S05 Episode 12: Prophet and Loss (Pt.2 of 2)

Part Two of S05 Episode 12: Prophet and Loss

Police cast their net ever wider in their effort to find a culprit for the brutal murder of the Evangelista family, drawing increasingly dark and strange connections to the case, but will any of it lead to an answer?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Please be advised the following episode contains distressing scenes of
murder involving children. Parental discretion is advised. You're listening to Unexplained,
Season five, episode twelve, Profit and Loss, Part two of two.

(00:31):
With the local neighborhood still reeling from the shock of
the brutal evangelist and murders, down at Detroit's Grand River
Avenue Police station, Detective Lieutenant John Whitman and detectives Charles
Searle and Earl Switzer were joined by Detective Fred from
as they trawled through the various correspondents taken from Benny's office,
having found a number of letters from the extortionist group

(00:53):
the Black Hand, and one in particular, sent six months
prior to the murders, ending with the line this is
your last chance. Police were beginning to suspect that they
were responsible for the deaths, but there was one other
letter that gave them even more pause for thought. It
was addressed to A Lewis Evangelista of Coreopolis, Pennsylvania, a

(01:15):
name the detectives knew well. Back in nineteen twenty six,
a man was found dead outside thirty five thirty two
Saint Auban Avenue, not far from Santina and Benny Evangelista's home,
having been shot multiple times. The man was later identified
as thirty three year old Felis Argento, a known enforcer

(01:38):
of the Black Hand. Argento had been ambushed to just
outside the property by Angelo Paperot and his son in
law Louis Evangelista. It seemed more than a little coincidental
that Lewis was also named Evangelista, leading the police to
speculate that perhaps he and Benny were related, or, more tragically,

(01:58):
that Benny and his family had been murdered in a
case of mistaken identity. The police interviewed Lewis at his
home in Coreopolis two days later, where he gave his
version of events. As he explained, he and his stepfather
police had shot Argento out of self defense when he
came to collect five thousand dollars of so called protection

(02:19):
money from his stepfather. The pair had warned police of
the impending danger, but were forced to take matters into
their own hands when the detectives assigned to protect them
failed to show up. After fleeing to Pontiac, twenty miles
north of Detroit, the pair were picked up by local police,
but eventually let go After Detroit police informed them of

(02:40):
their circumstances, the officers in Pontiac agreed not to book
them because they were essentially running for their lives from
a criminal organization, and to do so would have put
them in mortal danger. In short, Lewis knew only too
well how seriously the black Hands should be taken. But
as for Benny had a letter with his name and

(03:01):
address on it. He claimed to have no idea. The
pair were distant relations, he said, but hadn't spoken in years.
Then about the same time, another letter arrived at the
Grand River Avenue station, simply written on a folded up
piece of paper. It read, my conscience bothers me since

(03:22):
I killed that family of six. So we'll confess and
say I am sorry. I live on Lincoln Avenue in
the fifty four hundred block, but I won't give the
house number because I want thinking time. Searched the houses
and you will find the bloody hatchet in a suitcase.
I am ready for the worst punishment I can get.

(03:43):
Two officers were promptly dispatched to search the location, but
were unable to find any suitcase. In the end, investigating
officers determined the letter to be nothing but a hoax,
and Detroit's Finest were once again left empty handed. Having

(04:06):
reached something of a dead end, investigators turned to Benny's Bible,
the Oldest History of the World, for clues. The book
was republished online by Jarrett Koebec in two thousand and one,
painstakingly typing it up from one of only three original
copies thought to remain in existence. Jarrett describes the book

(04:26):
as a prime example of outsider art, but one that
was also gut wrenchingly awful, while at the same time offering,
as he says, a sidelong glance into all the weirdness
that makes up the basic fabric of the American experience.
The book, which had in fact been ghost written owing
either to Benny's lack of English or typewriting abilities, centered

(04:48):
largely around the wanderings of a prophet called Meal, as
presented to Benny through his apparent communications with God. It
was effectively a rewriting of the world as laid out
in the first section of the Torah, known as Basheet
or Genesis as it's known in the Old Testament of
the Bible. Though the press and police were quick to

(05:09):
hold up the oldest history as evidence that Benny was
attempting to establish a cult through his teachings. There's little
evidence to suggest he'd amassed any followers by the time
of his death. However, a sign that Benny had hung
up in his basement window reading Great Celestial Planet exhibition
suggests he'd been intending to entice people in to visit

(05:30):
his peculiar religious sanctum, though for what purpose exactly is
not entirely clear. For the family's priest father, Beccherini, even
if Benny had only concocted it all as an elaborate
money making scheme, it was still tantamount to blasphemy. Having
watched from afar, Beccherini had long been concerned that Benny's

(05:52):
dabblings in the occult might unwittingly awaken something dark that
he was not able to control. For those unfortunate to
have witnessed the horrific crime scene, especially considering the lack
of evidence and witnesses, they could certainly be forgiven for
thinking Benny had succeeded in summoning something unspeakable from the

(06:12):
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(07:46):
morning of Sunday, July fourteenth, another letter arrived, this time
sent to Detroit's Wayne County Police Station and addressed to
the station Sheriff Irah Wilson. The letter, which being dated
July sixth, was written only three days after the murders,
read as follows, Sir, just a few lines to introduce

(08:07):
to you a name of a good man of which
I believe he will lead the road to discover the
brutal slaughter of the evangelists if you only give him
the power to act the investigation. This man lives at
fourteen eighty five East Grand River in lansinc. His name
is George Prico. Later that day, two detectives made their

(08:28):
way to Lansing to interview Prico, a tailor who worked
at a vocational school for boys. Unfortunately, Prico claimed to
have no idea who might have sent the letter, but
he did confess to know something about Benny. According to Prico,
a friend of his from Detroit at once visited Benny
for treatment. During the appointment, Benny confided to the friend

(08:51):
that he feared a former patient was going to kill him.
In fact, as some have pointed out, in the preface
of his book, Ben, he appeared to have a prophetic
sense that he was going to die, writing that only
if I live shall I tell of the Third World,
a reference to one of the later volumes he planned
to write. As for helping the investigation, however, Prico's information

(09:15):
was far too vague to be of any use. Police
then turned their attention again to the idea that Benny
and his family were murdered for money. The theory was
given greater credibility when it was revealed that the night
before their death, Benny had made arrangements to have a
truckload of scrap timber delivered to his property early the

(09:35):
next morning, having offered two hundred dollars for the material
about three thousand dollars in today's money. The delivery was
arranged for seven am, and yet, despite the family's bodies
not being found until ten thirty am, no delivery of
timber was made to their home. Since Benny was thought
to have agreed to pay cash on arrival. The fact

(09:58):
that no money was found at the property during the
police investigation led some to believe that whoever knew about
the delivery might also have known the money would be
in the house. Neither the driver or the person who
Benny arranged the delivery with was traced, although it would

(10:20):
by no means have been unheard of. Most simply couldn't
believe that a crime of such deliberate brutality would be
perpetrated for such a relatively small sum of money. But
what the police ultimately couldn't shake was the suspicion that
all of it was somehow linked to Benny's strange and
unusual religion, and so they began to dig a little

(10:42):
further into his past, in particular to his time spent
in York County, Pennsylvania, a place located in the heart
of pow wow country. The practice of pow wow is
thought to have arrived in America with Dutch and German
mainly Amish as in the eighteenth century, with many heading

(11:02):
to Pennsylvania. The states soon became a focal point for
what would eventually become the Pennsylvania Dutch pow wow tradition.
Though taking many forms, the practice essentially involves the utilizing
of spells and charms in an effort to cure illness
and disease. The term pow wow is thought to derive
from the Algonquin word for healer or dreaming, for divination

(11:26):
and healing purposes. However, it wasn't until the publication of
the book pow Wow's or Long Lost Friend by Johann
George Hohman that it became synonymous with the growing folk
magic movement. Homan and his family emigrated to Pennsylvania from
Germany in eighteen o two. Practically penniless when they arrived,

(11:47):
Homan and his wife, Anna Catherine were forced to sell
themselves as indentured servants to raise money to live. Though
separated at first, the family were eventually reunited once their
debt was paid off, with Homan by then making a
living writing ballads and hymns to sell at market. Then,
in eighteen twenty, he published Long Lost Friend, a peculiar

(12:10):
mix of prayers and healing recipes. Though Homan never intended
it to be used for magical purposes, it soon gained
a glowing reputation among many of the local faith healers
and pow wow practitioners. Even mere ownership of the book
was said to bring protective powers to any one who
possessed it. It is thought Benny's own attempted religion and

(12:32):
self proclamation as a prophet and healer was heavily influenced
by the pow Wow movement, all of which led police
to wander if his death was linked to an equally
bizarre murder that occurred in Pennsylvania the previous year. It

(12:53):
was during Thanksgiving of nineteen twenty eight that thirty two
year old John Blymeer arrived at the Marietta use of
Nellie Knoll, also known as the River, which in Pennsylvania's
Lancaster County. Blymir had been struggling with his mental health
over the loss of two children and his wife leaving him.
Over time, he came to suspect his misfortune was due

(13:16):
to the fact that some one had put a curse
on him. Over the course of six sessions at a home,
employing all manner of spells, charms, and herbal remedies, Noel
attempted to determine the source of Blymier's misery. At the
end of the final session, Noel asked Blymeyer to hold
out his palm, into which she placed a single dollar coin,

(13:38):
telling him that the moment he removed it, he would
see the cause of all his pain. Blymier promptly removed
the coin, whereby he later claimed to see a vision
of Nelson Raymier, another local witch doctor and acquaintance of Blymier's,
who lived at a place known coincidentally as Heck Hollow
roughly twenty miles away with the malignant agent identified Noel

(14:04):
informed Blymyer that in order to break the curse, he
needed to collect a lock of Raymier's hair and bury
it six feet underground. But more crucially, he must also
locate Raymier's copy of The Long Lost Friend and burn it.
And so on November twenty seventh, Blymyer and two accomplices

(14:24):
arrived at Raymier's home and assaulted him. It isn't clear
if the men had only intended to subdue Raymeyer to
collect some hair and steal his book, but after a
quick struggle that lasted less than a minute, Raymeyer was dead,
unable to even find the book. Afterwards, Blymyer decided to
set fire to the entire house to be sure it

(14:44):
was destroyed. He and his accomplices were captured soon after,
with Blymyer sentenced to life for his crime. Though ultimately
he regretted his actions, he remained convinced, nonetheless, that Raymier's
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police couldn't find any obvious connection between Benny and the
Ramayer murder, it did lead them to something else. Having
looked further into Benny's time in New York County, police

(16:34):
became interested in a man he met there shortly after
he arrived in nineteen o six. Aurelius Angelino, also known
as Leon, was twenty years older than Benny and had
also emigrated to the US from Napoli, with Benny only
twenty two, when he was effectively banished to Pennsylvania by
his older brother. Some have speculated that Leon quickly became

(16:57):
something of a father figure to him. But more than
any think what drew them together was their mutual fascination
of occult philosophies, and in particular, the mystical teachings of theosophy.
In May nineteen nineteen, for reasons unknown, Angelino was jailed
and committed to a psychiatric unit, only to be released

(17:17):
soon after due to the please of his distraught wife,
who'd been left alone to look after their four children.
The day after he returned home, however, Angelino attacked his
wife with a club while she made dinner. After fighting
him off, she somehow managed to escape the house, taking
two of their children with her into the garden to

(17:37):
get away from him. Back inside the house, however, Angelina
quickly located the other two children, who he then battered
to death. After stripping naked, Angelino picked up his blood
soaked children and carried them into the yard, where he
proceeded to chop one of them up, stuffing their remains
into a garbage can before police eventually arrived to subdue him.

(18:02):
Leon was consequently committed to what used to be Fairview
State Hospital in Pennsylvania. Believing they might have a lead,
detectives working the Evangelista murder went to Fairview to interview Leon,
only to discover, much to their alarm, that he'd escaped
from the hospital the year after he was committed. In
nineteen twenty seven, two years before the Evangelista murders, a

(18:26):
body was discovered on a train track in Baltimore that
was later identified as Aurelius Angelino by his wife. Though
Detroit police were satisfied this meant he couldn't possibly be
their man, some have speculated that, due to the mangled
state of his body, it is entirely possible his wife
was mistaken in her positive identification. Nonetheless, the evangelistic case

(18:50):
remained open, with the investigation beginning to pete are out
once more. Detective Fred Frown, who was now leading the investigation,
was surprised to read one morning in the Border City
Star that one of his detectives, Michael Larco, had cracked

(19:12):
the case. Larco, a member of Detroit's Italian Squad specializing
in crimes relating to the Italian American community, was duly
brought in for questioning to give his side of the story.
It was a few weeks earlier, he said, when he
received a call from US Immigration asking him to take
custody of an Italian man who'd been picked up in

(19:33):
the town of Windsor, having illegally crossed the Canadian border. Strangely,
when the man was asked to empty his pockets on
arrival at the station in Detroit, he was found to
have a piece of paper with the address thirty five
eighty seven Saint Auban Street written on it, the home
of the Evangelista family. He also happened to have a

(19:53):
copy of the oldest History on him too. Then, over
the next few days, according to Larco, man slowly began
to open up. Not only did he know Benny, he'd
also once been a client of his. On his first
visit to Benny's home, the man, who had gone to
treat a minor ailment, was given a copy of his

(20:14):
book before being led down into the bizarre basement altar space. There,
the man watched a little unnerved as Benny fell into
a trance and proceeded to minister a cure for him.
Having felt better, he continued to visit Benny until eventually
he was broke. Only when his ailment returned did he

(20:35):
realize that he'd been duped. In the evening of July second,
the man slipped into Benny's home and found him sitting
in a trance at his desk. Taking the meat cleaver
he'd brought with him, he chopped Benny's head clean off,
then turned to find Benny's daughter staring up at him
in stunned disbelief. Believing he had no other choice, the

(20:56):
man proceeded to murder the rest of the family, and
when it was fled to Canada, Detective Larco claimed to
have traveled to Windsor himself to verify bank withdrawals made
by the man to Benny for the sum of ten dollars,
the amount he routinely charged his clients. Only none of
it was true. Larco had made the whole thing up,

(21:17):
attempting to pin the crime on the unknown Italian man
in the hope of receiving the states by then four
thousand dollars reward for the killer's capture. The man's prince
were taken nonetheless, and after they were found not to
match those at the evangelist of property, he was quietly
released the following day. In what appears to have been
a recurring theme in his career, Detective Larco was eventually

(21:41):
reprimanded and convicted of soliciting a bribe. Over the next year,
attention in the evangelistic case inevitably began to wane. With
no further evidence coming to light. To fill the vacuum,
police began increasingly to turn to more bizarre theories. One

(22:05):
detective suggested the killings were part of a series of
forty disparate murders or perpetrated by the same serial killer,
who he'd given the name the Holiday Ripper, but the
theory was never seriously investigated, and so the case went dormant.
Two years later, on Sunday, November twentieth, roughly ten blocks

(22:27):
from the former evangelist of property, a man walked into
the home of Robert Harris, a member of the Allah
Temple of Islam soon to be Nation of Islam that
had been established by Wallace Fard two years previously. As
the man searched for Harris, he stepped into a crude
oldar room at the back of the property and found
the body of a man named James Smith spread out

(22:50):
limply on top of it, an eight inch knife thrust
into his heart all the way to the hilt. His
head had also been bashed in Harris, who was arrested
along with his wife Bertha. Later that afternoon, having gone
to a friend's house for lunch, immediately confessed to the murder.
As he explained to police, he murdered Smith as a

(23:12):
sacrifice to Allah, claiming that the man had voluntarily climbed
on to the altar after Harris promised him his sacrifice
would make him the savior of the world. Though Harris
had no real standing in the Alla Temple of Islam
and his history of mental illness was well known to
his family and other members, it didn't stop the media

(23:33):
proclaiming him as the temple's high priest and describing the
movement as nothing but a voodoo cult obsessed with ritual
and human sacrifice. As such, investigators looking into the evangelistic
case couldn't help but wonder if Robert Harris was the
man that had been looking for all this time. Despite
only the most tenuous of links with both Benny's apparent

(23:56):
religion and the Alla Temple of Islam being described lazily
as colts, Harris was investigated for the crime. However, not
only did his prince not match those found at the scene,
but he was also in ten A c At the
time of the murders. Is there something interfering with your

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(25:28):
years had passed since the evangelist of family were brutally
butchered in their home at thirty five eighty seven Saint
Auban Street, when a woman, Teresa my Couci, walked into
Hunt Street police station claiming to have some vital information
pertaining to the murders, though the original investigators had long
moved on to other cases. Teresa was taken to see

(25:50):
Detective Charles Snyder, who duie set about taking her statement.
The information was regarding her ex husband and Berto Ecchio,
one of the original suspects in the case, who had
been arrested the day the bodies were discovered, alongside his
friend Angelo de poli. As. She went on to explain,

(26:12):
she and Umberto had actually been to the evangelist at
home on a number of occasions because she had once
been a client of Benny's, having been taken there by
Aumberto to undergo a series of healing rituals. Something that
had always bugged her since the murders, she said, was
the fact that Benny, as she recalled, used to have

(26:33):
two machetes hanging up on the wall of his office,
but nothing was ever mentioned of them in the subsequent investigation.
Presumably she thought because they were no longer there when
the police inspected the property. Not only would aumberto have
known about them from the times they went to visit Benny,
but he had some previous Two. In April nineteen twenty nine,

(26:57):
three months before the evangelist and murders, Techio, stabbed his
then wife's brother to death in a dispute over money
to raise a divorce Techio three weeks later, but despite
efforts to rid him from her life, in nineteen thirty two,
her second husband, Lewis Peruzzi, was found shot dead on
their porch. Only days before his death, Perrutzi had begged

(27:20):
police for protection from Techio, who'd threatened to kill him
and blow up the house. The death was oddly ruled
as suicide, and then more people began to come out
of the woodwork. Frank Costanza, who was a fourteen year

(27:41):
old paper boy at the time, revealed that he saw
Techio leaving the evangelist of property at five am in
the morning, despite Techio's previous claim that he'd returned to
his boarding house at eleven pm the night before. Following
up this claim, Detective Snyder reinterviewed former aqaintances of Techios
from the boarding house and received some startling information. One

(28:06):
former lodger, Camillo Treus, admitted that he had also accompanied
Techio along with Tapoli, to the evangelist of property the
night before the murders, Though they did return to the
boarding house at eleven pm after going out drinking, as
Techio had originally stated, by the time Treus woke up
the next morning at seven pm, Umberto was nowhere to

(28:28):
be seen. He didn't return to the boarding house until
four pm the next day, when he arrived carrying a
canvas mason bag about three feet in length. This bag, however,
was never found. As for Techio, police were unfortunately unable
to interview him again because by then he too was dead,

(28:52):
dying of a brain hemorrhage in November nineteen thirty five.
As frustrating as all this was, the irony of it
is that it was only the event of Techio's death
that gave others the confidence to come forward in the
first place. With all the new information regardless, in August
nineteen thirty six, Detective Snyder compiled a final report on

(29:15):
the crimes, concluding the Umberto, Techio was the murderer. Two
weeks later, Techio's Prince were sent to another police department
to verify them against the bloody prints found the evangelist
at home, and they were stunned by the result. The
prints were not a match. If you enjoy Unexplained and

(29:41):
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