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A trail of murder

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Oct 3, 2004, 10:59:22 PM10/3/04

From Here To Italy, A Trail Of Murder
In Windsor Locks, families still gather at B&B Automotive to mourn the
dead. In Hartford, a mother remains distraught over her jailed son. In
Italy, Benedetto Cipriani sits in a prison outside Rome.

October 3, 2004
By ANN MARIE SOMMA, Courant Staff Writer

CECCANO, Italy -- Letter 7B arrives four days late. In it, he tells
her he hasn't received her 4H. She isn't surprised. The Italian postal
system is notoriously slow and unreliable. He's written her 61 letters
from prison, sometimes three a day, but she's received only 55. Some
arrive weeks late; others never get delivered.

Anna Cellucci places the letter in a three-ring binder where she keeps
his other letters. Then, with the neat penmanship of a grade-school
teacher, she writes on a piece of paper divided into two columns, 7B
on one side and the letter's date on the other.

She devised the system to keep track of the letters they write each
other every day. 5B. 8H. 3A. The characters form a kind of secret code
between the lovers, private signals they use to label their
expressions of mutual love and longing.

She lights up another cigarette and begins reading letter 7B. She's an
attractive 46-year-old with ample curves. She exhales; the smoke
clouds her deep brown eyes.

"If something should happen to me," she reads aloud, "I leave you my
house in Meriden. I leave you my Italian and American pension. This
would be the case if you were my wife."

She sighs contentedly. "You see, Benedetto loves me. He worries about
my future without him."

Cellucci met Benedetto Cipriani in September 2003 on the Internet
dating service match.com. She liked his photograph, taken in St.
Mark's Square in Venice, so she e-mailed him a few lines. Separated
from her husband of 20 years, she was looking for a second shot at
love. Within weeks, their online encounter developed into a serious
relationship. They traveled to Rome, Venice and Florence. He bought
her gifts and talked about getting married.

She has chosen to share his letters on a park bench overlooking a
tranquil lake covered in fragrant pink water lilies, just a short
drive from the prison where he's being held outside Rome. She used to
come here with Cipriani until last April, when a small posse of
undercover Italian police officers, armed with an international arrest
warrant, hauled him off to prison from in front of her house. She
thought he had robbed a bank.

"He is a gentle man, a family man," Cellucci says. "He could never do
what the American police say he did."

Of course, letter 7B never mentions the pools of blood police found on
the grease-soaked floor of B & B Automotive in Windsor Locks, Conn.,
on July 30, 2003, or that one of the three slain men was the husband
of Cipriani's ex-lover.

None of his letters ever does.

Nor, throughout their seven-month relationship, did Cipriani ever hint
that he had returned to Italy after police questioned him about the
contract killing of Robert Stears, 42, Barry Rossi, 43, and Lorne
Stevens, 38.

He never told Cellucci that the house in Meriden, the same one he
promised her, was used as a lure to seduce women he had met on the
Internet. He never let on that for years he had been charming women
with his generosity and promises of love, only to turn at times into a
calculating and controlling man when things didn't go his way.

In fact, by the time Cellucci fell in love with him, Cipriani had left
behind a trail of deceit and lies and broken lives that spanned
decades, continents and generations. Some along that trail are dead.
Some are grieving for lost husbands, fathers, sons, friends. Others
exist in confusion and dread, wondering at the devastation around
them.

Cellucci admits that sometimes, late at night, when she is alone, she
wonders if Cipriani, now 49, did hire three young men to kill Bobby
Stears. But how could a man who cried when he took her to visit his
father's grave and who laughed watching Italian game shows on
television be guilty of murder?

Then morning brings another of his letters to ease her suspicions.

Joann

Joann Strangolagalli is remarried now, and she is reluctant to speak
of her days as Benedetto Cipriani's wife. She doesn't want her
whereabouts revealed, or her married name published. She is afraid of
the man she says once beat her if his pasta wasn't cooked right.

"If I had stayed with this man ... I would have been dead. I would
have died," Strangolagalli says. "I'm so happy I have my life right
now because this man would have killed me."

Strangolagalli was living on Long Island in the early 1980s when she
met Cipriani by chance, on an Alitalia flight. Both were en route to
Ceccano, this sleepy hillside town about 50 miles south of Rome.
Strangolagalli's parents had left Ceccano for the States in the 1950s
and she was returning to visit relatives. Cipriani, who had been
visiting relatives in Michigan, was going home.

Ceccano hasn't changed much since Cipriani grew up here in the 1960s
and '70s. Young boys still throw rocks in the meandering Sacco River,
or play soccer in the field where farmers once sold their livestock at
market. When an unmarried woman dies, it is still customary to bury
her in a wedding dress.

And every year, townspeople parade through the labyrinth of narrow
streets a statue of John the Baptist, who suffered the ultimate wrath
of a vengeful woman. Inside the ocher-colored, Baroque-style San
Giovanni Battista, Cipriani received his First Holy Communion under
the warm gaze of a 15th-century Madonna.

There he memorized the Roman Catholic liturgy, but felt intimidated
assisting the priest as an altar boy. Outside, he played soccer, but
the other boys teased him because he ran like a girl.

"We used to make fun of him. He was gullible, a simple kid you took
advantage of," says Gianni Olchi, who grew up with Cipriani.

Townspeople remember him as fat-faced and awkward, a child who felt
most comfortable with his hardworking family in their modest,
two-story home on Via Borgo Garibaldi. Cipriani's father, Fernando,
earned a meager living registering the names of the dead as the
caretaker of the local cemetery. His mother, Giuseppina, a small, thin
woman with rounded shoulders, stayed home to cook and clean and raise
Benedetto and his sister, Vittoria.

Cipriani was 12 years old when Fernando's death notice was posted in
the central square. Giuseppina was forced to take a job mopping floors
in the local schools to pay the mortgage. Cipriani worked in a
printing shop after school to help pay the bills. On Sundays, he took
his mother to the cemetery to place flowers on his father's grave.

Like most Italian men, Cipriani lived at home while he earned a
university degree in science. He remained single while his
neighborhood friends married local girls. He rarely dated. The few
relationships he had ended quickly.

But Cipriani's fateful encounter with Strangolagalli bloomed into
romance, and then marriage in Glen Cove, N.Y. They were wed in 1981 in
a Roman Catholic ceremony witnessed by friends and family.

Strangolagalli says now that shortly after the wedding, Cipriani
transformed into a bitter creature, jealous and abusive. He became
violent whenever he couldn't manipulate her into the traditional woman
he wanted her to be, she says. She feared he would kill her in a fit
of rage.

She felt used and betrayed. Through their marriage, Cipriani had
financial and professional opportunities on Long Island that he never
would have found in Italy.

Nine months after the wedding, Strangolagalli moved out, divorced
Cipriani and had her marriage annulled, declared void in the eyes of
the church.

Shelley

In the summer of 2001, an Enfield woman named Shelley Stears, a
5-foot-8 mother of three with a broad face and yellow-blond hair, was
looking for attention in cyberspace. Friends and relatives say she was
restless in her more than 20-year marriage to Robert Stears, and she
escaped the doldrums of domestic life by chatting with men on the
Internet.

She worked part time as a bookkeeper at her husband's business, B&B
Automotive in Windsor Locks, and came and went as she pleased. She
spent a lot of time shopping at Filene's and other department stores,
and buying furniture. Probate court records of Robert Stears' estate,
which list Shelley Stears as the fiduciary, show credit card debt of
close to $40,000.

What she didn't spend, she gambled away. A regular at the blackjack
table at Mohegan Sun, she liked to wager $25 bets per hand against the
dealer.

That same summer, Cipriani was a lonely man. He lived by himself on
the north shore of Long Island, commuting to an industrial park every
day for a job he disliked - marketing hermetically sealed bottle caps.

His five-year relationship with Leticia Diaz had ended in the late
1980s. Diaz says Cipriani was always kind and generous to her. "He was
a serious person, a homey type," she says. But she left him because
her daughter was acting up and she wanted to raise her alone.

Cipriani got married a second time, in the 1990s, to a woman named
Elizabeth Rodriguez, with whom he lived in Kings Park, N.Y. But that
marriage ended in divorce.

So Cipriani, often using the screen name "Bencini," found himself
spending hours searching the Internet for love and companionship.

He was registered with at least three chat rooms and online singles
dating services, charming women with promises of carefree dates that
conflicted with his obsessive and violent personality.

"Lets [sic] get together and know each other and take it from there,
you never know where we can get to. And if it doesn't click hey nice
to meet you," he wrote on americansingles.com.

He had mastered the art of online flirtation. For women looking for
committed relationships, he painted a portrait of himself as a man who
liked to cook and do home improvement projects.

Relationships, he wrote in poor English grammar on
americansingles.com, sometimes don't work, "so get your pieces
together and look for the right one most of the time is right there
but we don't see she or he."

On americansingles.com, Cipriani and Shelley Stears crossed paths.

According to police reports and affidavits, they had sex on their
first date, in August, in a room at the Windsor Marriott.

Their online encounter led to an old-fashioned affair. Cipriani
showered her with attention and gifts: jewelry, three cellular phones,
and $1,000 worth of clothes when she began a new job at Hilb, Rogal
and Hobbs, an insurance company in Hartford in February 2002. He even
took three weeks off from work on Long Island so they could have lunch
together every day.

Stears hid her infidelity from her husband by meeting Cipriani for
afternoon trysts in hotel rooms in the Windsor area, and later in an
Enfield apartment Cipriani rented to be close to her.

But their relationship was not clandestine. Friends and acquaintances
say they often saw the couple around the Windsor area eating at
restaurants with Stears' 8-year-old son, Bobby. Stears introduced
Cipriani as her friend.

Eventually, Stears told Cipriani she wanted to leave her husband. In
January 2002, with a real estate agent from Waterbury, Cipriani took
her to look at a building lot in a new subdivision on Kyle Street in
Meriden. He later purchased the lot for $60,000, and construction on a
$245,000 colonial-style house began in March 2002. Cipriani and Stears
planned to move into the house when it was built.

The subdivision developer told police that Shelley Stears visited the
construction site several times, and friends say she picked out
appliances and cabinets for the home. One relative recalls that
Cipriani, who is childless and had grown close to Stears' son, once
commented to Stears that he would be a better father than her husband
was.

But in June 2002, Cipriani moved into the house alone.

A month later, according to police affidavits, Shelley Stears told
Cipriani their affair was over. She wasn't moving into the house.

The rejection threw Cipriani into a tailspin. He retaliated by phoning
Robert Stears at work to say he'd been sleeping with Shelley and that
she stole money from B&B to pay for their love nest in Meriden. Then
he called Shelley and told her what he'd done. And he kept calling,
says Deborah Ahrens, Robert Stears' sister, who was with Shelley at
the time. Cipriani called and called and called until Ahrens answered
the phone.

Initially, Cipriani tried to charm Ahrens by playing on her sympathy.
He said he had invested a lot of money in the house in Meriden and he
just wanted to ask Shelley a question about the kitchen cabinets she
had picked out.

Ahrens resisted. She told him Shelley didn't want to talk to him. He
needed to move on. He was the loser in a three-way relationship and he
should accept it.

That's when the tenor of his voice changed, according to Ahrens. He
was angry. He told Ahrens that he and Shelley had a plan and they were
going to stick with it.

From June to October 2002, Cipriani talked obsessively about Shelley
Stears to David Orsini, the builder of the Meriden house, according to
the affidavits. Cipriani called Orsini at home and on his cellphone
about 10 times a week, sometimes three times in a day, begging him to
call Shelley Stears and convince her to be with Cipriani. Cipriani
believed Stears wanted to live with him in the house, but that her
husband had something on her and her son.

He asked Orsini at least five times if he knew somebody who could
"take care of this," according to police.

Stears would later tell police that she admitted her affair to her
husband, changed her phone number and stopped talking to Cipriani for
about two months. But Stears continued to see Cipriani on and off even
though she told her sister, Laurie Romaneck, that Cipriani once told
her he would "take away everything that is dear" to her and would "go
into the shop and kill them all."

Shelley Stears told police the last time they were together was on
July 23, 2003, seven days before Bobby Stears was killed. Shelley met
Cipriani at the house in Meriden.

"I went there to talk, but we wound up having intercourse," she told
police.

At the house, Cipriani gave her three statements from a People's Bank
account he opened in her name and told her that he had sold $18,000
worth of stock on Ameritrade and he was going to deposit it for her
use.

Shelley Stears told police that Cipriani said, "I won't need the money
where I'm going."

Rose

Rose Emily Mendez dreams of blood. It oozes out of her pores, flows
down the folds of her corpulent body and then splatters all over her
Flatbush Avenue apartment in Hartford. Since December, Mendez has had
the same recurring nightmare, interrupted only by the cries of her
8-month-old grandson in the next bedroom.

Mendez is a religious woman, prone to premonitions and superstitions.
In 1997, Mendez says, she sensed her uncle Israel "Johnny" Arroyo's
death hours before he was shot in his East Hartford apartment on
Christmas morning.

The blood she sees in her dreams is not a foreboding. It has already
been spilled. It is not the consequence of fate but of her mistake.
Because she dated Cipriani, her 21-year-old son, Erik Martinez, is now
in jail and faces the death penalty, charged in the killings of three
men she never knew.

"I blame myself. My son got messed up in this. I cry all the time,"
says Mendez, her expressions numbed by the powerful antidepressants
she swallows daily.

A 36-year-old single mother with a tattooed ankle, Mendez had
registered with an online dating service in hopes of finding a nice
man. Maybe someone who would lift her out of poverty and share her
struggles. She gave birth to her son at 14 and raised him without a
father. She says her child was the product of a rape.

Around June 2003, Mendez began receiving online messages from
Cipriani, who said he was a business executive in New York. They
instant-messaged each other for a while before meeting in person.

The night of their first date, Mendez waited for Cipriani outside her
apartment house, a sour-smelling old Victorian with broken windows in
a Hartford neighborhood where lost souls drift in and out of trouble.

Before they drove off to dinner at Hometown Buffet, Mendez introduced
Cipriani to her son and Michael Castillo, 20, and Jose Guzman, 23, two
distant relatives with criminal records who were staying in her
apartment.

Guzman had been sleeping on Mendez's sofa for almost a year while he
worked odd landscaping jobs. Raised in foster homes most of his life,
Guzman had nowhere else to go. Castillo lived in East Hartford but
frequently hung out at Mendez's apartment.

Mendez says she knew immediately that Cipriani wasn't her type. He was
short with thinning hair and at least 10 years older than he appeared
in his photograph. But he was charming and benevolent. He offered to
buy her Victoria's Secret lingerie and took her and her son and two
younger daughters out to dinner several times.

Mendez's mother, Elizabeth Aponte, who lives with the family, says
Cipriani offered to take her out to dinner as well. And when she
complained to him that she couldn't pay the electric bill, he said her
financial worries would soon be over. Aponte thought Cipriani might
bring the family good fortune and set Erik on the right path.

"He said he was a businessman from New York. I thought he could help
Erik find a job. I thought he was a good asset. He could give him a
reference, a white man could help him," says Aponte, 59, who helped
Mendez raise Erik.

Mendez says she dated Cipriani four or five times, then ended the
relationship after Cipriani took her to his house in Meriden and tried
to get her to perform a sexual act on him.

But Cipriani wouldn't let her go.

He e-mailed. "And he called, and called, and called, and called, and
called, and called, and called and called," Mendez says. "I told him
to stop calling. My kids had to lie for me to say I'm not here."

By that time, Cipriani had befriended Mendez's son. Throughout July,
Cipriani called the apartment many times asking to speak to Erik
Martinez, or to Guzman or Castillo. Mendez says she never asked her
son what he talked to Cipriani about. When Guzman spoke to Cipriani,
he always took the phone on the porch.

In August, Cipriani stopped calling. At the end of the month, Guzman
moved to Orlando, Fla., leaving Mendez with a filthy sofa she and her
mother replaced with a new one from Rent To Own.

Aponte would sometimes wonder out loud what happened to Cipriani. She
says it never occurred to them that Cipriani's disappearance was in
any way connected to headlines about the execution-style killings in
Windsor Locks.

Then, on Dec. 17, police stormed the Flatbush Avenue apartment and
arrested Martinez. Castillo was arrested the same day in the Hartford
area, Guzman was arrested later in Florida. All three were charged
with three counts each of murder, two counts each of capital felony
and one count each of conspiracy to commit murder.

Afraid that Cipriani might come back and hurt her, Mendez locked
herself inside her apartment for weeks and asked Hartford police to
patrol her neighborhood.

Mendez says she will never be able to raise the $3 million needed to
get her son out of jail. Martinez hasn't touched his 8-month-old son,
Nazir, since his arrest. He blows kisses at the baby through a glass
partition that separates prisoners from visitors at MacDougall-Walker
Correctional Institution in Suffield.

"I met him on the Internet," Mendez says of Cipriani. "But I didn't
know he was going to do this to my family."

Bobby, Barry And Lorne

On July 30, 2003, the day of the killings, Cipriani repeatedly called
Mendez's Flatbush Avenue apartment and received numerous calls from
the apartment and from Castillo.

According to search warrants of Cipriani's three cellphone records,
and phone records from the apartment:

At 5:30 a.m., Cipriani left his house in Meriden and drove two hours
to work in Edgewood, N.Y.

During his commute, he called the Flatbush Avenue apartment three
times.

Later in the morning and afternoon from work, he called the apartment
11 more times, but no one answered.

At 1:14 p.m. he called the apartment.

At 1:28 p.m. someone from the apartment called Cipriani's cellphone.

Sometime during the day, Cipriani called Shelley Stears on her
cellphone.

"I feel like I'm losing you," she told police he said to her that day.
"You never had me," she replied.

At 3:01 p.m., someone at the Flatbush Avenue apartment called
Cipriani's cellphone.

Around 4 p.m., Cipriani left work.

At 4:57 p.m., Castillo's phone received a call through a cell tower in
Windsor Locks about 1.6 miles from the crime scene.

At 5:06 p.m., a B&B customer who had followed his wife to the garage
to drop off her car for service noticed a red pickup truck parked in
the middle of the driveway. When he entered the garage he saw two
bodies slumped together on the garage floor. A pool of blood ran
toward a police cruiser that was in the garage for repairs. The
customer heard moans coming from one or both men and then called 911
for help.

Windsor Locks police found Stevens dead next to his wife's green Honda
Accord. He had stayed late to put new tires on the car so he could
safely go on vacation the following week. He was shot once in the
head.

Stears had been pulling out of the parking lot in his red Ford pickup
truck, headed home. Rossi was inside the office closing the day's
books.

Stears was forced out of his truck and back into the garage, where he
was shot once in the head and once in the back. Rossi was shot twice
in the head. All three men were lying face down when they were shot.

Only Stears was alive when police arrived. He later died at Hartford
Hospital.

At 5:18, Cipriani called Mendez's apartment.

At 5:49 p.m., Castillo called Cipriani.

Between 6 and 6:15 p.m., an hour after the three victims were found on
the garage floor, Cipriani called Shelley Stears again. She was
driving home to Enfield from her job in Hartford. He asked her if she
had heard from her husband and if he was golfing.

At 6:57 p.m., Castillo called Cipriani's cellphone.

Less than a half-hour later, Enfield police went to Stears' home and
told her her husband had been shot.

At 10:13 p.m., Cipriani called the apartment.

Cipriani continued to call and receive calls from the Flatbush Avenue
apartment throughout the night and into the next morning until police
showed up at his door in Meriden around 4 a.m. July 31.

Police questioned him about the triple homicide at B&B Automotive. He
admitted having an affair with Stears and buying her a cellphone. He
admitted buying the house in Meriden for the two of them because she
was going to leave her husband. He told police he had heard of B&B
from Shelley Stears but that he had never been there.

Seven days later, on Aug. 7, he boarded an Alitalia flight to Rome
with a return ticket for Aug. 29.

Flight

August in Ceccano is hot and desolate. Everything suffers from the
heat. Red geraniums thirst for water in ceramic pots. Stray dogs pant
in shaded alleyways. Even the tall, stately cypress trees in the
cemetery wilt from the scorching sun.

Castello dei Conti, the abandoned 12th-century castle perched on a
hillside, looks as though it might crumble into the town haphazardly
situated below. The brick buildings with their terra cotta rooftops
give off steam and the cobblestones swell.

The town's steep, winding streets are empty. Shopkeepers have escaped
to cool mountain villages or to breezy Mediterranean beaches. Everyone
is on vacation. The old folks stay indoors behind clasped wooden
shutters until the sun goes down.

Cipriani arrived in Ceccano on such a day in August 2003. Jet lagged
from the eight-hour flight from New York, he drove an hour along a
nondescript Italian highway in an air-conditioned rental car from Rome
Fiumicino Airport to his hometown.

He brought along his luggage, a laptop computer and a small bag
containing several documents, including his European Union passport,
his driver's license, and the business card of a Hartford attorney.

Cipriani's arrival in Ceccano, where he visited every few years to see
his mother and sister, always produced a curiosity in the townspeople
whose standard evening entertainment is strolling in the central
square and sipping an espresso at the corner cafe.

Short and stocky with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Cipriani liked to
ride into town in expensive Italian and German rental cars with a
woman at his side. One year, he gave the old women who sit on
straw-caned chairs shelling peas in wicker baskets plenty to talk
about when he brought home an African American woman.

Gossip spreads quickly in the town of 22,000 people, and Cipriani's
two failed marriages were well-known. Some chalked them up to bad
choices. Italians have an expression, "E' più facile sposarsi male che
mangiare bene." It's easier to marry badly than to find a good meal.

But people in town say Cipriani was a different man this time. He
arrived alone and bloated. He had gained weight and his hair was cut
close to his head. From a distance, he looked bald.

"I didn't recognize him at first so I went outside the bar and he told
me he was here to see his mother," said Carlo Tanzini, who runs a
local bar.

On Aug. 15 and Aug. 21, Cipriani called his boss at Lepel Cap Sealing
in New York. His supervisor, Laurie Zettwoch, told police Cipriani
claimed he was in Italy caring for his sick 80-year-old mother and he
didn't know when he'd be back to work. She fired him days later, his
absence being the last straw in a series of insubordinate behaviors.

Cipriani remained in Ceccano the entire month of August, emerging from
his mother's house for a morning espresso at Cafe Tanzini and short
walks to Via Madonna Della Pace, where his sister, Vittoria, lives
with her husband and two children. A few times, he drove to Terracina,
a nearby beach town, to visit a male friend.

Every few days he bought Merit 100s cigarettes and international phone
cards from Giovanni Giorgi's tobacco shop.

Giorgi said Cipriani always came into the shop with a black computer
bag. He was struck by Cipriani's heavy Italian American accent.

"You'd think he'd lose his Italian accent after living in America for
20 years," Giorgi said.

Then Cipriani went home to search for women on the Internet.

In late September, Cipriani logged onto Match.com. A woman in Sora, a
town 20 miles away, had sent him an e-mail message.

It was Anna Cellucci.

They spoke on the telephone several times a week before meeting at
Cellucci's apartment, which she shares with her two children. Cipriani
told her he wanted a long-term relationship. He told Cellucci that
Shelley Stears had taken him for a ride, then left him after he bought
her the house in Meriden. The affair was over; there was no reason to
return to the United States.

As they dated through the fall, Cipriani charmed Cellucci's
12-year-old son by taking an interest in the boy's fascination with
American racing bikes. He took Cellucci to Ceccano to meet his mother
and sister and to visit his father's grave. He bought her jewelry and
a cellphone, and sometimes called her 10 times a day just to say hello
or ask if she needed anything from the market.

He began staying at Cellucci's house in Sora where she cooked him
dinner and did his laundry. It made him happy. American women don't
like to do housework, Cipriani once told Cellucci.

Back in Connecticut, the investigation into the Windsor Locks case was
stalled. For months, police interviewed witnesses and executed search
warrants at Cipriani's Meriden home and B&B Automotive, but all they
had were three bullet-ridden bodies.

Then, in early December, police got the big break in the case that
would lead to the arrests of Martinez, Castillo, Guzman - and to the
allegation that Cipriani was involved in the killings.

Jose Velazquez, Martinez's 45-year-old uncle, arrested on a drug
charge in New Britain, told police he had information to share about
the Windsor Locks case. Velazquez said that in early August he had
accepted $100 to give Guzman and Martinez a ride to Wallingford to
pick up a payoff at a Stop & Shop supermarket. Velazquez said he was
dumbfounded and angry when they said it was for the killings in
Windsor Locks.

According to police sources, authorities now believe that Cipriani had
been plotting for some time to have Robert Stears killed, but he
needed someone to pull the trigger. Police believe he purposely
searched Internet dating services for women with grown sons he might
recruit. Investigators found in Cipriani's computer hundreds of
thousands of e-mails he traded with women he had met online.

When Cipriani met Rose Mendez online, he found not one but three
possible disciples. Police say Cipriani told Martinez, Castillo and
Guzman that Robert Stears was a child molester who had to be stopped.

Sources say the murder-for-hire scheme included a "hit package" that
Cipriani allegedly gave the three men at one of their final meetings
before the killings. The package included prepaid phone cards and
directions to Stears' home and B&B Automotive. According to police
affidavits, a picture of Robert Stears with his 8-year-old son was
e-mailed to Rose Mendez's computer. Police have not been able to
determine where Cipriani got the photograph, which the men destroyed
after the killings.

Cipriani allegedly promised the men a $5,000 payoff to be split three
ways, according to law enforcement sources.

Martinez told police that he surveyed B&B with Cipriani sometime in
July. He told police Cipriani asked him to kill someone named Rob or
Bobby and gave him $1,500. Cipriani also gave Martinez $900 to buy a
9mm pistol, which Martinez said he purchased with Guzman and
test-fired in Hartford's Goodwin Park, according to police. Police
haven't found the gun.

Through a series of interviews, police have also determined that
several days before the homicides, a business owner on Spring Street
in Windsor Locks saw Cipriani's red Mitsubishi Diamante in front of
B&B.

Police know through search warrants of phone records that as early as
July 15, individuals staying at Mendez's Flatbush Avenue apartment
began using GTS Prepaid calling cards given to them and activated by
Cipriani. Cipriani bought the cards at a Darien rest stop on his
commute between Long Island and Meriden.

Martinez has told police he eventually backed out of the killing and
that Guzman agreed to do it. Castillo agreed to drive Guzman to B&B on
July 30. Guzman told police he was the triggerman.

Martinez, Castillo and Guzman have all pleaded not guilty.

Meanwhile, Cipriani told two people in Italy that police in
Connecticut had questioned him about the homicides: Peppino Del
Brocco, an old family friend, and Romano Misserville, an attorney in
Ceccano. He denied any involvement in the crime, claiming he was in
New York when the killings took place. He insisted he had a toll
receipt to prove it.

Misserville, a tall 70-year-old with chiseled features, is known in
the region as a tenacious criminal defense attorney and a former
senator fascinated with Benito Mussolini. His law offices in Ceccano
and in nearby Frosinone are decorated with busts and memorabilia of
the barrel-jawed fascist dictator.

Throughout the fall, Misserville assured Cipriani that as long as
Connecticut police didn't have a warrant for his arrest, he had
nothing to worry about.

Capture

On a cold January day, Cristiano Tatarelli, a mild-mannered police
chief with a perpetual smile, answered a call in his office in
Frosinone. It was the Servizio Centrale Operativo Della Polizia Di
Stato, the state police in Rome, instructing Tatarelli to find
Cipriani and monitor his activities.

Tatarelli's Squadra Mobile, an investigative unit specializing in the
surveillance and capture of dangerous criminals, quickly discerned
that Cipriani didn't fit the profile of an international murder
suspect, but that of a middle-aged man who lived with his elderly
mother and traveled in small circles. He used his own name to register
in hotels and paid for meals and lodging with his American Express
card.

In Sora, where he spent many nights at Cellucci's home, he never hid
from view. He walked to the local cafe and supermarket, often passing
by one of the three police stations located in Cellucci's
neighborhood.

Twice local police officers in Frosinone and Rome stopped him on
routine traffic checks, but there was no warrant to arrest him.

Tatarelli says police also kept tabs on Cipriani by tracing his
cellphone calls, as well as calls made to and from his mother's
telephone. He sometimes used a pay phone in front of the train station
a few blocks from Cellucci's home. Phone traces show that Cipriani was
in contact with Shelley Stears; David Compagnone, a Hartford attorney;
and a real estate agent in Bucharest, Romania, where he was looking to
rent a two-bedroom apartment.

Cipriani lived off his credit cards and stock investments. On April
15, he sold more than $7,000 of stock on Ameritrade and deposited the
money into his account at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Frosinone.

On April 13, after 3½ months of watching Cipriani, Tatarelli received
a formal request from the U.S. State Department to arrest him. With
the assistance of Interpol, on April 23, around 5 p.m., armed
undercover police officers holding a photograph of Cipriani positioned
themselves in unmarked cars three blocks from Cellucci's home. Another
group of officers waited at a pay phone down the street.

About three hours later, police surrounded Cipriani as he emerged with
Cellucci from the front lobby of her home.

Tatarelli says Cipriani denied he was Benedetto Cipriani, but, "We
knew it was him. A picture doesn't lie."

Police seized three cellphones from Cellucci's house, along with an
envelope with Cipriani's name on it containing $8,091 and 6,500 euros.
His laptop was at his mother's house in Ceccano.

Cipriani was arrested on a provisional arrest warrant, which allowed
Italian police to hold him for 45 days while U.S. authorities prepared
a formal extradition request for him to stand trial on three counts of
murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

But Connecticut investigators now say the arrest was premature, and
has hurt their chance to question Cipriani about what Stears did or
didn't know about the plan to kill her husband. Three state police
detectives and an investigator from the chief state's attorney's
office had planned to travel to Italy before an arrest so they could
interview Cipriani, sources say.

They hope Italy will approve Cipriani's extradition to stand trial in
Connecticut. Police have agreed to drop a capital felony charge
against him because Italy cannot, under its constitution, extradite to
a country in which a suspect faces the death penalty.

Misserville, Cipriani's attorney, said he will fight Cipriani's
extradition in Rome's Appellate Court on a number of grounds,
including that Cipriani never hid from police while in Italy.

"We are asking that [Cipriani] not be extradited to the United States
because right now the only testimony I have read accusing [Cipriani]
of the homicides is that of three Puerto Ricans who say they are
innocent," Misserville said.

Three judges can rule to extradite Cipriani or wait for more
information before deciding. Even if Italy agrees to extradite him,
Cipriani could file an appeal that could take months or years to
resolve.

Misserville wants Cipriani to stand trial in Italy where he believes
his client will get a fair trial, free from publicity and media
accounts.

"The court of pubic opinion is very powerful in the United States,"
Misserville said.

Connecticut State Police are bracing for the added cost of flying
detectives overseas for a lengthy court proceeding.

State's Attorney James Thomas is confident the state has provided
Italy with the necessary documentation to approve Cipriani's
extradition.

"I don't see why they wouldn't grant our request," Thomas said.

Letters From Prison

He is never alone. He shares a small cellblock with three other men.
He is under constant supervision. The Italian prison guards control
everything inside Casa Circondariale, the maximum-security prison
surrounded by barbed wire and grazing sheep.

A loudspeaker wakes him up at 7 a.m. The fluorescent lights come on.
He hears the sound of keys scraping in locks and toilets flushing.

At 10 a.m., the prisoners are let outside. Lunch at 11 a.m. Dinner at
5 p.m. Pasta and a meat dish. He usually cooks his own pasta on a hot
plate in his cell.

His sister, Vittoria, brings him food in plastic containers, but it
rarely gets past the prison guards.

He is tired all the time. He suspects the food in the mess hall is
laced with tranquilizers. Only the Muslim prisoners who are fed a
particular diet are free from the fatigue.

Lights out at 9 p.m.

Cipriani describes his monotonous days in prison in the long and
disjointed letters he writes to Anna Cellucci every day. His letters
are dramatic monologues from a frustrated and frightened man.

Letter 5H: "If I can't see you I have nothing left but desolation."

He blames other people for his arrest: Connecticut police, Guzman,
Castillo, Martinez and Shelley Stears. He's an innocent man accused of
a crime he didn't commit.

"I am innocent. I didn't do anything. What man would pay $5,000 to
kill another man? What person with a brain would do that, only a crazy
man," he writes.

In another letter: "I only pray to God for justice for all that she
[Shelley Stears] has done to me and all that she has done to other
people."

He's afraid of being put to death if extradited to the United States.

"I can't go to America, the police have set me up. I don't have faith
in what the police say or will say if I go back to America. I don't
want to return."

Sometimes, his self-centeredness is stark.

The first letter from prison arrived six days after the arrest.
Cellucci had not seen or heard from Cipriani since police ransacked
her house and took her lover away, screaming to her that he was a
murderer.

The Italian newspapers, her only source of information, printed
different accounts of Cipriani's life and arrest. One newspaper
reported he owned a bed-and-breakfast on Long Island. Another dubbed
him a Latin lover whose nine months on the lam ended in a phone booth
in Sora while he spoke to Shelley Stears in Connecticut.

Cellucci was alternating between confusion and anger when she opened
the letter.

"First I want to say I love you. My heart aches to see you in that
state and for the humiliation I caused you. I will never leave."

Then he goes on to complain: He doesn't have a chair to sit on. The
prison guards haven't returned his belongings. They took his wallet,
his Movado watch, a condom and a few euros in change.

Cellucci leafs through the three-ring binder where she keeps all of
Cipriani's letters. They all look the same, three to four pages long,
signed with salutations of love.

Cellucci answers every one of them. She has to stop him from trying to
kill himself again.

On May 31, after about a month in prison, Cipriani slit both his
wrists with a disposable razor, went to bed and covered himself with a
white bed sheet. He bled until a cellmate noticed the blood-soaked
sheet and alerted the guards.

"My letters serve to help him to live. He says they are light, a
breath of freedom," Cellucci says.

Cellucci closes the three-ring binder. The sun is about to set on the
lake. She puts her reading glasses in her purse.

She never knew a place called Windsor Locks existed before she met
Cipriani. She often thinks about the widows of the slain men, their
grief and sorrow.

She wants the person responsible for the killings to be brought to
justice. She believes Cipriani had nothing to do with the crime, and
she'll prove it by marrying him.

"I'm going to marry Benedetto," Cellucci says. "Whatever happens, I
will marry him. I will marry and show the world that he did nothing
wrong."

B&B

B&B Automotive has become for many a place of reflection, the starting
point on a long journey of healing. Like a shrine, people hoping to
connect to the slain men visit the empty garage at all hours of the
day.

"I go there because that's where Lorne's soul left his body," says
Linda Stevens, Lorne Stevens' widow. "That's where he was taken from
me. It's where I feel the closest to him."

Deborah Ahrens, Robert Stears' sister, goes to the garage in the
middle of the night. Unable to walk down the driveway where her
brother was forced from his pickup truck into the garage, she stays in
her car near the entrance.

"My brother's last moments on Earth were there," Ahrens says.

For Leslie Hinckley, the garage is the place he skirted death.

An employee at B&B Automotive, Hinckley rushed out of the garage that
hot July day at 4:30 p.m. to keep a dental appointment.

Then something drew him back inside to offer a warm goodbye to his
co-workers. A half-hour later, the men were shot.

"I try to make the most out of my days. There is a lot of hurt that
wasn't there before. I lost three of my best friends," says Hinckley.

In a town of 9 square miles, everyone seemed to know Stears, Rossi and
Stevens. They were good-hearted men who coached Little League and
fished on weekends. They were generous and kind. Stears and Rossi
would fix your car at cost if you were low on cash. They loaned out
their flatbed truck for the town's Memorial Day parade every year.

What many remember most about the men is their laughter. The men would
drag race abandoned cars in the garage's parking lot. They were like
kids, always cracking jokes.

People liked to hang out with them at B&B. Even the police officers
who had their cruisers serviced at the garage stopped by to socialize.

The garage was like their second home. For years, Rossi and Stears and
the men they employed kept a ritual of eating lunch together every day
regardless of their schedules.

"It was like the Waltons," said Hinckley. "We made sure we all ate
together. I don't even eat dinner with my family every night."

B&B Automotive was Stears' and Rossi's dream. They opened the garage
in the late 1980s after working together in another garage in Windsor.
The initials of their first names, Bobby and Barry, made up the name
of their business.

Stears and Rossi were more like brothers than business partners. They
shared the same skin. They bowled together, golfed together and fished
together.

They were so close they shared a life insurance policy that created a
sort of double indemnity situation. In addition to their personal life
insurance policies, they had a second policy with Prudential Life,
which stipulated that if they both died at the same time, their wives
were to split the life insurance proceeds evenly.

Prudential Life, which cooperated with state police for several months
to hold off paying the policy, finally paid Shelley Stears and Anne
Rossi more than $300,000 each this summer.

In the wake of the killings, the closeness shared by the three men has
devolved into complex emotions of anger and blame and suspicion among
the widows and the victims' families.

After the killings, Anne Rossi filed lawsuits against Shelley Stears
over the assets of B&B, which have since been settled in court.

Many are angry with Shelley Stears, blaming the deaths on her affair
with Cipriani.

Stears has refused to talk about Cipriani with the other widows. Their
information is limited to the police affidavits they have read and
reread.

Stears did not attend a memorial service for the three men in August,
and has missed some of the trial proceedings for Guzman, Castillo and
Martinez.

Ahrens maintains a relationship with Stears to be close to her
brother's children. But she often wonders why Shelley Stears didn't
end her affair with Cipriani sooner. "I can't understand why it didn't
end when it became noticeable to her that he was dangerous," Ahrens
says.

Ahrens' 17-year-old son, Dan Ahrens, could have been killed, too, that
day. He was working at the garage, but left at 2 p.m.

Hinckley blames Shelley Stears for altering his life. "Three of my
best friends are gone because she was unfaithful to her husband. If
you are unhappy with your marriage get a divorce, move on."

Stears declined to be interviewed for this story. Her attorney, Peter
M. Berry, said his client has cooperated with the police investigation
from the start and is trying to deal with the loss of her husband, he
said.

"She is still very upset about her husband's death. It's been a
difficult year in a lot of respects," Berry said.

He doesn't know why state investigators want to question Cipriani
about what Stears may have known about the killings.

"As far as I know, they are done. My understanding is they've already
looked into that and that they've wrapped things up. The people they
suspected are in custody," Berry said.

Cipriani remains a mystery to many of the family members. He holds the
answers to their questions about why the three men had to die. But he
is a continent away. Italy for many of them is a faraway place, a
nation with its own justice system, the place Cipriani fled for
protection.

They feel trapped in a twilight zone of bureaucratic diplomacy
governed by international treaties with no regard for their suffering.

They want Cipriani to stand trial in Connecticut, but fear his
extradition will take years.

"I can't even get an answer about what happens to him if he doesn't
get extradited. Will he spend time in jail in Italy?" Ahrens asks.

For months, Ahrens has searched the Internet to learn about Italy's
judicial system. She's translated Italian newspaper articles about his
arrest in Italy. She wonders if Cipriani is related to the Cipriani
family in Italy that owns luxury hotels. Does he have mob ties?
Stears, Rossi and Stevens are named in
RickPorrello'sAmericanMafia.com, a website listing alleged mob hits,
misses, disappearances and deaths. Connecticut authorities say they
have investigated possible ties but found no connection between
Cipriani and the Mafia.

Ahrens and others want to know who has contacted Cipriani in prison.
None of them has ever heard of Anna Cellucci.

Many of the family members know what Cipriani looks like. Police
showed them Cipriani's driver's license. But they want to see him in
person.

"The damage this man has done to my life is immeasurable. My life was
perfect before Barry died," Rossi says.

Stevens has thought many times about flying to Italy to ask Cipriani
why her husband had to die.

"He was my life," she says. "Why did you have to take him away from
me?"

Courant Staff Writers Jeffrey B. Cohen and Dave Altimari contributed
to this story.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
ctnow.com/archives.
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PHOTOS
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[Benedetto Cipriani]
Benedetto Cipriani

[Rose Emily Mendez]
Rose Emily Mendez
(TOM BROWN)

[Anna Cellucci]
Anna Cellucci
(GREGORIO BORGIA / AP)

[Ceccano, Italy]
Ceccano, Italy
(EDOARDO PALMESI)

[Casa Circondariale]
Casa Circondariale
(EDOARDO PALMESI)

[Wedding Day]
Wedding Day

[Shelley and Robert Stears]
Shelley and Robert Stears

[Crime Scene]
Crime Scene
(MARK MIRKO)

[Family Mourns]
Family Mourns
(PATRICK RAYCRAFT)

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GRAPHICS
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[A Trail Of Murder]
A Trail Of Murder

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TIMELINE
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AUG. 7, 1955 -- Benedetto Cipriani is born in Ceccano, Frosinone,
Italy.

1970S AND 1980S -- Cipriani works as a buyer at Agusta, S.p.A in
Frosinone, Italy.

1980 -- Cipriani meets Joann Strangolagalli on an Alitalia flight from
the U.S. to Italy. They marry in 1981. Nine months later they separate
and divorce.

JULY 2001 -- Cipriani meets Shelley Stears on americansingles.com.

JANUARY 2002 -- Cipriani and Stears look at a lot on Kyle Court in
Meriden with a Waterbury real estate agent. Cipriani later purchases
the lot for $60,000 and has a $245,000 colonial?style home built for
himself and Stears.

MARCH 2002 -- Construction of the Meriden home begins. Cipriani rents
an apartment at Bigelow Commons in Enfield to be close to Stears.

JUNE 2002 -- Cipriani moves into the Meriden home. Stears refuses to
move in with Cipriani.

JUNE-OCTOBER 2002 -- Cipriani repeatedly calls David Orsini, the
builder of his Meriden home, and asks him to call Shelley to convince
her to be with Cipriani.
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Aussie Lurker

unread,

Oct 4, 2004, 5:38:33 AM10/4/04

"ienjball" <ienj...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3e86d7aa.04100...@posting.google.com...

> From Here To Italy, A Trail Of Murder
> In Windsor Locks, families still gather at B&B Automotive to mourn the
> dead. In Hartford, a mother remains distraught over her jailed son. In
> Italy, Benedetto Cipriani sits in a prison outside Rome.
>

VERY interesting read, thanks for posting it.

Aussie Lurker

0 new messages