Murder In Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy

I

PLEA

Chapter 1

ALL THE KNOTS COME TO THE COMB

VITA WAS A MURDERESS.

She took a life and ran.

Maybe she shot. Maybe she stabbed. No one was sure. But she took a life and ran.

She left her husband behind and crossed the Atlantic Ocean with her little boys, running from the crime. She made a home in the first place she found—an industrial city of train tracks and smokestacks and horse-drawn carriages with manure in the streets, where the bonfires burned as high as the rooftops on election night.

In the end she got hers. Boy, did she get hers. She paid the ultimate price.

Ma would tell me about Vita as we sat in our bright yellow kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey, circa 1969. As she spoke she cooked sauce on the stove, slowly turning the red bubbling lava inside the pot with a big metal spoon, meatballs bobbing at the top. She’d dip some crusty Italian bread in the pot and give me a taste, the hot sauce burning and shredding the roof of my mouth because I was too impatient to let it cool off. Between bites, I listened, and nodded and colored in my coloring book.

It was before I had started school; those stories were my first lessons.

I saw Vita in my head: her wild eyes, her passion, long hair whipping in the wind off that ship on the blowing ocean as she held her boys tight.

Ma was a great storyteller—but nothing compared with her father, Grandpa Beansie.

He’d spent time in Trenton State, the Big House, and loved to tell us about prison life: guys who liked to crochet, guys who kept mice as pets on little leashes, men being carried off to the electric chair. His hands would shake and his knees would buckle and he would pretend to cry, as if making his way down the last mile, the long corridor to the execution chamber. He was a real charmer, Grandpa.

But most of all, he loved to tell stories about Vita. And he told them to my mother.

Ma could have been a writer. She had studied journalism in high school, but never went on to college because she had to work to give her mother money and then decided she wanted a family of her own (a good, criminal-free family).

So Ma didn’t tell her stories to a wide audience. She told them to anyone who would listen. And that anyone was me.

She told me everything she knew about Vita, and that was as much as anyone knew. Vita couldn’t read or write. No letters or diary entries. I had never met anyone who couldn’t read or write. Reading was important in our apartment and a great escape from the realities of Jersey City.

Grandpa’s parents had passed the story of Vita down to him and he’d told my mother. Like a game of telephone, it was repeated from mouth to ear and mouth to ear, through the generations, changing, shifting, breathing—until it landed, finally, in my little ear. My orecchietta.

VITA GALLITELLI WAS MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, THE FIRST on the Italian side to come over to America. She came in 1892 with her two teenage sons, Valente and Leonardo, my great-grandfather. Vita had had three boys, but Ma said the youngest was lost on the way over. Ma had no name, no proof. Only the story.

The myth, really.

They left for America because Vita and her husband, Francesco Vena, had murdered someone back in Matera, a province tucked away in the farthest reaches of Southern Italy. It was a place my mother and I knew nothing about, filled with such intense poverty that no one really liked to talk about it. The name Matera came from the Latin word for mother. It was the motherland, but no one in my family ever considered going back there. Tourists didn’t visit, and even Italians from other parts of the country barely knew where it was on the map.

I looked in the atlas and found Matera at Italy’s instep between Puglia and Calabria, in the region of Basilicata.

My mother told me the story of Vita over and over again. She would tell it to me when we went to visit my great-aunt Katie, who would fill in some blanks with her own details. She would tell it to me as we walked over to church for Mass, which we attended dutifully every Sunday at noon. She would tell it sometimes on weekday mornings before I went to school, dressed in my blue checkered uniform, while braiding my thick, dark hair.

I figured Ma told me the stories to kill time and to distract me while combing the knots out, to stop me from flinching and screaming to high heaven as she stood over me in the shag-carpeted living room. Don’t cry, Ma would say. Vita had it so much worse. Poor Vita.

She told me that Vita’s husband, Francesco, stayed behind in Southern Italy, though his last name, Vena, traveled with my family to America. In Italy, maybe because of all the red tape involved in changing their maiden names, women kept theirs. But the children took the husband’s name. In our case, Vena.

One detail stuck in my head: my mother said the murder had happened over a card game.

It was unusual for a woman to travel to America without her husband or without him having gone to America first to scope things out. So just the fact that Vita went solo with the kids was a sign that something was a little crazy—batz, as Ma liked to say. Women were rarely in charge of their own destinies back then, or if they were, no one ever told stories about it.

In the movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, which my big brother loved, the Italian women were minor characters, usually in the kitchen cooking like my mother. While making chicken cacciatore, doing laundry, or combing their daughters’ hair, maybe they were wishing they could tell the stories and make the decisions and have the adventures.

But Vita was different.

Vita had left. For better or worse, like many of our ancestors. I thought about her coming through New York Harbor, without her husband, seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time, and wondering, Who the hell is that big lady?

When I looked at Liberty myself, from my neighborhood, I thought the same thing. Who the hell was she? I read somewhere once that Liberty was based on the sculptor’s mother. What was she thinking, to make her brow furrow like that? And had she read that big tablet in her arms? A woman in mid-nineteenth-century Europe? Did she even know how to read? And did she have adventures? Had she brought her kids along, or had she left them behind for someone else to take care of, while she stood, so stoic and important, her feet firmly planted on that pedestal?

The same way I looked at that light green statue, I looked at Vita, with awe and a sense of mystery. Who the hell was she? This complete stranger whose genes I carried around with me every single day in my DNA. And why on earth had she killed someone? Maybe self-defense, to protect her children or her husband. Or was it out of hatred or revenge? My family had a very finely honed sense of vengeance and, if they didn’t get even, they could hold a grudge for decades. Little did I know this trait—this never-forgetting, obsessive sense of revenge—was going to come in handy.

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER MY MOTHER UPPED THE ANTE WITH A NEW chapter, a cautionary tale. I was old enough to get pregnant, so Ma told me that Vita had been a loose woman—or as Vita’s own daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, liked to call her, a puttana. (They didn’t get along.) I imagined Vita on a busy street corner, giving passing men the eye.

Maybe this explained why my family was particularly good at making pasta puttanesca, which we called refrigerator pasta. We could whip up an amazing meal out of just a few random ingredients that were on hand—as the prostitutes once did for their hungry customers.

Ma said that Vita had sons by two different men. Someone named Grieco was involved. He was either a lawyer or a lover, and somehow helped Vita escape to America.

I took my first trip to Italy in college, studying at the University of Siena for a summer. I traveled no farther south than Rome, with no interest in finding my family’s roots. I was trying to get as far away from them as possible, to untangle myself from the petty crooks and shysters who made up a good part of my family tree: the bookie uncle, the embezzling cousins, the mob consigliere, the political fixers, even a murderer or two.

After graduating, I landed a job as a police reporter at my local newspaper, my family’s crimes occasionally making their way across my desk. One day, on assignment, I walked across the construction bridge from Jersey City to the nearby, soon-to-be-opened Ellis Island museum. Out of curiosity, I checked the immigration records, but there was no trace of Vita, since she probably came under an assumed name. Maybe Grieco’s name.

But I found Leonardo, thirteen, and Valente, fifteen, who arrived on separate ships in 1892—the year Ellis Island opened.

We had a couple of photos of Leonardo and Valente as adults in Jersey City, where they both lived and worked as barbers. Leonardo, my great-grandfather, looked a bit like Al Capone; he was a dapper guy with a round, pudgy face, a balding pate, full, shapely lips, and sad brown eyes. But he was much nicer than Capone. Leonardo’s brother, Valente, had a longer face and a full head of hair, but those same full lips as his brother.

No photos survived of either Vita or her husband, Francesco. But everyone said Vita looked just like my great-aunt Mary, Beansie’s older sister. She had a pretty face, but an underbite, thin lips, dark brown hair, and dark brown eyes, nearly black, like kalamata olives. So dark the light flashed off them like sparks. Like all the women on the Italian side of my family, she had soft, flawless skin. We laughed that this was due to all the pasta we cooked as mothers, the steam rising up out of the strainer and giving us facials.

Vita had the same crooked smile I had, and that many of the women in my family had, what we called our Mona Lisa smile, a hesitant smirk that didn’t give much away. You didn’t get the full-on smile until we knew you better, and then we would bend over backward for you, cook you elaborate meals, and do anything you asked. Well, almost anything.

Vita was short, not even five feet tall. We were all short. I was five feet and towered over some of my aunts. I would come to learn that this was due to centuries of poverty and no protein.

Like all the women in my family, Vita was tough but kind. We spoke, walked, and acted with purpose, usually while the men lollygagged along.

We took bullshit from no one. But we loved our men and our children and hugged them tight several times a day. We loved our sisters, but we could be catty sometimes and competitive, with a bit of a mean streak. But when it came down to it, we would do anything for them. Anything for our family, anyway. That’s just the way it was.

I TOLD MY CHILDREN ABOUT VITA WHEN THEY WERE OLD ENOUGH to pay attention. And when my mother came to my house to visit, we told them together. Dean and Paulina had heard so many family stories by this point that another crime didn’t really faze them.

I didn’t tell the story on the way to visit Aunt Katie, since Aunt Katie was dead. And I didn’t tell it on the way to church, since I didn’t go to church anymore: I had a list of grievances with the Catholic hierarchy that was longer than the pope’s robes.

I told the family stories while I cooked and the kids did their homework at the table in our own yellow kitchen. As I stirred a big pot of sauce, meatballs floating on top, my mother and I would tell them how Vita died at the age of sixty-four.

She was hit in the head with a sock full of rocks in Jersey City on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween when all hell broke loose and bonfires raged on its dirty streets. Had she not been smacked in the head, Vita probably would have lived longer. Due to genetics, and the Mediterranean diet, the women in my family lived long lives, well into their late eighties.

We all went to visit Vita’s grave once, looking for the first clue to that family mystery. She was buried deep inside Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City, her two sons and a couple of grandchildren piled on top of her, her name not even written on the tombstone. Just VENA.

I realized, now that I had my own kids, that my mother told me the story of Vita and Francesco over and over not just to pass the time, or for pure entertainment value, but to teach me something. Vita and Francesco had been involved in a murder. She had been a puttana. And look how it all turned out. Hit in the head with a sock full of rocks on Mischief Night. Not even a name on your own gravestone. There was an Italian saying that went, Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine, which meant All the knots come to the comb. It was the Italian version of what goes around comes around.

I searched for more clues about Vita and found her death certificate from 1915. It listed her birthday as August 22 and her mother as Teresina. Through a cousin, I also found the birth certificates of Vita’s sons—Valente from 1877, born in the province of Matera, in the town of Bernalda to Vita Gallitelli, wife of Francesco Vena, and Leonardo, from 1879, born in the neighboring town of Pisticci. The birth certificate said Vita had moved to Pisticci for work reasons.

Valente’s birth certificate said Vita was a weaver. And that Francesco was not present for Valente’s birth. Or for Leonardo’s birth two years later.

It was with these few meager clues—a few dates and street names—that I did something that surprised even me. I went to Basilicata with my mother and the kids on a long vacation to research that first family story. I left my husband behind, just like Vita had.

It would be fun, I told myself and my mother. We’ll rent a house in the town of Bernalda. Spend some time on the beach in nearby Metaponto. Eat some gelato. We can poke around a little, and talk to the locals, do some archival research. My mother was seventy-three and had never been to Italy or anywhere, really, and had never tasted gelato. It was time she had an adventure.

We would be the first in four generations to visit the town of our ancestors, on the arch of Italy’s boot. Vita had left and had never looked back. And neither had her children or grandchildren or even her great grandchildren.

I had no idea that I would cross the Atlantic again and again, that this trip was the beginning of an odyssey that would take me through ancient painted caves, over green volcanic mountains to dusty archives, to dead ends and the edges of cliffs, and to a valley of death where the drama all began.

I had no clue about the isolated world I was stepping into, or how long it would actually take to find Vita’s true story, a story more tragic—and eventually more triumphant—than anything I could have imagined.

How could I have known there was something hidden at the end of my ten-year journey that would change my view of my children altogether, that would make me question my very own identity? That in the end, I would discover one shotgun blast and five dead bodies, most of them belonging to my family?

Chapter 2

DARK TO DARK

I WALKED OUT ONTO THE BALCONY TO CHECK THE HEAT BEFORE the kids were awake, the punishing sun barely making its way over the horizon. From my second-floor perch, with a hand on my hip, I surveyed the neighborhood, which was already stirring, unsmiling men and women quickly getting chores done before the inferno arrived. Women hung laundry and men swept the cobblestones, which were already immaculate.

Across the street from me, on her own balcony that first morning, was a long-lost cousin. Maria Gallitelli looked up from her humongous laundry pile, wiped her dark brow with the back of her thin, brown arm, noticed me, and waved.

Buongiorno, she said, loudly, and smiled the exact same smile that my cousin Jill had back in New Jersey. Yeah, I thought. She’s a cousin all right.

Buongiorno, I said and smiled back. I told her I was visiting with my mother and two children and doing some family research. Young Maria Gallitelli had two sons and a husband, she said, gesturing inside with her head, so she was always hanging laundry, sentenced to a life of dirty undershirts and mutande—underwear—that would only get bigger and dirtier as her boys grew.

We chatted for a bit and finally I asked her, in my slow, stunted Italian, if she had ever heard the story of my great-great-grandmother Vita Gallitelli, who, with her husband, Francesco Vena, had been involved in a murder somewhere around here, somewhere in Matera province around the turn of the last century. They had killed someone, possibly in a card game? I raised my dark, bushy eyebrows, hoping she would nod and the details would come spilling out past her thin lips.

Maria Gallitelli scrunched her prominent Italian nose—a lot like my own prominent Italian nose—and thought for a second. She stuck out her bottom lip and shrugged. No, she said, shaking her thick head of short black hair. I don’t know that story. I never heard it. But I will ask my family.

Maria owned a bomboniere shop on the corner, where, between loads of laundry, she sold expensive wedding gifts, the kind that the bride and groom give to their guests, crystal or silver trinkets that cost a small fortune. Her wooden sign, with a big Gallitelli calligraphied across it, hung over the corner and seemed to be a sign from God that I should live on this street, so I had rented this spacious, second-floor apartment in Bernalda, sealing the deal with the landlady with a shot of homemade limoncello.

Maria and the other locals pronounced the town name Bare-NAL-da, with a little trill at the r. It was a perfect name for this bare-bones place still recovering from centuries of poverty and starvation, where life expectancy at the end of the nineteenth century had been thirty-nine years. My first day there I learned that the Basilicata region was also known as Lucania, its original Roman name. And residents were—and still are called—Lucani.

Bernalda sat on a small hill overlooking the fertile Basento Valley. And now, in the summer of 2004, I’d arrived with my family. In theory it sounded fabulous: live in a small, sun-splashed Italian village with your kids and your mother for a month and research your family’s roots.

But even on that first day, I noticed a darkness in Bernalda, as if a cloud were pressing down on its gray cobblestone streets and melancholy population. I wasn’t sure if it was something I’d brought with me, like luggage, or if it was some vestige left from the malaria and miseria that had gripped its residents for centuries, a hangover that would take several more generations to shake.

Our apartment was on the same street where Vita had lived more than a hundred years before, Via Cavour. The name of the street had been on the birth certificate of her oldest son, Valente. It was in the Centro Storico, or historic district, the neighborhood on the edge of town.

I was thirty-nine (ready for the grave by nineteenth-century standards), around the same age Vita had immigrated to America with her two sons. But I was traveling in the opposite direction with my own two children, Paulina, who was one, and Dean, who was four. And Ma.

When I looked at my mother, it was like looking in a magic mirror that showed exactly what to expect in thirty years. Along with her work ethic, I shared my mother’s temper, her impatience, her heartburn, her nice legs, thick middle, and face with its smooth, unwrinkled skin.

I had become who I had become because of her, not just through genetics, but because she took care of me every time I was sick and knew to call the doctor when I had pneumonia at age five. She took care of me when I wasn’t sick, feeding me homemade chicken soup with pastina. She walked me to school every single day and brought me back again, until, at age fourteen, I begged her not to. And then she followed about a block behind me. She always listened to me and hugged me daily, but when I got snotty or did something bad, she yelled at me, in a very loud and scary voice. She found my stash of pot in my room as a teenager and let me know she had. I obeyed her not just because I was afraid of her wrath (which I was) but because she loved me so much, I couldn’t bear to disappoint her. She had given me her best, and expected the best of me, so I gave it. People would say to my mother all the time, You’re so lucky. You have such great kids. And she would say, Luck has nothing to do with it.

I tried to follow my mother’s model of motherhood, and so far it seemed to be working. As far as I knew, my children had not inherited the criminal genes in my family and were not turning out to be sociopaths.

My husband,