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Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I am your host, Peyton Moreland. Thank you so, so much for being here. If this is your first time here and you're not really sure what this show is, it is a true crime podcast with a little bit of everything dark sprinkled in, which means we cover ghost stories, UFO stories, tinfoil tales, honestly, just all things dark and spooky over here on this channel and this show. Again, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for being here. Please give us a follow, a review if you can. It would be so, so helpful. All right, before we jump into the nitty gritty, I am going to do my 10 seconds.
I think all I want to talk about is over on my Twitch channel, which the links in everywhere, wherever you're watching or listening, you can click the link to follow my Twitch channel. On my personal channel over there, we have been doing a lot of get ready with me's hanging out together as a group with chat.
And it's honestly so fun. It's one of the best parts of my day to get on there and talk with all of you guys. So if you haven't checked it out and you're interested in having a little corner of the internet to hang out with and maybe even get ready with me at the same time, go check that out now. But yeah, that's kind of what we've been doing over there and it has been a blast.
And that being said, let's jump in to the Into the Dark episode. So sometimes you come across an idea that you can't get out of your head afterward. It's like it's lodged in your mind and these thoughts may pop up at inconvenient times or even shape the way you think and see the world from then on.
And that is going to be a key concept in today's episode. I'll be talking about a man who had a weird way of seeing the world. His friends and family told him he shouldn't believe the things he believed, but he couldn't let his ideas go either. Some people believe that his offbeat way of thinking culminated in a truly brutal murder.
one that's also unforgettable. So let's jump into this true crime episode. So let's begin by putting ourselves in the shoes of a man named Vincent Elias. Now it's 1929, so quite a while ago, and Vincent works in the real estate industry in Detroit. On the morning of July 3rd, Vincent has an appointment.
with a man named Benny Evangelista. Now, Benny also works in real estate. In fact, he's very accomplished and has made a small fortune buying and selling different properties. So that's why Vincent is there to see him that day. He actually needs to finalize the terms of a deal that he's working on with Benny. Now, like a lot of Benny's customers, Vincent is supposed to meet him in his home.
So shortly before 10.30 a.m. that day, Vincent knocks on the door and then waits for Benny or someone to answer. And he waits and waits, but nobody ever comes. When some time passes and there's no sign that anyone is going to let him in, Vincent notices the front door is unlocked. So he lets himself into Benny's house and goes looking for him. I mean, they do have a meeting, but
But there's no sign of life anywhere inside. Benny has a big family. He lives with his wife and four children. At this time of the morning, their home should be bustling. Benny's wife, Santina, should be in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast. The kids should be playing and shouting. And of course, Benny should be letting Vincent in for their meeting. But there's no sign of any of them. The entire home is irreplaceable.
eerily silent. And honestly, it's set up kind of oddly. So let me explain this to you.
upstairs, there are five bedrooms. One is where Benny and his wife sleep. That would be the primary bedroom. And another is shared by all four of their children. And then the remaining three bedrooms sit empty. And I mean, there isn't even furniture in them. Okay. So only two bedrooms are used, even though there's enough bedrooms for everyone.
The downstairs is a massive sprawl of a kitchen, a dining room, and Benny's home office. There's obviously nobody in them either. They are quiet and deserted.
Eventually, Vincent sees a staircase leading down into the basement. And since he's checked the entire house and no one is there and he doesn't know where else to look, he decides to head downstairs, down this staircase into the shadowy depths. And already this case is off to a mysterious start. Now, as soon as Vincent gets to the basement, he sees something shocking and confusing happening.
See, as it turns out, unbeknownst to Vincent, Benny is not only a real estate professional.
He has a side gig as an occult spiritualist. So people from all over the neighborhood in 1929 have been coming to Benny and asking him to cast spells for good luck or to make love potions or to tell their fortunes. And even though he has his home office for real estate, the basement is where Benny does this work.
And Vincent can tell this just by looking at the decor down there. It is full of books that Benny has written, all about magic and mysticism. The shelves are loaded with knives, herbs, and bottles with strange potions in them. There are also a fake beard and a wig tucked among these objects. Now apparently, Benny wears the wig and beard in his rituals.
Crucifixes and crosses are hung on the wall alongside other religious artwork. There are also a pair of swords mounted on display. But the strangest area of the basement is usually only open to the people who hire Benny for his spiritual services or anyone who's willing to pay him five cents for a tour.
It's a room with models of eight to ten planets made of wax and paper mache. Each one is suspended from the ceiling and they're all revolving around two big objects at the center. One is an altar that Benny uses for his supernatural rituals and the other is what Benny calls the sun.
But it doesn't look like the sun. It actually looks like a massive eye. It's also lit up because when he made the sun, Benny put an electric light bulb inside of it. Spaced out between the planets, there are even more wax and paper mache figures of various people and animals. Okay, so this is just all in this room.
Now, this collection of objects, the planets, the sun, and the people, is what Benny believes the universe really looks like. And he calls his display in the basement the Great Celestial Planet Exhibition. And when he does his rituals, the exhibition is a big part of them. But now, with Vincent down there, the house so silent,
The entire structure, the entire basement, just looks eerie and unnerving. So Vincent steps past the bizarre Great Celestial Planet exhibition and walks toward an armchair that's in the back of the basement. And that's when he sees it. Benny. He's fully dressed and sitting in the chair with his arms crossed in front of his chest like he's praying.
But Vincent can tell at a glance that Benny is not praying or meditating because Benny's head has been cut off. So despite the fact that his body is sitting in this chair with his arms crossed, his head is lying on the ground next to the chair by his feet.
So imagine showing up to this house, going inside. The entire family is missing. It's eerily quiet. You go downstairs and this is where you find a very strange basement of this guy that you're supposed to just be meeting for real estate. And then in the back of the basement, you find him headless.
Needless to say, Vincent begins panicking and calls the police. And before long, they're on the scene investigating Benny's murder. You can't chop your own head off and place it at the foot of your chair. Now, these officers have seen a lot of gruesome crimes over the years, but
Everything they see in the basement, Benny's staged body, the Great Celestial Planet exhibition, everything else. It is a lot even for them. I mean, this is deeply disturbing. Even the placement of this body. As local reporters begin showing up, the investigators ban their photographers from getting any pictures at all. So there are no pictures of the crime scene or of anything else in the house.
Even when the police are carrying the wax and paper mache planets out of the home, there's no blood or gore on them. But they still stop photographers from getting too close because they don't want these things appearing in the papers. They do not want this murder made public. They say that the sight of them might throw the people of Detroit into an uproar.
The details of this crime are just too disturbing. It's the sort of thing that most people would have a hard time ever forgetting. But throughout the investigation, there is one grim question hanging over everything. Like I mentioned before, Benny does not live alone. So the police need to figure out what happened to his wife, Santina, and her four children.
The oldest, Angelina, is seven years old. Margaret is five. Eugenia, sometimes called Jean, is four. And their youngest, Mario, is just 18 months old, still a baby. So despite the fact that Vincent had assumed the house was empty because he called out and no one answered, the officers searched the rest of the home room by room, and they make one grim discovery after the other.
So first they go into the primary bedroom and there they find Benny's wife, Santina, dead. And she's holding baby Mario in her arms. And tragically, he is also deceased.
Both of them were killed by someone who smashed their skulls in with an axe. The other children, Margaret, Jean, and Angelina, are in the other bedroom, and they were all killed the same way. They're all still in their beds as though they were killed in their sleep.
This is so, so awful and disgusting and gruesome. An entire family slaughtered by being hit in the head with an ax. But these murders were not quick or painless. The cut marks on the children's heads, necks and arms are deep and imprecise. It is truly horrific.
And the police can tell that everyone, including Benny, was killed with an axe. Based on the angle and trajectory of the cuts, the investigators are even able to determine that the killer who axed this entire family to death was left-handed.
And there are even more telling clues in the basement that police eventually discover. When the detectives look over the books in the altar area, they find one that Benny wrote. It's the first volume of a four-volume set of holy books, except the second, third, and fourth books are nowhere to be seen. But in the copy the investigators do find, they read an inscription inside written by Benny himself. And it says, quote,
I shall be back. So it's unclear what this means or what happened to the other holy books. If the murderer took them or if they're tucked away somewhere. The police also note that the killer arranged a bunch of pictures in a semicircle around Benny's body. And they're all framed photos of a dead child in a coffin.
Apparently, Benny and Santina had another child together who died of natural causes sometime in the past. Someone photographed that child at their memorial, and Benny and Santina kept those pictures. While whoever killed Benny found those images and arranged them around his body, with his head chopped off, after he was dead. Almost like the killer was taunting him, or disrespecting him, even after murdering him.
which has the detectives thinking, okay, this is probably not a robbery gone wrong. This murder is personal. And there's one other key clue in the basement. It's on the ground beside Benny's head and the photos of the children in the coffin and its footprints. Someone had stepped in Benny's blood and then tracked it all the way back up the stairs up to the primary bedroom where Santina and baby Mario were killed.
And then they walked from there across the hall to where the other children were sleeping. So this gives us a timeline somewhat of how the murders happened in the home. And then the police also find bloody fingerprints on the interior doorknob for the back door.
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He was originally from Naples, Italy. He came to the United States in 1904 when he was just 19 years old, and he didn't immigrate alone. He and his brother made the long journey to Philadelphia together. And sometime after that, Benny had some kind of spiritual awakening. Up until that point, he had always been a devout Catholic, just like the rest of his family.
But one day, finally in America, he apparently began having mystical visions, which Benny believed had been sent directly from God himself. And they also directly contradicted everything he had grown up with. The visions were not consistent with Catholic teachings, but Benny could not get them out of his head. Something about what he saw and learned in these trances was
was lodged in his brain. It was unforgettable and impossible to ignore. Before long, Benny began telling his friends and family about these apparent revelations he was having. According to Benny, at this point in his life, he believed that magic existed. He also thought it was possible to change your fate and to set your life on a new path.
So this was very...
Very upsetting for his brother who wanted nothing to do with Benny's new beliefs. I imagine this would be pretty upsetting for anyone. So his brother refused to even speak to him or to have anything to do with him as Benny began this faith transition and believing kind of wild things. So this had to be a huge blow for Benny since he barely had a chance to get to know anyone else in the United States at this point.
but he did have one other person he could rely on. It was a new friend he had made. This was a man named Aurelius Angelino. Aurelius and Benny met for the first time when Benny got to America and got a job working for a railroad. Aurelius was one of his coworkers, and as it turned out, he had a lot of other things in common with Benny besides the job. He was also an Italian immigrant, and he was also from Naples.
More importantly, Aurelius also believed in magic and spells and he was all in on the things Benny told him. He was feeding into this. He fully, 100% believed that Benny's visions were real.
and that Benny understood the universe in a way that most people just did not. So the two of them worked together to bring all of Benny's goals to fruition. First, they wrote their own version of the Bible. Every night, supposedly, Benny went into a trance where he talked to God. And while his mind was connecting with this divine power, his body wrote down everything he saw and learned.
And then sometime before 1909, remember we've jumped back in time, Aurelius and Benny started a new religious group called the Union Federation of America. Later, the officials in Detroit would call this movement a cult.
But Benny and Aurelius insisted that they were just helping people by spreading their enlightened beliefs to the world. So that is how his life went on for literal years from the early 1900s until 1919. He and Aurelius finished writing an early draft of their new version of the Bible. It was that four volume holy text I mentioned earlier.
It was full of alternate versions of the story of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, other religious stories. They also continued running the Union Federation of America. Benny and Aurelius brought in new followers by saying that Benny was with the power of God. And those were their exact words. You're basically starting a new religion.
According to them, Benny could heal people, brew love potions, or make curses to torment his followers' enemies. So not only is it a new religion, Benny is some kind of prophet or leader. Of course...
He charged his members a fee for all of the spiritual work that he did in his church, which meant that Benny and Aurelius were also getting quite rich right up until their partnership ended in blood. This is 10 years before Benny and his family would be murdered.
So one day in 1919, Aurelius went on an apparently unprovoked rampage. He lived at the time with his wife and two sons, and Aurelius flew into a rage and went after all of them with, get this, an axe.
And while his wife survived the attack, sadly, his children did not. He murdered them both. Right away after the slaughter, Aurelius was arrested. And after the courts decided that mental illness was a factor in the murders, Aurelius was committed to a treatment facility. Except he only stayed in that hospital for four years. Because in 1923, he escaped.
Unfortunately, the officials never figured out how he got out or where he went afterward.
So what we do know is that after Aurelius' arrest, Benny left Pennsylvania. It sounds like the brutal murder from his partner might have spooked him and he wanted a fresh start in a new city. So once he resettled in Detroit, he stayed far away from anything that had to do with mysticism or the occult for almost six years. So he kind of up and abandoned all his beliefs.
and in his absence the union federation of america fell apart like i said before sometimes ideas get lodged in your mind and you can't let go of them
from what i can tell that seems to be what happened with benny as much as he wanted to get away from magic he kept finding himself getting drawn back toward it so around early june of 1923 benny slid back into his old ways of doing things he began to spread word through his community that he could help people with their problems he could cast spells for them to try to tell their futures
And each time someone came to him seeking spiritual help, he would charge $10, which adjusted for inflation was a lot of money. It's close to about $300 today. It was about what a blue-collar factory worker would make in several days on the job. But Benny justified the expense by advertising himself as a spiritual doctor. I mean, he even got a license to practice medicine.
He couldn't actually prescribe anything, but he could legally see patients, give them diagnosis, and recommend different treatments that didn't involve medication. Treatments like, say, chants, rituals, or potions. So once again, Benny was getting wealthy thanks to his occult beliefs. But this time, he was doing it without his partner.
which might've been risky because it's very likely that Aurelius was still alive and still on the loose in early July, 1929, when Benny and his family were slaughtered. And the crime, okay, when police learn about all this history is just too similar to Aurelius's family murder to be a coincidence. What were the odds that he and Benny would both lose their children to a killer with an ax?
Unless Aurelius was behind both slaughters. So that's one theory about who killed this family. It was Aurelius and he wanted to destroy his former business partner the same way he'd once destroyed the people he loved the most. The problem is there isn't much hard evidence to support this theory. The crimes are similar, but nothing definitive puts Aurelius at the scene of the homicides.
However, there is some interesting circumstantial evidence. See, just two weeks before the Evangelista family slaughter, another family was also axe murdered. A woman named Mrs. Chypinski lived in River Rouge, Michigan with her three children. Now, one night in June, an unknown attacker broke in and hacked all of them to death.
So by July 3rd, when Benny's family is also axed to death, the Chapinski murder is still unsolved. But the police can't ignore the pattern here. Are all three ax rampages connected? Could Aurelius have escaped from the hospital and come to Michigan to target his old partner? And if so, did he also kill the Chapinskis on the way?
There's no clear connection between Aurelius and this other family, but maybe the murder was just practice before he eventually went after Benny?
Or perhaps he simply got confused and attacked the wrong house. So that's one theory, but it's impossible to prove, at least not unless the police can track down Aurelius and question him. But they never learn where he is, and to this day, nobody has any idea what became of him after he escaped the mental health facility.
So we also can't say if he had anything to do with the other murders, particularly because the police have other credible theories and other suspects to investigate. See, while they're searching Benny's home, they find a letter that was delivered to him six months earlier, and it's unclear who sent it. But the text says, quote, this is your last chance.
Now this is clearly a threat, and this gives the police an idea. They figure that the brutality of the murder is consistent with a professional hit. And they also know that it's common for the mafia to prey on immigrant families. Families like the Evangelistas. So the police assume that someone from the mafia must have sent this threatening letter.
And when Benny failed to do whatever the mob wanted from them, they sent a hitman to teach him a lesson. But of course, when they try to pursue that lead, they get nowhere. Basically, really, they never had any reason to believe the mafia were involved in the first place. They were just going off of assumptions and stereotypes about Italian immigrants.
So from there, investigators come up with another theory that Benny's mysticism might be a factor in the homicides. Like I said before, he charged his customers a lot, $10 for a consultation. He had a lot of clients. It's said that he saw something like 75 to 100 people a day every single day.
And it's safe to say that Benny was kind of already getting a reputation in the area as a con artist.
He promised people he could cure them of all kinds of diseases, but after his customers took his cures, they were still sick. Other people bought spells that were supposed to bring them financial success or make their crushes fall for them. But after weeks went by, they were still broken single. So it stood to reason that a disgruntled former client
might have wanted to get revenge on Benny. But no matter how hard the detectives looked, they couldn't find a list or any other record of Benny's customers. They didn't have any names or leads to follow. So it could be a former client, but there's no way to figure out who it could have been. The next break in this case comes when the detectives start to try to build a timeline of Benny's death. They want to know exactly when the killer broke in and who might've talked to him around that time.
Well, the investigators learned that one of the last people Benny even spoke to was a man named Umberto Tacchio. Umberto is another of Benny's contacts in the real estate business. Benny actually sold him a house recently and Umberto had owed him money for the purchase.
Well, on the night of July 2nd, this would be just one day before the murder, Umberto came over to Benny's house to make his final payment. He actually had a friend with him, a man named Angelo Deppoli. All right, you guys, are you looking to enhance your nutrition this year? Factor offers chef-prepared gourmet meals that simplify healthy eating. These meals are dietitian approved and can be heated and ready to enjoy in just two minutes, a
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So the police want to bring Umberto and Angelo in for questioning, just to get a sense of how that conversation went. And when they're on the way to Angelo's house to ask if he'll consent to an interrogation, they see something interesting.
There is an axe just sitting out in Angelo's barn. An axe that looks like it could match the injuries on Benny and his family's bodies. The investigators also find a knife and a pair of boots in this same barn. And everything, the axe, the knife, and the boots were recently washed.
But even though the ax is mostly clean, there is some kind of red stain on it that police find. They can't tell if it's blood or rust, but they plan to test it and find out for sure. And in the meanwhile, they actually arrest Angelo on the spot.
But when they ask him about the axe, the knife, and the boot, he says he has no idea how those even ended up in his barn, that they're not his, and he doesn't know who put them there. And as for an alibi, Angelo says he was with his friend, Umberto, all night. Apparently, after he and Umberto gave Benny his money, they went to a bar together and spent the evening drinking.
Well, the police are already questioning Humberto by this time, so they ask him if he can corroborate Angelo's alibi. And he can. He has the same exact story that he was at the bar with him all night. Now, as the police are looking at Humberto's history, they find out he does have a record. About three months earlier, he got into a fight with his brother-in-law and ended up stabbing him.
for whatever reason he was never charged or arrested for that crime but the circumstantial evidence seems pretty telling umberto had stabbed someone before and angelo had a freshly cleaned axe that could be the murder weapon problem is there is no other evidence against either man the police can't prove the axe is the murder weapon and they also can't prove it belongs to angelo on top of that the alibis check out
So eventually the police have to release both men because they don't have enough to hold them on. They can't cross either man off the suspect list, but they can't move forward with charging them either. Especially because before too long, another person of interest emerges in this case. It's a delivery man who was supposed to see Benny on the morning of July 3rd before his body was discovered.
See, Benny had recently bought a new house. He then had it torn down so he could build new property on that land. And that morning, on the 3rd, a driver was supposed to stop by and collect all of the lumber from the demolition and deliver it to Benny. Benny was going to go through the wooden planks to see if any of them could be reused in a construction project. Well, the driver never picked up the wood and never brought it to Benny's house.
Naturally, the police want to know why this contractor missed his gig.
Did he somehow know that Benny wouldn't be available to receive the delivery? Maybe because he was dead? Well, when they question the driver, he insists he had nothing to do with Benny's death. And once again, even though the clues are tantalizing, there's no proof. The police cannot find a smoking gun against this driver, which is a huge theme with this case, if you can't tell.
There are a lot of different theories and explanations floating around, but it's almost impossible for the police to narrow down any one suspect or lead. This is in part because the people in Benny's community refuse to cooperate with the authorities. Some of them are too embarrassed to admit that they had worked with a spiritualist, a fraudster, a con artist, and worst of all, someone who teaches things that are un-Catholic in 1929.
And others just don't trust the police. There's a lot of tension between the authorities and the Italian community in 1929. So it's possible that there are people who know more about what happened to Benny and his family, but they aren't talking. And this is especially frustrating because Benny's friends and neighbors want to see his murder solved. He and his family were beloved. Hundreds of people turned out to his funeral.
There were so many attendees, they couldn't all fit into the church. So instead, they tried to pile into a funeral home next door. And the owner of that business had to lock the door to stop mourners from overcrowding his business. That's how many people wanted to grieve Benny and his family.
But when it's time for them to tell the police all they know, it's like all of a sudden they have nothing to say. They won't even admit that they know him. 500 people of interest are questioned in this case, and none of them are ever charged with murder. And the last clue about the crime, if you can call it a clue at all, pops up about a year after the slaughter in 1930.
Sometime that year, a woman is out walking around in Detroit when she sees a stray dog in the streets. It has a collar on and the tag says who it's supposed to belong to. And it's Benny's family's dog. It had been missing since the day of the murder. Everyone assumed it must have been terrified during the massacre and ran out of the house and spent the next year just living outdoors as a stray.
So the woman takes it in and spends the next few years spoiling the pup. I mean, at least the family dog got a good ending. But of course, since dogs can't talk, it was never able to get the police any closer to identifying the real killer, which is why I said it barely counts as a clue, but it's also really eerie and interesting. And that's where the trail dried up. To this day, the police still do not know who axed Benny and his family to death
As the years went on, eventually his old house was demolished. Nothing was built in its place, and today, the land is a vacant lot. Rumors say that it's haunted, and the spirits of Benny and his family are trapped on the property, waiting for justice. Some people claim to see Benny's headless spirit walking from one end to the other. After all, he did write in his Bible that he would be back.
Beyond that, the details of his story have a way of getting lodged in your head. Sadly, even though this case is striking, it might not ever be solved. And we'll just have to wait to see if we ever find out who went in and axed this entire family to death.
And that is the case of Benny Evangelista and his family. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Let me know in the comments what you think since it is an unsolved case. And I will see you next time as we go further into the dark together. Goodbye.
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