A woman has set out to investigate the 100-year-old cold case murder that has plagued her family for decades.
Jo Piazza, from Philadelphia, had grown up being told that her great-great-grandmother Lorenza Marsala was killed in Sicily before she could join the rest of the family on their move to America.
The mom-of-three, who is an author and podcast creator, was forced to unravel a whole host of wild theories about the death – including speculation that the village had turned on her because she was a witch or that she owned land the mafia wanted to get their hands on.
Jo said that members of her family had tried to warn her off delving into the case at the risk of ‘opening old wounds’ – but she was undeterred.
The intriguing tale began after Jo’s father passed away back in 2015.
She was pregnant at the time, newly married, had recently relocated and lost her job, telling Today: ‘I didn’t have time to grieve… All of it is a blur.’
The doting daughter was forced to clear out some of his belongings so her mom could have a fresh start – with one item being his computer.
But Jo came to regret throwing it out after coming across some emails from her dad when she was cleaning out her inbox a few years later.
She said that she had responded to most of them at the time but there were a handful that had gone unopened.
‘One caught my eye. It was his grandfather’s birth certificate. He had remarked on the fact that the mother’s name, Lorenza, was so beautiful. “She was the one who was murdered,” he reminded me in all caps,’ she shared.
Jo revealed that her father had become ‘obsessed’ with discovering the truth about her death – even making several trips back to the island.
However, he eventually had to limit his research to that which she could do online after suffering a rare form of muscular dystrophy.
Hellbound and Down 