Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
A diabolical crime took place in June 2000 in the Italian village of Chiavenna, a town of 8,000 people in the Lombard Alpine province of Sondrio, where the 60-year-old nun Maria Laura Mainetti was brutally murdered. For three weeks, the Carabinieri puzzled over who had murdered the nun, who unconditionally supported people on the margins of society and was deeply committed to helping young people, until they tracked down three of Maria Laura Mainetti’s students, who confessed to the brutal murder during questioning. Their motive could easily have come straight out of a horror movie, as they wanted to offer a human sacrifice to the devil. That is why the three students—Milena Da Giambattista, Ambra Gianasso, and Veronica Petrobelli, who came from good families and were between 16 and 17 years old—lured the nun and their catechism teacher, Maria Laura Mainetti, into a park under the pretext that one of them was expecting a child after being raped and wanted to have an abortion. There, Maria Laura Mainetti was forced to kneel before them. The three girls verbally abused Maria Laura Mainetti and struck her on the head with a brick. They then took turns stabbing Maria Laura Mainetti 19 times; during the satanic ritual, she promised her murderers forgiveness until they slit her throat. After the murder, they mixed their blood with that of the nun. The students, who were bound together by a blood oath and in whose notebooks countless satanic writings were discovered, confessed to the police that they had long planned the murder of a Roman Catholic Christian. Originally, they wanted to murder a priest, but he seemed too strong to them, which is why they chose Maria Laura Mainetti as their victim for the devil. The three diabolical students—who were minors at the time of Laura Maria Mainetti’s murder—were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 8 to 12 years, which they have already served. All of Italy was shaken by the cruel crime at the time. On June 6, 2021, the 21st anniversary of her murder, she was declared a martyr of the Catholic Church and beatified by Pope Francis. Here is a brief account of her life. Maria Laura Mainetti was born on August 20, 1939, in Colico as Teresina Elsa Mainetti, the youngest of nine siblings. She attended school with the Daughters of the Cross in Parma and then went to the order’s high school in Rome, where she began her novitiate in 1957 and took the religious name Maria Laura. In 1969, she took her perpetual vows at the motherhouse in La Puye. She then worked as a teacher at elementary schools run by the Daughters of the Cross in Vasto, Rome, and Parma. She was deeply committed to helping the poor and vulnerable and became the superior of the convent in Chiavenna, where she served as principal. Her heart was devoted to working with children and young people. She was deeply committed to the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders until she was brutally murdered by her own students.
