Chapter 7

Of late years, round and about Viterbo, there was a well-known character, Giovanni Ugolini by name, a sort of itinerant "Jack-of-all-trades," who wandered about from place to place, picking up any odd job he could find, and begging when he could turn his hand to nothing else. He is described in the legal reports as a Tinker and Umbrella-mender, but his especial line of industry, novel to us at any rate, seems to have been that of a scraper and cleaner of old tombstones. By these various pursuits, he scraped together a good bit of money for a man in his position, and at the end of his winter circuit, in the year 1857, he had saved up by common report as much as 70 scudi, or about 14 pounds odd. On the 4th of May in that year, Ugolini left the little town of Castel Giorgio, with the avowed intention of going to Viterbo, to change his monies into Tuscan coin. Being belated on his road, he resolved to stop over the night at the house of a certain Andrea Volpi which lay on his road, and where he had often slept before. On the following morning, about eight o'clock, he left Volpi's house and went on his journey towards Viterbo. Nothing more is positively known about him, except that on the same day his body was found on a bye-path, a little off the direct Viterbo road, covered with wounds. No money was discovered about his person, while there was every indication of his clothes and pack having been rummaged and rifled.

Assuming, as one must, the correctness of these facts, there can be no doubt that a very brutal murder and robbery had been committed. For some reasons, what, we are not told, the suspicions of the police fell at once on one of Volpi's sons, called Serafino, a lad of about 22, and on a friend of his, Bonaventura Starna, about two years older than himself. Both of these persons, who were common labourers, were, in consequence, arrested on the 7th of May. They were not tried, however, till the 27th of April, in the year following, when they were arraigned for the murder before the lay criminal and civil court of Viterbo.

The two prisoners, nevertheless, are not tried on the same charge. Volpi is arraigned by the public prosecutor on a charge of wilful murder, accompanied with treachery and robbery, while Starna is only brought to trial as an accomplice to the crime, not as a principal. Before the actual guilt of either prisoner is ascertained, the public prosecutor, that is, the Government, decides the relative degree of their respective hypothetical guilt. The justice of this proceeding may be questioned, but its motive is palpable enough. There was little or no direct evidence against the prisoners, and to convict either of them, it was necessary to rely upon the testimony of the other.

"With both the prisoners," so runs the sentence of the court, "a criminal motive could be established in the fact of their avowed poverty, as they each clearly admitted, that neither they nor their families possessed anything in the world, and that they derived the means of their miserable sustenance from their daily labour alone." A very close intimacy was proved to have existed between the prisoners, so much so, indeed, that Starna had frequently been reproved by his parents for his friendship with a man who stood in such ill repute as Volpi. The fact that the murdered man was, or was believed to be in possession of money, was shown to be well known amongst the Volpi family. Two of Serafino Volpi's brothers were reported to have spoken to third parties of Ugolini's savings, and one of them expressed a wish to rob him. Why this brother was neither arrested nor apparently examined, is one of the many mysteries, by the way, you come across in perusing these Papal reports. Serafino too had mentioned himself, to a neighbour, his suspicion of the tinker's having saved money. On the morning of the murder, Starna was known to have come to the Volpi's cottage, to have talked with Serafino, and to have left again in his company, shortly after Ugolini's departure. After about an hour's absence, Serafino Volpi returned home, and therefore had time enough to commit the murder. He was shown, moreover, to have been in possession of a knife, about which he could give no satisfactory account, and which might have inflicted the wounds found on the corpse.

These appear to have been all the facts which could be established against either Volpi or Starna by positive evidence, and, at the worst, such facts could only be said to constitute a case for suspicion. Previously, however, to the trial, Starna turned, what we should call, "King's evidence," and, in contradiction to his foregoing statements, made a confession, on which the prosecution practically rested the whole of its case. According to this confession of Starna's, on the morning of the murder he called by accident at the Volpi's, and stopped there, till after the tinker, who was an entire stranger to him, had left the house. Serafino Volpi then offered to accompany him to his (Starna's) house, on the pretence of borrowing some tool or other. They walked quickly to avoid the rain, which was falling heavily, and shortly overtook Ugolini, who exchanged a few words with Volpi about the weather, and then turned off along a bye-road. Thereupon Volpi proposed that they should follow the old man and rob him, adding, "he has got a whole lot of coppers." Starna, according to his own story, refused to have anything to do with the matter; on which Volpi said, in that case he should do it alone, and asked Starna to go and fetch the tool he wanted, and bring it to him where they were standing. Starna then left Volpi running across the fields to overtake the tinker, and went home to find the tool. In a very short time afterwards, as he was coming back to the appointed meeting- place, he met Volpi in a great state of agitation, who told him that the job was finished, and Ugolini's throat cut, but that only 20 pauls' worth of copper money, about eight shillings, were found upon him. Starna admitted that he then took eight pauls as his own share in the booty, and told Volpi to wash off some spots of blood visible on his sleeve. He also added, that later on the same day he met Volpi again, and then expressed his alarm at what had happened; on which he received the answer, "If you had been with me, you would not be alive now."

One can hardly conceive a more suspicious story, or one more clearly concocted to give the best colour to the witness's own conduct, at the expense of his fellow-prisoner. No evidence whatever appears to have been brought in support of this confession. The court, notwithstanding, decides that the truth of this statement is fully established by internal and external testimony, and therefore declares that the alleged crimes are clearly proved against both the prisoners. "Considering," nevertheless, "that though Starna was an accomplice in the crime, from his having assisted Volpi, and from having, by his own confession, shared in the booty, yet that his guilt was less, both in the conception and in the perpetration of the crime, there being no proof that he had taken any active part in the murder of Ugolini," therefore, "in the most holy name of God," the court sentences Volpi to public execution, and Starna to twenty years at the galleys.

Of course, both the prisoners resorted to their invariable right of appeal, but their case did not come on before the lower court of the Supreme Clerical Tribunal at Rome for upwards of a year, namely, on the 17th of May, 1859. At this trial, no new facts whatever appear to have been adduced. I gather indistinctly, that Volpi's defence was that he had not left his father's house at all on the morning of the murder, but that his attempt to prove an "alibi" was unsuccessful. The chief object indeed of the very lengthy sentence of the court, recapitulating the evidence already stated, is to establish the comparative innocence of Starna, who, for some cause or other, seems to have been favourably regarded. We are told, that "the confession of Starna is confirmed by a thousand proofs;" that "it is clearly shown" that Starna "in this confession did not deny his own responsibility; a fact which gives his statement the character of an incriminative and not of an exonerative confession; and that though he might possibly have wished, in his statement of the facts, to modify and extenuate his own share in the crime, yet there was no reason to suspect that he wished gratuitously to aggravate the guilt of his comrade;" and that also taking into consideration the villainous character of Volpi, it cannot be doubted, that he was the principal in the crime. The court at Viterbo had decided that the crime of the prisoners was murder, coupled with robbery and treachery. The Court of Appeal decides, on what seem sufficient grounds, that there is no proof of treachery, and therefore, the crime not being of so heinous a character, reduces the period of Starna's punishment from twenty to fifteen years, while it simply confirms the sentence of death on Volpi.

Again, as a matter of course, there is an appeal from this sentence to the upper court of the Supreme Tribunal, which appeal comes off after four months' delay, on the 9th of September, 1859. The only ground of appeal brought forward is one which, according to our notions of law, should have been brought forward from the first, namely, that the guilt of Volpi is not adequately proved by the unsupported statement of his accomplice Starna, and "that the evidence which corroborates this statement, only constitutes an _a priori_ probability of his guilt." The court, however, dismisses this plea at once, on the ground that it is not competent to take cognizance of an argument based on the abstract merits of the case, and therefore confirms the verdict.

On the 25th of November the sentence is submitted to, and approved by, the Pope. On the 3rd of January, 1860, orders are issued from Rome for the execution to take place. On the 17th the authorities of Viterbo notify to the prisoner that his last appeal has been dismissed, and "call on the military to lend their support to the execution of the sentence," and on the following day, two years and eight months after his arrest, Volpi is executed for the murder of Ugolini on the Piazza della Rocca at Viterbo. On that day, too, appears the first report of his crime and trial.