One of the most disgusting, criminal, shocking episodes in Italian judicial history
Huffington Post Italia
By Susanna Schimperna
August 6, 2024
It was the night between 5 and 6 August 1970 when, at the home of William Berger and his wife Carolyn, between Positano and Praiano, on the Amalfi Coast, the carabinieri and the financial police burst in, probably called by the locals who fantasized about the free and fun life of that couple, filling themselves with hatred.
Berger is forty-two years old, he is an actor of Austrian origin and is known in Italy for having shot western films (the spaghetti western genre sees him appreciated as the protagonist), but also The Harem and The Man of the Five Balloons by Marco Ferreri, Face to Face by Sergio Sollima, Today to me ... tomorrow to you by Tonino Cervi and the small cult 5 Dolls for the August Moon by Mario Bava. Carolyn or Carol Lobravico is above all an actress of the Living Theater and has worked less in the cinema, her most important film is Ombre scorventi di Caiano, in which she appears in a secondary part while her husband is the protagonist.
The police search the house, and the people present, nine including Berger and Carol, and take away 0.9 grams of cannabis, 37 plastic syringes, the hosts and all the guests except for one girl, strangely because the cannabis belongs to her. Carol protests, explains that the syringes are necessary for a therapy against the after-effects of viral hepatitis and not to inject who knows what drug, which in the other hand is not found. They don't listen to it. The men will be locked up in one criminal asylum, the women in another. William was soon transferred to the prison of Salerno.
Carolyn is very sick, getting worse and worse. At a certain point she begins to scream in pain and again they do not listen to her, on the contrary, for four days they tie her to the bed. The magistrate authorizes hospitalization in a private facility "chosen by the relatives", too bad that they do not say anything to her husband and therefore she remains there, until they decide to move her, on October 2, to the Cardarelli hospital in Naples. It is too late. They operate on her; the intestine is already perforated. He dies at the Incurables. Maybe she had peritonitis, but we will never know why they will bury her without an autopsy. William will be able to see her for five minutes, while she is already dying and weighs 40 kilos.
In the meantime, many have moved in favor of Berger. In America, Allen Ginsberg chairs a committee that upholds his innocence, and in Italy the defense lawyer Dario Incutti, destined to become a true prince of the Bar, plays a decisive role. Years later, Incutti would declare: "A dramatic story. There was a bad law that equated the small drug user with the big dealer." Small detail, however: they had found only that scant gram of drugs, at the Berger house. Which was grass. Which did not even belong to him.
Eight months later, in April 1971, all the defendants, including William, were acquitted for lack of evidence. Thus ends, with enormous pain on the part of many and an atrocious and avoidable death, one of the most disgusting, criminal, shocking episodes in Italian judicial history.
[For further reading on William Berger and this tragic event check out House of the Angels: Love Notes from the Asylum by Timothy Wilson and William Berger (1973) published by The Viking Press, New York]
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