30. Andrea Sardos Albertini: The Boy Who Wrote Back

In June 1981, a 25-year-old law student named Andrea Sardos Albertini left Trieste with three million lire in cash to buy a used car in Turin. He never came home. His body has never been found.

For the next twenty-four years, Andrea's father — a cassation-court attorney named Lino — believed he could speak with his murdered son. Through a medium named Anita, who balanced a felt-tip marker on her open left palm and let it write top to bottom across the page, the family received what they understood to be Andrea's own account: where he had gone, what had happened to him, where his body lay in the Po. In 1983, divers working the exact stretch of the river the medium had described pulled up fragments of jeans and socks consistent with what Andrea had been wearing.

The book Lino wrote about all of this — Esiste l'Aldilà — sold more than a million copies and was translated into fifteen languages. It has never been published in English. Italian Catholic families have kept it on their shelves for forty years. The case remains unsolved. The four men allegedly responsible have never been named.

This is the first English-language deep dive on Andrea Sardos Albertini — a missing person, a grieving family, a bizarre form of automatic writing, an investigation that ended in mud and silt and silence, and a question I genuinely don't know how to answer.

Did Anita talk to Andrea? Or did a father, drowning, build a raft out of the only material he had left?

Before we talk about how he died, we talk about how he lived.

I'm Dino Malvone. This is I Fear You, Babe.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of I Fear You Babe. My name is Dino Malvone and I'm your host. Okay, quick personal note before we get into this episode. I was recently home in Pennsylvania, and that's where my family lives. And I was reminded when I was in my mom's kitchen that week, like on a shelf, was this book that I can remember from when I was younger. It's this paperback book of a called Esiste l'Audila, which is the afterlife exists. My uncle Vincenzo gave it back to her back in the 80s. And, you know, while the story you're about to hear was unfolding in real time in Italy, he'd read it and he brought it for her, or bought it for her rather, and she read it and they talked about it, and she's held on to it for like 40 years. It's still, I just I was looking at it whenever I was home. My family's obviously, well, I don't know if it's obvious, but my family's Italian, and I say this with like the most amount of love ever. They're wildly Catholic. And the it's like the kind of Catholic where there's like a rose, there's like religious iconography all over my house. There's a rosary, you know, and a saint somewhere, you know, in every room. And the Catholic Church, and uh, as you'll hear later in this episode, hated the book that my mom has. And they actually issued like a formal, they well, several formal critiques. Theologians wrote about whole takedowns of it, and yet there it is sits on my mom's shelf 40 years going, with you know, it still looks brand new. So, you know, and that tension, the official like church position versus like what actually moved Italian Catholic families like mine is I think part of what this case is. And it's part of why I wanted to tell it from you know, from that perspective. And yeah. So, all right, let me tell you about a tree, because this is interesting. And if you walk along the Po River in Turin, which is in northern Italy, it's the corner of the country that brushes up against the Alps, and you follow a path behind a place called the Borgo Medivale, you'll come to a tree. And it looks like every other tree on that stretch of the river until you get close to it. Because nailed to the bark, you know, it's weathered and warped from 40-something Italian winters, is a photograph of a young man with dark hair, an open face. He's in his mid-20s, and holding the kind of smile that you can tell immediately was what it wasn't posed. You know, it was like a very candid photo. Around the photo are some dried flowers, a few laminated newspaper clippings that are kind of curled at the edges, a rosary, you know, sometimes some fresh flowers that someone leaves and you know, someone else will replace. And the tree is actually a memorial. The the young man in the photo is named Andrea Sardos Albertini, and he vanished in June of 1981. His body's never been found. But here's the thing, and here's the thing that makes me want to talk about this case for an entire episode that's been rattling around in my head since I first heard about it was that a woman who never met Andrea, who lived in another part of Italy, supposedly held a felt tip marker with her open hand, like barely held onto it at all, just so it like stood up. And you'll see what I mean. And the marker began to write. And it wrote in Andrea's voice, and it was in his handwriting, and it told his father what happened to him. It told his father where his body was. And his father, who was a serious courtroom hardened, they called him a cessation court attorney who had spent his entire career interrogating, interrogating the difference between fact and feeling. He believed it. He spent the next 24 years of his life believing it. And he wrote three books about it. One of them my mom has, you know, that's the one that's the bestseller. Built a whole foundation, and he went to his grave still trying to recover his son from the bottom of the po. So today on the show is a missing person, you know, obviously a grieving family, a medium with a quote unquote bizarre form of automatic writing, an investigation that ended in mud and silt and silence. And a question I genuinely don't know the answer to. Did Anita talk to Andrea? Or did a father who was drowning build a raft out of the only material that he had left, which was hope? Anyhow, welcome back to I Fear You Babe. I'm Dino. Let's get into this week's deep dive. Okay. So obviously, hello, welcome back, babes. If you're new here, first of all, hello. I'm so glad you found us at I Fear You Babe, is the Thursday deep dive where we sit with one case for as long as it takes to get it right. On Mondays, we're going to do active case updates, the weekly roundup. Okay. So Thursdays, we go like, we go deep on this. So today's case is honestly really different from what we usually do. And I want to flag that right at the top because I think the framing matters. What I'm really interested in about in this one is first of all, I love this story. And secondly, there's not one English speaking podcast about this story. So I, you know, I think it's an interesting, it'll be interesting. I listened to a few of the Italian ones with my mom when I was home with her. So anyway, today, you know, most of the cases we cover on the show, by the way, have all been like adjudicated. There's like a perpetrator, there's court, there's records. You know, I'm working with like documents. I'm we do like deep dives with like court documents and anything that's public record. And this one is not like that. This one ends with a big question mark. There's no, there's no trial, there hasn't been a trial, there's no conviction, there's no body, there's no closure. So at least not the kind we normally see whenever we say closure. The only evidence of what happened to Andrea Sardos Albertini comes from a source that the criminal justice system, you know, the Catholic Church, and really honestly, most of the scientific community would just reject outright. So I'm gonna walk you what's through what is known. So, and and it's like the documented, verifiable timeline of his disappearance. And then I'm gonna walk you through what was claimed, and I'll be really clear with you of, you know, with which is which. And at the end of it, you can decide for yourself. Okay. Because I mean, I I think I've decided, but I don't know if I've decided. And I'll tell you that now. I've been reading about this case for weeks, and I still don't know if I'm fully there yet. And one quick housekeeping thing, this episode is gonna deal with an unsolved disappearance. It's like presumed homicide and a family's prolonged grief. There's not gonna be graphic content, but if you have missing, you know, but if missing person cases or like paranormal grief content is difficult for you right now, this might not be this might not be the episode for you. This might be one to skip. And and if that's the case, I'll see you on Monday for the uh for the case updates either way. All right, let's go to Trieste. So Trieste is a coastal city in Italy, and we're gonna talk about Andrea. So I understand that you want to understand who Andrea was because the entire phenomenon that comes later, you know, the books, the foundation, that tree by the river, is built on the foundation of how absolutely loved this kid was. So Andrea Sardos Albertini was born on July 29th, 1955 in Trieste. And if you don't know that place, it's a picture very top right corner of Italy. It's the little sliver that pokes out toward what is Slovenia on the Adriatic. It's a coastal city. It's like Austro-Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian architecture. You know, there's espresso bars on every corner. This beautiful, weird kind of Central European kind of Italian energy, okay? And his family was prominent in the region. His dad, Lino Sardos Albertini, was originally from Capoldistria. Capoldistria. Well, which is now in Slovenia, but at the time Lino was born, it was Italian. So, like I said, he was a cessation attorney, which is a specific term that we'll land on for a second because I think it matters. And in the legal system, that cessation attorney is a lawyer who's qualified to argue before the court of cessation, which castation, sorry, the highest app appellate court in the entire country. And it's not a title title that you get easy. You don't become a cessation attorney, you know, you know, being a guy who has feelings, basically. You become one by being very precise, very relentless, and being incapable of letting a sloppy argument slide. So, you know, hold on to that because uh it comes back. And Andrea's mom, and I want to name her because I think we kind of glaze over the moms in these cases a bunch. And the Italian press often just refers to her as the mother, was deeply involved in his life, very close to him. You know, it's the kind of mom that he calls whenever he's traveling, obviously. And there's one detail from Andrea's childhood that I want to flag because I think it ends up mattering for how this story unfolds. So when Andrea was five years old, he had an infection that burned the auditory nerve in one of his ears. So he went deaf in that ear. And the family, you know, these the very intensely practicing Catholics, kind of Catholic, that they're not messing around, you know? They took him to Lord of this, brought him home holy water, treated him with it, and his hearing came back. And for the rest of Andrea's life, his family treated that as a miracle, like a big capital M medicale. Okay, it's not medicale. That's just being silly. So I'm telling you this because Lino, who the is the dad, was not casual Catholic. He's a rosary in the drawer, mass on Sunday, the you know, the whole thing. And he's like the kind of Catholic for whom contacting the dead through a medium is like an absolute non-negotiable hell no. The church does not permit that kind of stuff at all. You pray for your dead, do you commend them to God? You don't summon them. So that's the man we're meeting in the story. So you think about that too. Because what he eventually does is going to require him to walk away from a piece of his faith that he carried, you know, his whole life. Okay, back to Andrea. So in by the spring of 1981, Andrea is 25 and he's basically like, you know, peaking. He's studying law school at the University of Trieste. He's like one exam away from his degree. Just one, and he's done, you know. So he's also a professional volleyball player, like professional, professional. He plays like in Serie A. The it's the top flight of Italian volleyball. And for a Trieste-based team called Ravalico. He's a spiker. If you don't know volleyball, the spiker is the guy who's who does the dramatic jumping and like smash it down on the other side of the net thing. It's the um, it's like the glamorous position, you know, the one you walk away and flip your hair, but it's also the position that requires you to be extremely athletic, extremely tall, and really willing to throw your body around. So he played six full Series A seasons with that team through the 70s. So, you know, you picture this kid, he's like 25, six feet something, in really good physical condition, and on the verge of becoming a lawyer like his dad. You can imagine he's like popular and social and traveling for matches all over Italy. Like just in his moment. There are these like old photos of him that float around in the Italian press, you know, very dark hair, slightly long, like 70s, 80s feathered hair. You know, kind of slightly mischievous face. He he looks like every Italian guy you've ever seen drinking espresso at a sidewalk table at three in the afternoon, like talking like really loud with his hands. Uh, he looks uh like very alive. And that's the thing I keep coming back to with these photos because he looks really, really, really alive. So anyway, that's this is that's the man who we lose. So in the late spring of 1981, this dude, Andrea, decides he wants a new car. And his current car is I don't know how do you how do you say it? It's basically like he wanted to get like the updated version of this little French car, and it's basically the car that he has is like little economical French car that was basically everywhere in Europe in the 70s, and by all accounts, his car was on its last legs, it was like kind of falling apart, and he you know, he needed something more reliable. So he tells his parents he's gonna take a trip and he's gonna drive up to Turin to look at used cars because Turin or like Turino is the home of the fiat, which if you ever been to Italy, you know, you know Fiat. It's the it's the Italian Detroit, basically, Torino. If you want a used car in 1981, in Italy, Turin is the best place in the country to find one. So that's important because you know, we'll slow down on it. This dude takes three million lira in cash with him. And that uh in June of 1981, 3 million lira is basically 2,500 bucks in 1981 dollars. Today, that's like eight to ten thousand dollars if you adjust for inflation or whatever. But so anyway, it's a nice it's enough to buy a decent car, right? And in 1981, before debit cards and wire transfers, you were like there was a normal part of life, is just like you bought a car with cash in your pocket. You drive up, you see the car, you negotiate, you hand over the cash, you drive home. So that's how that worked, you know. But this is one of those details that becomes haunting in retrospect. Everyone knew he was carrying cash. You know, he told his parents, he probably told his friends, he probably told the guy who was selling, whoever he's meeting up with there, because he had to confirm he was, you know, a real, a real buyer. So here you are, 25-year-old alone in this unfamiliar city with a bunch of money in your pocket in cash. And so, anyway, on the morning of Tuesday, June 9th, 1981, Andrea leaves Trieste in this old car of his, and he drives west toward Venice, and he parks this car at the train station and in Venice, and that's the part that it this is the part of it's called Mestre. It's like not, it's on the mainland part of Venice, it's the part that isn't all like water, and he gets on a train heading northwest to Torino. His car, that old car, will sit in the Mestre parking station lot untouched for days. And sometime during the day on June 9th, which is that same that same Tuesday, he Andre Andrea calls his mom from somewhere along the route. And we don't know exactly where, but he's checking in and he's letting her know that and he's making pretty good time. And, you know, that's the call of a kid who's like pretty close to his mom. He hasn't told her not to worry because he hasn't given her a reason to worry yet, you know. So he arrives in Torino that evening. He checks into Hotel Astoria, and the Astoria is like a legitimate hotel. Not like not luxury, but it's not like a hostel. It's just a normal mid-tier hotel in center in in central Torino. And he checks in under his name and he goes to bed. Wednesday, which is June 10th, 1981, from the hotel Astoria, Andrea places his one last phone call. It's uh to a friend who it back into the este where he's from. And we don't have a transcript of that call, it's just confirmed that the call happened. And by all accounts, nothing about the call is alarming. It's just a young guy checking in, you know. And that call is the last documented contact anybody has with Andrea Sardos Albertini. And after that, it's complete silence. He doesn't come home, he doesn't call again, he doesn't check out of the hotel. You know, they find his stuff is still in the room. The car is still parked at the Mestre train station parking lot, and the 3 million lira is gone, presumably with him, presumably where I mean wherever he went. So but he's just literally gone. So the first 48 hours of a missing person case are pretty much everything, right? You know this if you've listened to this show for a while, and after 48 hours, the trail starts going cold in a way that's like pretty terrifying once you've watched it happen a couple times. So the Sardo's Albertini family doesn't waste 48 hours. As soon as Andreas misses his like unexpected check-in, they are on the phone. They've got the Torino police to the Polizia di Stato, which is like the state police, and to the Carabinieri to anyone they can mobilize, honestly. And here's what having a cessation attorney for a father actually matters in a practical way. Excuse me. Lino is not some random grieving parent showing up at the precinct who's like asking nicely. He's like a big ass deal, high-profile attorney with connections in every level of the Italian legal system. So he activates everything he has. He hires private investigators, he puts up money for tips. He drives back and forth between Trieste, Mestre, and Torino, retracing his son's last movements himself. And what he turns up. So the car, it's exactly where he parked. Andrea parked it. It's untouched. There's no sign of struggle, no sign anyone else had been in the car. And it actually matters because it confirms that whatever happened to Andrea happened after he left his car there. So, you know, it happened near or in Torino. The hotel room at the Astoria, like his belongings are still there. Clothes, the toiletries, his bag. And you know, it looked he didn't pack to leave. So whenever he left, then whenever he went the night of the of June 10th or the early morning of June 11th, he expected to come back to the room to grab his stuff. And then there's the phone records, and then there's the call to his mom on the 9th, the call to his friend on the 10th, and after that, that's nothing. No more calls placed from the hotel phone, no calls from any number that was traceable back to him. Then the trail kind of just ends, right? I mean, imagine it's 1990, it's 1981. There's no CCTV in Torino. That's not even like a thing yet. They just, it was 1981, girl. We're working with witness statements and physical evidence, and there's no physical evidence, and there's no witnesses. So, you know, the police in Torino investigate, they look at the local used car market, they look at, you know, known criminals, hospitals, morgues. They had some river patrols, and they turned up nothing. So, of course, weeks pass, months pass, and the case goes from active to cold, and then from cold to basically frozen. By the fall of 1981, Lino Sardos Albertini is not a man with a missing son anymore. He's a man with a case that has stopped moving. And anyone who's ever loved a person who disappeared knows that there is nothing worse than when the case stops moving. So not knowing is the wound. And the not knowing doesn't close. It just sits there and just continues to be infected more and more every year. And this is the state Leno is in when someone in his orbit, it's like a referral from one of his clients, tells him about a woman named Anita. Okay, so now we're gonna take a step away from the part of the story that's like every where everything is documentable and into part of the story where things get a little bit weird. And I'll be really up front with you about what we know about Anita and what we don't. So, what so what we know is that she was an Italian. She was a woman, let's say, modest social standing. So, you know, not famous, not part of any organized spiritualist circle that I can find a record of. She had a son named Valtter, who is mentioned in some accounts, and she practiced what's described as automatic writing in Italian scrittura ad automatica. What we don't know is her last name, and I've been not able to find it in any Italian source, and I think it's actually deliberate. Lino, when he wrote about her in the books, he referred to her as Anita or the medium or the sensitive and protected her identity. We don't know where exactly she lived beyond that she was somewhere reachable from Torino. And we don't know how she came to develop this practice. We don't know whether she had been involved in with the Sardos Albertini family before or even like peripherally. And I think that matters because it's the central question that the skeptics raise. What is distinctive about Anita's practice, and this is the detail that when I first read about this case, made the hair on my arm stand up, is how she wrote. So most automatic writing, like the way it's traditionally practiced, the medium holds the pen in their hand. Like they, their grip, their hand like grips the pen like normally. And the claim is that the medium's consciousness withdraws and the spirit's consciousness directs the muscles. To an outside observer, it just looks like someone's writing. Anita didn't do that. So buckle up because this is genuinely strange, and the more you sit with it, the stranger it gets. So Anita is right-handed her whole life, her even grocery list and every signature, every birthday card, you know, she used her right hand to do. But when she does this, and like only when she does this, she uses her left hand and she holds the pen. Like she doesn't hold the pen. She holds her left hand open, like palm, the the palm is vertical. And she places a felt tip marker, which is like a regular kid-sized felt tip marker, on her open palm. And then the marker stays standing, it doesn't roll forward or back, or you know, and it doesn't tip over, it just stays standing on her palm, like it decided to by itself. And Anita has described in the book and on television feeling something like a pulse in her hand while it sits there and that heartbeat is not hers. And then the marker starts to write. But here's the next layer the marker doesn't write from left to right like normal Italian or English, it writes top to bottom, so vertically, so down the page. So Anita can't read what's being written as it happens, even if she wanted to. And she doesn't usually even try. She is, by all accounts, sometimes blatantly checked out during the process. And there's footage of this from a 1985 RAI broadcast, which is the Italian TV channel. My mom watches it like nonstop. And you can find it online. There are descriptions in Leno's book where she's smoking a cigarette, watching television, having a separate conversation with the people in the room, while her left hand produces page after page of text in a script that isn't hers, in writing direction that humans don't normally write in. You know what I'm saying? Only when it's done does someone turn the page 90 degrees so the message can be read. And that's the bizarre part. Okay? That's why Lino in the book calls it bizarro tipo di scrittura automatica, a bizarre type of automatic writing. It wasn't standard. It wasn't even close to standard. And then and the writing that came out, Lino claimed, was in Andrea's handwriting with Andrea's voice, with Andrea's specific way of phrasing things. I know it's crazy, right? So here's one more detail before we move on because it matters for the skeptical read. Anita refused to be paid. She refused publicly. She didn't want her last name in the books. She didn't want to be a public figure. And by Lino's account, she was actively uncomfortable with the attention the case eventually drew her into. And that doesn't prove anything either way. There are unpaid frauds and there are paid sincere people in the world. So, you know, it's a messy place. But it's part of the picture and it's a fair, it's fair fact check. If it's fair, it has to include that little piece. Okay. So the picture, okay, picture this. Leno at this point has nothing. He tried the police, he tried the private investigators, he tried like anything and everything a man with money and connections can do. He's also, remember, really, really, really Catholic. Meeting with a medium is like on the face, the kind of thing he spent his whole adult life believing like he should not be doing. But then through one of his legal clients, not a friend, it was like a legal client, not a family member, not a, you know, not but a woman who had retained him professionally. This is who he got the referral from. He hears about, through this woman, he hears about a sensitiva called Anita. So he goes, you know, he's a lawyer, he's uh the the cessation attorney, and he goes in really skeptical. And he goes in with the explicit intention of catching her in a fraud because that's what he does for a living. You know, he catches people in their stories. So the first session happens, Anita sits down, she does the thing I just described with her hand open or whatever, and the message that emerges, according to Lino, is from his son. And, you know, in the I'll be careful here because what I'm about to describe is in the in the eyes of mainstream science and law enforcement, not real. You know, it is, depending on your worldview, either like a paranormal phenomenon or fraud or an unconscious, you know, psychological process happening in Anita's brain that produces text that felt to be, you know, to a grieving father, like contact with his dead son. And I'm gonna describe it the way that Lino described it. And you keep your own counter in your head as we go. So, you know, across you know, dozens and eventually hundreds of sessions over the next several years, the entity claiming to be Andrea communicated with Lino through Anita's marker. The earlier sessions, according to Lino, contained you know, verifiable details, things only Andrea would have known. So there was like some family memories, small interior facts about his childhood, the names of friends and of pets, things that happened on specific volleyball trips. And Leno, the lawyer, made a point of testing. You know, he would ask questions whose answers he knew, but Anita could never have known. And whatever was coming through, he says, answered them correctly. Now, skeptics will tell you, and they're and they're not wrong to point this out, that this is exactly the kind of thing you would expect from cold reading. Like a grieving father, you know, telegraphs everything, his face, his body language, you know, the hesitations in his voice, so they're like, you know, they read that stuff. You know, the questions that he chooses to ask, the ones he doesn't ask, you know, a skilled reader, even one operating in good faith and not consciously cheating, can you know, pull a remarkable amount of information out of somebody who desperately wants to be heard, you know? And that's kind of the skeptical read. And I think you should hold on to that. So then the believer reads that the volume and specificity, specificity of what Anita is producing, you know, the pages and pages and pages, eventually publish it as the appendices in the books. You have to see them. With handwriting analysis, compared them to Andrea's known samples. You know, it exceeds what cold reading can plausibly explain. And I honestly don't know exactly which one of those reads is 100% right. What I know is what got written down. Before we get to what got written down, and before what I tell you what Andrea said supposedly happened to him, I want to flag something that's been sitting with me, you know, the longer I've worked on this case, because I think it's actually the structural fact of the whole thing. Because everything we know about Anita, you know, what she said, how she said it, what came out of her, you know, marker, how she behaved during the sessions, we know because Leno wrote it down and published it. You know, the TV appearances confirmed that she was an actual human being, but they don't confirm any specific session. You know, every transcript in the book is sourced to Lino. Every claim about what happened in a session ultimately came from him. And that's not saying that he's lying. I mean, of course, he's like the cessation attorney who's like, you know, can never tell a lie. You know, his standards for evidence were higher than yours and mine. And he had a very professional incentive to be precise. There's no documented case of him being caught misinterpreting or misrepresenting a quote. So, you know, it's also not independent confirmation, though. There's no other observer who sat through the sessions, or, you know, nobody ever else, no one else ever saw or wrote a separate account. There's no skeptic who was invited in to watch and walked out with their own notes, you know. So there's the evidentiary chain on the supernatural part of this case has like a weak link, you know, and it's just it, and if you trust Leno, the whole thing stands. If you doubt him, the whole thing falls. There's really nowhere to triangulate from there. And that's the structural fact. So you have to hold on to that. But okay, but eventually, in one of those sessions, the entity claiming to be Andrea told his father what happened to him. Okay. So, and this is the version of events that Lino published. It's not the official police account, it's not been legally adjudicated, and it and it's what came it, it is what came out of Anita's marker. Okay. So, according to Andrea, after his last phone call from the hotel Astoria on June 10th, 1981, he had arranged to meet someone who was likely the seller of the used car like that night. The meeting was set to play, take place in the Parco di Del Valentino, the big park that runs along the Po River in central Torino, specifically near the Borgo Medievale, which is kind of a replica medieval village inside the park. It's like a tourist site during the day, and at night in 1981, it was deserted. When Andrea arrived at the meeting spot, he was met by, he wasn't met by a single car seller. He was met by four men. And the Italian press, picking up on the language used in the medium's transcripts, called them four drug addicts. Whether that description is accurate or how the you know the entity framed it, I don't know. But the four men robbed him, they took three million lira, and then they killed him. The exact mechanism of death isn't dwelt on at length in the published transcripts. Leno, you know, mercifully didn't seem to want to publish the granular details of his son's last moments. But the gist is that it happened quickly and violently in or near the Borgo Medivale on the night of June 10th, or the early morning hours of June 11th. And this is 1981. They then disposed of his body in the Po River, and the spirit or entity gave a very specific location, which is a stretch of the river near the Borgo Medivale between Lungopo and Viale Stefano Tour, near a spot called the Cortile del Melograno, the Pomegranate Courtyard, which is just in front of a riverside restaurant called San Giorgio. And that's the story. That's and you know, that's the thing. If you accept the framing here for a second, you know, if you put yourself in Lino's shoes, this is pretty useful, right? This is like operational. It's something that you can act on, and you know, you have a location, you have a manner of disposal and possible cause of death and a motive, you know, and the cessation lawyer is not going to sit on actionable intelligence. So he went to the police. And now imagine you're a Torino homicide detective and it's late 1981 or early 1982, and this famous Trieste lawyer walks into your office and says, you know, my son's been missing for several months. He was murdered by four drug addicts behind the Borgo Medivale and dumped in the Po River. And the location of the body is here on the map. I know this because a medium wrote it down. You know, your first move is not to deploy the divers. Your first move is very politely to ask this clearly devastated man to please go home and try to take care of yourself and get some sleep. But, you know, Leno was not the kind of man you say no to easily because he had a lot of money, he was connected. And here's the thing: even setting aside the medium's claims, the basic theory of the story he was presenting wasn't crazy. A young man with a lot of cash on him in this strange city, going to a deserted location at night to meet a total stranger. That's a robbery homicide setup that happens all over the place all the time. The medium framing was unusual, but the underlying scenario was completely consistent with what cops would normally consider plausible. So a search of the section of the Po was eventually conducted. Now, divers go into the river, and the Po, by the way, is not a forgiving river. It's really wide, it's totally brown, it carries a lot of sediment and visibly on the bottom, you know, visibility at the bottom is like basically zero. Like they, I've said but this before, you can't even see your own hand in front of your face. The search is done by hand. You like feel around. So, on top of the diver search, the family commissioned what was for 1981 or 1982, pretty cutting-edge technique, which was infrared aerial photography of the riverbed. And the idea is that decomposing organic matter, even underwater, produces a slightly different thermal signature than the surrounding sediment. And infrared imaging can sometimes pick that up. According to Leno's accounts and the Family Foundation's publications, the infrared imaging detected what looked like the shape of a human body on the riverbed in roughly the location the medium had specified. So, you know, it's roughly, you know. And I'm gonna be honest about that word. The infrared pictures have never been independently published in a forensic journal. We don't have the original images for review. We have is the family's account, and we have the account that's in the book. And, you know, the skeptics have pointed it out that you can find a human-shaped shadow in almost any infrared image of a riverbed. And if you motive and if you're motivated to find one, especially the the Poe River also has been the disposal site for a lot of sad things over the centuries, and there's a lot of stuff down there. You know what I'm saying? But the family had what they thought was a positive identification of the body's location, and here is where the case turn takes a turn. But I cannot, in good conscience, leave it out because it's genuinely the most uncomfortable detail for the skeptics in this entire story. In 1983, which was two years after Andrea's disappearance, divers returned to the exact stretch of the Poe that Anita's marker had specified. They worked with grappling hooks and they pulled up fragments of fabric. The fabric, when examined, was determined to be compatible with the jeans and socks Andrea was known to be wearing when he disappeared. So, you know, okay. So two years after the medium's marker had drawn, like, you know, the X marks a spot in the Po behind the Borgo Medivale, divers working that exact spot recovered material that's consistent with the missing man's clothes. So it's not nothing, but what fragments did not give the family was a body. You know, despite the recovery of the fabric, the actual remains were never brought up. The current of the Po, with like the silt and the rate of decomposition over two summers and two winters, and the practical limits of what Divers could do with the equipment of the era, you know, all conspired against a complete recovery. And eventually the family, exhausted, like made the decision to just stop. And later, Lino wrote that he came what he came to interpret this failure as meaningful, that if the body had been recovered, the story would have been a tragic but mundane, a mundane homicide. The fact that it couldn't be recovered, he eventually decided was evidence that Andrea's purpose was something larger. To his that his absence was basically the point. And I'll come back to that interpretation in a second. But now, the longer that the sessions continue with Anita, the more the messages from Andrea shifted in tone. You know, early on, the messages were for focused on the practical, you know, what happened, where, who. It was like the forensic information, right? But over months and then years, the spirit began describing what Andrea claimed to be experiences on the other side. It was not generic afterlife. It was really specific. And there was a tunnel. Yes, that's the one that you've heard about from near-death experiences, but described as something you don't pass through immediately. There's a weight, the spirit said. The weight is different for different people, and there's a light at the end called by Andrea, the lucha infin infinita, or the infinite infinite light. And the infinite light is what Andrea identified as God. And Andrea, according to these messages, had been given a mission. His mission was to communicate through Anita and through his father that the afterlife was real, that death was not the end, that souls continued, that they were aware and that they could still love and still be loved. Leno, the spirit said, had been chosen to be the vehicle for this message. Andrea's death, his pointless, brutal death at the hands of four men in a park that night for the contents of his wallet was, according to Andrea, not pointless at all. It had been part of the whole plan. Andrea had volunteered somehow on a level of existence Leno didn't have access to, to die young so that he could come back through Anita's marker and tell the world the afterlife exists.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

And you know.

SPEAKER_00 46:45

Because as a piece of theology, leave aside the question of whether it's true. Just look at it as a story. This is a it is kind of comforting, right? If you're a parent who's lost a son and you've been carrying the weight of my child died for nothing, or you know, my child died because four strangers wanted his cash. What Anita's Marker offered Lino was a complete reframe of that story. You know, it's like, you know, he didn't die for nothing, but you know, he died for this big cause. He decided, he died to bring that message. It was like it had cosmic meaning. And, you know, and as far as Lino goes, like he'd been chosen to carry that meaning forward. And I don't say that to like be, I don't, I'm not sneering at it. I say because I want to be honest with you about why this story landed the way that it landed, because it would have landed for almost any grieving parent. Of like, of course it landed for Lino. But and okay, there's one more detail from this period of the sessions that I think is genuinely strange. And I'll so throughout the years of communication, Leno repeatedly asked the spirit for the names of the four men who had killed Andrea, like over and over again. He was a lawyer. He wanted to get them prosecuted and find some justice. And the spirit like refused. According to the published transcripts, Andrea said that he had forgiven his killers and that he did not want them to be subjected to human to human justice, that pursuing them would not align with the infinite light, and that he would not assist his father in their identification. The believers writ of this, of course, and you know, they thought it was consistent with a soul who had experienced spiritual transformation and forgiveness on the other side. But of course, the skeptics were like, Anita couldn't actually produce the names because Anita didn't actually know who killed Andrea because nobody knew because there was literally no information to channel, and the forgiveness framing is like theologically beautiful and really operationally convenient, you know? So listen, I don't know. But in 1985, Lino had compiled the transcripts of the sessions, like all of his own reflections and a chronology of Andrea's disappearance and documentation of the search efforts into like a manuscript. And that's that book that I told you about that my mom still has at the house, which is called Isiste L'Aldila, The Afterlife Exists. And he published it in 1985 with a small press. It was picked up by a bigger, big, like one of the biggest publishers in Italy, and for Mass Market edition in 1988, and it became like a freaking phenomenon. And let me give you the numbers because they're staggering. Okay, so Aziste La Dila sold over a million copies just in Italy. It went through like 30 different Italian editions. It was translated into 15 languages. Although, fun fact for your true crime listening club, it was never translated into English. If you want to read it in English, you can't. And there's no authorized English edition. So you have to go through Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, or one of the other 12, you know? Isn't that crazy? So Lino went on Italian national television. The case was covered on a show called Mr. O on June 20th, 1985. Buona Domenica, it's a really hugely popular Sunday afternoon show, did a segment on December 15th, 1986. In November 1994, the case was covered on Mistedi, Mistedi, an Italian unsolved mystery style program. Listen, if you guys are listening to me say these Italian words and I'm saying them wrong, don't come from me. Each appearance drove more book sales and more letters from grieving families and more pilgrimage to that tree that is memorializes him on the Poe. And Lino followed up with a few other books in a foundation published book, a separate biography of Andrea by the journalist Antonio Casiani. It came out in 1997. The foundation's stated mission was to preserve Andrea's memory and to study paranormal phenomena as evidence of the afterlife. And the response from the establishment, as you can imagine, was pretty brutal. The Catholic Church was really critical. There was a theologian named Armando Pavese. He wrote a book in 1997 explicitly attacking this book and similar works for confusing the faithful with and dabbling in what the church classified as forbidden spiritualist practices. This Armando guy was all respectful of Lino's grief, but uncompromising about the methodology. You know, from the Catholic perspective, you don't contact the dead. You pray for them, you commend them to God, you do not summon them through a woman with a marker. Okay. Skeptical organizations did their own takedown. There was this guy named Piero Angela, the most famous Italian science communicator of his generation, did extensive critical work on Italian spiritualist phenomena and was really, really, really unimpressed. But here's what's interesting, and I think this actual cultural footprint on this case, none of those takedowns dented the book's appeal at all. This book kept selling. People kept making the trip to that tree. The foundation kept receiving letters from grieving parents. I mean, you know, they said they had been brought back from the edge of suicide from reading this book. So whatever Anina and Lino were doing, fact or fraud or unconscious co-creation, was meeting a need that the establishment, which is either the scientific one or the religious one, wasn't meeting. So in okay, Lino died on April 21st, 2005, at the age of 90 years old. He spent, like, check this out. He spent the last 24 years of his life in dialogue as he understood it with his murdered son. He never recovered Andrea's body. He never identified the four men. And he went to his grave fully believing. Okay. In 1992, more than a decade after the disappearance and after the family had given up on dredging the Poe, Andrea was officially legally declared dead. Presumed death under the Italian law, right? There was no body, there was no funeral mass with remains. There was no grave. There was by then only the book, you know, the foundation and the photograph nailed to the tree. Anita, we don't know exactly when she died. The record on her, as I said, is like really sparse. The foundation still exists in some form, and it has produced occasional publications, and it remains the case's archive, of course. The four men, if they ever existed, were never identified or prosecuted, never named. They are either still alive somewhere in northern Italy as old men carrying a 45-year-old secret, or they are themselves dead, or they never were. We don't know. The Poe still runs past the Borgo Medivale. The tree's still there. Every once in a while, somebody replaces the flowers. And here's where I land on it for whatever it's worth. I I don't know if Anita talked to Andrea. I really don't. I'm not someone who's going to stand here and tell you that the afterlife is real. But I'm also going to tell I'm not going to tell you that it's not real. I I know what I personally believe, but I'm not going to stand here and tell you. And I think I'm comfortable saying that out loud. So, but something did happen to Andrea Sardos Albertini, obviously, in Turin in that June of 1981. And, you know, the most likely explanation, which the boring forensic one, is exactly what Anita's marker described, you know, which is that he probably met someone or some group, was robbed for his cash that he was carrying, and then he was killed, you know, and his body was tossed in the river. And I think that's probably the the you know simplest read, given what we know. And we don't need any paranormal explanation for that read, I guess. It's the read I would give you if there was like no medium involved at all. What I find fascinating and what I think is worth an hour of your time on a Thursday is what the medium did to the story. You know, she didn't change the underlying fit physics of Aunt Andrea's death. You know, he still died. He's still gone. But she gave the story this frame and gave Leno a way to live the next 24 years of his life without being destroyed by his son's death. She turned this senseless death into a mission. You know, she put a tree on the bank of the Po and made it a place where people have who've lost their own kids can go and be for just a second, you know, low less alone. And, you know, you can call that fraud, you can call it grief management dressed up as theology, you can call it a paranormal phenomenon. You can call it whatever you want, but it's not nothing. And it really moved Italy, and it's still moving Italy. And the book is still in print on its 30th edition, 40 years after its initial publication. For Andrea, what I want to leave you with is the picture of him. You started with, I started this episode. He's 25, one exam away from having his law degree, you know, he was the that spiker dude in the Series A volleyball team. So he had a mischievous-looking face, and he loved his mom. He called her all the time, called her from the road, probably carrying way too much money in his pocket toward this car that he was excited about getting. And and so that's the kid that we lost. And if you take anything from this episode, that's that. And so that is essentially the story of Andreo. And look, there's a reason why this thing sold a million copies in Italy. It's not because you know, Italians wanted the supernatural, it's because they wanted this like promise of the afterlife, you know? And whether you believe that or not is between you and like you and your that's it. But that's our episode for this week of I Fear You Babe. Thank you for sitting with me through that one. I know it was a different kind of case than what we usually do, and I appreciate you sitting around and listening. And if this episode hits you, share it with a person you think might enjoy it. That's I mean, that's how the shirt show grows. It's all word of mouth, you know. One one listener at a time. And yeah, Monday I'll be back with active case updates. Until then, take care of each other, take care of yourselves, and I will see you on the other side. Ciao.