The sources located so far offer different variants of the name: "Clothida Cravana" in one instance and "Maria Clothida Gaione, nee Cravino," or, in another "Maria Gaione."
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FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 2): London, April 23. – A message from Rome states that the trial of Clothida Cravana, who is charged with poisoning her son, daughter, and husband, is causing a sensation, partly owing to the beauty of the accused, who is a well-known woman in Turin.
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FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 2): London, April 23. – A message from Rome states that the trial of Clothida Cravana, who is charged with poisoning her son, daughter, and husband, is causing a sensation, partly owing to the beauty of the accused, who is a well-known woman in Turin.
Since her arrest she has lost three stone in weight, but she defended
herself during the opening days of the trial with the utmost vigour. She
declared that her accusers were acting under the impulse of a vendetta, and
that her father-in-law, who is the principal witness for the Crown, had made
immoral advances, which she had repulsed.
The trial is expected to last a fortnight. The evidence shows that the
three victims died of poisoning by corrosive sublimate. When the first child
died in March, 1916, the magistrate decided that there was no case for the
jury. No official inquiry was held when the daughter died in similar
circumstances in 1917, but the aged father-in-law, with unwearying persistence,
induced the police to order post-mortem examinations and try the accused.
[A cable message from London on April l8 stated that Clothida Cravana had
been accused of poisoning her son, daughter, and husband. The woman, it was
stated, had frequently sent poison to her husband during the war, when be was
in hospital at the front. Before her arrest she had been living a life of
dissipation on 900,000 francs, inherited from her alleged victims.]
[“Poison Trial. – An Italian Sensation.” The Sydney Morning Herald
(Australia), Apr. 24, 1923, p. 9]
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FULL TEXT (Article 2 of 2), Rome, May 26. – Maria Clothida Gaione, nee Cravino, described
by prosecution for crown as a modern Borgia, stands her trial at the assize
court of Alessandria today on the capital charge of murdering her husband and
two children.
The case has aroused extraordinary interest, not only
because of the sensational charge itself, but, also because Maria Gaione is a
beautiful woman about thirty years old, and one of the prominent personalities
of the town of Ovada.
The allegations of the prosecution re briefly that Maria
Cravino poisoned her husband, her son, and her daughter in order to give rein
to her unbridled passions; that as a result of these murders she inherited
300,000 lire ($15,000); and that she proceeded to dissipate this sum with a
series of lovers.
The case for the crown is that in February 1916 the
Carabinieri (the Italian gendarmes) received an anonymous letter referring to
the death In the previous January of Ernest, Maria Cravino’s ten-year-old son.
The letter said that the boy had been killed by his mother.
On the strength of this letter an autopsy was ordered,
criminal proceedings were initiated, and several witnesses were heard before
the Juge d’Instruction of Novi Ligur. This brought the case to March 1918, when
the examining magistrate decided there was no case to go before a jury.
In September of the same year Angela, the younger sister of
the boy Ernest, also died, her symptoms being identical with those of her
brother. Apparently this singular coincidence aroused no special comment. At
all events, no official inquiry was ordered.
A little more than two years elapsed, and then. In January
1919, Giovanni Gaione, the husband, fell ill with the same sinister symptoms.
The doctors called in to visit him eventually diagnosed his
case as one of poisoning by corrosive sublimate. On February 3, 1919, while the
husband was still living, his father, Giovanni Battista, telegraphed to the
King's Proctor of Novi Ligurs begging him to make inquiries.
A few lays later Maria Gaione's husband died. There was an
autopsy, but death was ascribed to pulmonary pleurisy. The father-in-law,
entirely dissatisfied with this finding, continued to press for a more
searching inquiry, and in August 1919 Maria had again to face an examining
magistrate. Once more it was decided that there was no case against her.
The old man, with unwavering persistence, still sought for
fresh evidence, and eventually, on the strength of further testimony, induced
the authorities to make an order for an exhaustive and highly technical post-mortem
of the bodies of the husband and both children. The prosecution alleges that
distinct traces of corrosive sublimate sufficient to cause death, were found in
the bodies of both father and son, but it was impossible to determine the cause
of the daughter's death.
A warrant was issued for the arrest of Maria Clotilda
Gaione. Andino Carlo, alleged to be her lover, and her servant, Elina Minolli,
were also arrested, but both the latter were discharged when the examining
magistrate found that there was no case for trial on a charge of complicity.
Maria Gaione, since her arrest, has become a shadow of her
former self, and has lost more than three stone in weight. Nevertheless, at the
opening of the trial she defended herself with the utmost vigor, maintaining
that one of her accusers was acting from a sense of vendetta only, as he had
been her lover and she had afterwards discarded him.
[“Modern Borgia Up For Murder - Beautiful Italian Woman is
Accused of Poisoning Husband and Children,” The Winnipeg Evening Tribune
(Canada), May 26, 1923, p. 2]
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Victims:
Ernest, son, 10, died Feb. (or “Mar.”) 1916.
Angela, daughter, died Sep. 1918 (or “1917”).
Giovanni Gaione, husband, died circa Feb. 6, 1919.
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[665-1/9/21]
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