When black-haired
Carolina was nine years old, she saw her
father commit a murder. "Father was
squabbling in the kitchen one night with a
stranger," she remembers. "I heard them and
went to look. On the kitchen floor I saw a
man with his throat cut and his head all
bloody. I hurried back to bed."
A few months later
Carolina's father, Ernesto Picchioni, was
known to all Italy as the "Monster of Nerola."
With her mother, two sisters and a brother,
Carolina lived with him in a dank stone
cottage in a lonely gorge in the hills east
of Rome. Father Picchioni was an itinerant
olive-picker, chicken thief, and loud-mouthed
braggart who was first a Fascist, later a
Communist. Always roaring at his wife and
children, he once made them dig a long
family grave in the backyard so that "it
will be ready when I want to get rid of you."
After Dark.
One night in
1944 a lawyer named Pietro Monni stopped in
the lonely gorge to ask help in fixing the
leak in his bicycle tire, and stayed for the
night. Carolina's mother heard a shot. "I
got up and saw my husband carrying out a big
bundle—a sheet with a human foot hanging
out."
Three years later another
bicyclist stopped, and did not live the
night. This time Carolina's terrified mother
summoned her courage and notified the police.
At the trial Picchioni brazenly confessed to
two more murders, and a dozen others were
attributed to him. He was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Carolina's mother took up
washing and Carolina and her sisters were
sent to Rome's House of Calasanziane Sisters
for orphans and convicts' children.
At the orphanage Carolina
learned to sew, made laces, embroideries,
bridal trousseaux; she left the institution
only for group walks, saw no movies, read
only religious books. In the home's routine,
she rose every day at 5:30, attended Mass at
6, worked all day.
Carolina had grown into a
tall, slim, black-eyed girl of 17 when, one
day last fall, the Sisters told all 157
girls to line up for inspection. A greying,
well-dressed man looked along the line and
said: "I'll take that one," and pointed to
Carolina. Hastily, the Sisters told him the
story of her father. "All the more reason to
take her," said he. "She deserves a break."
Pygmalion.
Carolina's
benefactor was an Englishman named Robert
Wilbraham Fitz Aucher. A vicar's son, Fitz
Aucher was a man of great charm and erratic
fortune. Three years ago he struck it rich
when he sold a rust-proofing process to a
Belgian steel concern for close to
$1,000,000. After that he expanded
gloriously, launching enterprises from
Norway to Iran. He did not marry, but
brooding on his loneliness, decided to adopt
children. He dreamed of being a Pygmalion to
some poor Italian girl and transforming her
into a perfect English lady. Italian friends
sent him to the Calasanziane Sisters.
Fitz
Aucher arranged a legal guardianship for
Carolina and younger sister Gabriella. While
he traveled the international business
circuit, Fitz Aucher lodged Carolina with an
elderly couple in one of Rome's most
expensive districts. Carolina went on a
happy whirl of movies and shopping, rode
home weekly in a Rolls-Royce to her old
village of Nerola. Fitz Aucher started her
studying English, tennis, driving, planned
to adopt her formally and take her to London.
A fortnight ago Fitz
Aucher died of a heart attack. Last week
every daily newspaper in Rome headlined the
happy story of La Cenerčntola, the
Cinderella girl, who had inherited an
estimated $2,000,000 in her benefactor's
will. Carolina, the monster's child, had
overnight become the richest 17-year-old
girl in Italy. She talked happily of
building a home for her mother, of praying
for the soul of Signor Fitz Aucher, that "very
good man," and of going to Texas to see some
cowboys.
Time.com
