March 3, 2025 • 47 mins
We don’t talk a lot on this show about female killers, but author Craig Monson has brought me a fascinating story right out of a Hollywood film. His book, The Black Widows of the Eternal City, centers on a web of women poisoners in 17th century Rome and their male victims.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It seems too.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Soon to kill off a second one, and Jenonima answered
one is about the same as two, and barely a
week later, husband number two was dead.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers mate, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. We don't talk a lot
on this show about female killers, but author Craig Monson
(01:12):
has brought me a fascinating story right out of a
Hollywood film. His book, The Black Widows of the Eternal
City centers on a web of women poisoners in seventeenth
century Rome and their male victims. I was really interested
in your book because I've dabbled a little bit in
(01:33):
research about Roman poisoners, and I looked at what has
been purported to be the first serial killer in the world,
Lacusta de Gaul, who was essentially hired by several different
emperors to poison very famous people to get people out
of the way. And you know, I learned that they
used enslaved people as food testers because everyone important was
(01:57):
being poisoned. So when your book came up about something
much more contemporary seventeenth century Rome than what I was
used to, was really excited to hear the story. So
what is seventeenth century Rome like politically? And you know
where crime? Where are we?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Well?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
The story takes place in Rome in the sixteen fifties,
which was a period when the city was controlled by
the papacy and dominated by several old, extremely wealthy, and
rival noble families. The general populace had little say about
how they were governed, and existed in what we could
(02:36):
call a culture of surveillance. The police employed a network
of spies and snitches, for example, and the doctors and
barber surgeons were required to report any cases of possibly
suspicious deaths. In addition, there was the archetypical nosy neighbor paradigm,
(02:58):
the social figure who always had her nose in everybody
else's business and was really a characteristic figure in the
neighborhood whose eyes and ears basically missed nothing, so that
life was lived much more publicly than it is today.
Gossip and word of mouth were incredibly powerful and spread
(03:22):
in churches and piazzas, and so they were effectively the
social media of the day and made it very difficult
to keep anything secret. So that's sort of the situation
in which the story was sort of developing.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
One thing that I like to ask people when we're
setting the scene of a particular city in a time
period is what were the punitive charges for different things?
For instance, I'm always shocked at time periods where theft,
like stealing five dollars would be a capital crime. So
how now was crime and punishment handled in seventeenth century Rome.
(04:04):
Was it really easy to be thrown in jail?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Well, it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
It was very easy to be hauled in and questioned,
but in order to be convicted you needed a confession
or you needed the testimony of two eyewitnesses, and so
that was a little tricky. In this case, because a
lot of the evidence was gossip that was circulating around
(04:30):
second and third or fourth hand and getting a confession
what often became the critical technique, and that's one reason
that torture was used so regularly.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
So where do we go from there? We kind of
set the scene what ends up happening next.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Apparently it took several years for the would be widow's
crime to be discovered, and this was because the chief
protagonists were meticulously careful about distancing themselves from the actual poisonings,
particularly in the early years. And then by a happy
(05:11):
accident in the spring of sixteen fifty six, bubonic plague
struck Rome. So within the year, twenty three thousand Roman citizens,
which was twenty percent of the population, died. Therefore, any
poisoned husband simply disappeared, unnoticed among thousands of other hastily
(05:31):
buried corpses. But then once the plague was over, they
started to notice this curious uptick in husband's deaths. And
I can sort of give a brief outline of how
it worked. In sixteen fifty eight, first a Francesco Tombourini,
the woodworker of the Trevi Fountain, died. Then on July
(05:54):
twenty second, sixteen fifty eight, Simon Umbert of French painter
on Via de la Croce died. Then three days later,
July twenty fifth, Antonio Julie, the debt ridden mattress maker died.
Then three weeks after that, on August sixteenth, Giovanni Pietro Beltrami,
(06:16):
the dier at the Elm, died. On November nineteenth, marc
Antonio Ronieri, the roving adventurer died. So with this kind
of steady stream of kind of mysteriously dying husbands, it
was almost inevitable that they would be noticed.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
In addition, the nosy.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Neighbors of a linener who had a shop just across
the street from Rome's notorious toured and on a prison
remembered several other curious deaths in the linener's family right
before the plague. On March twenty third, sixteen fifty five,
the linener's son in law had abruptly died of a
(06:58):
virulent stomach infection. Then in September of that year, the
husband of the linener's sister in law died of the
same systems, and a month after that, on October ninth,
the linener's other son in law, who ran a barber
shop right next to the prison, died of the same symptoms.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And this is all after the bubonic plague had dissipated,
and that's why this was alarming. Okay, so this is
way beyond their normal death rate after a plague.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And also it was curious that the husbands of the
Linener's daughters also displayed unusually ruddy faces. And as somebody
said at one of the at the funerals, they look
better dead than when they were alive.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Well, I was going to ask that what are the
external symptoms, because did they have any idea about toxicology?
I know, with arsenic I think it was that organs
would turn black and the face would be black, and
was there sort of an obvious tailtale sign for whoever
the corner type person was.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
The traditional version of the story says that there were
no symptoms and that was one of the virtues of
the poison. But in fact, there were symptoms. I mean,
for one thing, they first developed a burning in the
throat and a terrible thirst. Then they started having extreme
stomach pain and began to vomit so violently that one
(08:31):
neighbor said he vomited so much he looked like he
would turn himself inside out. So there were in fact
characteristic symptoms, and some of those symptoms were associated with
arsenic And interestingly enough, in this period apothecaries were forbidden
to sell arsenic to women, So in this case, the
(08:54):
women who brewed the poison enlisted the services of a
priest who was also a sort of who practiced witchcraft,
and he would go to the apothecaries and buy the
arsenic for them.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
What is this concoction exactly? Because with my research with
Lucusta degal it was night shade belladonna people would know
as belladonna, but you know it was very plant based poison.
So what is this.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Well, I mean, it's interesting that for a long time
the nature of the poison was shrouded in mystery, and
one of the most recent scholarly books suggests that it
was strychnine. Well, it couldn't have been strychnine, because death
by strychnine involves horrible grimaces on the face and the
sort of tensing up of the body, whereas these people
(09:49):
look better dead than alive. So there's been lots of
speculation about what the poison involved. And one of my
favorites is a suggestion by Alert and a toxicologist that
it involved the bacterial laden drippings from a moldering dead
pig that had been smeared with arsenic.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
That what this person ingested is that what happened.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That they then, I guess they thought they collected these
drippings and used.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That, Oh, that's awful.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
In fact, I've established that the poison in fact is
described in the transcript of the investigation, and one of
the women, named Giovanna de Grandi's, says that it involved
grinding together arsenic lead, bird shot, and sometimes adding antimony,
(10:41):
and they were ground together then simmered for about an
hour in a new jar. They said it had to
be a new jar, which was sealed with doe, and
then it was allowed to cool overnight, after which it
was ready, and one of the witnesses said it was
clear and tasted just like water from the well. Wow.
(11:04):
And the other interesting thing is how carefully the Lieutenant
Governor of Rome and his assistants tried to test the poison.
We haven't really talked about how they caught Giovanna de
Grandi's in the act when she was offering another woman
a little vial filled with liquid. Well, they took that
(11:25):
little vial and they fed small quantities every day to
a prison dog and a prison pig, and they carefully
recorded their symptoms day by day, and after barely a
week they were dead.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Then they got.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
A local apothecary to brew up a fresh batch using
Giovanna de Grandi's recipe, and then they fed it to
more prison pets, except this time one of the dogs
was also given the alleged antidote, which was either lemon
juice or vinegar, and sure enough.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
That dog survived.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
So they then had a clear idea of what the
poison in fact involved.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
That had to have been a coincidence, right that the
dog recovered or was there something in lemon jee No.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
It was that was definitely the antidote, because at the
end of the case, a broadside was published, you know,
in sixteen fifty nine in you know, several months later,
forbidding anyone to use arsenic, especially women, for any purpose,
(12:38):
And then it also told what the antidote was, you know,
a few ounces.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Of lemon juice or vinegar.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
So, and another one of the women who was a
purveyor of the poison. In telling how she first encountered it,
said her neighbor had a cat and she fed it
to the cat and the cat died, and then she
skinned the cat and found that the cat's flesh again
was very ruddy, like the faces of the dead husband's.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So, if we go back to you know, sixteen fifty eight,
sixteen fifty nine, there's a series of deaths of men
all sort of running together, and the investigators are saying
that this is odd. What is their step, what do
they do to investigate? Are they able to connect to
these women or how long does this go on before
they finally are able to connect them together.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Well, the interesting that thing that happened was one woman
who planned to poison her husband got cold feet, and
she confessed to her father confessor that she had thought
of buying poison from this woman, Giovanna de Grandi's, but
then changed her mind, And of course the priest ignored
(13:54):
the much vaunted sanctity of the confessional and ratted her
out to the police. So this woman was arrested. She
realized she was in a difficult position, and she petitioned
the pope for immunity from prosecution if she told all
and also agreed to collaborate with the police in a
(14:17):
sting to catch Giovanna de Grandi's in the act. So
she went to Giovanna de Grandi's and told her she
had a wealthy woman who wanted to kill her husband
and needed some of her liquid, and Giovanna de Grandis
was to go to the so called Well of the
Most Holy Martyrs in Rome's church of Santa Pudenciana. There
(14:40):
she would find a woman with bright red sleeves and
a handkerchief pinned to one of her sleeves, and that
would identify this woman as the guide who would take
her across town to the house of the wanna be widow. So,
while Giovanna was making her way across town, the lieuten
tenant Governor of Rome and the chief of police and
(15:03):
two flunkys whom they brought along as witnesses, were already
at the house in question, where they found the wife
of a sergeant who had been dressed up in velvet
and fancy jewels and was playing the role of the
wanna be widow. And while they waited for Giovanna's arrival,
the two witnesses crawled under a bed where they could overhear,
(15:28):
and the Lieutenant Governor in chief of police hid behind
the curtains. So when Giovanna arrived, and at the very
moment when she pulled out this little glass vial wrapped
in an embroidered handkerchief, they leapt out of hiding, caught
her in the act, arrested her and took her to
tourden on a prison and began to interrogate her.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Now, I think is a great time to tell me
about her your central character. So she, you know, just
as somebody here during this for the first time. Of course,
I'm thinking this is some sort of criminal mastermind who
is able to, somehow through an underground network reach out
to all of these troubled women who need a solution
(16:13):
to their terrible husbands. And she has this solution. But
where does she come from? What's her origin story?
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Well, the interesting thing is that Giovanna de Grandi's is
not the person who has been made the central figure
in subsequent generations. Giovanna de Grandi's was a woman who
had been sort of upper middle class and then in
the course of four marriages, none of which she poisoned
by the way each husband dies, and she declines another
(16:44):
step into the social hierarchy, until in the end she's
basically a procurus. But once she's arrested, she almost immediately
gives up and confesses, as she said herself, I could
care less about dying, but I wouldn't want to be
torn and threatened with tortures. She immediately caved in, and
(17:05):
over the next few days and weeks she identified a
string of poisoned purveyors and poison purchasers.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
And the most important to.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
One of these, and the one who has captured the
imagination of subsequent generations and even has a page on Wikipedia,
is Gendonimu Spahna, who's been the chief figure in subsequent
retellings of the tale over subsequent centuries.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So we start with a woman who was interested in
poisoning her husband, backs out, tells a priest, he turns,
so we have a lot of flipping happening in seventeenth
century Rome. The priest turns her in, she creates the
sting or goes to the police, and there's a sting
who ends up capturing another woman who is now getting
(17:54):
ready to turn on Giovanna Grundez, right, and then she
turns on the main character right, which is Geronima.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Yes, Geronima Spawna got it.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
And it's within twenty four hours she has named Geronima
and by the next day Geronima has has has been arrested.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Now what is her defense? Does Geronima say what happened?
Or does she keep her mouth shut?
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Well, the interesting thing is Genonima's strategy ever since the beginning,
had been to keep as much distance from the whole enterprise,
so she had always been very careful to work through intermediaries.
X would tell Why about the poison, who would get
Z to go to Gerdonima to get the poison, who
(18:44):
would then bring it back to X, who would then
give it to Why. And Geronima also lived on the
other side of the Arno from downtown Rome, so she
was also physically kind of removed from where much of
the action was happening. And so it's interesting that as Giovanna,
(19:06):
the one who is in prison and is confessing, named
all these various women, many of them had never even
heard of Gerdonima because she had been so successful about
keeping her distance. The irony is then that Geronima Spanna
has become in subsequent centuries the sort of heroine of
(19:26):
the whole story, but her biography has also been shrouded
in mystery. But I established that she was born actually
of a well to do family in Sicily about sixteen fifteen.
Her mother died when she was about two years old.
Her father promptly remarried a woman named Julia Manngardi, who
(19:48):
has now become known as Julia Tofana. Later generations have
made Julia almost as famous as Geronima as a famous poisoner,
and she's in fact become the subject of elaborate, confusing
and contradictive biographies that, for example, indicates she died anywhere
(20:09):
from sixteen fifty nine to seventeen thirty, which meant she.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Would have died at great old age.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
In fact, I've now I found her death records, so
I know she died in sixteen fifty one. Geronima later
said that Julia was a wonderful woman who taught her
everything she knew.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
I was wondering what Julia's significance. I predicted murder victim.
But it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like mentor
mentee with her stepdaughter.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
She says she taught her everything she knew Geronima's father
died very quickly. He wasn't poisoned, and so then Julia,
Geronima and Julia's next husband promptly flees sicily, and it
looks like they were just ahead of the police. And
they settled in Rome in sixteen twenty four, and both
(21:00):
Julia and her stepdaughter Geronima then became kind of go
betweens or fixers. For example, they would bring together buyers
and sellers of various items. And they also became marriage brokers.
And of course marriage brokers were extremely important figures in society,
because nobody in their right mind married for love. You
(21:23):
always used a marriage broker, and so they found appropriate
wives for husbands and appropriate husbands for wives. And they
also were fortune tellers traffickers in so called women's secrets.
And these secrets ranged from face balms to tinctures for
the complexion, to perfumes, to kitchen recipes to charms and
(21:49):
other mysterious means of solving family and household problems. But
of course, in Julia and Geronimous case, one of these
secrets was this secret concoction to do away with abusive
or simply inconvenient husbands.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
So this is a crime syndicate, right.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
It's a sort of syndicate.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
But to me it looks too hap hazard, as we'll
see to have been a proper syndicate. It was two
sort of airzats and halp hazard.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
When you take the customers. If you remove the number
of customers that they had, that Geronima and Julia had,
how many people purveyors, apothecaries, you know, all of these people.
How many people do you think were involved with this
minus the customers.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Well, in the ultimately there are five purveyors of the poison.
Actually there were six if you count Julia. But the
thing is Julia the stepmother, was dead by sixteen fifty one,
and it's really after her generation that the business really
gets going.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Then there were five.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
There was Ganima, there was Ivanna, the ones who's ratting
on everybody else, and she in fact fingers three others.
And all these five were believed to be to know
the poison recipe, which was really important. That they knew
the recipe, that they brewed up the poison, and that
(23:18):
they pervaded to the one to be widows. So basically
there were five. But then there is testimony that suggests
that One of these others had a woman off in Palestrina,
which is a suburb of Rome, who kind of acted
as a runner. If anybody in Palestrina needed to get
(23:40):
rid of a husband, she would carry the poison. And
then there were a couple other cities where there seemed
to have been women who acted as go betweens. A
lot of it has a sort of haphazard quality about
the way it's happening.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Let me ask you about Geronima. When a woman would
come to her her and say or to somebody you know,
I'll go between and say I need to get rid
of my husband. Does someone in this group have any
kind of moral compass to check? Do they have to
give an excuse and say he's a horrible husband, or
can it simply say I'm tired of having sex with
this guy. I'd like to go with a younger man,
(24:18):
and that be okay.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
The interesting thing, one of the interesting things is that
often what they hear is that these women who have
all these secrets know how to reconcile husbands. So they
go to them because they say, I have this husband
that beats me, or he's lazy, he never earns any money,
(24:42):
and we're starving to death. Can you tell me a
way to reconcile with him? There are cases in the
transcript where a woman will say, oh, yes, I can
do that. Pay me, and here's what you have to do,
and she tells her to sort of say a charm
and and put some non poisonous chemical in his food,
(25:04):
and that will do the trick.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
But of course it does nothing. It's sort of Charlatanism.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
On the surface. Geronima is a psychic, right, is that
sort of what her job is?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Oh, it's yes.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
She was called Lyndovina or Lastrologa, which means the astrologer,
and she's in fact supposed to have predicted who would
be elected the current pope in the years when this
was happening, which was Alexander the Seventh. And one reason
that she got such a reputation was because there was
(25:37):
such a wide interest in these so called secrets. Aristocrats,
aristocratic women, and women from all classes of society were
interested in secrets, so that in a way, the secrets
opened palace doors to Julia and Judonima, who seemed to
(25:57):
have cultivated aristocratic women who were fascinated by secrets, not
just poison but the face balms and tinctures for the
complexion and telling the future. One reason I think that
Geronima became the primary character and subsequent retellings of the
tale was because she had all these connections with various aristocratic.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Women in Rome who would loan.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Her their carriage, for example, if she wanted to visit
all the seven churches she was very careful to, whereas
most of the other women were, for example, beggars, laundresses, procuruses.
Geronima cultivated this image as a refined, aristocratic, pious woman
(26:45):
and kept her distance from the more nitty gritty aspects
of the business until she was finally caught out late
in the investigation.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Tell me about the investigation. I know you have people
turning on her and she's arrested. What happens with the investigation?
She's jailed immediately, I assume is there bail In seventeenth century.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Rome, Gedonima was arrested, as I said, almost immediately, and
then over the next few weeks. Givanna, the one who
is kind of the key figure in Giving Everything Away,
gives out the names of all sorts of other women,
But interestingly enough, a lot of these women seem to
(27:28):
know nothing at all about Judonima's Spahna, because they've only
gone through intermediaries, and because Ganima had been so extremely
careful to distance herself from the women who were actually
doing the poisoning, and in fact, it looks like Gedonima
may never have poisoned anybody herself.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Tell me the two rules about convicting somebody in seventeenth
century Rome, two witnesses and what was the other one
that you have to have if you don't have witnesses?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Oh, you had to have a confession.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Okay, So do either of these things come up with
Droonima's case while she's in jail?
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Absolutely, I mean Jradonima is interrogated twenty four times over
six months. She answers the questions endlessly with all sorts
of irrelevant information. They'll say, do you know a woman
named Maria? Because one of the five poisoned purveyors was
(28:26):
named Maria Spinola, And she says, I don't know anybody
named Maria, which is absolutely ridiculous because everybody in Rome
has Maria as a name. And then she'll say, but
I knew a Cecilia whose mother was a laundress, who
was from Messina. You know that Messina is in Sicily,
(28:46):
and I also knew a woman named Julia Pisciata, and
so she would drive the interrogator crazy with all this
irrelevant information that she obligingly offers, but without ever admitting
any sort of wrongdoing herself.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
One thing I want to emphasize, and hopefully I'm right
about this, is you know why some of these women
are turning so quickly on each other if they are
being threatened with torture. The Romans are known, I mean,
I think the most well known for torture. What would
have been the various punishments that would have happened to
(29:26):
people men or women in this time period.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
It's worth remembering that, you know, all the women are
thrown into tordent On a prison, but prison was a
place where people were kept for questioning, or where debtors
were kept. You didn't get sent to prison as a punishment.
So if you're found guilty of something, they don't throw
you in prison. You might be executed, which was reasonably common,
(29:54):
or you might suffer some sort of physical punishment like
being branded or whipped, but often the common punishment was exiled.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
They just wanted to get you rid of you.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
And so for minor crimes, if you were exiled, you
were exiled from Rome. For slightly more serious crimes, you
were exiled from Rome and the Vicinity. And for the
more serious crimes than that, you were exiled from the
Papal States. And the Papal states encompassed basically most of Italy,
(30:27):
from the area near Naples up to beyond Bologna.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
So the central third of Italy.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
And Geronima, I'm assuming, is facing execution for all of this, right.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Oh yeah, Though it takes them a while to get
to that, because obviously Gudonima is refusing to confess to anything,
and so many of the women have never.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Heard of her.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Do they release her? Do they have to release her?
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Well, finally, after about four months, the Lieutenant governor brings
in old servant. And this was a woman of an
embittered snitch of a woman who spent all her time
hiding behind doors eavesdropping, and she was only too ready
to tell everything she knew, plus a certain amount more
(31:17):
that she just made up. She said something like I
saw her give poison to any number of people, and
most of them were women. And so finally here he
had an eyewitness, and then she said something like and
I remember before the plague, she gave it to a
(31:37):
Catadena who was the wife of the butcher of the
Sistine Bridge. And so the next day the so called
butcher's wife of Ponte Sisto was arrested and they began
to interrogate her, and immediately she realized the danger she
was in. So she petitioned the pope, and he gave
(31:59):
her in unity if she told everything she knew. And
so the interesting thing is here is a woman who
not only incriminates Giovanna, but in great detail tells what
the plight of these women was.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Like, what's so interesting hearing your story. I just finished
a book about a woman who dies, who's murdered, And
I always say, I'm always looking for the female heroes,
and I continually come up in my books with female heroes,
which you have in an odd way, right, because they're
trying to help these women with their marriages and also
(32:36):
with abusive husbands. But then I also end up with
a lot of female villains, which you have here too.
So this is such a female centric story that you've
come up with.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
And it's so full of ambiguity because they're more anti heroes, yeah,
than heroes or villains. I mean, it's kind of romantic
to think of women like Jiuvanna and Jerdonima helping these women.
But the main thing they're trying to do is sell.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Them the poison.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
And I mean there are cases, I mean Giovanna, for example,
with one woman that she sold the poison to. Once
the husband is dead, Giovanna keeps coming and asking for
more and more money.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Does this organized crime?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah, And so in this particular case, the very next day,
of course, the butcher's wife of ponte Cisto is arrested and.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Agrees to tell her story.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
And it turns out that this Catina had grown up
in her father's butcher shop and at age sixteen in
sixteen thirty eight, had been married off to the butcher
of Ponte Cisto, who was just a colleague of her father's,
who happened to be eight years older than she was.
So she's sixteen, he's already in his mid twenties. And
(33:57):
although she said she never left the house to go
to mass and never stood at the windows or did
anything else immodest, her husband constantly beat her and He
also kicked her in the stomach when she was seven
months pregnant, as she said, saying he wanted to expel
the fetus from my body. And so Katarina therefore sought
(34:21):
out Gerdonima' spahna because she had heard that she could
reconcile husbands and wives. So she claimed she didn't go
to her originally for the poison, but for reconciliation. Now,
who knows, maybe she was lying, but of course Gerdonima responded,
and it's interesting this woman quotes Gudonima's very words. And
(34:43):
Gerdonima said, this husband of yours will bury you. And
then she went on, I might have discovered a way
to deliver you from your husband. I know how to
make a certain mixture. If you were to add it
to wine, to stew, or to whatever you like, and
your husband would were to eat it, he would die
(35:04):
either sooner or later, whichever you'd like. He could have
time to confess, he could take communion, he could receive
all the sacraments of the church. So she sort of
gives Katerina a way out. You know, oh, he's not
going to die unshriven without having confessed and received extreme function.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
So that sort of.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Helps, so Katina was sold on the idea, but she
had to pay ged on him at such a hefty
price that she paid in installments, and within the week
the butcher of Ponte Cisto was dead. But then within
six months, Katerina's family began to insist that it was
(35:46):
improper for her as a woman to be alone without
male supervision, and so they insisted that she remarry to
a cloth cutter from the neighborhood, and she had to
marry him without any seeing him, and again she testified.
He was ugly, little, hunched over, toothless in front, he
(36:07):
wore ragged hose, had a beard, and was so hairy
he looked like an animal. But ten months after her
first husband had died, her family insisted that she marry him.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
So it wasn't long before.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Katerina paid a visit to Geronimo's Spahna again and Geronima said, well,
if you want to free yourself, you know the way,
And then Katerina responded, it seems too soon to kill
off a second one, and Geronima answered, one is about
the same as two, And barely a week later, husband
(36:42):
number two was dead.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
It sounds like her family needed to receive some poison too. Katerina, Oh,
I know.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
But this was not uncommon at all.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
A woman's behavior was a reflection upon her entire family.
In sixteen fifty nine, then Katina confronts Jonima Spahna with
her testimony, and Jeronima continues adamantly to maintain her innocence
and even claims that Katina was in fact in love
(37:14):
with a lawyer who conspired with her to murder her
husband's The judge even tortured Katina in the presence of Geronima.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
What because there.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Was another interrogatory technique. If you brought a witness and
the accused together, you could torture the witness to prove
that they were telling the truth. And even under torture,
Katterina continued to insist that her story was true. But
of course Gdona was unmoved and she admitted to nothing,
(37:49):
unmoved by torture. Okay, So they're having a hard time.
They're not getting Geronima to confess, and you know, they're
they're coming up with they have Katerina and coming up
with witnesses.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
So where do we go from there?
Speaker 3 (38:03):
So finally, in July sixteen fifty nine, the Lieutenant Governor's
so called Congregation on Crime meant to consider the fate
of all the women locked up in prison. Giovanna de
Granti's and three others, plus Gdonima Spahna, were the five
culprits believed to have brewed the poison and to have
(38:26):
peddled it, and all but Gedonima had confessed, so that
you know, they were fine with all except Guronima, and
a case could have easily been made for torturing Gudonima
to get her confession. But interestingly enough, the Modernese ambassador
wrote to his home court it was considered unwise to
(38:48):
proceed to torture, because they feared with her diabolical arts.
This rogue could boldly bear up under it. Given the
enormity and heinousness of the crime to the destruction of
the state, His Holiness Pope Alexander the seventh signed a
papal degree against that woman so that she could be
(39:09):
sentenced to the usual punishment, and of course the usual
punishment was hanging. So on July fifth, sixteen fifty nine,
Jononomus Bana, Giovanna de Grandi's and the other three poisoned
purveyors were all taken to Rome's Compo de Fiori, which
could accommodate the maximum number of spectators, and apparently spots
(39:34):
at the windows of the houses around the square sold
for as much as the rent in a rooming house
for a year to all the people that wanted to
witness this, And chroniclers claimed that the entire city was there,
as they put it, everybody but nuns and the infirm.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
I mean, that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
So the five were marched out one by one and hanged,
and then their bodies were taken to the church of
San Giovanni Decolato, which is the church of Saint John
the Baptist beheaded, which was the customary burial place for
the victims of execution, and they were interred beneath the
pavement in the cloister. And so as for all the
(40:18):
other women who were locked up in prison, they all
escaped the gallows. And interestingly enough, the view apparently was
that as silly women, they were too weak minded and
gullible to resist the temptations of the likes of Giovanna
de Grandi's and Giodonimuspahna. As one theologian wrote, women are
(40:42):
too easily seduced. They are obstinate seducers.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
So let me get this. So we're saying misogyny has
actually benefited these women.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Yeah, exactly, They're easily taken in by these five poison purveyors.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
So were they exiled all of these women.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
So it's interesting those few of higher social status who
were implicated apparently got off scot free. Women like the
Aldebrandini duchess. Some of the other more ordinary women were
interestingly enough forced to stand below the gallows during the
(41:21):
execution of a poison paveyre and then were flogged through
the streets and banished from the papal states for life.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yep. And this is why the Romans were known for
torture and for executions that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
It wasn't just Rome, it was common practice throughout Europe.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
And then as for Cottadina, the butcher's wife, despite having
received papal immunity, she was sentenced to permanent lifetime house
arrest in Rome.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
That's basically what happened to the rest of them.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
And I had wondered about Giovanna de Grondez because didn't
she have immunity? Also, why is she on the gallows.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
No, no, no, she was.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
She was the one who said, I don't mind dying,
but I don't want to be tortured, okay. And what
they seem to have been worried about was who knew
the poison recipe, because the five who were killed were
all the ones that knew the poison recipe. And I
don't know if I already mentioned, but for centuries afterwards,
(42:23):
until at least the mid eighteenth century, the pope kept
the transcription, the transcription of the investigation locked up under
lock and key, because they were afraid that other disgruntled
wives might find the recipe and more unfortunate husbands would suffer, or.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
They would just pay a man to go to an
apothecary and buy the arsenic and that would have mister, yeah, yeah,
what do we learn from Have we learned anything, Craig
from this story? I mean, what what is the takeaway
for you? Besides you know that, of course poison and
is still considered a woman's weapon, which I think is
the lady's weapon, which is odd to me.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
The stories remain compelling because these women's dilemmas are not
unlike those that women continue to face. Of course, it's
only a since the nineteen seventies that battered wife syndrome
has come to be widely recognized but also widely disputed
as an extenuating factor in cases of spousal murder, and
(43:28):
of course, long prison sentences are more common now than executions.
But as he left office in twenty sixteen, the governor
of Missouri, my home state, declined to consider clemency or
pardons for any of fourteen women survivors of domestic abuse,
some convicted several decades earlier of murdering their alleged abusers,
(43:52):
and in all cases, whether for or against battered wife syndrome,
such decisions inevitably lay to mixed reviews, and public recognition
of a domestic abuse is an issue in spousal murder
has also burgeoned, interestingly enough, because of the public media explosion.
Late in twenty sixteen, after receiving a clemency petition with
(44:18):
no fewer than four hundred thousand signatures, the President of
France freed Jacqueline Savage, who was serving a ten year
sentence for murdering her husband after almost fifty years of abuse.
It's also interesting I think that in nineteen ninety nine
(44:38):
the Dixie Chicks. Highly successful Goodbye Earl, whose heroines confront
and solve a marital predicament in ways remarkably similar to
The Black Widows of sixteen fifty nine, rose very near
the top of the charts, but it also provoked considerable
consternation and anxiety on country music stations, which sometimes declined
(45:03):
to play it, as they had also refused to play
Garth Brooks's nineteen ninety one and the Thunder Roles, in
which an abused wife murders her husband.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
I think that this story that you've told when people
ask me, why do you tell stories from the eighteen
hundreds and the seventeen hundreds of your case, the sixteen hundreds,
why do you tell these stories that have been told
for so many years and have been forgotten? And I
say this because this story will happen tomorrow, because these
(45:36):
people just replicate themselves throughout history, and now you know
there is somebody who is being abused and trying to
figure out a way out of it, and in seventeenth
century Rome, this was sort of the solution. So I mean,
I think you've done a wonderful job explaining this story
that anti heroes, as you call them, and I.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
Think it also gives the greater clarity about the depth
of resistance for centuries, indeed for millennia to female autonomy. Absolutely,
I've become more aware of the abiding double standards about
dubious behavior when it comes to men or women. Men
(46:19):
can get away with what the women can, and perhaps
it also helps me understand the leveling of anxiety within
many churches and among many politicians when it comes to
controlling women's behavior and when it comes to controlling women's bodies.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast to More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis
(47:10):
a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff,
and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold
More Wicked, and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It seems too.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Soon to kill off a second one, and Jenonima answered
one is about the same as two, and barely a
week later, husband number two was dead.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers mate, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. We don't talk a lot
on this show about female killers, but author Craig Monson
(01:12):
has brought me a fascinating story right out of a
Hollywood film. His book, The Black Widows of the Eternal
City centers on a web of women poisoners in seventeenth
century Rome and their male victims. I was really interested
in your book because I've dabbled a little bit in
(01:33):
research about Roman poisoners, and I looked at what has
been purported to be the first serial killer in the world,
Lacusta de Gaul, who was essentially hired by several different
emperors to poison very famous people to get people out
of the way. And you know, I learned that they
used enslaved people as food testers because everyone important was
(01:57):
being poisoned. So when your book came up about something
much more contemporary seventeenth century Rome than what I was
used to, was really excited to hear the story. So
what is seventeenth century Rome like politically? And you know
where crime? Where are we?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Well?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
The story takes place in Rome in the sixteen fifties,
which was a period when the city was controlled by
the papacy and dominated by several old, extremely wealthy, and
rival noble families. The general populace had little say about
how they were governed, and existed in what we could
(02:36):
call a culture of surveillance. The police employed a network
of spies and snitches, for example, and the doctors and
barber surgeons were required to report any cases of possibly
suspicious deaths. In addition, there was the archetypical nosy neighbor paradigm,
(02:58):
the social figure who always had her nose in everybody
else's business and was really a characteristic figure in the
neighborhood whose eyes and ears basically missed nothing, so that
life was lived much more publicly than it is today.
Gossip and word of mouth were incredibly powerful and spread
(03:22):
in churches and piazzas, and so they were effectively the
social media of the day and made it very difficult
to keep anything secret. So that's sort of the situation
in which the story was sort of developing.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
One thing that I like to ask people when we're
setting the scene of a particular city in a time
period is what were the punitive charges for different things?
For instance, I'm always shocked at time periods where theft,
like stealing five dollars would be a capital crime. So
how now was crime and punishment handled in seventeenth century Rome.
(04:04):
Was it really easy to be thrown in jail?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Well, it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
It was very easy to be hauled in and questioned,
but in order to be convicted you needed a confession
or you needed the testimony of two eyewitnesses, and so
that was a little tricky. In this case, because a
lot of the evidence was gossip that was circulating around
(04:30):
second and third or fourth hand and getting a confession
what often became the critical technique, and that's one reason
that torture was used so regularly.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
So where do we go from there? We kind of
set the scene what ends up happening next.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Apparently it took several years for the would be widow's
crime to be discovered, and this was because the chief
protagonists were meticulously careful about distancing themselves from the actual poisonings,
particularly in the early years. And then by a happy
(05:11):
accident in the spring of sixteen fifty six, bubonic plague
struck Rome. So within the year, twenty three thousand Roman citizens,
which was twenty percent of the population, died. Therefore, any
poisoned husband simply disappeared, unnoticed among thousands of other hastily
(05:31):
buried corpses. But then once the plague was over, they
started to notice this curious uptick in husband's deaths. And
I can sort of give a brief outline of how
it worked. In sixteen fifty eight, first a Francesco Tombourini,
the woodworker of the Trevi Fountain, died. Then on July
(05:54):
twenty second, sixteen fifty eight, Simon Umbert of French painter
on Via de la Croce died. Then three days later,
July twenty fifth, Antonio Julie, the debt ridden mattress maker died.
Then three weeks after that, on August sixteenth, Giovanni Pietro Beltrami,
(06:16):
the dier at the Elm, died. On November nineteenth, marc
Antonio Ronieri, the roving adventurer died. So with this kind
of steady stream of kind of mysteriously dying husbands, it
was almost inevitable that they would be noticed.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
In addition, the nosy.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Neighbors of a linener who had a shop just across
the street from Rome's notorious toured and on a prison
remembered several other curious deaths in the linener's family right
before the plague. On March twenty third, sixteen fifty five,
the linener's son in law had abruptly died of a
(06:58):
virulent stomach infection. Then in September of that year, the
husband of the linener's sister in law died of the
same systems, and a month after that, on October ninth,
the linener's other son in law, who ran a barber
shop right next to the prison, died of the same symptoms.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And this is all after the bubonic plague had dissipated,
and that's why this was alarming. Okay, so this is
way beyond their normal death rate after a plague.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And also it was curious that the husbands of the
Linener's daughters also displayed unusually ruddy faces. And as somebody
said at one of the at the funerals, they look
better dead than when they were alive.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Well, I was going to ask that what are the
external symptoms, because did they have any idea about toxicology?
I know, with arsenic I think it was that organs
would turn black and the face would be black, and
was there sort of an obvious tailtale sign for whoever
the corner type person was.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
The traditional version of the story says that there were
no symptoms and that was one of the virtues of
the poison. But in fact, there were symptoms. I mean,
for one thing, they first developed a burning in the
throat and a terrible thirst. Then they started having extreme
stomach pain and began to vomit so violently that one
(08:31):
neighbor said he vomited so much he looked like he
would turn himself inside out. So there were in fact
characteristic symptoms, and some of those symptoms were associated with
arsenic And interestingly enough, in this period apothecaries were forbidden
to sell arsenic to women, So in this case, the
(08:54):
women who brewed the poison enlisted the services of a
priest who was also a sort of who practiced witchcraft,
and he would go to the apothecaries and buy the
arsenic for them.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
What is this concoction exactly? Because with my research with
Lucusta degal it was night shade belladonna people would know
as belladonna, but you know it was very plant based poison.
So what is this.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Well, I mean, it's interesting that for a long time
the nature of the poison was shrouded in mystery, and
one of the most recent scholarly books suggests that it
was strychnine. Well, it couldn't have been strychnine, because death
by strychnine involves horrible grimaces on the face and the
sort of tensing up of the body, whereas these people
(09:49):
look better dead than alive. So there's been lots of
speculation about what the poison involved. And one of my
favorites is a suggestion by Alert and a toxicologist that
it involved the bacterial laden drippings from a moldering dead
pig that had been smeared with arsenic.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
That what this person ingested is that what happened.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That they then, I guess they thought they collected these
drippings and used.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That, Oh, that's awful.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
In fact, I've established that the poison in fact is
described in the transcript of the investigation, and one of
the women, named Giovanna de Grandi's, says that it involved
grinding together arsenic lead, bird shot, and sometimes adding antimony,
(10:41):
and they were ground together then simmered for about an
hour in a new jar. They said it had to
be a new jar, which was sealed with doe, and
then it was allowed to cool overnight, after which it
was ready, and one of the witnesses said it was
clear and tasted just like water from the well. Wow.
(11:04):
And the other interesting thing is how carefully the Lieutenant
Governor of Rome and his assistants tried to test the poison.
We haven't really talked about how they caught Giovanna de
Grandi's in the act when she was offering another woman
a little vial filled with liquid. Well, they took that
(11:25):
little vial and they fed small quantities every day to
a prison dog and a prison pig, and they carefully
recorded their symptoms day by day, and after barely a
week they were dead.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Then they got.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
A local apothecary to brew up a fresh batch using
Giovanna de Grandi's recipe, and then they fed it to
more prison pets, except this time one of the dogs
was also given the alleged antidote, which was either lemon
juice or vinegar, and sure enough.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
That dog survived.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
So they then had a clear idea of what the
poison in fact involved.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
That had to have been a coincidence, right that the
dog recovered or was there something in lemon jee No.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
It was that was definitely the antidote, because at the
end of the case, a broadside was published, you know,
in sixteen fifty nine in you know, several months later,
forbidding anyone to use arsenic, especially women, for any purpose,
(12:38):
And then it also told what the antidote was, you know,
a few ounces.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Of lemon juice or vinegar.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
So, and another one of the women who was a
purveyor of the poison. In telling how she first encountered it,
said her neighbor had a cat and she fed it
to the cat and the cat died, and then she
skinned the cat and found that the cat's flesh again
was very ruddy, like the faces of the dead husband's.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So, if we go back to you know, sixteen fifty eight,
sixteen fifty nine, there's a series of deaths of men
all sort of running together, and the investigators are saying
that this is odd. What is their step, what do
they do to investigate? Are they able to connect to
these women or how long does this go on before
they finally are able to connect them together.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Well, the interesting that thing that happened was one woman
who planned to poison her husband got cold feet, and
she confessed to her father confessor that she had thought
of buying poison from this woman, Giovanna de Grandi's, but
then changed her mind, And of course the priest ignored
(13:54):
the much vaunted sanctity of the confessional and ratted her
out to the police. So this woman was arrested. She
realized she was in a difficult position, and she petitioned
the pope for immunity from prosecution if she told all
and also agreed to collaborate with the police in a
(14:17):
sting to catch Giovanna de Grandi's in the act. So
she went to Giovanna de Grandi's and told her she
had a wealthy woman who wanted to kill her husband
and needed some of her liquid, and Giovanna de Grandis
was to go to the so called Well of the
Most Holy Martyrs in Rome's church of Santa Pudenciana. There
(14:40):
she would find a woman with bright red sleeves and
a handkerchief pinned to one of her sleeves, and that
would identify this woman as the guide who would take
her across town to the house of the wanna be widow. So,
while Giovanna was making her way across town, the lieuten
tenant Governor of Rome and the chief of police and
(15:03):
two flunkys whom they brought along as witnesses, were already
at the house in question, where they found the wife
of a sergeant who had been dressed up in velvet
and fancy jewels and was playing the role of the
wanna be widow. And while they waited for Giovanna's arrival,
the two witnesses crawled under a bed where they could overhear,
(15:28):
and the Lieutenant Governor in chief of police hid behind
the curtains. So when Giovanna arrived, and at the very
moment when she pulled out this little glass vial wrapped
in an embroidered handkerchief, they leapt out of hiding, caught
her in the act, arrested her and took her to
tourden on a prison and began to interrogate her.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Now, I think is a great time to tell me
about her your central character. So she, you know, just
as somebody here during this for the first time. Of course,
I'm thinking this is some sort of criminal mastermind who
is able to, somehow through an underground network reach out
to all of these troubled women who need a solution
(16:13):
to their terrible husbands. And she has this solution. But
where does she come from? What's her origin story?
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Well, the interesting thing is that Giovanna de Grandi's is
not the person who has been made the central figure
in subsequent generations. Giovanna de Grandi's was a woman who
had been sort of upper middle class and then in
the course of four marriages, none of which she poisoned
by the way each husband dies, and she declines another
(16:44):
step into the social hierarchy, until in the end she's
basically a procurus. But once she's arrested, she almost immediately
gives up and confesses, as she said herself, I could
care less about dying, but I wouldn't want to be
torn and threatened with tortures. She immediately caved in, and
(17:05):
over the next few days and weeks she identified a
string of poisoned purveyors and poison purchasers.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
And the most important to.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
One of these, and the one who has captured the
imagination of subsequent generations and even has a page on Wikipedia,
is Gendonimu Spahna, who's been the chief figure in subsequent
retellings of the tale over subsequent centuries.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So we start with a woman who was interested in
poisoning her husband, backs out, tells a priest, he turns,
so we have a lot of flipping happening in seventeenth
century Rome. The priest turns her in, she creates the
sting or goes to the police, and there's a sting
who ends up capturing another woman who is now getting
(17:54):
ready to turn on Giovanna Grundez, right, and then she
turns on the main character right, which is Geronima.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Yes, Geronima Spawna got it.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
And it's within twenty four hours she has named Geronima
and by the next day Geronima has has has been arrested.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Now what is her defense? Does Geronima say what happened?
Or does she keep her mouth shut?
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Well, the interesting thing is Genonima's strategy ever since the beginning,
had been to keep as much distance from the whole enterprise,
so she had always been very careful to work through intermediaries.
X would tell Why about the poison, who would get
Z to go to Gerdonima to get the poison, who
(18:44):
would then bring it back to X, who would then
give it to Why. And Geronima also lived on the
other side of the Arno from downtown Rome, so she
was also physically kind of removed from where much of
the action was happening. And so it's interesting that as Giovanna,
(19:06):
the one who is in prison and is confessing, named
all these various women, many of them had never even
heard of Gerdonima because she had been so successful about
keeping her distance. The irony is then that Geronima Spanna
has become in subsequent centuries the sort of heroine of
(19:26):
the whole story, but her biography has also been shrouded
in mystery. But I established that she was born actually
of a well to do family in Sicily about sixteen fifteen.
Her mother died when she was about two years old.
Her father promptly remarried a woman named Julia Manngardi, who
(19:48):
has now become known as Julia Tofana. Later generations have
made Julia almost as famous as Geronima as a famous poisoner,
and she's in fact become the subject of elaborate, confusing
and contradictive biographies that, for example, indicates she died anywhere
(20:09):
from sixteen fifty nine to seventeen thirty, which meant she.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Would have died at great old age.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
In fact, I've now I found her death records, so
I know she died in sixteen fifty one. Geronima later
said that Julia was a wonderful woman who taught her
everything she knew.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
I was wondering what Julia's significance. I predicted murder victim.
But it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like mentor
mentee with her stepdaughter.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
She says she taught her everything she knew Geronima's father
died very quickly. He wasn't poisoned, and so then Julia,
Geronima and Julia's next husband promptly flees sicily, and it
looks like they were just ahead of the police. And
they settled in Rome in sixteen twenty four, and both
(21:00):
Julia and her stepdaughter Geronima then became kind of go
betweens or fixers. For example, they would bring together buyers
and sellers of various items. And they also became marriage brokers.
And of course marriage brokers were extremely important figures in society,
because nobody in their right mind married for love. You
(21:23):
always used a marriage broker, and so they found appropriate
wives for husbands and appropriate husbands for wives. And they
also were fortune tellers traffickers in so called women's secrets.
And these secrets ranged from face balms to tinctures for
the complexion, to perfumes, to kitchen recipes to charms and
(21:49):
other mysterious means of solving family and household problems. But
of course, in Julia and Geronimous case, one of these
secrets was this secret concoction to do away with abusive
or simply inconvenient husbands.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
So this is a crime syndicate, right.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
It's a sort of syndicate.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
But to me it looks too hap hazard, as we'll
see to have been a proper syndicate. It was two
sort of airzats and halp hazard.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
When you take the customers. If you remove the number
of customers that they had, that Geronima and Julia had,
how many people purveyors, apothecaries, you know, all of these people.
How many people do you think were involved with this
minus the customers.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Well, in the ultimately there are five purveyors of the poison.
Actually there were six if you count Julia. But the
thing is Julia the stepmother, was dead by sixteen fifty one,
and it's really after her generation that the business really
gets going.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Then there were five.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
There was Ganima, there was Ivanna, the ones who's ratting
on everybody else, and she in fact fingers three others.
And all these five were believed to be to know
the poison recipe, which was really important. That they knew
the recipe, that they brewed up the poison, and that
(23:18):
they pervaded to the one to be widows. So basically
there were five. But then there is testimony that suggests
that One of these others had a woman off in Palestrina,
which is a suburb of Rome, who kind of acted
as a runner. If anybody in Palestrina needed to get
(23:40):
rid of a husband, she would carry the poison. And
then there were a couple other cities where there seemed
to have been women who acted as go betweens. A
lot of it has a sort of haphazard quality about
the way it's happening.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Let me ask you about Geronima. When a woman would
come to her her and say or to somebody you know,
I'll go between and say I need to get rid
of my husband. Does someone in this group have any
kind of moral compass to check? Do they have to
give an excuse and say he's a horrible husband, or
can it simply say I'm tired of having sex with
this guy. I'd like to go with a younger man,
(24:18):
and that be okay.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
The interesting thing, one of the interesting things is that
often what they hear is that these women who have
all these secrets know how to reconcile husbands. So they
go to them because they say, I have this husband
that beats me, or he's lazy, he never earns any money,
(24:42):
and we're starving to death. Can you tell me a
way to reconcile with him? There are cases in the
transcript where a woman will say, oh, yes, I can
do that. Pay me, and here's what you have to do,
and she tells her to sort of say a charm
and and put some non poisonous chemical in his food,
(25:04):
and that will do the trick.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
But of course it does nothing. It's sort of Charlatanism.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
On the surface. Geronima is a psychic, right, is that
sort of what her job is?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Oh, it's yes.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
She was called Lyndovina or Lastrologa, which means the astrologer,
and she's in fact supposed to have predicted who would
be elected the current pope in the years when this
was happening, which was Alexander the Seventh. And one reason
that she got such a reputation was because there was
(25:37):
such a wide interest in these so called secrets. Aristocrats,
aristocratic women, and women from all classes of society were
interested in secrets, so that in a way, the secrets
opened palace doors to Julia and Judonima, who seemed to
(25:57):
have cultivated aristocratic women who were fascinated by secrets, not
just poison but the face balms and tinctures for the
complexion and telling the future. One reason I think that
Geronima became the primary character and subsequent retellings of the
tale was because she had all these connections with various aristocratic.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Women in Rome who would loan.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Her their carriage, for example, if she wanted to visit
all the seven churches she was very careful to, whereas
most of the other women were, for example, beggars, laundresses, procuruses.
Geronima cultivated this image as a refined, aristocratic, pious woman
(26:45):
and kept her distance from the more nitty gritty aspects
of the business until she was finally caught out late
in the investigation.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Tell me about the investigation. I know you have people
turning on her and she's arrested. What happens with the investigation?
She's jailed immediately, I assume is there bail In seventeenth century.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Rome, Gedonima was arrested, as I said, almost immediately, and
then over the next few weeks. Givanna, the one who
is kind of the key figure in Giving Everything Away,
gives out the names of all sorts of other women,
But interestingly enough, a lot of these women seem to
(27:28):
know nothing at all about Judonima's Spahna, because they've only
gone through intermediaries, and because Ganima had been so extremely
careful to distance herself from the women who were actually
doing the poisoning, and in fact, it looks like Gedonima
may never have poisoned anybody herself.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Tell me the two rules about convicting somebody in seventeenth
century Rome, two witnesses and what was the other one
that you have to have if you don't have witnesses?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Oh, you had to have a confession.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Okay, So do either of these things come up with
Droonima's case while she's in jail?
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Absolutely, I mean Jradonima is interrogated twenty four times over
six months. She answers the questions endlessly with all sorts
of irrelevant information. They'll say, do you know a woman
named Maria? Because one of the five poisoned purveyors was
(28:26):
named Maria Spinola, And she says, I don't know anybody
named Maria, which is absolutely ridiculous because everybody in Rome
has Maria as a name. And then she'll say, but
I knew a Cecilia whose mother was a laundress, who
was from Messina. You know that Messina is in Sicily,
(28:46):
and I also knew a woman named Julia Pisciata, and
so she would drive the interrogator crazy with all this
irrelevant information that she obligingly offers, but without ever admitting
any sort of wrongdoing herself.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
One thing I want to emphasize, and hopefully I'm right
about this, is you know why some of these women
are turning so quickly on each other if they are
being threatened with torture. The Romans are known, I mean,
I think the most well known for torture. What would
have been the various punishments that would have happened to
(29:26):
people men or women in this time period.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
It's worth remembering that, you know, all the women are
thrown into tordent On a prison, but prison was a
place where people were kept for questioning, or where debtors
were kept. You didn't get sent to prison as a punishment.
So if you're found guilty of something, they don't throw
you in prison. You might be executed, which was reasonably common,
(29:54):
or you might suffer some sort of physical punishment like
being branded or whipped, but often the common punishment was exiled.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
They just wanted to get you rid of you.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
And so for minor crimes, if you were exiled, you
were exiled from Rome. For slightly more serious crimes, you
were exiled from Rome and the Vicinity. And for the
more serious crimes than that, you were exiled from the
Papal States. And the Papal states encompassed basically most of Italy,
(30:27):
from the area near Naples up to beyond Bologna.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
So the central third of Italy.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
And Geronima, I'm assuming, is facing execution for all of this, right.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Oh yeah, Though it takes them a while to get
to that, because obviously Gudonima is refusing to confess to anything,
and so many of the women have never.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Heard of her.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Do they release her? Do they have to release her?
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Well, finally, after about four months, the Lieutenant governor brings
in old servant. And this was a woman of an
embittered snitch of a woman who spent all her time
hiding behind doors eavesdropping, and she was only too ready
to tell everything she knew, plus a certain amount more
(31:17):
that she just made up. She said something like I
saw her give poison to any number of people, and
most of them were women. And so finally here he
had an eyewitness, and then she said something like and
I remember before the plague, she gave it to a
(31:37):
Catadena who was the wife of the butcher of the
Sistine Bridge. And so the next day the so called
butcher's wife of Ponte Sisto was arrested and they began
to interrogate her, and immediately she realized the danger she
was in. So she petitioned the pope, and he gave
(31:59):
her in unity if she told everything she knew. And
so the interesting thing is here is a woman who
not only incriminates Giovanna, but in great detail tells what
the plight of these women was.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Like, what's so interesting hearing your story. I just finished
a book about a woman who dies, who's murdered, And
I always say, I'm always looking for the female heroes,
and I continually come up in my books with female heroes,
which you have in an odd way, right, because they're
trying to help these women with their marriages and also
(32:36):
with abusive husbands. But then I also end up with
a lot of female villains, which you have here too.
So this is such a female centric story that you've
come up with.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
And it's so full of ambiguity because they're more anti heroes, yeah,
than heroes or villains. I mean, it's kind of romantic
to think of women like Jiuvanna and Jerdonima helping these women.
But the main thing they're trying to do is sell.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Them the poison.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
And I mean there are cases, I mean Giovanna, for example,
with one woman that she sold the poison to. Once
the husband is dead, Giovanna keeps coming and asking for
more and more money.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Does this organized crime?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah, And so in this particular case, the very next day,
of course, the butcher's wife of ponte Cisto is arrested and.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Agrees to tell her story.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
And it turns out that this Catina had grown up
in her father's butcher shop and at age sixteen in
sixteen thirty eight, had been married off to the butcher
of Ponte Cisto, who was just a colleague of her father's,
who happened to be eight years older than she was.
So she's sixteen, he's already in his mid twenties. And
(33:57):
although she said she never left the house to go
to mass and never stood at the windows or did
anything else immodest, her husband constantly beat her and He
also kicked her in the stomach when she was seven
months pregnant, as she said, saying he wanted to expel
the fetus from my body. And so Katarina therefore sought
(34:21):
out Gerdonima' spahna because she had heard that she could
reconcile husbands and wives. So she claimed she didn't go
to her originally for the poison, but for reconciliation. Now,
who knows, maybe she was lying, but of course Gerdonima responded,
and it's interesting this woman quotes Gudonima's very words. And
(34:43):
Gerdonima said, this husband of yours will bury you. And
then she went on, I might have discovered a way
to deliver you from your husband. I know how to
make a certain mixture. If you were to add it
to wine, to stew, or to whatever you like, and
your husband would were to eat it, he would die
(35:04):
either sooner or later, whichever you'd like. He could have
time to confess, he could take communion, he could receive
all the sacraments of the church. So she sort of
gives Katerina a way out. You know, oh, he's not
going to die unshriven without having confessed and received extreme function.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
So that sort of.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Helps, so Katina was sold on the idea, but she
had to pay ged on him at such a hefty
price that she paid in installments, and within the week
the butcher of Ponte Cisto was dead. But then within
six months, Katerina's family began to insist that it was
(35:46):
improper for her as a woman to be alone without
male supervision, and so they insisted that she remarry to
a cloth cutter from the neighborhood, and she had to
marry him without any seeing him, and again she testified.
He was ugly, little, hunched over, toothless in front, he
(36:07):
wore ragged hose, had a beard, and was so hairy
he looked like an animal. But ten months after her
first husband had died, her family insisted that she marry him.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
So it wasn't long before.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Katerina paid a visit to Geronimo's Spahna again and Geronima said, well,
if you want to free yourself, you know the way,
And then Katerina responded, it seems too soon to kill
off a second one, and Geronima answered, one is about
the same as two, And barely a week later, husband
(36:42):
number two was dead.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
It sounds like her family needed to receive some poison too. Katerina, Oh,
I know.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
But this was not uncommon at all.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
A woman's behavior was a reflection upon her entire family.
In sixteen fifty nine, then Katina confronts Jonima Spahna with
her testimony, and Jeronima continues adamantly to maintain her innocence
and even claims that Katina was in fact in love
(37:14):
with a lawyer who conspired with her to murder her
husband's The judge even tortured Katina in the presence of Geronima.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
What because there.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Was another interrogatory technique. If you brought a witness and
the accused together, you could torture the witness to prove
that they were telling the truth. And even under torture,
Katterina continued to insist that her story was true. But
of course Gdona was unmoved and she admitted to nothing,
(37:49):
unmoved by torture. Okay, So they're having a hard time.
They're not getting Geronima to confess, and you know, they're
they're coming up with they have Katerina and coming up
with witnesses.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
So where do we go from there?
Speaker 3 (38:03):
So finally, in July sixteen fifty nine, the Lieutenant Governor's
so called Congregation on Crime meant to consider the fate
of all the women locked up in prison. Giovanna de
Granti's and three others, plus Gdonima Spahna, were the five
culprits believed to have brewed the poison and to have
(38:26):
peddled it, and all but Gedonima had confessed, so that
you know, they were fine with all except Guronima, and
a case could have easily been made for torturing Gudonima
to get her confession. But interestingly enough, the Modernese ambassador
wrote to his home court it was considered unwise to
(38:48):
proceed to torture, because they feared with her diabolical arts.
This rogue could boldly bear up under it. Given the
enormity and heinousness of the crime to the destruction of
the state, His Holiness Pope Alexander the seventh signed a
papal degree against that woman so that she could be
(39:09):
sentenced to the usual punishment, and of course the usual
punishment was hanging. So on July fifth, sixteen fifty nine,
Jononomus Bana, Giovanna de Grandi's and the other three poisoned
purveyors were all taken to Rome's Compo de Fiori, which
could accommodate the maximum number of spectators, and apparently spots
(39:34):
at the windows of the houses around the square sold
for as much as the rent in a rooming house
for a year to all the people that wanted to
witness this, And chroniclers claimed that the entire city was there,
as they put it, everybody but nuns and the infirm.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
I mean, that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
So the five were marched out one by one and hanged,
and then their bodies were taken to the church of
San Giovanni Decolato, which is the church of Saint John
the Baptist beheaded, which was the customary burial place for
the victims of execution, and they were interred beneath the
pavement in the cloister. And so as for all the
(40:18):
other women who were locked up in prison, they all
escaped the gallows. And interestingly enough, the view apparently was
that as silly women, they were too weak minded and
gullible to resist the temptations of the likes of Giovanna
de Grandi's and Giodonimuspahna. As one theologian wrote, women are
(40:42):
too easily seduced. They are obstinate seducers.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
So let me get this. So we're saying misogyny has
actually benefited these women.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Yeah, exactly, They're easily taken in by these five poison purveyors.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
So were they exiled all of these women.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
So it's interesting those few of higher social status who
were implicated apparently got off scot free. Women like the
Aldebrandini duchess. Some of the other more ordinary women were
interestingly enough forced to stand below the gallows during the
(41:21):
execution of a poison paveyre and then were flogged through
the streets and banished from the papal states for life.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yep. And this is why the Romans were known for
torture and for executions that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
It wasn't just Rome, it was common practice throughout Europe.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
And then as for Cottadina, the butcher's wife, despite having
received papal immunity, she was sentenced to permanent lifetime house
arrest in Rome.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
That's basically what happened to the rest of them.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
And I had wondered about Giovanna de Grondez because didn't
she have immunity? Also, why is she on the gallows.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
No, no, no, she was.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
She was the one who said, I don't mind dying,
but I don't want to be tortured, okay. And what
they seem to have been worried about was who knew
the poison recipe, because the five who were killed were
all the ones that knew the poison recipe. And I
don't know if I already mentioned, but for centuries afterwards,
(42:23):
until at least the mid eighteenth century, the pope kept
the transcription, the transcription of the investigation locked up under
lock and key, because they were afraid that other disgruntled
wives might find the recipe and more unfortunate husbands would suffer, or.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
They would just pay a man to go to an
apothecary and buy the arsenic and that would have mister, yeah, yeah,
what do we learn from Have we learned anything, Craig
from this story? I mean, what what is the takeaway
for you? Besides you know that, of course poison and
is still considered a woman's weapon, which I think is
the lady's weapon, which is odd to me.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
The stories remain compelling because these women's dilemmas are not
unlike those that women continue to face. Of course, it's
only a since the nineteen seventies that battered wife syndrome
has come to be widely recognized but also widely disputed
as an extenuating factor in cases of spousal murder, and
(43:28):
of course, long prison sentences are more common now than executions.
But as he left office in twenty sixteen, the governor
of Missouri, my home state, declined to consider clemency or
pardons for any of fourteen women survivors of domestic abuse,
some convicted several decades earlier of murdering their alleged abusers,
(43:52):
and in all cases, whether for or against battered wife syndrome,
such decisions inevitably lay to mixed reviews, and public recognition
of a domestic abuse is an issue in spousal murder
has also burgeoned, interestingly enough, because of the public media explosion.
Late in twenty sixteen, after receiving a clemency petition with
(44:18):
no fewer than four hundred thousand signatures, the President of
France freed Jacqueline Savage, who was serving a ten year
sentence for murdering her husband after almost fifty years of abuse.
It's also interesting I think that in nineteen ninety nine
(44:38):
the Dixie Chicks. Highly successful Goodbye Earl, whose heroines confront
and solve a marital predicament in ways remarkably similar to
The Black Widows of sixteen fifty nine, rose very near
the top of the charts, but it also provoked considerable
consternation and anxiety on country music stations, which sometimes declined
(45:03):
to play it, as they had also refused to play
Garth Brooks's nineteen ninety one and the Thunder Roles, in
which an abused wife murders her husband.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
I think that this story that you've told when people
ask me, why do you tell stories from the eighteen
hundreds and the seventeen hundreds of your case, the sixteen hundreds,
why do you tell these stories that have been told
for so many years and have been forgotten? And I
say this because this story will happen tomorrow, because these
(45:36):
people just replicate themselves throughout history, and now you know
there is somebody who is being abused and trying to
figure out a way out of it, and in seventeenth
century Rome, this was sort of the solution. So I mean,
I think you've done a wonderful job explaining this story
that anti heroes, as you call them, and I.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
Think it also gives the greater clarity about the depth
of resistance for centuries, indeed for millennia to female autonomy. Absolutely,
I've become more aware of the abiding double standards about
dubious behavior when it comes to men or women. Men
(46:19):
can get away with what the women can, and perhaps
it also helps me understand the leveling of anxiety within
many churches and among many politicians when it comes to
controlling women's behavior and when it comes to controlling women's bodies.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast to More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis
(47:10):
a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff,
and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold
More Wicked, and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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