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.

Support the show