The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 40
Learning that Rosa lived on the top floor, the officer rushed up the stairs and knocked repeatedly on the door, as loudly as he could, but got no response. He went back down, thinking that no one was home, but quickly ran up again when the neighbors told him there were people up there. This time he kicked at the Mortaras’ door until finally it was opened by a 12-year-old boy who, Masini said, seemed confused. The officer brought the youngster downstairs with him, but since the boy seemed to know nothing, Masini took him back upstairs. The boy did not knock on the door but whistled, and a girl came to open it. Masini went in and found Momolo in bed. The invalid, reported the policeman, said that he didn’t know what had happened. Masini went to investigate the windows that looked onto the courtyard but found them all closed. “I looked on the ground briefly but didn’t find any traces of blood.”
The matter of blood was on the Magistrate’s mind that day as he asked the two medical examiners to do more detailed studies of the forensic evidence, focusing, in particular, on the wound to Rosa’s forehead. Could it have been made by the blade that was found in her pocket? And could they shed any more light on whether the wound came as a result of the fall or had been inflicted first? On April 19, they submitted their report.
On the razor the doctors had no doubt: “Such a wound could not have been made by the blade of the razor found in Tognazzi’s pocket.” The gash was not caused by anything as sharp or as light as a blade. The mysterious razor seemed to have nothing to do with the young woman’s death.
The doctors were also able to reconstruct the position in which Rosa had landed. Given the nature of the fractures to her right foot and leg, as well as to her hip, they were confident that, “if not in a perfectly upright position, she was in a vertical position not far from fully upright” when she hit the ground, right foot first.
As for the kerchief, if the wound that it covered had been produced by the fall, “it would have had to be lacerated.” It was not.
The Magistrate had also asked whether the limited amount of blood on the kerchief and the lack of much blood below Rosa’s head on the courtyard didn’t show that the wound must have been inflicted elsewhere. In this, the doctors had to disappoint him. The amount of blood in the handkerchief, they reported, was consistent with the nature of the wound.
In response to the Magistrate’s final question, the medical examiners reported that, had the head wound been caused before the fall, Rosa might well have lacked the strength to resist being hoisted out of the window.
For the Magistrate, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. On April 20, he wrote up his preliminary findings, in which, in addition to emphasizing all the evidence about the wound, the kerchief, and Momolo Mortara’s violent temper, he gave great weight to Officer Masini’s testimony. Why had the Mortaras not answered the door when the policeman first knocked? Why, later, had Aristide come out, closing the door behind him, taking the officer downstairs? And why were none of the family members able to give the officer useful information? The family’s behavior could only be explained, he wrote, by their frantic effort “to gather up all the bloodstains, which were consequently not found anywhere in the apartment by later inspections.”
Bolaffi’s behavior, according to the Magistrate, was suspicious as well. Although he testified that he had already looked out the window and seen Rosa below, when he got downstairs, he had asked Signora Ragazzini what had happened, pretending that he didn’t already know. And then, when the widow replied that he should know better than she, he said nothing but simply went off.
Given all this evidence, Marabotti concluded, “the unshakable conviction arises that this is a case of homicide, that this could only have occurred inside the Mortara home, where, it seems from other evidence, Mortara’s 20-year-old [sic] son, Ercole, a pharmacy student, was to be found.” This new wrinkle to the case had arisen from further testimony from neighbor Andrea Casalegno, who claimed to have seen Ercole at the front window of the Mortara apartment immediately after Rosa fell, and shortly thereafter running out the front door without stopping to talk to anyone. Why would everyone in the household be trying to cover up the fact that Ercole had, in fact, been home when Rosa went out the window?
That afternoon, the judge signed his third arrest warrant in the case, citing Ercole.
CHAPTER 26
Momolo’s Trial
THE MAGISTRATE DECIDED not to execute Ercole’s arrest warrant immediately but instead had police deliver a summons for him to appear to face charges on April 23. But as soon as Ercole received the order, he went directly to see the Prosecutor to try to clear himself.
When Rosa fell from the window of his older brothers’ bedroom, Ercole recounted, he was out. “I returned home after five o’clock; it was about 5:20. My friend Vittorio Boas, who’s a student at the Technical Institute, can tell you. I know that I returned exactly at 5:20 because the church bell in our neighborhood rings at that hour, and because I noted the time on the clock at the pharmacist’s in via Alfani.”
The Magistrate walked Ercole into a nearby room for a lineup. Andrea Casalegno was brought into an adjoining room, from which he could view three men standing against a wall. He pointed to the man on the left. That was the one, he said, that he had seen at the window of the top-floor apartment of via Pinti when he first got to the scene of Rosa’s fall. The young man to whom he pointed, with a dark, patchy mustache and long curly hair, was Ercole Mortara.
The following day, April 22, Vittorio Boas, 17 years old, Jewish, and Turinborn, was called in to be questioned. Ercole Mortara, he said, was his friend. Vittorio recalled that he had gone to get Ercole at the Mortara home, near his own, around noon on the day in question. “We stayed together until he walked me home,” he recollected. “When Mortara left me, it was about 4:30 or 5. But I know that the five-o’clock bell hadn’t yet sounded.”
Marabotti and his team of investigators had by this time, less than three weeks after Rosa’s death, gathered a mountain of evidence. He was convinced that she had been murdered. It was time to draw up the formal charges, but first he wanted to have one more talk with Bolaffi. The family would be hard to crack, but maybe he could get the family friend—after two weeks in jail—to confess what he knew.
Bolaffi was not in a particularly cooperative mood. “I’ve already told you the whole truth,” he complained to the Magistrate, “so there’s nothing more to say.” Responding to the Magistrate’s question about Ercole, Bolaffi stuck to his story: the boy had not been home when Rosa went out the window. Marabotti thought the time had come to apply more pressure:
I warn you to tell the truth, because from our investigations it emerges that Rosa Tognazzi suffered a serious wound to her head before falling from the window … so that the injury occurred inside the home. There is reason to believe that someone in the Mortara family did it, and in particular Momolo, who has an erratic and violent character. So you must have witnessed what happened: with Mortara’s responsibility for the girl’s injury being so clear, the decision was made to throw Tognazzi from the window.… Your silence in this regard [warned the Magistrate] leads to the supposition that you, too, took part in throwing the woman down into the courtyard.
“We were all in the bedroom when the woman fell from the window,” Bolaffi insisted, “and we’re all innocent.”
On April 24, unmoved by these protestations of innocence, Marabotti sent the formal charges to the Civil and Criminal Court of Florence. Momolo Mortara was charged with having, “on April 3, 1871, between 4:30 and 5 in the afternoon, mortally wounded his domestic servant Rosa Tognazzi by a blow to the head made by a heavy, lacerating object, and then … in order to conceal his crime, threw her from the window with the aid and direct cooperation of Flaminio Bolaffi and Ercole Mortara, his son.”
In support of this accusation, the Magistrate offered an array of evidence. The medical inspectors “admitted that the wound to the left parietal ridge was made before the fall.” The evidence pointed to Momolo as the one who had struck the blow. He was irritable and bad-tempered and often driven by his foul disposition “to violent acts.”
Momolo’s entire defense, the Magistrate argued, was based on the claim that he had never gotten out of bed that day, due to the tumor on his knee. But this fact was disproved by the neighbors who had seen that he was up, especially Violante Bellucci, who, the very evening after the death, had seen him leave the building with his little son. And further incriminating Momolo was the delay in opening the door of the apartment to the police officer, “because in those precise moments, it was necessary to get rid of the traces of blood and prepare some kind of alibi.”
However, reasoned the Magistrate, once Momolo had mortally wounded Rosa and come up with the idea of throwing her out the window, “it was impossible for him to do it alone. Others needed to help, and these were Flaminio Bolaffi and Ercole Mortara, his son.” The evidence showed that Bolaffi had been lying. Here again the Magistrate cited the ingenuousness of Bolaffi’s question at the courtyard of “What happened?” and his claims of ignorance about the circumstances of Rosa’s fall when reporting the matter to the police.
The evidence pointed to Ercole Mortara as another of the conspirators, claimed Marabotti, for he too had lied about being there at the time of the incident, and why else would he lie but to conceal his guilt?
This was murder, not suicide, the Magistrate insisted. Rosa was a cheerful soul, not engaged in any amorous relationship that could have gone bad, in perfect health, with sufficient means of support. “She would never have been able to conceive, much less execute, such an act, on a moment’s notice and without giving any sign.” As for the claim that she would have killed herself over the dispute with her former employer, “The accusation of theft that was leveled at her is a ludicrous basis for trying to explain such a disproportionate effect.”
The following day, the three-member judicial council of the Civil and Criminal Court, which was responsible for the preliminary phase of murder trials, issued its judgment. The investigating magistrate, Clodoveo Marabotti, was himself one of the three judges. In a decision that largely reiterated Marabotti’s charge, the court ruled that there were strong grounds for believing that Momolo Mortara was guilty of voluntary, unpremeditated homicide and that both Flaminio Bolaffi and Ercole Mortara were guilty of being accessories to the murder. The three men were ordered bound over to the next higher court, the Court of Cassation. Responsibility for the next phase of the investigation was placed in the hands of the prosecutor attached to the court.
A few days later, the procuratore generale wrote up his preliminary reactions to the mass of documents that had been forwarded to him. The basic question was “determining if this was a case of suicide or, rather, of homicide.” The Prosecutor was not entirely happy with the work done by the investigators so far. In particular, evidence for the crucial question of whether the injury to Rosa’s forehead had preceded her fall appeared to him to be less clear than it had been to the investigating magistrate. He wanted the medical examiners to reconsider, as well, the issue of whether Rosa might not have landed headfirst, and not feetfirst, thus explaining her cracked skull. And then there was the crucial issue of the kerchief. The Magistrate had reported that it belonged not to the victim but to the Mortaras. How did the defendant claim it had ended up around his servant’s head? And what of Momolo’s claim that he was too infirm to get out of bed, much less assault anyone? A medical examination of his condition must be ordered. Finally, there was the perplexing question of the bloodstained razor in Rosa’s pocket. Whose was it, and was the blood fresh?
While both Momolo and Bolaffi were kept in jail, Ercole was allowed to remain free for the time being.
In response to a request from Bolaffi’s lawyer, who sought to show that Rosa was, indeed, in a suicidal mood that afternoon, the investigators interviewed the Bolaffis’ 22-year-old servant, Adele Reali. She told how, at about 4 p.m. on April 3, Imelda arrived at their apartment “all frightened, and recounted that two men were downstairs with her servant and they were talking angrily, and that they had followed the servant for a long way along the street. She then said that she did not want to return home with her. A little later,” Adele continued, “the servant came in with their little dog, and I saw that her face was red and she was crying, and she told me not to open the door to the two men who were coming up the stairs. Then, a little later, the doorbell sounded. I went to open it, and there were two men there who I didn’t know.” The men were finally persuaded to leave.
Adele then went to the kitchen, where she found Rosa standing by a window to their courtyard, looking out and crying. “I asked her what happened, and she told me that these men had said that she owed them ten lire, but it wasn’t true. She remained in the house until near five o’clock, when my employer Bolaffi returned home.” When Rosa left with Imelda and Bolaffi, “her face was red and she was crying, and it seemed she was very upset.” She wore no white kerchief.
The investigators succeeded in tracking down Rosa’s sister Giuseppa, the one whom she had taken food to in the hospital. I turned out that Giuseppa had last seen Rosa, though only briefly, the day before she died, having come by the Mortara home to say hello. How did she seem? She seemed fine, said Giuseppa. “She told me that she was doing well and was happy. I asked her if her employers were good people or if they mistreated her, and she answered that she was happy.”
Had Rosa ever mentioned killing herself? asked the investigator. “My sister never showed the least idea of doing harm to herself or committing suicide. It’s unthinkable.”
On May 16, the investigating magistrate returned to the infirmary of the Murate prison to interview Momolo Mortara. He had been there now for almost six weeks. The interview was brief. The Magistrate had only a few questions.
Asked about the white kerchief, Momolo reported having heard his daughter Ernesta say that the kerchief was hers, and that she had given it to Rosa on the morning of her death, but he had never seen her wearing it.
The following day, Momolo’s physician, Dr. Gonnetti, came to testify. He had been called to the Mortara home on March 22 and found Momolo in pain, with a badly swollen right knee. He diagnosed a tumor and prescribed bed rest and some medication. The next day he had been called back by one of Momolo’s sons because the pain had gotten worse. The last time he had seen his patient was the day before Rosa’s death. “He was still in bed,” the doctor reported, “but he said he was feeling better and that he was getting up to go to the lavatory.”
Asked if, in his professional opinion, Momolo could have gotten out of bed on April 3, the doctor responded yes, he could, unless he had gotten worse since the previous day’s visit.
Would Momolo have had enough strength on April 3, the Magistrate asked, to administer a blow capable of producing the head wound described in Rosa Tognazzi’s autopsy report? He showed the report to the doctor. And could Momolo, in a moment of fury, have had the strength to throw the woman out the window, given that she was only semiconscious?
Dr. Gonnetti, a cautious man, responded: “I lack the information I would need to answer these questions. Having seen Mortara only three times, I cannot say how much strength he might have had on April 3. I would have to know the size of the stick with which the blow was struck.… I believe, though, that Mortara was able to administer such a blow with a stick … but I do not think it equally reasonable to believe that Mortara, especially given the state of his knee, could have had the strength and leverage to throw an unconscious Tognazzi out the window.”
That same morning, May 19, the final witness was called, Marianna Mortara. During the weeks that Momolo had been in jail, the family had moved out of its apartment on via Pinti, but whether they were forced out by their landlord or could not stand the hostile glances and overheard comments of their neighbors, we do not know.
Rosa, Marianna recalled, had begun working for them on February 28. They were so pleased with her that they had given her a salary of twelve lire per month rather than the customary ten.
Marianna then recounted the events of April 3: Bolaffi’s unexpected return with Imelda and Rosa, his appearance at the bedroom where she sat with her bedridden husband, and the story that Bolaffi told of Rosa’s stormy encounter with her former employer. But in the details that followed, there were some elements that were new to the Magistrate.
While we were talking, Rosa had gone up to her room. Meanwhile, Bolaffi was saying that we should give some careful thought to the matter, and he advised us to fire the servant and report her to the police. Since he was talking so loudly, I asked him to speak more softly so that Rosa wouldn’t overhear him. I then called Rosa from my husband’s bedroom, and since she didn’t answer or come down, I got up to go look for her. Going upstairs, I found that she’d locked herself in on the terrace with the key that is always left in the lock. Her face was all red, and it seemed to me that she’d been crying. I asked her to come down and prepare dinner, but she didn’t say anything. She walked ahead of me down the stairs, and I accompanied her to the kitchen, where I told her that she shouldn’t get all upset, and that if she was innocent, she had nothing to fear.
Marianna then returned to the bedroom. About five minutes later, she heard a big, sudden noise. Their dog started barking. Momolo thought that Rosa must have slammed the door and left, and Aristide ran to call after her down the stairway.
Bolaffi and I went to the front window to see if she was leaving the building, but since we didn’t see her, we started to go back. As we passed the room with the two beds, where the dog kept barking, I saw that the window was open. I approached it with Bolaffi and saw Rosa lying in the courtyard, groaning. Desperate, I went back to the bedroom, no, first I threw myself in Bolaffi’s arms. Since none of my older sons were home, I told him that he would have to do what had to be done. He said that he would go down to help Rosa and to report it to the police, and without even going back to my husband’s bedroom, he left.…
