Two new cases this week that almost don't seem real. A mother and her two teenage daughters killed in a quiet Canadian city by a 17-year-old boyfriend — and police calling it femicide on the record. A family of three in the North Carolina mountains found dead after three welfare checks, with the family's own 16-year-old daughter now charged. Plus the unanimous death penalty verdict for the man who killed seven-year-old Athena Strand — and the sentencing of Kouri Richins on what would have been her husband Eric's 44th birthday.

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

⚠️ Content note: graphic detail throughout. Take care.

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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.

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Back from two weeks out with the heaviest stretch of cases the show has ever covered. An arrest in the Wilmer, Alabama family murders. Two USF doctoral students from Bangladesh, both found dead. New developments in the Celeste Rivas Hernandez case. And a death penalty verdict that may come this week for the man who killed seven-year-old Athena Strand. Plus follow-ups on Anna Kepner and Kouri Richins.

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

⚠️ Content note: graphic detail throughout. Take care.

Support the show