ITALY: Monster's Child

When black-haired Carolina was nine years old, she saw her father commit a murder. "Father was squabbling in the kitchen one night with a stranger," she remembers. "I heard them and went to look. On the kitchen floor I saw a man with his throat cut and his head all bloody. I hurried back to bed."

A few months later Carolina's father, Ernesto Picchioni, was known to all Italy as the "Monster of Nerola." With her mother, two sisters and a brother, Carolina lived with him in a dank stone cottage in a lonely...

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