Revisiting A 90-Year-Old Murder: Uncovering A Death That Changed My Family's History
How family lore about the murder of my Great-aunt Augustina went from a vague story, to stone-cold reality nearly a century after she was gunned down in her home in front of my 10-year old grandfather
Prologue: Laying the Groundwork
Some might remember that in 2023, I wrote a piece during Italian American Heritage Month about a story within my family history of my great-aunt Augustina Massari, who was murdered at 16 years old.
You can find it here if you have not: Ottobre is Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month: Part 2.
At the time, I was limited in my knowledge of the event, and not only was I limited, but so were my father and my aunt.
The only information anyone really had was limited to a third-hand account via my grandmother. My grandfather, Mario, never spoke about it, and my father never asked my grandfather directly.
Going off a single source, in this case, my grandmother, which is removed from what you're trying to mine for information, even with the best intentions, no matter the individual, is just not super effective.
Even if it is your grandmother.
The farther sources are removed from any incident, the less based in reality they become. An easy analogy everyone knows is whisper down the lane. The farther you move from point A down the line, the more distorted the picture, even if the whisperers consist of Mother Teresa, Jesus of Nazareth, Siddartha Gautama, Honest Abe, Lao Tzu, and some villain with Wonder Woman’s lasso tightly wrapped around their person.
Oral accounts are just not something you can take at face value without other corroborating elements to give them weight, whether it’s written, visual, other witnesses, or whatever. You need other ‘things’ along with a story, aka other sources or source material, to get the closest picture to the objective reality any human being possibly can.
So, let’s backtrack a bit for those who didn’t read the previous piece. As of 2022, neither my father nor my aunt knew my great-aunt’s name, only that she was murdered.
According to family lore prior, again via my grandmother and not the direct source of my grandfather Mario, all they knew was his sister was murdered and killed across the table from my grandfather when he was a boy. My great-grandfather Edwardo, at the time, had been dead, and my widower great-grandmother, Felecia Massari, was dealing with the Great Depression, three living children, and was an immigrant with very little grasp of English. Due to all these factors, my grandfather Mario was forced to work as a necessity at a very young age to help support the family.
We understood that there had been an older man essentially stalking his sister, and my great-grandmother, Felecia, and Mario’s sister tried to squash all advances continually.
The man did not accept no.
Now, I was putting together my family tree via Ancestry.com and stumbled upon a document connection, as the Ancestry system links items it finds within the crawls on the internet, and connects it with the individual you add to your tree, and discovered two points of information.
The first was the name of my great-aunt, Augustina Massari, a name neither my father nor aunt ever heard their entire lives.
And with this name, it linked to a very particular piece of documentation:
Boom, there was now a name to this ethereal, mysterious, legendary figure in our family and confirmation of her murder by a man named Cesare Della Valle. His name will be the last time I mention it at all throughout this series.
Unfortunately, past these few nuggets, there was nothing else to confirm the rest of the story’s details.
We only knew my Mario’s side, according to an oral tradition, if you want to call it that. Was the target really my great-grandmother or Mario, and not Augustina? Was it Augustina? Was it because she rejected him? Or was he directing his anger towards other family members?
Yes, she died from a gunshot, but was it for the reasons that were ‘passed down the lane?’
Our understanding was that Mario had supposedly run down the police car with his sister’s killer in custody, trying to avenge her, but his brother Joseph stopped him or held him back, again supposedly causing lasting friction until before Mario passed from cancer.
Again, there was more uncertainty in the details and details that were given by my grandmother and not Mario.
When you think critically, were those details even from my grandfather? Maybe they were actually from my great-grandmother Felecia? Felecia lived with Mario and my grandmother until she passed, and maybe it was a conversation at some point. Potentially a family friend told my grandmother. Shit, maybe my grandmother even heard the story from mutual friends or experienced it in some form or fashion living in the same neighborhood of Italians in South Philly.
No idea.
Now, my little prepper completed something my family probably never thought would happen…did happen. This year, I stumbled on actual, non-family, real source evidence and documents to corroborate the entire story. An event that’s been so impactful in our family, causing massive ripples that have crossed generations as a result.
Even crazier, it’s not one source, but nearly 30 different for an incident I’m sure my father and aunt thought was probably gone with their parent’ passing. Augustina’s death was a major news event in Pennsylvania that was covered over two years and across multiple outlets.
Absolutely wild.
Within the span of two years, this girl, whose passing was nearly 100 years ago and near-forgotten, went from a figment and obscure figure to a name and person to now, a girl whose entire neighborhood of hundreds stood behind her and ready to seek out her killer.
She was no longer nobody.
I don’t want to sound corny or even cliche, but I feel like she’s been reborn and given a second chance. And what she lost in her life, her future potentially whatever that might have been, I hope to help her live on through telling this story.
The Murder of Augustina Massari
Once again, only thanks to the absolute wonders of Ancestry.com and their partner Newspaper.com, was this single article to my attention.
Honestly, I’d do a plug for Ancestry and Newspaper for the rest of my life from this one article alone, and as much as AI scares me and I also loathe its existence, Newspaper.com’s ability to scrub an unknown amount of history allowed me to find all of the clippings I did, is nothing less than life-changing.
Joking aside, the effects all of this has had on my aunt and father, both of whom, in a lot of ways, finally see this person they’ve known all their life abstractly as someone who was truly real.
My dad, paraphrasing, said this article made her a real person who he could see, he could imagine, he could be friends with. A doting aunt. His father’s big sister. Augustina was now a real person. And the pain that my grandfather and his father endured his entire life took on a tangibility that was different now.
There was a face. There was a name. There was a story.
He could now see the person who was lost.
Not that the suffering of his father, Mario, wasn’t real before, but no details were ever discussed, and now, he knew who my father lost and what caused that suffering.
It was a very emotional experience for both my father and aunt and, in a much smaller way, myself too.
Pepe Silvia
As emotionally impactful as this was, I am also one layer back from it all where yes, I can feel an emotional weight but also be completely fascinated and enthralled from an investigative perspective without feeling anything.
As someone trying to be objective and completely devoid of attachment to an analysis of the details, which were…different than what we were told and yet…similar too.
To start, 500 people surrounded the police car trying to bring righteous justice to this POS? That’s a massive detail, not to mention!
Second, the killer was in the house and not from the alley, as we thought. That’s a big difference. And there was no mention of Mario sleeping or chasing the guy.
Was that Mario’s wishful thinking after the trauma? That because he couldn’t react, he must have been asleep or something to that effect?
Third, wait, wait, wait…the killer frequently visited the house? What the hell does that mean?
And fourth, this murderer sounds completely manic and unhinged! He was definitely out of his mind with the up-and-down personality shifts.
Not only that, he’s f******* 46?! Augustina was 16. When we heard older in our version of the story, it was assumed that maybe he was in his mid to late 20s, only slightly older. But 46?! And the f******* newspaper is calling him a ‘suitor’!
It was all a lot to take in, but as a professional analyst, one of the hats I wear, and my two years of undergraduate history major training, I instantly went into, alright, grab a beer, stretch those fingers, and absolutely deep diving records like a mad man to get as complete a picture as I could.
The problem I am now faced with.
How do I lay out these 30 articles in a concise fashion to tell this story without seeming crazy?
Down The Rabbit Hole
The way I decided to tackle this is by date. Take the events and how they were covered by the papers, from the first articles to the last ones I could find, and then try to wrap it neatly up with my own analysis thoughts, with as objective a hypothesis as I can come up with.
July 19th, 1937, is the first date I could find any coverage of this in the newspaper searches; Augistina was killed on the 18th, using a variety of terms from Mario Massari to Augustina Massari, Felicia Massari, the killer's name, variations, and combinations, or Guiseppe or Joseph Massari.
July 19, 1937
Pieces of evidence I found notable or that stood out:
The murderer worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C) at some point, which was still active at this time.
My great-grandmother Felicia had left the room when the murder occurred.
This article mentions church as the tipping-off point for the killer and an incident confirmed from my family’s story that Augustina rejected him at church and why he killed her.
This article confirms, from our own lore, that my Mario was sleeping during the murder.
The murderer was a frequent visitor. What does that mean? Why? How often? Lots of questions here.
The swiftness of the women neighbors coming to the home after gunshots. To me, this emphasizes how close the buildings had to have been and how tight-knit and aware everyone was of their community.
The ‘children,’ alluding to only Mario and Augustina, resented the killer for the assumption of authority in their home since my great-grandfather was dead. That’s striking to me because there is no mention of my Uncle Joe, and seems to allude to only two children
The killer slapping Augustina a week prior for “talking back” was unexpected, shocking, and a very new wrinkle in all of this.
Evidence pieces:
There are similar details from the previous clipping. However, they might be all pulled from a single source, which causes some issues when looking at historical documents that pull from a single source. I’ll use an example:
In the historical research of the Bible, there is a believed source titled Q. “The whole idea of a Q gospel is based on the concept that the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are so similar that they must have copied from each other and/or another source…The predominant argument for the existence of a Q gospel is essentially this: (1) The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written after A.D. 70 and, therefore, could not have been written by the Apostle Matthew, John Mark, or Luke, the doctor. (2) Since the authors of the Gospels were not firsthand witnesses, they must have used other sources. (3) Since Mark is the shortest Gospel and has the least original material, Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. (4) Since there are many similarities in Matthew and Luke which do not occur in Mark, Matthew and Luke must have had another source. (5) This source, Q, was likely a collection of sayings of Jesus, similar to the Gospel to Thomas.”
That said, some further details as to how Mario was sleeping are added, specifically, Mario sleeping with his head in his arms. This was such a specific detail that we knew from our story, further aligning and confirming our oral version, that had to have been burned in Mario’s memory for such detail to get passed down.
Evidence pieces:
Here is the first mention of Mario’s actions after the fact. A ten-year-old child chasing a grown 40-year-old man who just gunned down your sister with a butcher knife. Can you imagine? That’s literally my son’s age. A 10-year-old boy chased down his sister’s killer, with no idea whether he would get shot himself, running down a grown man. I saw this with no sarcasm, but how many of you can name a child who would do that and not crawl into a ball? Or be seized by fear and emotion they couldn’t move? Even a grown adult. How many adults wouldn’t be frozen? Mario as a boy, chased down an armed assailant who killed his sister in front of him with a knife. It’s now harder for me to grasp seeing the details and age than the story I was told about all of this, and it further confirms my grandfather trying to chase this individual down after Augstina’s death, we were told, with a whole new layer to it.
The neighbors are mentioned once again, as well as the altercation which occurred from the prior week. However, this time a threat is added to the mix, “There will be crepe at your door for this.”
I think the word that would have actually been said is ‘crepa,’ and this is a translational error, and not crepe, like the pastry. To have ‘crepa’ at your door means to have cracks in your door, which is bad luck. There are different variations of this depending on region and what region the killer was from; I don’t care to find out. He doesn't deserve the time.
There was a phrasing from Sardinia I found on Reddit I thought might have been the closest implication to what cracks at the door would have meant in this case, “When someone dies, on the morning of the funeral, you should not close the doors but leave them ajar so that the soul of the deceased can exit the house.”
There is lots of the same recurring information here. I just don’t know what they are pulling from, and journalism in 1937 wasn’t exactly a golden age. Were they onsite? Was there a police report they were writing from? Was it from a single source or several? Were there interviews conducted? I just don’t know.
The murderer is referred to as allegedly a ‘family friend,’ definitely a new detail. He frequented the house, and he was a ‘friend.’ Spidey-sense went off with this one.
The murderer was arrested nearly a decade earlier for assault and battery with intent to kill, so he has a history of violence. To me, this adds to the article, which kicked off the search. It’s safe to assume the killer was off his rocker and a mentally unstable person.
Evidence pieces:
There is confirmation of the location of the murderer that my family was always told, which was in the kitchen, and sitting with Mario. This article is the closest that I’ve come across with details of what happened and what I was told. Mario was dozing, sitting with his sister when she was shot. He always believed that because he was dozing off to sleep, it was why he was not shot and that because he was nodding off, a bullet missed him and hit his sister. Now, was this again, piecing together a puzzle from grief and not reality? Did he want to think it should have been him and not Augustina? Again, it arouses questions, but it supports what my family understood. Mario was in the kitchen with his sister Augustina, sitting with her, nodding out to sleep after working when she was shot and killed.
Another variation of the murderer being mentioned as a ‘friend’ of the mother, my great-grandmother Felecia, again, and this time, he is stated as a close friend.
In this article clipping, the murderer is, again, mentioned as supposedly providing fatherly advice to the children. What strikes me is that this one also alludes to only these two, Mario and Augustina, and not my Uncle Joe being present or around. Even existing at all, it seems.
The murderer makes mention of Augustina being around boys and Augustina ignoring him at church when he asks about her mother, Felecia. The question is, who told the police about this incident? The murderer? Neighbors who attended the church? Mario? A combination? Who and what is the source of the incident that keeps being mentioned?
Overall, there are several connecting threads from the other papers that tie them all together.
That was only the first day of coverage, which lasted from 1937 until 1938, at least that I could find. This, to me, is crazy, considering my family knew so few details prior, and none of us had any idea how much coverage this reserved.
My father and aunt didn’t even know their own aunt Augustina’s name until 2022!
And yet, this murderer was covered all over Pennsylvania and papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the city’s largest papers. Unfortunately, we’re going to pause and pick this up in another edition of this series, with plenty more articles to cover and look at.
I hope you follow in this journey and story along with me.