Off With His Head: The Benny Evangelist Story

In the early 1900s alternative healing practices and occult beliefs were all the rage. Voodoo and Satanism washed over the United States as people began to look outside of the church for answers. Benny Evangelist and Aurelius Angelino were two Italian immigrants looking for a fresh start in America. 

Both became interested in the occult and both of their families suffered for it. 

Learn all about the horrific tragedies that struck their households and the roles they have played in them. Aurelius broke free from an insane asylum and was never heard from again. Benny lost his head. 

*May not be suitable for children

Transcript

In the year plus that I’ve been working on this podcast I have stumbled upon stories that I never knew. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole and learned new things about stories that I thought I knew. It would seem that in the world of the bizarre, mysterious and unknown, there are stories upon stories that are buried deep in the past, forgotten by many, or since they happened during a time without the internet or social media, never really discussed unless passed down generationally.  

What I present to you now is one such story. Some of you may have heard about it. There’s certainly information out there in the darker corners of the world wide web. But not much. A majority of the information in this episode comes from newspaper archives and a smattering of seemingly… hopefully… reliable retellings available on the web.

It's a strange tale. Sometimes grotesque. Sometimes shocking, and one that I’m still learning more about as I speak. If there are younger listeners around, I’d maybe skip this episode. 

So let us go on this journey together. There’s strength in numbers. 

Episode 40 - Off With His Head

Benjamino Evangelista was born on June 3rd of 1885 in Naples, Italy. Little is known about his early life or his family but around 1904, eighteen year old Benjamino emigrated to the United States. It was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he met up with his older brother, Antonio and changed his name to Benny Evangelist. 

The two worked together as part of a railroad crew and adjusted to life in America. After some years together Antonio cut ties with his brother, Benny, in 1908. Benny had begun having visions that went against Antonio’s Roman Catholic beliefs and had become extremely interested in the occult. Antonio sent Benny to join a railroad construction crew 100 miles east in York, Pennsylvania. 

It was there he’d meet his future wife, Santina and best friend, Aurelius Angelino both of whom hailed from the same hometown as Benny.  York, at the time, was bustling with believers in folk religions, faith healers and Hex magic users. Benny and his friend Aurelius both became very interested in what these new religions had to offer. Santina would occasionally partake in the sessions as well. 

Aurelius Angelino arrived in New York in 1912 with his wife, Freda, where he worked for a short time as a lumberjack. Over the course of the next few years, the couple moved to York, Pennsylvania, and two became six as the Angelino family grew. First came Helen, then Edwig and Aufergi, twin boys and finally Aurelius Jr.. The family owned a modest home on the old factory road in an area flush with immigrants. 

In York, as I mentioned a moment ago, Aurelius became fast friends with Benny Evangelist. The pair learned all they could about dark magic and spells, healing and the occult. 

In July of 1916, Aurelius was badly injured in an automobile accident when he was thrown from the vehicle and landed on his head, shoulder and right arm. The accident forced him to stay home from work for thirteen months. His wife, Freda, took a job at a nearby factory stripping tobacco to make ends meet. Over the course of the thirteen months, Aurelius slowly spiraled into a deep depression and told Freda, “If this doesn’t drive me crazy, nothing will.” 

As the years ticked by, Aurelius took on random jobs, never lasting for long. At some point in early 1919 he was sent home from a job after becoming violent. As the taxi cab drove him home he jumped out and ran away. Things were going downhill fast for Aurelius Angelino.

On February 10th of 1919, Freda contacted the authorities and Aurelius was brought up on charges of abuse. Freda was often the target of his anger and instability. He was placed in jail but after assaulting a number of guards, was transferred to the Lancaster County Insane Asylum.

Throughout February, March and April, the Lancaster Charity Society visited the Angelino home, leaving donations of food and money, checking up on Freda and her four children. Freda visited her husband everyday while he was a resident at the asylum, eventually sharing the news that his mother had been sending money from Italy so that he could move his family back to his homeland. 

Freda did all she could to convince his physician, Dr. J.A. Capp and the asylum board that he would be okay once back in Italy with his mother. She promised that they would move right away and showed the board the money she’d collected for passage. 

The doctor at the asylum happened to also be Freda’s physician, he’d delivered her twin boys just four years before. Dr. Capp felt bad for Freda and agreed that moving back to Italy might be good for Aurelius. Plus, the idea of sending a “trouble making foreigner” out of the United States seemed appealing. Despite having just reported to the board that Aurelius would need a solid year of treatment, he signed off on his release after only four months. 

Aurelius was released from the Lancaster County Insane Asylum on Saturday, May 17th. He spent the evening and overnight hours singing and shouting, unable to sleep.

On Sunday morning, Freda cooked breakfast for the family. Aurelius tried to pick a fight with her and she refused to argue, so he struck her, grabbed his daughter Helen and left the house.  

The two entered the Pennsylvania train station where Aurelius snatched a hat off of a woman’s head and began dancing and singing. When an employee threatened to notify the police, Aurelius took his daughter’s hand and ran back home, returning after noon. From there, the family, except for the twin boys, visited a neighbor’s home for an early dinner. While there, Aurelius stole a pocket knife and various other trinkets before escorting the family back home. 

Once home, Aurelius proclaimed that he was hungry, despite having just been fed bread and macaroni. Freda questioned him but knew not to upset him so she offered to cook him eggs. She told her husband to go check on the twin boys while she prepared food for the three of them. The boys hadn’t gone to the neighbor’s house because at the time, they had no clothes to wear. 

While cooking the eggs, Freda heard a commotion in the boys room. Loud thumps and soft cries rang out and she panicked, calling to her husband. Aurelius came out of the room, looking more enraged than she’d ever seen him. He waved a carving knife at her, taunting her, saying, “this is how you do it!” He lunged at his wife but she dodged the attack and ran out of their home. 

At this point, Freda fainted on the front lawn. Aurelius stripped naked and left through the front door giving chase to a neighbor who was helping Freda off the ground. He returned to the house, wrapped himself in a towel and scooped up the now deceased, and also naked, twins from their bed and carried them out to the front lawn.

Neighbors, alerted by Freda’s screams, were gathered in the road in front of the Angelino home. They watched, afraid to approach the man, as Aurelius carried the boys through the open front door, laid them down in the grass and began chopping at their bodies with an axe. 

He yelled to one neighbor, “Do you want some fresh liver?” and “Nice fresh meat!” to another. Police arrived at 2:55pm and surveyed the scene. 

A news article from the May 19th Lancaster News Journal wrote that, “The man, as he labored at his repugnant task, was babbling and was unaware of the approach of the officers. Angelino made no resistance as the officers closed in around him.”

As they took away his axe and knife, Aurelius Angelino said seven words, “I didn’t do it, someone else did.” 

The Lancaster News Journal called it the “most heinous crime in the history of the county, maybe the country.” 

Aurelius had apparently snapped, aided by his accident, depression or possibly possession. Benny Evangelist and his wife, Freda, fellow students of the occult were reportedly horrified by their friends actions and soon moved to Detroit, Michigan to get away.

The move to Detroit proved to be a successful one for Benny. He started off as a carpenter but quickly became a prominent building contractor before venturing into the world of real estate. His first of five children was born in 1922, a girl they named Angelina. 

When Benny wasn’t working on homes, he was making money on the side through faith healing.  As early as 1906, Benny claimed to receive daily religious visions between the early morning hours of midnight and 3:00am. He sold spiritual remedies, hexes and herbs from his basement and received $10 a pop for private "readings." 

The Evangelist basement was your typical 1920’s dingy basement. In one of the rooms, however, Benny had wired in electricity. The ‘Prophet’ as he’d become known by his following, set up an altar of sorts. The walls and ceiling of the room was lined with green cloth. Suspended above the altar by wire were nine bizarre, freakish wax figures that represented the planets in our solar system. In the middle of the dangling figures hung an electrically lit, huge eyeball. If you were to drive by the home and look in one of the basement windows you’d see a large sign that read "Great Celestial Planet Exhibition."

In these readings, Benny called upon the powers of the cult he’d created known as the “Union Federation of America.”  Benny claimed to have the power to heal various ills and chase away bad spirits. He could be seen on the local streets, chanting and dancing and occasionally sacrificing chickens in the name of medicine. 

In 1923, Benny and Freda’s first son, Mario, was born. Unfortunately, Mario passed away the following year. 1923 also saw Aurelius Angelino back in the news. In early October, Aurelius managed to escape from the state asylum.  

In 1924, the Evangelists welcomed their second daughter, Margaret. 

By 1925 Aurelius’s now ex-wife, Freda had remarried. It’d been nearly two years since his asylum escape and no one had been able to locate the man. In the six years since the gruesome murders of her twin boys she’d stayed in Pennsylvania and married a man named Adrian Bartholomew.  

In June of 1925 an explosion rocked the Bartholomew home followed by a fire that gutted the house. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but Freda, who was pregnant at the time, was understandably shaken up. The leading theory from detectives was that Aurelius had sought to finish off his family and destroy her new life. Freda was placed under police protection and local and state police scoured the community, searching for the former inmate. 

Aurelius Angelino was never located and the bombing case was never solved.  

In 1926 Benny Evangelist contacted a printing company to aid in printing copies of his self published book entitled, "The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Mich." Through twenty years of his midnight to 3:00am visions, he was able to piece together his own history of the world. The book was to be the first volume of four that explained the time between 4305 years before Adam all the way until 5995 years after the great flood when Noah built his ark. 

The book begins with an explanation from the author. 

“My story is from my own views and signs, that I see from 12 to 3 A.M. 

I began on February 2, 1906 in Philadelphia, Penn., and it was completed on February 2, 1926, in the city of Detroit, county of Wayne, state of Michigan. 

On this new earth the last one was created by God the Father Celestial and the great prophet Miel. We call it today the great Union Federation of America. I am with the power of God and I respect this Nation. 

In this book I shall express all my views of the past twenty years. In this great continent are all the generations. 

By the willingness of God, my respect to this nation, I shall do my best to tell you of the old world. I shall tell you about the world before God was created up until this last generation, and I shall explain to you your descendants.”

1926 was also the year that Benny and Freda welcomed their third daughter, Jean. 

In the time between 1926 and 1929 there isn’t much information on Benny Evangelist. It’s assumed he got to work on the second volume of his book and continued buying up and fixing properties while selling his cult based potions and promises from his basement. The couple did have another child in 1927, a boy they named Mario, presumably after his deceased brother who’d passed away before the age of one. 

The news of the events on July 3rd, 1929 would shake the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and the entire country. The following story is not for the faint of heart and taken directly from newspaper articles. 

On the Fourth of July, a real estate man named Vincent Elias stopped by the Evangelist home to speak with Benny about some property he wished to purchase. After knocking and getting no response he noticed that the door was open. He went inside and entered Benny’s office. 

Seated at the desk with his arms folded was Benny Evangelist. On the floor next to Benny Evangelist, in a pool of blood, was his head. His eyes were open, staring off into the distance. Vincent Elias then ran up the stairs to the second floor where he found Santina Evangelista, still holding on to her 18-month-old son Mario. Both had their heads attached, but barely.

Across the hall, the three daughters, Angelina, seven, Margaret, five and Jean, four, met the same fate. Angelina and Margaret were laying in their twin bed. Jean was found near the doorway on the floor. 

The murderer had left fingerprints on doorframes and throughout Benny’s office. There were also bloody footprints leading out of the office and part way up the stairs. 

News of the murders traveled fast. Rumors swirled as to the who and why and detectives were quick to bring in some possible suspects. The prevailing theory was that this had something to do with Benny's ties to the occult. 

Many people believed that the police botched the investigation from the start, allowing newspaper reporters and curious onlookers in and around the house, contaminating the crime scene. By the time that the initial 18-hour investigation was over only one real clue remained, a single bloody fingerprint on the front doorknob. Something else that hurt the investigation is that many of the neighbors in the area were Italian immigrants who weren’t in a hurry to get mixed up with the police. 

The Evangelist’s family physician, Dr. Alf Thomas, was quick to point out that he considered Benny to be insane. He’d witnessed Benny standing out in the street late at night, mumbling to himself and staring up at the stars. Benny’s attorney informed the police that while he’d been tangled up in a few lawsuits, none of them, in his opinion, would have warranted this type of reaction.  

Police interviewed two men who were housemates in a home owned by Benny. Angelo Depoli and Umberto Tecchio had visited the Evangelist home the evening before the murders. Tecchio was there to make a payment on the home. They both stated that nothing unusual had happened during the visit and that they went out drinking afterwards. Police found an ax, banana knife and recently washed boots inside of the barn behind their house. 

Nearly 100 years later, it seems obvious that these two men, or at least one of them, might have been the assailants. Had police been working with today’s technology it would have been much easier to rule them out or find them guilty. However, neither man's fingerprint matched the one usable print at the crime scene.

Detroit police detectives learned that only three months before the Evangelist murders, Tecchio had killed his brother-in-law after an argument. He apparently was never prosecuted for the admitted murder and while it certainly made him a prime suspect, there was no physical evidence and no confession. Umberto Tecchio was never charged and passed away five years later. 

After ruling out numerous suspects, police began to shift their focus to different theories. It was possible, they learned, that Benny Evangelist had some connection to the ‘Black Hand’ organization. Now there were two different Black Hand organizations in the early 1900’s. In 1901, it was a secret military society of officers in the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia. The group is most known for its alleged involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The American version of the Black Hand was sort of the precursor to the mafia. 

With the wave of Italian immigrants came a group of men bent on terrorizing and extorting fellow Italians. Kidnapping, murder, arson and dynamite were all in their playbook. Their calling card was often a coal-blackened handprint on their target’s door along with a threatening letter. 

Police found a letter that was supposedly from the Black Hand in Benny’s office. The letter simply said “This is your last chance.” It was dated nearly a year before the murders and its placement amongst the numerous papers and letters in and around his desk gave off the impression that he hadn’t taken the threat very seriously. 

Also, by 1929, prohibition was nearly a decade old and the Black Hand had almost entirely morphed into the Mafia. 

Detroit police detectives had a seemingly never ending list of leads to follow. There were notes found from angry husbands claiming that Benny Evangelist’s faith healings and cult practices had ruined their families. Numerous notes were sent to police stations from different people who claimed to have carried out the murders. Every ex-mental patient was a suspect, as was any Italian with a criminal record. Every lead, unfortunately, proved fruitless.   

At the funeral for the six victims, police intermingled with the nearly 3000 attendees, in hopes that the suspect would be there. Many murderers, they knew, felt the need to be near the aftermath of their carnage. Numerous arrests were made, but everyone in question turned out to be curious lookie loos who just wanted to be at the funeral. 

The caskets were carried from the church to the nearby Mt. Olivet cemetery in downtown Detroit amongst a sea of mourners.  

Detectives followed trails to the east coast, to Oklahoma as well as Canada. It was there, that a man described as a ‘Mad, raving Italian’ admitted his anger towards Benny Evangelist over his canceling their sessions due to him running out of any form of payment. The man lived in Windsor, just over the bridge from Detroit, but again the evidence didn’t line up and he was released. 

It wasn’t until a year later, in July of 1930 that the name Aurelius Angelino would come up again. In March of 1930, police investigators exhumed Benny Evangelist’s body and took his fingerprints. Those fingerprints, they said, matched bloody fingerprints that they’d taken from the home where Aurelius Angelino killed his sons. Why the bloody fingerprints were still on the walls eleven years later, who knows? But it certainly threw another strange twist into the investigation. 

With the connection made by police between the two men, Angelino became a prime suspect. The issue was, no one had seen him in over six years. He was still on the run. Some wondered, were they working together? Was that even Benny’s decapitated body? Were they the same person? Had they switched identities? Every answer led to another question. 

Later in July of 1930, police traveled to Indiana and arrested a 38-year-old black man named Claude Lewis. How he became a suspect is unclear, but he was quickly released. And then… nothing. 

Every so often the Detroit News and Free Press would print an article about the case. On the ten year anniversary they printed a recap of the murders and stated that police were still working on the case. There was a blurb about the new Homicide Squad Chief assigning detectives to the case in 1945. In 2020, the site of the Evangelist murders, which is now just an empty lot, was added to a haunted Detroit tour. 

Some interested parties have tried to find clues within his book, “The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Michigan”. There’s a point where he questions whether or not he will live to finish the four volumes. There’s another that suggests that if he dies, he will be back. 

There are only three remaining copies of the book known to exist today. One is locked away in a New York library and there are currently two available on Amazon, both of which go for over $2,000. Finding a readable version on the internet was difficult, it took all of my googling power. 

It’s a hard read, full of errors and confusion. I’m not suggesting you read it unless you are very curious. He wasn’t a writer by any means, but I think he believed what he wrote. 

Benny Evangelist and Aurelius Angelino, two Italian immigrants who came to this country to live the American dream but ended up falling into a world full of hexes and axes and black hands and the occult. 

I plan on visiting the Evangelist family graves in the near future but I’m told they are hard to find within the cemetery. For all of the pomp and circumstance of the funeral, it would appear that their headstones were small enough to be swallowed up by the cemetery lawn. 

Have you heard of this story before? Do you have any details to share? Any crazy cold cases near where you live? Let me know and I’ll look into them. Email me, Curator135@gmail.com. 

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