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All right, everybody, welcome to folk Horror Friday. Now I
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have to give credit where credit is due, because this
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idea was born while I was on an episode of
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Occult Rejects with Neck the host, and my fellow reject
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for that episode, Judith the Lone Go check out their
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stuff please. The guests on this episode were the wonderful
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hosts of Weekly Bizarre podcast, Jessica and Montana. And as
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I listened and I was on this to what they do,
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something just clicked right. They tell creepy stories in a
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way that is but thoughtful, unsettling and honest. Frankly, it
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was just fun. And it reminded me that some of
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the strangest stories are not hiding in fiction. They are
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buried in old court records and village rumors, straight up
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forgotten newspaper clippings, right, family legends, and the dark corners
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of history where folklore and reality start to shake hands.
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And so that is what we are doing here on
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Fridays every Friday. We're gonna step into the stories that
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live somewhere between true crime, dark folklore, strange history, occult belief,
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spiritual warning, and I mean good old fashioned campfire dread, right,
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and of course I can't just keep it in the
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little box, so that's extensive. But these are not just
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creepy stories for the sake of being creepy. We're going
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to ask, as usual, deeper questions. What did people believe
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or what were they afraid of? What kind of darkness
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were they trying to bargain with? Possibly? And what happens
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when grief becomes superstition? All kinds of stuff. Right, when
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a person stops praying and starts making deals, when does
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that happen? Right? So this is folk horror Friday, real cases,
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real people and things, real darkness, and sometimes the kind
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of story that makes you check the locks, maybe when
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you go to bed, say a prayer and wonder what
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else has been hiding in plain sight?
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Hear pass the trees where the old roads bend.
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There's a story Berry.
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Where the daylighting, blood on the roads and smoking the sky.
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True, don't sleep on folk horror Friday, Full horor Friday,
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Keep your land high, real dark stories where the dead
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don't lie Full color Friday.
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Don't you turn away? Something still whisper from.
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A shallow green. Today we're gonna start with a woman
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whose story sounds like folklore I mean reads like a nightmare,
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and somehow it is documented history. A mother, a fortune teller,
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three missing women, a terrible bargain, and a kitchen that
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became something much darker than a kitchen. This is the
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story of Leonarda Tanchuli, better known as the soap Maker
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of Correggio. Here we go. There is a bar of
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soap sitting in a glass case in a museum in Salerno, Italy.
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It is yellowish, waxy, I mean unremarkable to look at
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the kind of thing you'd find in a grandmother's bathroom,
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And in a way, that's exactly what it is. It
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came from a grandmother's home. It was made in her kitchen.
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She gave bars just like it to her neighbors, who
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used them to wash their face and their hands and
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probably thought nothing of it. But the museum is called
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the Museum of Criminal Anthropology. And the soap, the real soap,
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behind the real glass, is what remains of a woman
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named Virginia Katchopo. Got Chobo right, Virginia Katchopo. Welcome to
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folk for a Friday. I'm your host, and this is
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broadcasting seeds. Guys. Tonight we're going to going back to
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a small town in northern Italy. The year is nineteen
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thirty nine, the war is beginning, the world is about
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to come apart, and a quiet neighborhood in a town
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called Correggio, a woman named Leonardo Leonarda, is making soap
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in her kitchen, and she has decided that God, Fate,
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and the spirits of the dead have given her permission
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to do it. This is the story about superstition, about motherhood,
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about it the way a village can trust someone completely,
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and how that trust can become the most dangerous thing
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in the world. To understand what Leonarda Chantulli became, you
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have to understand what the world told her she was
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from the very beginning. She was born on April fourteenth,
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eighteen ninety four, in Montella, a small town in the
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Aveno province of southern Italy. The kind of place where
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anyone knows, where everyone knows your name, your business, your
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family's reputation going back three generations, the kind of place
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where a secret is never really a secret. And Leonarda
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arrived as a secret that couldn't be kept. Her mother, Amelia,
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had been raped, and when the pregnancy became impossible to hide.
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There was only one acceptable path. She was forced to
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marry the man who had assaulted her. Because that makes sense.
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That man became Leonarda's father, and her mother, trapped in
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a house with a rapist and the living proof of
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what he had done, never quite forgave the child for existing.
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Leonarda would later write that her mother made it clear
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in a thousand small and large ways that she was
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unwanted and cursed, just born wrong. The family was steeped
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in Southern Italian folk belief, the kind that included the
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evil eye, the power of blood, curses, and the idea
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that certain people are simply marked by fate from the
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moment they draw breath. Her mother didn't just neglect Leonarda,
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I mean she taught her carefully and deliberately to believe
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she was straight up doomed. She attempted to take her
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own life twice before she reached adulthood. The first time
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she tried to hang herself, someone found her in time.
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The second time the rope broke. Later, in her memoir,
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which is a seven hundred page handwritten document she called
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Confessions of an Embittered Soul, she would write about what
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her mother said when she survived that she was sorry
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to see her alive again. She grew up anyway right.
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She married a man named Raphael Pensardi in nineteen seventeen,
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against her family's wishes, which cost her their inheritance. The
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couple was poor. They moved often, trying to build something stable,
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and then, just when it seemed to be finding their footing,
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two things happened that shattered Leonardo's already fragile sense of safety.
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The first was children, and Leonardo became pregnant seventeen times.
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She gave birth to seventeen children. Ten of them died,
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some in infancy, some as toddlers, some older. If you
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are a parent, sit with that number for a moment.
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Ten children gone. Some sources say illness, some say miscarriage,
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but the effect on Leonarda was the same regardless of
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the cause. She became absolutely convinced that the deaths were
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not random, not medical, not the ordinary brutality of early
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twentieth century survival. They were a prophecy being fulfilled because
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there had been a prophecy before the loss. True, the
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loss is truly mounted. Leonardo had visited a fortune teller.
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Now the woman read her fortune and told her, you
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will marry, you will have children, and all of your
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children will die young. Then she visited a Romani palm
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reader who looked at her hands and said, in your
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right hand, I see prison, in your left hand a
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criminal asylum. Leonardo wrote those words down. She kept them,
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She turned them over in her mind for years, and
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where another person might have dismissed them as superstition, Leonardo
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Chenttiulli filed them away as facts. Now the shape of
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her future as fixed and real as the lines on
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her palm right. The second thing that happened wasn't earthquake,
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and in nineteen thirty the Erpini Irpinia earthquake destroyed their home.
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They had nothing. They rebuilt. They moved again, this time
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to a small town in the Amelia Amelia Romania Romandia
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region of northern Italy, a town called Correggio. In Correggio,
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something unexpected happened and Leonardo thrived. She opened a small shop.
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She was warm, personable, a naturally magnetic presence who who
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knew how to listen and how to make people feel seen.
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Came to her with their problems, money troubles, family disputes
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and loneliness, and slowly organically she slipped into a role
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that has existed in every small community in human history
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in one form or another. She kind of became the
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village wise woman. She wasn't advertising herself as a fortune
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teller exactly, but she knew things, she had instincts. She
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offered guidance. Women in particular came to her lonely women,
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older women, women who needed someone to help them imagine
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a better future than the one that they were currently living.
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And Leonarda would listen, think, offer advice. Sometimes she'd read
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cards or palms. She had the gift, people said. She
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had seven surviving children, and she was loved in the community,
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and for the first time in her life, she seemed
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to be winning against the fate her mother had predicted
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for her. And then, in nineteen thirty nine, her eldest
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and most beloved son, Giuseppe, came home and told her
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he was going to enlist in the Italian Army. Now
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the war. He was going to the war, World War two.
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Everything Leonardo Chinculi had ever feared collapsed into a single moment.
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This was it, this was the prophecy. She had already
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lost ten children, She was not going to lose Giuseppe.
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She could not, she would not. She began to pray,
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She made offerings, she visited churches, and somewhere in that
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spiral in the old Southern Italian folk religion, she had
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grown up with the superstitions her mother had planted so
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deeply they had become part of her bones. She arrived
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at a conclusion she needed to make a sacrifice, not
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a symbolic one, not a prayer or a fast or
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a candlelight lit like add an altar right, a real one,
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blood for blood, a life for a life. She would
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later explain this was with total calm and total sincerity.
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She believed, without any doubt that human sacrifice was the
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only currency Fate would accept in exchange for her son's safety.
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And she, who had already paid so much, who had
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surrendered ten children to the dark, was willing to pay more.
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The only question was who Leonarda's shop gave her what
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she needed. Period. Women came to her, women with needs,
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women with dreams, women who had nothing tethering them to
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Correggio and everything to hope for somewhere else. And Leonarda,
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the village oracle, the neighbor, Everyone trusted. The woman with
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the warm eyes and the steady voice knew just what
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to say. She started with Faustina Setti. Faustina was in
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her fifties. She had never married, and she desperately wanted to.
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She had been coming to Leonarda for guidance, and Leonardo
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had been patient and kind and fall encouragement. And then
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one day Leonardo told her she had wonderful news. She
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had found her a man, a suitable husband, waiting for
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her in the town of Pola. All Fustina had to
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do was write letters to her friends and her family,
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saying she was moving so no one would worry, and
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tell no one where she was really going, so not
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to jinx it. Faustina agreed to all of it. In
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Leonardo's kitchen, the same kitchen where she made her shop's goods,
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she killed Faustina Seti with an axe. She drained the blood,
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She cut the body into nine parts. She boiled the
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remains in a pot with seven kilograms of caustic soda,
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stirred until the flesh dissolved into what she described as
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a thick, dark mush, which she poured into buckets and
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emptied into a nearby septic tank. Then she took the
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blood she had collected and let it coagulate. She dried
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it in an oven, grounded into powder, and then mixed
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it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, eggs, and margarine. She
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baked it into teacakes. She served them to her son,
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to her friends, to neighbors who came by the shop.
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She told no one. She felt no remorse. She had
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saved Giuseppe for now, but Giuseppe was still alive, still
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going to war, still in danger. One sacrifice, Leonardo decided
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was not enough. Six months later, she found Francesca So.
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Francesca was looking for work, specifically a job teaching at
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a school, and Leonarda told her she had connections and
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she knew someone in Piacenza who was looking for exactly
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the right person. Same instructions as before, Write your letters,
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tell no one where you're going, keep this between us,
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so not to tempt fate. Francesca did everything she was told.
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In Leonarda's kitchen, she met the same end as Faustina,
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the same acts, the same pot, the same caustic soda,
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the same slow, methodical process of your rature erasure, more
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soap for Leonarda's collection, more tea cakes, more silence. By now,
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Leonarda had a rhythm. She was not a woman who
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seemed to be unraveling. She was not frantic or unstable
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by every external measure. She was still the warm, capable,
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beloved neighbor of Correggio, and the woman who came to you,
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came to when you needed help, when you needed someone
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to see your future more clearly than you could see
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it yourself. That was, of course, the thing that made
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her so dangerous. The third victim was Virginia Catchpo. Virginia Catchopo.
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Virginia was a widow, a former opera singer. Former opera singer.
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Some accounts say she had performed at Lascala Lascala, the
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famous opera house in Italy. She had seen better days,
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and she knew it. She was lonely, underemployed, and hoping
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for something, for anything, to change, and Leonarda told her
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she had found her the perfect position, secretary to a
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mysterious impresario in Florence, a good salary, a fresh start,
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a new life, exactly what Virginia had been dreaming of,
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the same instructions, write your letters, tell no one come alone,
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Virginia Catchopa walked into Leonardo's Chanchuli's kitchen and did not
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walk out. But Virginia was different from the other two
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in one significant way. She was fat, and leonarda ever methodical,
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ever practical. Ever, the woman who wasted nothing noticed this.
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In her confession, she described what happened to Virginia in
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language so matter of fact it is almost more disturbing
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than any display of emotion could have been. She ended
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up in the pot like the other two, Leonardo wrote,
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her flesh was fat and white, and when it had melted,
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I added a bottle of cologne, and after a long
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time on the boil, I was able to make some