On December 11 2006, in a beautiful little town in Italy, two men were out for a walk when they noticed a fire in a nearby second-story apartment window.
They quickly ran up the outside stairs to get to this apartment, but when they reached the open front door and looked inside, they froze.
What they saw was nothing short of a nightmare.
Today's story is about something called the Urba Massacre and it is extremely graphic, extremely upsetting and it involves harm to a child.
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On the late afternoon of December 11th 2006, 30-year-old Raffaella Castagna glanced out the upstairs window of her condo that was located in the center of Erba, a small and well-to-do town in Northern Italy.
The weather had been beautiful all day, but since she needed to go out to the store to pick up a few things for dinner, she reflexively was looking outside to make sure the sun was still out.
When she saw that it was, she turned around, grabbed her coat off of a nearby chair and then walked into the kitchen to say a quick goodbye to her mother and her two-year-old son, Yusuf.
Her mother, 60-year-old Paolo Galli, was sitting in a chair next to little Yusuf, who was busy drawing pictures at the table with thick-colored crayons.
Raffaella gave her son a kiss on the head and then asked her mom if there was anything she needed at the store, since she'd be there anyways.
Paula, who was an attractive woman with light brown hair pushed behind her ears, looked up for a minute from Yusuf's scribbles and told her daughter that maybe she should pick up some clementines and a little cake for Yusuf.
And other than that, if Raffaella got the loaf of bread and bottle of wine along with the vegetables, they'd need to make pasta that evening.
They'd be all set.
Raffaella smiled and nodded and then thanked her mom for looking after Yusuf for a bit, and then she turned and headed towards the door of her condo, where she took a shopping bag from the hook off the wall and slipped it over her shoulder.
After calling out a final goodbye to her mom and son, Raffaella stepped outside of her apartment onto a narrow balcony that stretched the length of their three-room unit.
To her left was the stairway that led both down to the cobblestone courtyard below, and also there was a stairwell that went up to the attic apartment right above her condo where Mr. and Mrs. Cherubini lived.
Before heading for the stairs, Raffaella just walked forward and leaned up against the railing and surveyed the courtyard right in front of her.
Her apartment was part of a very old complex of condo units clustered around this rectangular courtyard right in front of her, where residents parked their cars.
Some of the seven buildings that made up this complex were six stories tall, while others were just three stories tall.
Raffaella's apartment was located on the second floor of one of the buildings that had three stories.
It was a renovated farmhouse with pale stone walls that looked yellow in the afternoon sun.
To her right, at the far end of the courtyard, was a gate that led out to a narrow road called Via Diaz that left the courtyard and wound around the outside of the condo complex and led down to the shops and restaurants in town.
The single window in Yusuf's bedroom and the window in the master bedroom that Raffaella shared with her husband looked out over this road via Diaz, and Raffaella's son loved to stand at those windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of a big truck as it drove by.
From her perch on the balcony, Raffaella looked up and over the roofs of the condo in front of her.
In the distance she could see the purple outline of the Alps, the mountain range that separated her town from their neighbors France, to the east, and Switzerland and Austria to the north.
But like most of the other 16000 or so inhabitants of Urba, Raffaella didn't really notice all the beautiful sights around her that made Urba and other small Italian towns popular to tourists.
Instead, as she stood there at the balcony railing, all she could think about was just how happy she was now that her family had finally started speaking to each other again.
For almost three years, ever since her relationship with her 25-year-old Tunisian husband, Azouz Marzouk, had started getting serious.
Her father and two brothers had basically stopped talking to her.
Raffaella had always been more rebellious than her two brothers, and her family, who were all devout Catholics, had not been happy when she converted to Islam and married Azuz.
But when Yusuf was born, Rafaela's mother saw just how much Azuz cared for the little boy, and it changed her mind about him.
And in time she fully accepted her daughter's life decisions and from that point onward she did her best to be the most supportive grandmother she could possibly be.
And recently Rafaela's father Carlos, who owned a successful local furniture company.
He had also finally started coming around too.
And while, of course, this made Rafaela extremely happy, it was actually little Yusuf, with his dark hair and dark eyes and bright smile, who was the happiest about this new family dynamic, because he adored his grandparents and his grandparents totally adored him.
Recently, Yusuf's grandfather had sent some of his workers over to Rafaela's condo to install some soundproofing.
This way, Yusuf could play on the floor of his bedroom with his beloved trucks and push toys without disturbing the neighbors.
Yusuf was extremely pleased about this.
At some point, Rafaela pushed herself up from the railing, she buttoned her coat and then she walked down the stairs to the courtyard.
As she left the courtyard and turned onto Villa Diaz, heading for her favorite local market, Rafaela nodded and smiled at some of her neighbors who were also out for a walk.
Raffaella enjoyed the chance to walk into town by herself, going as slowly or quickly as she wanted.
She had recently landed a good part-time job at an assisted living community for the disabled and, while she loved the work, At times it could be so hectic that it was nice to get away and be alone whenever she could.
After making the walk into town, Raffaella got the things she needed from the store and then she began the walk back home.
As she neared the gate that would take her back into the courtyard, Rafaela greeted and waved to a few more neighbors who looked like they were heading into town themselves.
Rafaela felt like she knew everyone who lived in her apartment complex, from the friendly volunteer firefighter to the garbage collector and his tiny wife who cleaned houses for a living, to Mrs Cherabini, who worked in sales, and her husband, 63-year-old Mr Cherabini, who couldn't wait for his wife to retire.
As Raffaella crossed the courtyard and began walking up the steps to her condo, she wondered what her neighbors thought of her when they saw her walk by.
When she reached her door, she used her key and she opened it up, and then, once she stepped inside, she called out to her mother and to Yusuf to let them know that she was home.
Yusuf came pattering down the hallway to greet her, Raffaella scooped him up and gave him a kiss and then, while carrying her son and the groceries, she headed into the kitchen to see her mother.
Once she was there, she and her mother chatted while they began preparing dinner And while Yusuf giggled and ran around knocking over blocks and riding his scooter, the kitchen slowly filled with the smell of olive oil and fresh garlic.
A little while later, at about 820 pm that night, two of Raffaella's neighbors were out for an evening walk.
It was a clear night and the temperature had dropped to a cool 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the two men stepped out of the courtyard onto Villa Diaz, they followed the road as it turned right and brought them right alongside the backside of the building that Raffaella's apartment was in.
As the two men walked, one of them smelled smoke and looked up at the building right next to them, and they could see flames licking against the glass of one of the windows in Rafaela's apartment.
After signaling the other neighbor to look up as well, they watched as the glass broke from the heat of the fire and then smoke began pouring out into the night air.
Both men immediately sprang into action.
They turned around and they raced back into the courtyard.
And as they ran, they pulled out their phones to call the fire department that was located just over a mile away.
As they raced up the stairs and then reached the second floor landing, they saw a very badly injured man laying on the ground right in front of them.
The door to Raffaella's burning apartment was open and the injured man was laying across the threshold.
His head was inside the apartment and his legs were outside on the landing.
The two neighbors rushed over and grabbed the man's ankles and dragged him as far from the open door as they could.
As they did, they heard a woman scream coming from the attic apartment that was located directly above Raffaella's apartment.
It was clear the upstairs apartment had caught fire as well.
The injured man nodded his head helplessly towards the outside stairs that led up to this attic apartment.
But when the two neighbors looked up at the third floor and saw the apartment above, There was so much smoke and fire coming out of the windows that they knew it would have been suicide to try to go up there and save whoever was screaming.
And so, with no time to feel bad about that, the two neighbors turned their focus to the open doorway to Raffaella's apartment.
One of the men stepped inside the very smoky apartment and, after taking only a few steps, he saw there was a woman lying motionless on the ground, and her skin and clothes were on fire.
As the neighbors pulled her out onto the landing by her ankles and tried to extinguish the flames on her, they looked up and saw the fire inside of Rafael's apartment had finally reached the front entryway.
So the men knew that even if there were more people trapped inside of Rafael's apartment, there was no way they could get to them.
By the time the fire department arrived just minutes later, the terrible screaming in the attic apartment had stopped and the two neighbors, who were now coughing and filthy, could see that the woman they had pulled from the apartment, who had been on fire, was 30-year-old Rafaella Castagna, and she was dead.
As the firefighters and emergency medical personnel took over, The two neighbors who had done their best to save the people in the fire stumbled back down the stairs and out into the courtyard, shocked and horrified by what they had just seen and experienced.
Meanwhile, both the courtyard and the street running alongside the back of the condo, via Diaz, were filling up with neighbors and curious bystanders.
Some were taking pictures with their phones, but most just stared upward at the firefighters climbing up the ladder truck trying to make their way into the burning apartment.
Once the fire was finally out, medical personnel and police went inside to see if anyone else had been in there, and unfortunately there had been.
One by one, three more bodies were brought outside.
The first was Raffaella's mother Paola, who had been found halfway down the hallway that connected the entrance of the condo to the kitchen and living area.
The second was the Castagna's 55-year-old neighbor, Mrs Cherabini, who had been the woman screaming in the attic apartment, and the third and final stretcher that came out carried the small body of Raffaella's two-year-old son, Yusuf.
The only survivor, Mr Cherubini, who had been pulled out onto the landing by the two men who first reported the blaze.
He had been rushed to the hospital in the nearby city of Como and it was unclear if he was going to survive.
Late on the night of the fire, Rafaela's father learned the terrible news.
In a voice so choked with tears that you could barely understand what he was saying.
Carlos called Rafaela's two brothers and told them Your mother and sister and Yusuf, their neighbor Mrs Cherubini, they're dead.
All four of them are dead.
After the four bodies were loaded into ambulances and taken to the medical examiner's office, where a doctor would perform autopsies to determine the cause of death.
Police tried unsuccessfully to disperse the crowd of spectators in the courtyard and out on the road on the other side of the condo.
So instead, police just used yellow tape to set up a clear perimeter around the burned out apartment to at least keep people at a distance.
As the police and arson investigators, who were dressed in full body protective gear, started lugging lights and equipment into the ruined unit, the mood amongst the residents who were still gathered outside in the courtyard quickly turned from shock to concern.
Neighbors began speculating about how the fire could have started and spread so quickly, and how none of the victims appeared to have even tried to escape or call for help.
Soon, neighbors were wondering out loud if there was more to these tragic deaths than just an accidental house fire.
But the police and other authority figures who were on scene were not speculating, and the two neighbors who had been first on the scene and who might have been able to give the residents more information, they were not there to answer any questions either, because they had gone to the police station to tell law enforcement what they had seen.
But within 72 hours, the worst fears of the Castañas neighbors were confirmed.
The initial investigation by police and arson inspectors, along with an examination of the four bodies, revealed that the victims had actually been murdered and that the apartment had been set on fire to cover up evidence of what the Italian press had dubbed the Urba Massacre.
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In the initial police reconstruction of the crime, Mr and Mrs Cherabini, the Castagna's neighbors who lived above them in the attic apartment.
They had likely smelled smoke and had rushed down the outside stairs from their apartment to the Castagna's to see if something was wrong.
But once they reached that second floor landing, the Cherubinis must have stumbled into the perpetrator, who had just killed Raffaella, her mother and Yusuf and set the fire, and was now trying to flee.
And so the murderer must have seen the Cherubinis and attacked first, striking Mr Cherubini down, leaving him for dead in the doorway, and then chasing Mrs Cherubini back up the stairs into her attic apartment, where the murderer attacked her too, leaving her trapped and incapacitated before the fire killed her.
Given that the first body found inside of Rafaela's apartment was Rafaela and that the door did not show any signs of a forced entry, police suspected that Rafaela must have recognized the perpetrator and opened the door for them.
The only person who could confirm or deny any of these details was Mr Cherabini, and while he had survived the attack, after reaching the hospital he had fallen into a coma, and so he had not been able to tell police or anybody what had actually happened.
After the news broke about the murders, the police flooded Rafaela's apartment complex and began interviewing everyone.
Did the Castañas have any enemies?
Did you see anyone strange walking around the apartment complex that night?
Did you see any of the Castañas that night?
And if so, what were they doing or who were they talking to?
But even as investigators carried out these constant interviews with neighbors and continued sifting through all of the evidence in the burned-out apartment for clues to the killer's identity, The investigator's real attention was actually focused on Rafaela's husband, Azuz.
He had not been home at the time of the fire, and his whereabouts were unknown.
Police weren't the only ones to suspect Azuz.
As everyone in Urba seemed to know, Rafaela's husband had only recently been released from prison that year under a mass pardon by the government.
Azuz had been serving time for dealing drugs, and so the investigators and people in Irba were suspicious that his drug ties may have had something to do with the murders.
And the Italian media seemed to think the same thing.
And so they quickly began running these stories that more or less declared that Azuz was either involved in the murders or that he was the murderer.
But it would turn out Azouz had a rock-solid alibi.
Within a few days of the murders, Azouz arrived back in Erba from his parents' home in Tunisia, where he said he had been visiting at the time of the murders.
He said.
As soon as he heard that his family had been killed, he jumped on a plane and headed back to Italy.
But even with this rock-solid alibi, the police still felt like Azuz could be a suspect.
But without any evidence to support this theory, they did have to start looking elsewhere.
So, without any other leads to chase down, investigators again turned to the Castañas' neighbors in hopes of finding any new information that could help them solve this case, which by now had become a major national media sensation.
And when the police went back, for the most part people had really nice things to say about the Castañas.
But as police dug deeper and deeper and asked people more and more questions, they eventually started hearing about a feud that the Castañas had with their next-door neighbors, Olindo and his wife Rosa.
Olinda was a large, awkward, and shy man who left early each day for his job as a garbage collector.
And Rosa was a tiny, dark-haired woman whose house cleaning services were very much in demand.
Now, when the police learned that this potential feud the Castañas had was with Olindo and Rosa, they almost didn't follow up because they had already spoken to this totally unassuming, quiet couple and they learned that they were gone at the time of the fire and whenever the murders happened.
And like everyone else, they had seemed very upset about what happened to the Castañas.
And, you know, whatever issues they had with the Castañas had to be fairly minor.
But at this point the police had so little to go on.
They decided they would follow up and they would ask the middle-aged couple to come into the station for another round of questioning.
And so the couple happily agreed, and before long they were sitting in a room at the station ready to talk about whatever the police wanted.
And over the course of the subsequent conversation, this couple would tell a truly unbelievable story that would not only shock the police, it would shock the world.
Based on their story and on subsequent evidence and testimony that their story helped uncover, the police were able to piece together almost exactly what happened to the victims.
On December 11th, so the night of the attack, just before 8 pm, which was a couple of hours after Rafaela had returned from the market and had made dinner with her mother while Yusuf played on the floor around them, two people walked up the outdoor flight of stairs that led to the second floor landing where Rafaela's apartment was.
To understand what happens next, you need to have an understanding of the layout of Raffaella's apartment.
Once you step through the front door and you go into the apartment, you would be standing in the middle of a hallway that stretched out to the left and to the right.
The longer part of the hallway ran off to the left towards the combination kitchen and the living room area at the far end of the unit.
Between the front door and the living room kitchen area there was another doorway on the right side of the hall that led into Yusuf's little bedroom.
If you turned right when you first walked into the hallway after coming into the apartment, you would almost immediately come to a closed door that led into the master bedroom.
At exactly 8pm the two people got off the stairs on the second floor landing and came to a stop directly in front of Rafaela's apartment door.
Once there, they each reached down and touched the outside of their coat pockets, confirming that what was supposed to be in there was still there.
Then they each pulled rubber gloves from those pockets and spent a few moments pulling first one set of gloves onto each of their hands and then a second set.
Once they were ready, one of these two people rang the doorbell, And then they both leaned forward a few inches, straining to hear the sound of footsteps coming towards the door, so they would be prepared for when it opened.
Less than a minute later, they heard Raffaella's voice on the other side of the door asking who was there.
One of the two people out on the landing calmly identified themselves and gave their reason for being there.
After just a moment's hesitation, Raffaella opened the door.
Instantly, one of the two people on the balcony who were the attackers pulled a heavy metal bar with a sharpened tip out of their jacket pocket.
They lunged forward and they delivered a savage blow to Rafaela's head.
As soon as Raffaella fell to the floor, her attacker reached into their jacket pocket and pulled out a sharp kitchen knife.
Then they rushed forward until they were standing directly over Raffaella and they reached down and they slit her throat from ear to ear.
As Raffaella grasped at her neck, trying to stop the blood that was now pouring out of her, her attacker proceeded to stab her 11 more times.
After this, the two attackers stepped over Rafaela's body, and then they turned left and began walking down the long hallway toward the kitchen and living area.
As they pushed aside a child's scooter and toy trucks, they came face to face with Rafaela's 60-year-old mother.
Paola had left the living room couch where she was sitting next to her grandson, and was calling out in a panicked voice to her daughter, asking what was going on.
Without hesitation, the same attacker who had just savagely attacked Rafaela raised the same sharpened metal bar and swung it at Paola's head.
But the grandmother put up a fight, raising her arms to shield herself from this blow, before pushing the attackers as hard as she could back down the hallway.
However, The two attackers eventually overpowered Paola and they knocked her to the floor.
And as soon as she hit the ground, one of the attackers leaned down and made a deep slash across the woman's throat.
At the same time that was happening, the other attacker stepped past Rafael's mother and headed into the small living area where two-year-old Yusuf, still dressed in his trousers, socks and a brightly patterned top, sat too terrified to make a sound alone on the small sofa.
He watched as his murderer walked up to him, leaned forward and, with their weapon held in their left hand, they grabbed his shoulder and then, a moment later, they slid the point of the knife into the little boy's throat.
With the entire family either dead or dying.
The attackers turned and began walking back down the hallway, back towards the front door.
On their way, they poured lighter fluid on Paola and her daughter Rafaela.
They also sprayed lighter fluid all over Yusuf's bedroom and the master bedroom.
Then the attackers lit three separate fires around the apartment before heading for the front door.
But as the attackers stepped out onto the second floor balcony, they heard footsteps pounding down the enclosed stairway right above them.
It was Mr. and Mrs. Cherubini, They had indeed smelled smoke and they were coming down to help their neighbors.
Taken by surprise, the attackers responded with immediate savage force.
As one of the attackers slashed the throat of Mr Cherubini, leaving him to bleed out, where he fell partway across the threshold of Raffaella's condo.
The other attacker took off after Mrs Cherabini, who had begun running terrified, back up the steps to her attic apartment.
By the time, Mrs Cherabini had managed to get back through the door of her own home, where police would find her dead kneeling on the floor with her head in her hands.
She had suffered eight blows to the head and 34 stab wounds to her back and thighs.
The only reason Mr Cherubini did not die from this attack was because of a congenital malformation of his carotid artery that stopped him from bleeding out before emergency medical personnel had arrived and could take him to the hospital.
By 8.15 p.m., the two killers had finished their work.
They had stuffed their bloody gloves back into the pockets of their coats, they had gone back down the stairway that led into the courtyard and they had disappeared.
Just five minutes later, the two men who had been walking past Rafael's apartment that evening along Via Diaz.
They would look up and they would see flames and smoke starting to pour out of the second story apartment window and they would run back and discover the gruesome scene.
The reason Olindo and Rosa's story was so shocking to police and the reason it filled in all of these gaps about what happened was because their story was actually just a detailed confession.
The shy garbage collector and his tiny wife, who was obsessed with quiet and cleanliness, were the killers.
Alindo confessed to killing Raffaella and her mother and slashing the throat of Mr. Cherubini.
The details of Mrs Cherubini's death are unclear, but Rosa would tell police that she remembered chasing Mrs Cherubini back up the stairs and as the terrified woman scrambled to get back into her apartment.
Rosa recalled making an upward stab with her knife into the back of Mrs. Cherabini's thigh.
As for little Yusuf Rosa, showing no emotion, told police that she was the one who slit the boy's throat.
When asked why they did this, Olindo and Rosa, who did not have children of their own and who seemed not only socially withdrawn but morbidly attached to one another, said that they could not stand the noise that their neighbors, the Castañas, made while going about their daily lives.
And once Yusuf was born, the sound of him crying at night and playing with his toys and riding his scooter and sometimes screaming in toddler frustration was just too much for Rosa and her husband.
According to a transcript of this confession, Rosa would say Rosa and Olindo's issues with the Castañas came to a head on the afternoon of December 31st 2005, roughly one year before the murders.
On the second floor, landing right outside of Rafaela's apartment, Olindo and Rosa confronted Rafaela and her mother Paola, about the noise coming from their apartment and at some point during this confrontation, as rosa swore and cussed out raffaella, her husband olindo wound up and hit raffaella, knocking her to the floor where she hit her head hard on the concrete Before Raffaella could even get to her feet.
Rosa and Olinda were hustling away back down the stairs and as they did this, Rosa would call over her shoulder 'Do not dare report us or we will make you pay'.
But immediately after this assault, Rafaela contacted a lawyer and began talking about filing a complaint against the couple.
Rafaela's father, Carlos, had tried to mediate a settlement between his daughter and this couple.
He also had that soundproofing installed in Rafaela's apartment because he wanted his grandson Yusuf, to be able to just keep playing like a little kid and not have anyone get mad about it.
But nothing worked, and Olindo and Rosa continued to complain and cause problems.
And so finally, not long before the murders occurred...
Raffaella went ahead and filed a lawsuit against her neighbors.
However, she did tell them she would drop it if they just paid her family 5000 euros or about 6850.
Furious and absolutely unwilling to pay, Olindo and Rosa decided that they would just have to murder the Castañas instead.
On the night of the attack, so December 11th 2006, when Rafaela came to the door and asked who was there, Rosa and Olindo called back and said that they were there to accept the terms of Rafaela's proposed monetary settlement.
Knowing full well, as soon as that door opened, they were going to murder Rafaela.
They were going to murder her mother, her child and anyone else who got in their way.
After leaving the burning condo, Olindo and Rosa had gone back to their own home, disposed of their bloody gloves and weapons, they put their bloody clothes in the wash, they showered and dressed and then they went out to a local restaurant, so it would appear that they had not been around when the crime was discovered.
But as Rafaela knew from her own experience, there are no secrets in small towns.
And after the murders were discovered, many neighbors noticed that Olindo and Rosa did not seem all that upset about these horrible murders that had taken place, and they didn't seem remotely scared about the idea that there could be a killer or killers still on the loose.
So that, combined with the fact that everyone in the complex knew about Olindo and Rosa's feud with the victims, had led several neighbors to tip off police that maybe they should look into this unassuming couple.
And when the case against Rafaela's husband Azuz, fell apart, because he was totally innocent and had an alibi, this is exactly what the police did.
Although the killers would later withdraw their very detailed confessions, the details they provided to police, combined with the fact that Mr Cherubini would eventually come out of his coma and he would positively identify Olindo and Rosa as his attackers, was enough to send the couple to trial on October 12 2008, almost two years after the Irba massacre.
At their trial, the police would explain that they bugged Olindo and Rosa's home with listening devices shortly after neighbors had brought up their suspicions around this couple.
And so, within days of the murders, Rosa was overheard on one of these listening devices saying to Olindo see how peaceful it is now.
We can finally sleep well.
On November 26, 2008, Olindo and Rosa were found guilty of first-degree murder.
They were each sentenced to life in prison where, for the first three years, they would spend every daylight hour in solitary confinement.
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