible and such a deeply traumatic experience that


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[Assistant] When you add like a curse and several deaths of children, the idea of a curse and all that.


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[Assistant] And there's no way, there's no autopsy to tell you that like this isn't a curse, this is like a congenital thing, this is some kind of hereditary thing, this is a, this is a SIDS kind of thing where you couldn't have avoided it, it's just, you know, like all this stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But whatever the real explanation was, as far as Leonardo was concerned, this is just proof of the curse.


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[Assistant] She was sure that this was just gonna continue happening and that it was going to come for Giuseppe eventually.


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[Assistant] So the incredible loss caused a bout of depression unlike anything that she had ever experienced before.


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[Assistant] And I mean, the anxiety ramped up, the seizures were now ramping up. She was in very poor health at this point.


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[Assistant] And you know, Raffaele was also struggling with the same grief, like as the father.


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[Assistant] But he was also trying to help her and trying to keep her from succumbing, essentially. Sounds like he really, really loved her. He did. He really stuck around and he really, he really loved her. He wanted her to be better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and so he was, he tried to like console her, and then he was like, you know what?


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[Assistant] Like this was a bad time in our lives, but again, we're of that era too, where he was like, let's have more children. Oh God.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and he's trying to fill a void in his own heart, you know, like it's all very sad and like very incomprehensible, truly, that's why I'm like, I can't even like put my own opinion in here because I can't even go there. And she was reluctant at this point because she was reluctant to tempt fate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But eventually they did try to get pregnant again and in a few years after that she did successfully deliver five healthy baby boys. What? Yeah.


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[Assistant] And there was no, from all the sources, there is no sign of abuse, there is no sign of, and her children, like, you know, there's no,


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[Assistant] Nothing that said that they were abused or killed or poisoned.


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[Assistant] There's also no autopsy around to... Yeaah. But there was no, like, Raffaele didn't claim that there was any kind of shenanigans going on. And they all died very young.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wow. I don't know what to think of it. I think it's, oh, uhm.


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[Assistant] Horrifying and staggering number of children to lose. And she obviously becomes a murderer.


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[Assistant] All I know is that all the sources are saying that it's without explanation.


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[Assistant] I mean, yeah, it's all tragic regardless. And later when she spoke about this, she was quoted as saying, almost every night I dreamed of small white coffins swallowed one after the other by Black Earth. Oh my god.


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[Assistant] So the grief drove her deeper and deeper into depression and despair, you know.


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[Assistant] And she's just becoming more paranoid, more anxious, more upset.


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[Assistant] It was so bad that like Giuseppe, you know.


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[Assistant] He couldn't let his guard down for even a minute with her. Like, she was on him.


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[Assistant] Of everything. I bet. And luckily at this point, thanks to the connections that Raffaele had made in the community through his job, cause he was a really hard worker and, like we said, a kind guy. Right. They found more work for her as an after hour cleaner at a local bank. Okay. So it was a, you know, a better environment, like she liked it better.


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[Assistant] And now she could focus on, hopefully focus on something else. And the job suited her for a time.


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[Assistant] And she didn't mind, you know, it was repetitive, it was kind of isolated, the hours and all that, but she didn't really mind it. Okay. The only complaint she really had was that after she had to pay out of her pocket for cleaning supplies. Oh, that's shitty. And after that she was left with very little. So it was like she was away from her son.


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[Assistant] And not really bringing home enough to really make it worth it. Right. So in an effort to change this, she started making her own soap.


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[Assistant] Even in 1930, banks keep meticulous books. They know when there's a discrepancy.


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[Assistant] And so when she came back to work the next afternoon, she was met by the police.


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[Assistant] The rest in the criminal charge were definitely a source of embarrassment and anxiety all by themselves. Of course. But then she quickly realized that by doing this to try to help her family, she could affect her family.


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[Assistant] Greatly with this. Most importantly, her son.


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[Assistant] And unlike her usual, you know, fears and anxiety and paranoia, this wasn't really unreasonable one to be worried about. No, that's legit. Because although Raffaele, like we said, he was well respected, well liked.


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[Assistant] Uhm, the shame and suspicion of this could have fallen back on him at his job where they could say he had something to do with this or knew about it.


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[Assistant] And she realized this, and she was like, oh shit, so in order to place as much distance between that happening and her,


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[Assistant] She went out of her way to make sure everyone knew that she did it by herself. That he had nothing to do with it. Rafael did not know about it. She said, I only did it because I was quote, seized by madness.


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[Assistant] But she made sure, like, he did not know about it. Yeah. Do not punish him for it. So she's clearing her husband's name. Yeah. Or trying to, at the very least. They did love each other. It sounds like it. That is one thing that I truly believe. Yeah.


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[Assistant] Now, she went before a judge in 19, uh, it was 1927, so when I said 1930, before I meant like almost 1930, not exactly.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and she was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in an institution that had once served as a nunnery and was still operated by the church.


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[Assistant] Now according to, uh, Genevieve Ortiz, who is the author of The Deadly Soapmaker of Correggio, the true story of Leonardo Cinchulli, uh, what would have been considered a very grueling sentence and mistreatment at the hands of nuns because it was not a nice place.


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[Assistant] Now, Leonardo went through her sentence, no incident, and was released a little over a year later. And when she got home, though...


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[Assistant] And after years of being super supportive and super patient and super understanding,


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[Assistant] He got a little resentful at that point. And he figured, and to him he was like, where has my patience gotten me?


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[Assistant] This is what happened. And according to Ortiz, for the first time in their marriage, he'd become openly critical of a mistake. And it's a hard one man.


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[Assistant] Given the shame that she, and you know, the turmoil that she brought to her family now, and the ways that her crime had affected, you know, everything.


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[Assistant] Like, we can't stay here. No way. So they relocated to La Cedonia Avelino and they hope to start over again.


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[Assistant] Now for the second time, they had uprooted themselves, they were gonna start a new life, but now...


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[Assistant] They have a sm- they have a child. Right. With them. So they can't sleep in strangers hay barns and like, you know, in exchange for a day's labor and all that, which is what they did the last time they relocated and it was just like adventure together as a couple. This is different. Now they have a child.


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[Assistant] So when they finally reached Lacedonia, uh, Raffaele found a clerical job and they were able pretty quickly to afford a very small house in a very rural village.


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[Assistant] It took a few months, but they settled in and once the move was behind them,


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[Assistant] Everything calmed down, the tension kind of chilled out, and she again found herself pregnant.


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[Assistant] Which just brought back the same anxieties and fears that the baby was going to die like all the other ones, so.


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[Assistant] And she, and fortunately, she was spared


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[Assistant] That tragedy right away, because she did end up having a healthy baby.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and she ended up having another healthy baby right after that.


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[Assistant] I was just gonna say I lost count at this point. It's either 11 or 12. So now she has Giuseppe and two other babies. They were very quick together.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and it's, so, you know, at this point, the children seem to be doing okay.


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[Assistant] And her and Raffaelli's relationship was on the mend.


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[Assistant] And whenever she had the chance to visit another traveling fortune teller, she would do it.


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[Assistant] Uh-huh. Which only fed her anxieties. And one afternoon, about two years after they came to Macedonia,


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[Assistant] She visited another one and this woman took her hands in hers.


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[Assistant] Oh wow. Which also makes me think like, damn, these were like the real deal. I was gonna say- I- and Leonardo just left this woman and went home.


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[Assistant] And this is, she went right back to obsessing over possible future tragedy, cause that doesn't sound great. It's like, girlie, that is in your control. Yeaah. And on 1930, after, uhm, about three years after arriving in Macedonia,


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[Assistant] Uhm, there was a violent and destructive earthquake that struck the region. It killed more than a thousand people and caused so much damage.


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[Assistant] Including Leonardo and Raffaele's house. It was completely destroyed. Oh no. So they were devastated, but they were able to collect what they had in the rubble.


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[Assistant] And, uh, the residents of Correggio, they knew of this devastating earthquake and they welcomed all the people that were displaced from Macedonia. And these people in Correggio did everything they could to make sure these people felt welcome and like gave them opportunity, like they were super warm, super hospitable to these people.


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[Assistant] Things weren't as fucking terrible as they have been. Like, you know, it seemed like, okay, they were stable at this point because they had an income now. Raphael, he got a pretty good job. The children were healthy. They were making friends. They were doing well in school.


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[Assistant] And the earthquake had affected her so deeply.


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[Assistant] It shook her in a way that the other tragic events hadn't yet.


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[Assistant] It was like, after this event, she internalized all the collective horrible events that had happened, and she was like, this was all my fault. It was my fault for marrying Rafaely in the first place.


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[Assistant] She cannot look at this all and go it's in the past. I just gotta move forward. I gotta look at my happiness that I have and move forward. She just can't seem to do it. No. And as a result,


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[Assistant] She kind of went the other way and just gave up the hypervigilance because she was like, you know what?


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[Assistant] I can't protect them from this curse, so I just have to live.


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[Assistant] So it was almost like a positive thing, where she got hyper, hyper, hyper obsessed, and she couldn't settle herself down about it, and then it got so bad, so unsettled, even though everything was so stable, that she just went, fuck it. And then it was like she was able to just, for a moment, it was difficult, but she was like I'm gonna let go.


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[Assistant] And I'm gonna try to just live. And I'm gonna try to like, be in this moment. But then...


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[Assistant] And she started to feel a little bit stable. She was starting to gain a little bit.


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[Assistant] And she was kind of trying to like integrate back into like being a human and being, so she started, you know, she made friends in the community.


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[Assistant] She participated in community events. And she and Raffaele eventually became a very well-liked and very well-respected couple in the community. Wow. They were working and eventually friends and neighbors like helped her buy this, open this little storefront.


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[Assistant] In the village. For soap. And it was attached to the family home.


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[Assistant] Really? Like everything was like, what the fuck is this? This is like, the most on its head from what it was. It's like, it's such a like, you would think it's a success tale, but this is just like, holy shit, you came out of...


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[Assistant] The brinks of just despair, like the depths of despair and just awfulness, and look at you. You're feeling it.


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[Assistant] And the war effort was ramping up and they needed soldiers and the Italian military employed a campaign of nationalism to convince young men to join the fight.


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[Assistant] Somebody who was very enticed by this was Giuseppe. Yeah.


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[Assistant] Uh, he saw the war as an opportunity to, you know, fight for, you know, his national pride, but also get away from his overbearing mother. And so Leonardo...


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[Assistant] Didn't find out from Giuseppe that he joined the army. She found out from neighbors at the market.


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[Assistant] And after all the years that she had obsessed over protecting him and watching him, she was like, I can't let this go. I'm not letting this happen.


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[Assistant] So she was literally unwilling to let this happen, but he was an adult now and able to do it.


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[Assistant] So she decided to turn back to her interest in


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[Assistant] You know, at that point, self-help wasn't really, like, a thing, you know? Like, that's the unfortunate time period of it all. That's your self-help. Lift the curse. Yeah, you know? Now, in the years since they'd moved to Correggio, Leonardo had relaxed, like I said, and settled into this kind of, like, less anxious existence, but this...


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[Assistant] Sporadically visiting fortune tellers and had become a little bit of a student of the occult at that point.


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[Assistant] You know, it wasn't bothering her at that point. And she was learning about magic and learning about fortune telling and like, you know, like the cunning women that we talked about, like, you know, in previous episodes of like the 1600s. Fun shit. And she ended up getting this huge collection of books that she was collecting about the different subjects. All healthy. Yeah.


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[Assistant] So she went looking in this collection trying to find something that could help her son and keep him safe. Sure. And she found what she thought was the solution in a book called The Law of Equivalent Exchange.


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[Assistant] According to Genevieve Ortiz, who I mentioned before, the thought of human sacrifice deeply disturbed Leonardo, but she felt she had no other choice.


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[Assistant] If she wanted to protect him, she was going to have to exchange someone else's life. Oh wow. As we can see, there is something.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so Leonardo started collecting all the things she was gonna need to create an effective poison.


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[Assistant] To do this. And she began to think about who her victim would be, who her sacrifice would be. If you say Raphaeliamo.


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[Assistant] No. Okay, okay, good. Uhm, but she settled on a woman named Faustina Seti who was a 76 year old spinster. Oh my god. And as far as Leonardo knew, she didn't really have a lot of family and not a lot of ties in the community.


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[Assistant] She's still a 76 year old woman. Now in the years since she opened that shop in Correggio,


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[Assistant] Uhm, Faustina had been one of the many women who would come by regularly. Even supported her business and you're gonna sacrifice her. And she would come by to like just chat with her, share her like, you know, her woes kind of thing. And she would lament a lot about how lonely she was.


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[Assistant] That's horrible. And her social position as a spinster meant that the community kinda looked down on her as sort of like...


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[Assistant] Somebody deserving pity a little bit, and that's really it. It's like, okay, you've been there before too, Leonardo. Exactly! And Leonardo was able to convince herself that she would actually be doing Faustina a favor by ending her life. I murdered her. I'm just ending her misery.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and she figured that it was going to ensure that Faustina's life became meaningful because she was sacrificing her to save Giuseppe. So she was convincing herself that this was fine.


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[Assistant] So once she figured that out, she invited Faustina to the shop and she said, I found a man who is interested in meeting you.


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[Assistant] And he, and so she, I mean Faustina was desperate to be married to get out of this.


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[Assistant] And they won't interfere with your new relationships, so just let them know that you're gonna be gone. This is cold blooded.


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[Assistant] What was that about? Like nothing makes sense here, even with your, you're trying to validate it in your own mind. Yeah. And Faustina did it all. She wrote the letters and Leonardo promised to mail the letters a few days after she had left. So on the morning that she was supposed to leave, she went to Leonardo's shop.


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[Assistant] And she was so excited, so nervous. This is so mean. And Leonardo invited her to sit down and have a drink of wine to calm her nerves.


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[Assistant] Uh, it obviously never would have occurred to her that this was a bad thing to do because Leonardo was her friend. Yeah. So she did. She sat down.


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[Assistant] Later, Leonardo would tell authorities that she, her intention was to swing the axe.


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[Assistant] Leonardo had to literally, like, rip the axe out and then brought it down again and again and again.


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[Assistant] And she said all she thought about was Giuseppe's safety as she did it. No. So what ended up, what it ended up being was a fucking...


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[Assistant] Massacre. And a nightmare. In her shop, right? Yep. And it was covered in Faustina's blood. There was tissue.


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[Assistant] All manner of biological matter all over the room covering Leonardo.


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[Assistant] Later in her published memoir,


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[Assistant] Titled, An Embittered Soul's Confession. She Said This.


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[Assistant] I threw the pieces into a pot, added seven kilos of caustic soda, which I had bought to make soap.


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[Assistant] As for the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it, and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, and eggs, as well as a little bit of margarine. Kneading all the ingredients together, I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit, though Giuseppe and I also ate them.


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[Assistant] To unsuspecting patrons of her shop.


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[Assistant] Yep. See how it flips the whole time you're sitting there going, my God, this poor woman, the tragedy she has endured. And this is when you look back and you go,


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[Assistant] She went mad. She went fucking mad. And a lot of death happened around you. That's the thing. And I don't know, there's nothing that says she did anything to her children. And I won't remain there, but I'm just saying this


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[Assistant] But again, there's nothing that says that she did anything to her children, but my goodness, this is her first kill.


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[Assistant] Wow. Now according to the law of equivalent exchange, the sacrifice should have ensured, you know, an easy exchange. But as far as Leonardo could tell, this wasn't an easy exchange. She was like, you know what, this was not easy. It ended up being very messy and very horrific.


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[Assistant] And she said- And then I made cake about it? Yeah, you know. And then she said the flesh and the fat that she was actually, cause you know, she made the blood into tea cakes. She was thinking, you know what, I can have this equivalent exchange and save Giuseppe. I can also make tea cakes out of the blood. And I can also use the fat and the flesh to make some soap. And I can get some, you know, a lot of good stuff out of this. But she said, you know, cause it was such a messy murder.


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[Assistant] It was all kind of rendered useless. She couldn't use the fat and the flesh. It didn't work.


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[Assistant] So she said, I don't know, I don't think it went that well. So, you know, there was a lot of mistakes, a lot of mishaps here, and so she believed


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[Assistant] I think it worked. Giuseppe's safety is a scapegoat at this point. I also think that. I think that's a bunch of bullshit.


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[Assistant] Now unlike Faustina, Francesca was a former school teacher, an active member of the community,


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[Assistant] And she didn't have any children of her own, um, but she was actually a widow, a recent widow. And Francesca was going to be missed and noticed. Yeah, she's yelling. So very different, like unfortunately from Faustina, like she really tried to pick somebody that didn't have a lot of ties in her. Yeah.


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[Assistant] And, but uh, Francesca was in desperate need of work at this moment since her husband had passed away. And so she turned to Leonardo for advice. No thank you.


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[Assistant] Now on a visit to the shop, Francesca explained the whole thing like, oh geez, like I need to find work, like this is awful.


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[Assistant] And Leonardo said, wow, lucky, lucky solution here.


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[Assistant] Because she said, I happen to know a very good and well paying job at a girl's school.


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[Assistant] In the northern city of Piacenza, I believe it is. I'm sorry Italian listeners. Uh, but, you know, you gotta get there quickly to apply. It's not gonna be vacant for long. We gotta get you there.


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[Assistant] You know, she was desperate. She was excited for an opportunity to get out of her space and her grief at this point. Yea, of course. So she didn't ask a lot of questions. She was just like, sure, awesome. Leonardo's a good lady.


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[Assistant] I like her and Raffaele. Why would I worry about this? They're so well respected. So one September morning, she arrived at Leonardo's shop early before she planned to leave to go apply for this job.


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[Assistant] And Leonardo was like, sit down, write a couple of postcards to loved ones telling you why you're, you know, telling them why you're leaving. You don't want to worry them. But you gotta get there, like, cause you gotta get there so quick. That we don't, you don't have time to tell everybody.


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[Assistant] And she said, don't tell anyone where you're headed because people might try to stop you from taking this job because they won't want you to move away from them, so.


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[Assistant] Yeah. Fucking wild dude. That's the thing, there's so much fucking cold callousness here and cunning. Yeah, yeah. Involved in this and like manipulation. And just, oh, just. Yeah.


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[Assistant] And so she said, you know what, sit down, have a glass of wine before you leave.


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[Assistant] And she poured her a glass of poisoned wine and quickly it disoriented her.


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[Assistant] She disappeared into the back room and returned with an axe in her hands. She's gonna do the axe again? Well this time she knew what to expect and she said she swung with confidence this time.


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[Assistant] What? So wait, I thought this was a sacrifice to protect your son. Why are you stealing her shit? That's not an even exchange. Cause she just got rid of the rest. She kept the stuff that was valuable.


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[Assistant] Yeah. It's also like, honey, people are gonna find that. Yeah. And then she dismembered her body.


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[Assistant] The blood was dried and eventually went into more popular tea cakes.


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[Assistant] The remaining flesh and other useless parts, which he deemed useless, were tossed into a vat of caustic soda and then thrown into the sludge pit behind the house later that evening.


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[Assistant] Later, after she had been arrested, Leonardo said she only killed this woman because of her, you know, deluded belief that doing so would protect her son during the war. And obviously that is deeply irrational, uhm.


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[Assistant] This would have been a plausible explanation if you look at it as like a, like she is deeply disturbed and sick and needs to be taken away. Taken care of.


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[Assistant] That you'd be like, okay, like maybe she thinks that. And if it was one person. That's the thing. Because...


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[Assistant] Like, it would still be horrific just saying that. And you could almost look at it as she's saying that first one didn't feel right.


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[Assistant] Easy. And it wasn't easy. So I was worried that I fucked it up and that it wasn't going to work. So you could almost understand why a sick person


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[Assistant] would delude themselves into believing that they need to do it correctly.


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[Assistant] You could almost believe that if you're looking at it like this is a sick person. You know what I mean? Like not any rational person thinking this. Like looking at the sickness. You could almost think that.


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[Assistant] But given that the murder, you know, this, this murder, the second murder, Francesca Suavi,


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[Assistant] It should have satisfied the law of equivalent exchange that would ensure Giuseppe's safety, correct? Like, you did it. According to...


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[Assistant] The deluded and irrational and deeply disturbed and sick thinking. Yeah. Of Leonardo. Yep. This, you did it in one swing.


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[Assistant] This was also not the last murder that she committed. Yeah, I know.


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[Assistant] Her third victim was completely senseless, they all are, but even by her own rationale, it would make this victim completely senseless.


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[Assistant] This one also comes off as very personal.


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[Assistant] Somebody pissed her off, huh? Yeah. So in Correggio, there were not a lot of like famous people walking around. Nope. It was a pretty small village. But there was one notable resident. Her name was Virginia Cachopo.


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[Assistant] She was actually a former opera star. Oh shit. And Cachopo had retired from the stage because it was after her husband had died several years earlier. So much death. But you know, she was a wealthy patron of the arts. She was a beloved resident in Correggio.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, several years earlier, and when Virginia decided, you know, I miss the excitement of like, urban life, and she wanted to move to a larger city, she was like, I gotta get outta here, I wanna leave.


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[Assistant] Leonardo took this as a personal betrayal of their friendship.


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[Assistant] But she was leaving her, but she was just abandoning her. That's wild. And she said, and she thought, you know what?


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[Assistant] According to Ortiz, she said if she wanted someone good enough to kill for Giuseppe, Virginia was as good as it got in a place like, uh, Coreggia. A charity killed someone twice for Giuseppe. Thank you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I think we can let go of that theory. Yep. Now she used a pretty similar tactic as she had in the first two victims. She told, uh,


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[Assistant] Virginia, that there was an available secretarial job in Florence, and you know, that was really good for her skill set, it was a pretty, it was a cute job, you know, like it was in a, it was gonna be in a city.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when Virginia arrived at the store on the morning of September 30th, 1940,


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[Assistant] Things got off to like, not an easy start for her plan, because Virginia repeatedly refused Leonardo's offer for wine. She was like, no thank you.


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[Assistant] She kept insisting, kept insisting, and after a while she was like fine, I'll have a little drink with you.


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[Assistant] Uh, but it took a long time and some real zhuzhing.


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[Assistant] And that's when the poison began to work. Oh no. Virginia became immobile and Leonardo laid her on the floor of the shop and carefully, as she's conscious, but immobile.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Removed all her expensive jewelry and anything of value on her and stuffed them all in her own pockets. Oh my god. So...


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[Assistant] I don't think it was ever to save Giuseppe. I mean, none of it would have been an even exchange, but this is definitely not. And then she left the room as Leonardo laying there mobile.


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[Assistant] Or no, uhm, or excuse me, then as Virginia's laying there, a mobile.


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[Assistant] And she returns with an axe, and she raised it above her head.


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[Assistant] As, and Virginia's laying on the floor and she brings it down on Virginia's chest.


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[Assistant] And Virginia was said to let out one small gasp and then died on the floor.


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[Assistant] Leonardo quickly dismembered the body as she had done previously.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, saved any usable parts for soap and tea cakes again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And now apparently, remember Giuseppe is a grown boy here. At war. Grown man. A few days later, after she'd finished making the soap from Virginia's remains, Leonardo took a bar home and insisted that Giuseppe wash himself with it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was a teenager at the time and he was like, no, like that's weird that you're just giving me this random bar of soap to wash with. And making me use it. So he, she dragged him into the tub.


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[Assistant] Pulled off his clothes for him and washed him entirely from head to toe with it.


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[Assistant] And then she brought him to the kitchen and made him eat some tea cakes.


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[Assistant] This is... That were made with Virginia's blood. No, that's... That's another crime.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in the first two cases, she had successfully avoided suspicion, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Neither one of the women had huge family ties. I guess like, you know, Francesca had more than Faustina, but... That's still not very many. Virginia.


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[Assistant] It was like she went up in each time with how many people were gonna wonder where they were.


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[Assistant] Now just a few weeks after the murder, Leonardo was beginning to feel as, you know, I think I did satisfy the law of equivalent exchange, like I think I'm good. And then Virginia was sister in law.


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[Assistant] Albertina Fanti came knocking on the door looking for Virginia.


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[Assistant] And basically, Virginia had told her, Albertina, about the potential job in Florence, and had told her


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[Assistant] I heard about it from Leonardo. Right. So she decided to go straight to the source. And she's like, listen, your tea cakes are fucking weird lately. Leonardo had not accounted for this possibility happening, so she just stared at her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then this woman is peppering her with direct questions being like, what the fuck happened here? So she just apologized and closed the door. Girlie.


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[Assistant] I mean, I'm glad that it went that way, cause like, that's us, but- So, Albertina was like- That's weird. That's weird. So she went about town asking about her sister and this whole thing. And at one point she learned that two other women from town who had disappeared after going to Leonardo's shop. Uh huh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, Leonardo had been careful to cover her tracks. She did a very thorough job of cleaning up after herself. There was really not a lot in the way of evidence for the investigators to work with. And it's the forties? Yea, at this point it's the, yea, forties. So we don't really have like DNA or anything like that? No, we don't have anything like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what they did have were the postcards.


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[Assistant] So the postcards and letters that she had these women write, they were, uh, they were all mailed by Giuseppe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She had had her son mail these and just, like, just being like, can you run this errand for me? Yeah, of course he didn't know. And in this case, so...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Giuseppe had mailed these letters, they knew this now. So now, just like when she was arrested for the fraud case, it hit her. Oh fuck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm gonna get him in trouble for this. So, her son was arrested.


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[Assistant] He obviously killed these women. She went, confessed to all three murders, insisted he had nothing to do with anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That she committed all three letters with the intention of protecting, or all three murders, excuse me, with the intention of protecting him. Uh huh. And at first the investigators were like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, right. I don't believe that at all. And they were also like, you're a respectable woman in town. I don't believe this. Like, I don't believe that you murdered three people. Like, that doesn't make sense. But then she sewed them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the investigators were fucking horrified, but were also like, uh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So she was immediately arrested and taken to jail. You don't say. But because the war was raging across Europe at the time, all local prosecutions were temporarily on pause. So she was held in a jail cell until they were going to prosecute her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And during that time, her family, including Giuseppe, completely disowned her.


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[Assistant] All turned their back on her and they referred to her as basically a monster and they referred to her as the soap maker of careggio. I don't like that personally. And throughout her entire incarceration, she expressed no remorse, no regret.


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[Assistant] She came forward and confessed when he was going to be put on trial for it.


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[Assistant] But it didn't. No. And then you would think, okay, in her delusion and her sickness. She didn't do it right.


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[Assistant] She didn't do it right, so she did this awful second thing. Yeah.


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[Assistant] Then that third one was completely senseless. She did not align with any of this. Very petty. She's stealing from these women as she goes, which is not part of the whole thing.


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[Assistant] So I think it's just- I think part of her-


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[Assistant] Was obsessive about her child due to all the trauma and all the curse nonsense and all that. I do believe maybe it started off like that. I think she was a very, very, very, very, very sick and disturbed


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] An unhelpable human being to be quite honest. And I think there was also a part of her that came from


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[Assistant] I think it's a little bit of like a, ooh, where did that come from? That was, that was lying dormant in there somewhere. Cause you can't just bring an axe on three different people and chop them up and make them into tea cakes and soap.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Without having a little bit of something off in there. That was always there to begin with. That's a couple screws loose, my dude. Now, Leonardo died in prison on October 15th, 1970.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Never answered any more questions that any authorities, reporters, anyone asked her wouldn't answer anything. She did what she did. She told you why she did it.


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[Assistant] I have nothing else to say. I gave you all the information. I gave you all the evidence. I don't regret it. This is why I did it. She was like 90 when she died. Yeah, she lived long. Holy shit. Hey, that- that fortune teller told you you're gonna live a long life, but it's gonna be sad.


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[Assistant] Yeaah, cause it's like even the stealing of the valuables, she was running her own shop at that point, you know, Raphaeli had a good job, they were stable, they weren't struggling. Well, it wasn't like she tried to sell them even. She was well respected, she was...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People came to her, they came to her shop. It wasn't like she was, so she didn't need to do, like there wasn't even the robbery and like financial distress and all that. I think she just.


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[Assistant] Well that's the thing, you don't give people.


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[Assistant] Tea cakes made with human remains and seldom bars of soap made from the fat and flesh of three murder victims. No.


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[Assistant] That just blew my fuckin' mind apart. Yeah, my oh fuckin' my. And that is the story of Leonardo Cianciulli, the soap maker of Correggio.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So boss bitch, it makes me think of the Doja Cat song. I'm a bitch. I'm a boss. I'm a bitch and a boss.


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[Assistant] That's Bridget, to be quite honest. Triple B. Yeah. False bitch Bridget.


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[Assistant] This motherfucker just didn't want to pick up his egg tab.


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[Assistant] And she's just laying on the floor on fire at this point, and he's in the house with her.


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[Assistant] But you know, it's a fun little gift if you can find some that are, that are interesting


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[Assistant] I'm not saying anything, I'm not saying he did it, I'm just saying if you know the whole place is thinking you might have done it and then you go marry the lady you were having an affair with


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[Assistant] His wife is trying to get custody of a child while married.


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[Assistant] To a man who admitted to just doing a con


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[Assistant] Yeah, we got four of us, so we can. I missed you this week. I missed you this week. It felt weird without you. It was very strange.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We, and actually I have a funny story related to it because uhm, we took the fam to Storyland in New Hampshire. Except for me. And, well Ash wouldn't go. I'm just kidding, I wouldn't go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She was starstruck and as we're walking away after taking the picture she was like...


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[Assistant] But like I didn't think of that so I apologize because I was very hot and we'd been at Storyline twice and that's like...


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[Assistant] Yeah, we, I mean we had a, we had a very nice family time and we went with Deb Deb.


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[Assistant] That's a joke. Yeah, we are. Kidding. Kidding. Uhm, when we, we last you, we last you. When we last you talked to. It's been a few days. I also am getting over that illness that started in part one, so. Oh shit, you were sick in part one. Now I'm at the end of that illness, because I wouldn't have been able to talk through this if we'd done it all at once.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oop, knockin' on wood. Uh, but when we left you in part one, we were right at the part where, well, we had seen Walter Freeman and his partner there, Watts, kinda fuck up a lot of lobotomies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were following, uhm, the original lobotomy procedure.


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[Assistant] Which did not, is not to be confused with the transorbital lobotomy that he creates later.


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[Assistant] When we last left you, I was talking about how he ended up performing a very failed lobotomy on one Rosemary Kennedy.


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[Assistant] By far one of his greatest failures and most public greatest failure, for sure. Did he ever like speak on it? Uh, he considered it just like, oops, okay, moving on. Oopsy. Yep, like there wasn't really. Wow. Just off we go. Yeah.


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[Assistant] You would think, right? There's a lot with this. And I think, uhm, I think the outcome...


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[Assistant] That's fucked up. Uhm, so let's talk about, finally, Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy, how it came to be.


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[Assistant] And to do that we need to start with what happened to get there.


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[Assistant] So Rose Kennedy went, not Rosemary, Rose Kennedy, her mother. Sure. Went into labor on September 13th, 1918 and Rose Kennedy and Joe Sr.


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[Assistant] Uh, they placed a call to their obstetrician and they were thinking the doctor was going to arrive pretty quickly from Boston. It wasn't going to be crazy.


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[Assistant] But at that time, there was a pneumonia outbreak in Boston, so the doctor was actually detained. He wasn't able to leave right away. Oh shit. Yeah. 1918, am I right? Yeah, you're right. So he wasn't gonna make it to the Kennedy's house before...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The baby actually entered the birth canal. Like it was happening quick.


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[Assistant] We knew, people knew that like, you don't hold a baby in the birth canal.


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[Assistant] In 1918, it was well documented that that, like, what the outcome would be from that, what kind of complications would arise from it, like, very much known, like, right.


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[Assistant] We can't blame this on like, oh we didn't have the research kind of thing. Cause we did.


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[Assistant] So at the time, believing she was doing the right thing, a young nurse that was present for the birth,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ended up trying to hold Rose's legs closed to stop the baby from being born.


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[Assistant] That's bad in every way that something can be bad for both mother and baby.


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[Assistant] When a baby is being born, a baby is being born. You can't just cross your legs and stop it from happening. Oh my god. So that didn't work.


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[Assistant] So she reached into the birth canal and held the baby's head there and kept the baby


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[Assistant] In the birth canal for two hours.


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[Assistant] Like what is the fucking logic there? I don't, I don't know. I do not know. What? And again, it was 1918, it was very well established that stopping a baby who is moving forward down the birth canal would definitely


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this is what happened with Rosemary. Rosemary was the baby.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and they actually named her Rosemary, but they nicknamed her Rosemary.


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[Assistant] Now to anybody who was around Rosemary or just saw Rosemary, she was just like all the other children around her. You know, nothing outwardly wrong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but by the time she entered primary school, that's when they started seeing that there was some developmental disabilities, some cognitive impairments. Yeah, gee, I wonder why. Exactly. And as she got older, Joe and Rose Kennedy


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They tried to work with, like, you know, to try to make life easier for her, try to make learning easier. They hired private tutors to help with school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, they also would go out with her, hire people to go out with her whenever she went into, like, the community.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and the older she got though, the more difficult it was getting. And not just for them to like help her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it was now becoming a political thing where they were not keeping up appearances. Uh, because now as she's getting older, it's becoming evident that something's going on. And for them,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The primary issue was that Rosemary would go into what they described as fits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, this was happening to her as she was getting older, and the fits that they are describing are not temper tantrums, they're seizures.


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[Assistant] And apparently, so the author Kate Clifford Larson described them as seizures or episodes of mental illness, quote unquote.


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[Assistant] Uh, these would happen in public and this would embarrass her parents.


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[Assistant] Now, this whole story is sad from start to finish. It really is.


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[Assistant] Um, because it didn't become a thing of like, you know, let me just comfort my child and show everybody that like, you know, this happens to families all over everywhere that like, you know, kids have to go through this. They could have been an example. Yeah, absolutely. To show people like, you know, this is how you show love and affection and, you know, support for,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A child who is cognitively impaired, like nope, we're not going to do that. That's, it's annoying. So.


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[Assistant] Now at this point, like throughout much of the 20th century, mental illness and cognitive or developmental impairments were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A cause of shame and a lot of families would hide or just institutionalize their disabled family members instead of dealing with any of the quote unquote embarrassment or any social stigma that came from it. They didn't want to deal with it so they would just kind of lock them away. That's it. Like let's pretend they just don't exist.


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[Assistant] They didn't ask to come into this world. Like you brought them in. Right. So take care of them. Like that's your whole job. Your whole job is supposed to be I brought you into this world, it's my job to take care of you and make it safe and make you safe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And not only not fulfill it, but actively, like, throw them in a cage and, you know, throw away the key. It's like, damn. And it's like just because of something they have no control over and did not ask for and did not participate in creating. That is just beyond.


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[Assistant] And the thing is, this was also very difficult for the very, um, devoutly Catholic Kennedy family because their church, um, was actually,


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[Assistant] A certain kind of church that deemed disability the result of sin, and they viewed it as a punishment from God.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's ridiculous. It's really awful. So while Joe and Rose Kennedy refuse to have their daughter at this time,


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[Assistant] Rose said that she was having a little bit of trouble managing her daughter's behavior.


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[Assistant] Because it was becoming a little unpredictable and you know, as she gets older, it's harder to lay down that parent card.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and she was also having trouble just meeting her needs without help.


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[Assistant] So they were a very wealthy, very well connected family. So they first sent her to various boarding schools where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People really liked her. Like Rosemary was an unbelievably charismatic and likable person.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and even though she was struggling academically and struggling a little to fit in and kind of like find her place, she worked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And very much she really wanted to make her parents proud. Like it was clear that she just really wanted to win them over, essentially.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And again, people around her loved her. They thought she was, everyone said her personality was so likeable, so charming, she was so charismatic. She was like a hot ticket, you know? Look at pictures of her, she looks like a hot shit. Yeah. And she is beautiful, like she's just like one of the, she's like of that era, she's what you think of. Like it's just like she's so cool. And so,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things probably would have continued this way for Rosemary. I think they probably would have just kept trying what they were trying, doing what they were doing.


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[Assistant] You know, I think it would have probably went okay. Right. But then her father had political aspirations. And by 1938, Joe Kennedy Sr. had been named the ambassador to the court of St. James in Britain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which was a position that required him to present himself and his entire family to monarchy at Buckingham Palace.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, especially kids. That's tough. That is tough. You know what I mean? It's a lot to, uh, you know. To live up to. Yeah. And it's a lot to expect of your entire family. It is. But in order to prepare Rosemary for the, what was now going to be very intense scrutiny of the public.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the Kennedys enrolled their daughter at the Belmont House, which was a Catholic boarding school that was run by nuns and favored hands-on learning over rote memorization.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If things just kept going the way they were going, we probably would have been okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now World War II may have prevented Rosemary from being thrust into the spotlight, but it didn't change the fact that the family, and especially Joe Kennedy Senior,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was seeing having an intellectually disabled daughter a problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Would love to believe in my heart of hearts that he's a father and was hoping to cure this for his daughter's sake as well, but there was definitely political ambitions at the forefront of this. Yeah, I don't think you can argue that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this is when he, so in his search, he was searching high and low for something, something that would cure this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and this is when they were doing prefrontal lobotomies and it was definitely still controversial in the medical community.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but it was also gaining some traction a little bit in the press.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, as quote, a cure for the physically disabled and mentally ill.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, she's just having fun. And the nuns were getting worried that she was going out to pick up men and would end up like pregnant or whatever. You fucking live your damn life, alright? Go crazy. So with that being brought to the Kennedys, they were like, okay, so Joe Kennedy brought up the procedure of the prefrontal lobotomy to his wife, Rose Kennedy. Rose was skeptical and she was like, I don't know about this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And she asked her daughter Kathleen to find out more. She was like, will you go find out for me?


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[Assistant] I don't know anything about this, please just like go tell me if this is real. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And according to Clifford Larson, Kathleen spoke to a journalist whose name is John White.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know him. Yeah. And, uh, this John White guy had done some reporting on mental illness and treatments for the Washington Times Herald. And he had done a real deep dive into this. So he told Kathleen that these were bottom, uh, the results of the lobotomies were quote, no good. And he said, don't know. Like I can tell you through my research.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The results are not promising at all and in fact they're a little scary, like don't do this. So Rose was like, okay, like thanks for letting me know. But Joe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In fact, biographer Lawrence Leamer wrote, Joe liked to cut away at a problem and then move on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To cut away at a problem, if you're considering Rosemary the problem, that's exactly what you're doing, cutting away and then moving on. Yeaah, seriously. Now, after checking into George Washington University Hospital, Rosemary was evaluated by Walter Freeman and Watts. And they diagnosed her with agitated depression.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was like, I don't know if that's it, my guys. Nooo. Uhm, and they both said, ugh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What's great is that this is easily treatable with a prefrontal lobotomy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now based on that initial evaluation, Joe Kennedy Sr. approved the surgery without telling his wife.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or explaining to Rosemary what was happening


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it was just after that initial evaluation, they took a peek at her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They did the initial evaluation. He said, go right ahead. Later that day, Rosemary was given an anesthetic to, um, to numb her brain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like that is, that is macabre, all of that, like thinking about that. This young, beautiful, vivacious, but struggling young woman reciting poetry while they drill into her skull and sever her pre-frontal lobe connections.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That her father consented to. And is he in the room? Like just there? I have no idea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 23 years old. I'm assuming there was something, I mean this is way back. Yea, there's no. And I'm assuming it has something to do with what she was struggling with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They just assumed that it was his decision to make. It's like giving me anxiety. And I don't know if this was in the time where like, you know, he's the father, so he can make a decision, he's the man of the house.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But again, he had approved this whole thing based on the fact that Freeman and Watts had assured him this was going to solve all of Rosemary's problems.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It did put to an end her explosive outbursts and you know, the seemingly difficult behavior that they were dealing with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It also rendered her unable to speak and unable to move.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After months of therapy, she regained the partial ability to walk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh my god. Did he ever speak publicly about this? This was one of those things that was just like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's that. That's a fucking stain on your life, my dude. And so it took also months for her to regain the ability to speak. And when it was, it was, quote, a mix of garbled sounds and words.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do it. Oh my god. So they put her in a prison of her own mind. Yea, absolutely. Essentially. How fucking dark.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, once she was deemed stable, Jo sent her to Craig House, which is a psychiatric facility. And then she was transferred to St. Coletta's, which was a residential facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin. And she lived at that facility until her death in 2005.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For six decades, she lived at that facility.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Joe never visited her. He died never visiting her. Fuck that guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but Rose and Rosemary lived at, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In fact, it was 20 years before she saw any family member.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 20 years. She lived at St. Colettas for 20 years before any of her family members found out where she was or went to see her. Most of her family didn't even know where she was. You wouldn't even tell them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All to be a fucking political leader. And it was only after Joe's death in 1961 that Rose Kennedy learned where her daughter was. She never knew where she was. He wouldn't tell her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Batman is a monster! And he went to, yep, and she went to see him, her, after 20 years of not seeing her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when Rosemary saw her mother for the first time in 20 years, she ran towards her. And I guess, like, Rose held out her arms, because she's thinking, she's running into my arms. And all the nuns there immediately went to stop her, because they knew.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And started pounding on her chest and scree- they said she was shrieking at her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they said after 20 years and a fucking lobotomy, she remembered that her mother was not there to take care of her when she needed it. Oh my, this is, this is a gut-wrenching story. There's a, um, I'm just trying to find.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rose saw her for the first time and that's where it came out, like, you know, that after 20 years in a lobotomy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and I guess there were after that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was, she still, she still knew what it, like, you know, there was still anger there. Of course, they ruined her fucking life. She would bring her to like, uhm, you know, to the cape and stuff. Rose would bring her to the cape. Rose would bring her to the house and everything and try to like, you know, be a part of her life at that point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think the ma- Rose going swimming and wanting her to come in and Rosemary just like wouldn't even look at her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like the nuns were like, she, yeah, it's like, you know. She was abandoned. Yeah, she like, I don't know what you expect here. And I guess Rose was quoted as saying like, Rosie, what did we do to you?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And years later, I guess, somebody, Lawrence Lemur, who I mentioned earlier,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was doing research for his biography on the Kennedy family.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he ended up meeting a server at a Nashville pancake restaurant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 1941, when Walter Freeman and James Watts


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just cavalierly recommended Rosemary undergo a fucking lobotomy by just looking at her. They had no research or evidence to say that that was going to solve her problem, but they, they claimed it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They wanted to say we did the lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy. And they figured, let's roll the dice. If it turns out in our favor, then we win. If it doesn't, they'll lock her away. So who gives a shit?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is not a good surgery. No. But they still went ahead with it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when it went terribly fucking wrong, they just brushed it off and went ahead totally undeterred. And they just kept doing them. Oh no, well now they, now they, they were like hmm. This is when they went transorbital.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because if there was any trait that Walter definitely demonstrated throughout his entire life, from very young, it was impatience. This man had no...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fucking patience for anything. Seemed to say that in part one. And we know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That doing things quick and doing them right are not always the same thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was always looking for the quickest way out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And in fact, one of his biggest issues with psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic illness, like, you know, talk therapy and cognitive therapy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was that the process could take years or even decades to show progress. He didn't like how slow it was. I want it done now. Which...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In one sense you're like, okay, I understand wanting to find something to add to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, so that's always a good thing, is to make people's suffering lessen quicker. Of course.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you shouldn't just be looking for the quickest thing. You should be looking for something that in, you know, in tandem with what's going on. It just, ugh. And so that's what bothered him the most.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] While he believed the prefrontal lobotomy was definitely the solution to many of society's like issues, he was growing kind of frustrated with the fact that this procedure was being limited a bit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because they needed trained neurosurgeons to do it and there was long recovery times due to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the fucking head trauma that you would sustain during the surgery.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in the years after Rosemary Kennedy's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Absolute disaster of a lobotomy. Uh, he shifted a lot of his attention to adjusting the procedure so it could be done quickly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Have your lobotomy on your lunch break. Can I ask you a quick question?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So with the regular lobotomy, as well as the transorbital lobotomy,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, they're kinda like drilling holes in the skull. Right. So they're not taking like a big chunk out of the skull, it's like a drilling a hole.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that you just leave. Like it's that will, I'm not sure what happens to that. I'm sure a lot of the issues that happened after that was probably did stem from that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, to find a solution to this, like, slow-ness that Walter Freeman was not diggin', he turned to the work of Amaro, and I think it's Fiamberti? Sounds very Italian. Sounds very pretty, with an Italian accent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, he was an Italian psychiatrist who also shared Freeman's enthusiasm for quick fix solutions to the problem of mental illness.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now a few years earlier than this, Fiamberti had successfully found a way around the need to drill into the topper side of the skull.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, by accessing the frontal lobes through the orbital socket.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It basically would be inserting a guide needle into the space between the eyeball and the wall of the eye socket. And it's the one that's like next to the bridge of your nose. Nope. So the inside.