How Writing 'The Sicilian Inheritance' Led Jo Piazza to Investigate a Murder in the Family

When I first started writing a novel loosely based on the murder of our family matriarch in Sicily, I didn’t want know the real story. I wanted to let my imagination run free. I wanted to create characters and a mystery in my head using just this nugget of information about the murder of a woman who stayed behind while her husband made his fortune in America.

But once my novel Sicilian heritage put to bed and in the hands of my editor, something told me that the story was not finished. I had to know the truth about what happened to my great-great-grandmother Lorenza Marsala. I became obsessed with solving Lorenza’s actual murder and, being the incredibly thorough content creator that I am, decided to make a true crime podcast about it.

My family has been passing on the story of Lorenza’s murder for over a hundred years. It changes depending on who’s talking, with numerous theories and tangents and mythologies involved. We are Italian Americans and we love to beautify and entertain the audience with our lore.

But what has always remained the same is the fact that our matriarch was killed before she could join her husband Antonin and her five children here in America in 1916.

There are numerous theories about the death of my great-great-grandmother

Lorenzo Marsala (in the middle) with two family members.

Courtesy of Jo Piazza

Some of my family members claim that the murder was committed by the local mafia, which they always call the Black Hand. They believe she was killed because the Black Hand wanted her land or they wanted to steal her money after she sold it. Some even believe that she herself worked for the mafia.

My dad, who passed away seven years ago, always thought she was killed because she was a witch, or a healer, and someone important died under her care, and then she was killed in revenge because she couldn’t save them. Or maybe they just didn’t like witches.

Since this story may involve the mob, primary research is not without its risks. I didn’t fully believe it until I spoke with Barbie Latza Nadeau, a journalist and expert on the Italian mafia. Barbie told me that there is still danger in investigating mob crimes, even if they happened decades ago.

“You always have to be careful what you dig up when you’re sifting through the ashes because you might come across something that someone doesn’t want you to know about,” she explained. “I’m not trying to scare you. I just think you just have to be careful.”

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Some family members warned me not to investigate

Not everyone in my family is happy about my digging into the past either, and many have tried to dissuade me from it.

My uncle Jimmy warned me not to go to Sicily to find out the truth. “Why are you opening old wounds?” he asked me. “You will end up with our revenge again.” He was joking, but not joking.

I am not the first in my family to seek the truth. Many of my relatives went to the village of Caltabelotta, where our family comes from, to try to find information, and some encountered strange things along the way. My cousin Laura claims that lightning struck the church in the town square when she mentioned Lorenza’s name to a local official. Another says the mayor threw them out of the city’s municipal office when they asked to see her death certificate.

Family members found some birth certificates, but no real evidence of what happened to Lorenza.

How could I solve a hundred-year-old murder? None of the people who were there are alive anymore. I had no idea how to get any records of a death in a foreign country, especially one that happened so long ago.

First: the Internet. Next up: A family trip to Sicily

The Piazza family on their journey.

Courtesy of Jo Piazza

I started at Ancestry.com, which gave me Lorenza’s birth and death dates. I quickly learned the limitations of research in the United States. There was no way I could solve this thing from my laptop at my desk. So last summer I packed up my entire family, including three children under the age of seven, and headed to Sicily to do original research on Lorenzo Marsala.

Can I find an official death record? Was there a police report? Has anyone been prosecuted and if so, are there trial records? I was just about to find out.

There is another story my family has passed down about what happened after Lorenzo was killed: her sons were drawing straws to see who would return to Sicily to avenge her death. Many relatives believe that a son named Giuseppe drew the short straw and returned to avenge his mother by killing her killers during a rabbit hunt and then disappeared.

If this is true, surely there must be some record of it.

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When I arrived in Caltabelotta, I cautiously made my way up the mountain to the small town. Caltabelotta is beautiful, one of the most striking places you will ever see, and the road is narrow and winding. If a car is speeding down a mountain, you have to stop to miss it. The old stone houses seem to overflow from the jagged cliffs that jut out on top of the mountain. Clouds often cover the top itself, making the scene both beautiful and ominous.

I made an appointment at the local municipal office. The guides and translators I hired, Ciro and Ettore, told me that I would be better received if I agreed. I’m still worried.

Finding Clues in the ‘Book of Death’

Jo Piazza with ‘The Book of Death’.

Courtesy of Jo Piazza

But lightning didn’t strike when I mentioned Lorenza’s name in the community hall and asked if I could see the record of her death. In fact, the city manager brought out a massive two-meter cloth book, Atti di Morteor what the locals call the “Book of Deaths”, which listed all the deaths in the village in 1916.

The book is divided into two parts, A and B, both handwritten in careful cursive. There is one important difference between Section A and Section B—Section A lists people who died of natural causes, usually in their homes. Others are unnatural causes, accidents or murders. The second place is where we found Lorenzo. It was the first real evidence I had that she was murdered over a century ago.

My whole body tensed as I looked at the page. Here she was. This was real. It was no longer just a story told over cocktails at a family wedding. Lorenzo Marsala was born here and died here, probably in a horrible way.

At first, nothing seemed suspicious about Lorenzo in the book of unnatural deaths to the city manager and our translators. She was a farmer in her fifties in 1916. Farming was a dangerous business. Her death certificate did not list the cause of death, only the date, time and place where her body was found – five kilometers outside the city.

A suspicious finding, and a cold case has warmed up

Lorenza’s entry in the ‘Book of Death’.

Courtesy of Jo Piazza

But just as the administrator was about to slam his book and go to lunch, I asked him to look again. Something told me we weren’t done. Call it the intuition of the great-great-granddaughter of a Sicilian witch. He opened the book again and looked at another entry below Lorenza’s. He gasped and his eyes widened. “There’s something here,” he whispered in Italian.

That other person was killed at the exact same time, in the exact same place outside the city as Lorenzo. His name was Nicolo Martino, a name I had never heard before. A name no one in my family had ever heard before.

It finally became clear that Lorenza’s death was not an accident. In a time before gas-powered cars or farm equipment, it would have been rare for two people to die in the same place at the same time.

‘Sicilian heritage’.

Courtesy of Jo Piazza

For the first time since I heard this story as a child, I truly believed that my great-great-grandmother had been murdered, but there was still a lot of work to be done to find out how and by whom. There were police reports to investigate, court records to dig through, local elders to question. It would take more than a year and another trip across the ocean to learn anything more.

But when I stared at the book of death and saw her name next to the stranger, I realized, perhaps because I have a bit of that Sicilian woman running through my veins, that the truth would be absolutely stranger than fiction.

Sicilian heritage is out on April 2nd and is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold.

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Source: HIS Education