Delirium, fanaticism, deception, Satanism: words that we don't often use except when news events like the one in recent days happen. Altavillathe last of the religious crimes resulting from “mystical” motivations.
Now it has been discovered that the 17-year-old daughter, who escaped the massacre of her family, also participated in the torture and murder of her mother and two brothers, convinced that the devil had entered the house. After days of silence, she herself confessed it to the magistrates, after the arrest of her father who confessed to her crimes. “They were all prey to a mystical delirium,” said the Termini Imerese prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio.
And so Giovanni Barreca, husband and father of the three victims, and his accomplices Massimo Carandente and Sabrina Fina, three possessed with an obsession with the devil, ended up in prison. Prayers were not needed to get Satan out of the covers of his mother and brothers, who were beaten, hit with electric wires, suffocated and hogtied.
In the history of Italian news some of these religious crimes have become national cases followed for months (sometimes years): from the murder of sister Maria Laura Mainetti in Chiavenna to that of Chiara Gualzetti in Bologna, from the killing of newborn Maria Elenia Politanò from the Caraffa massacre in Calabria to the murders of the sect of Satan's beasts.
The great religious crimes of Italian news
Antonella Salamone and her children Kevin and Emanuel Barreca – Palermo, 2024The last of the cases. In addition to the husband and father of the victims, Giovanni Barreca, a couple of friends with whom Barreca shared religious fanaticism, Sabrina Fina and Massimo Carandante, were also arrested for this religiously motivated murder. After some interrogations, the eldest daughter and sister of the victims, 17-year-old Miriam, was also arrested. She spoke of “demons” in the house, due to which unpleasant situations would have occurred.
On 27 June 2021, at just 15 years old, Chiara Gualzetti was killed by a peer in the park of the Monteveglio Abbey, near Bologna. The sixteen year old friend, after accompanying her out of the house, brutally attacked her with a knife and continued to attack her with kicks even when she fell to the ground. The attacker justified his action by citing a malicious internal voice that incited him to carry out that violence. After the crime, the little girl's body was abandoned at the edge of a forest in the park of the Monteveglio Abbey and was found after a day of searching. The young man admitted after being arrested that he had premeditated the murder and that he had already previously tried to kill his friend. Just last year the killer was sentenced to 16 years on appeal.
In January 2008, Claudio Tomaino, 30 years old, took his own life in Viterbo prison. He was in jail accused of massacre of his uncle and his family in Caraffa (Catanzaro), which occurred on 27 March 2006. The entire Pane family was killed in the massacre: his uncle Camillo, his wife Annamaria and their two children, Eugenio and Maria. Economic motivations – a debt never paid – and linked to Satanism emerged as possible causes of the murder. In fact, among the objects in Tomaino's house, a pact signed in blood was found in which he promised loyalty to Satan in exchange for impunity and prosperity.
The brutal murder of Sister Maria Laura Mainetti, aged 61, on 6 June 2000, was a definite act a sacrifice to Satan. The attack was perpetrated by three 17-year-old teenagers from Chiavenna, who stabbed the nun 19 times on a rural path. The young killers, before committing the murder, knelt down and used two knives that they had brought from home. Prior to the crime, the girls had made a pact by drinking a mixture of their blood. Sister Maria Laura Mainetti was proclaimed blessed on 6 June 2021. The murder was motivated – by the 3 girls – by boredom and the search for strong emotions. Today they are all released from prison.
On 12 September 1994, the two-month-old baby, Maria Ilenia Politanò, was killed in Polistena. The case was particularly shocking because it was they who killed her members of his family during an exorcism rite: his uncle was accused of his death, but his parents also witnessed the massacre. Believing they were freeing the house from demonic presences, they tortured her with barbaric practices until she died. The case was defined as an act of do-it-yourself exorcism, practiced by her uncle, believed to be a holy man, the same one who then, having recovered from his mystical delirium, took her to hospital.
The Beasts of Satan sect, operating in the province of Varese, was at the center of a trial in 2007 which led to the conviction of some of its members for the murders of Mariangela Pezzotta, Chiara Marino, Fabio Tollis, as well as crimes of concealment of corpse and induction to suicide by Andrea Bontade, revealing a dark corner of society linked to satanic practices. The case opened when, on 24 January 2004, Andrea Volpe and Elisabetta Ballarin were found near Panperduto (Somma Lombardo, VA) and interrogated by the carabinieri, they said they had killed Mariangela Pezzotta, buried in a hole in Golasecca, near the chalet where Volpe lived. Thanks to the father of one of the other victims, Fabio Tollis, then 16 years old, the investigations led to the discovery of the murder of his son and his friend Chiara Marino, which had occurred years earlier.
Source: Vanity Fair
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