Angelina Napolitano

By Justin Brett

While the Sault is a small city and typically seen as a friendly one, unfortunately, crime can and does still happen here. This isn't always historic, obviously, but one famous crime became the subject of debate when it happened, and is still somewhat relevant today. That is the case of Angelina Napolitano.

In almost every way, Angelina was a perfectly normal woman. She was born in Naples, Italy in the late 1800s, and as an adult immigrated to the United States before later moving to Canada with her husband, Pietro Napolitano. The couple had four children together around this period, and Angelina was pregnant with a fifth.

All was not well with their marriage, however. Pietro worked as a labourer, but was unable to make enough money at the job for the family to buy their own house, especially with the children they had. In order to increase their income, it seems he tried to threaten Angelina into prostitution, verbally as well as physically. Finally, Angelina had had enough: after one last time he threatened her following his shift, Angelina struck Pietro with an axe as he slept, killing him.

What she did after may seem unusual for a murderer, as Angelina confessed to a neighbour and waited for the police. Naturally, a trial was held. The prosecution had a far stronger case, with nine witnesses present, while Angelina only had herself. Her lawyer was also an issue, as Angelina obviously didn't have the money to hire one herself, and Uriah McFadden, the one appointed to her, only had one day to prepare a defense. The precedent being different at the time also worked against her, as a history of abuse like what she had suffered was not considered admissible in court, harming McFadden's attempts to engender sympathy for her from the jury.

Angelina was found guilty, and despite the jury's recommendation for clemency, the Judge present sentenced her to death by hanging, with time allowed for her to give birth to her fifth child. That may have been where the case ended, but by this time the story had become national, even global news, with many letters and petitions being sent in demanding clemency for the woman. This was during a time when women had begun looking for suffrage, and the idea of a woman being killed for ridding herself of an abusive husband wasn't something that was ever going to be ignored.

There were countless different opinions of what the right consequences for Angelina were, and many reflect the standards of the period. One columnist of the Sault Star echoed a very common sentiment at the time that Italians like her were simply violent in general, going as far as to say her execution might teach them a lesson about the consequences of such behaviour. This type of rhetoric is still quite common today, but it may be a surprise to learn a group as common as Italians were the subject of it.

Angelina's character as a woman was also attacked using then-current standards. Sometime before the murder occurred, Pietro had attacked her with a knife during one of their arguments, an incident he received a lenient sentence for. A large reason why is due to Angelina taking on a male border during a period Pietro was away, something the Justice in charge of his trial considered 'provocation' on her account.

This border was brought up in her own trial later on by the presiding judge as evidence of her poor character, as well as articles of the time, with the Sault Star going as far as to say her husband was the better of the two in the same breath as acknowledging he had attacked her. The Star in general seems to have had a vested interest in the proper sentence for her, to the extent that one letter to the editor objected to their reporter misrepresenting the facts at hand.

On the other hand, even defenses of Angelina can be seen as a bit old-fashioned. Some of the letters and articles argued she should not be put to death due to the murder being the only method an 'uneducated' woman of 'little intelligence' could see of defending herself. Some petitions from men's groups argued for leniency because Pietro had failed in his role as her husband by trying to order her into prostitution. It seemed like everyone had their own opinion on the matter.

Eventually, these petitions and outcries succeeded, and Angelina's sentence was reduced from death to simply life imprisonment in the women's wing of Kingston Prison, a large prison with a long history that housed many of Canada's criminals. Not much is known about Angelina's time in prison, but it seems to have been unpleasant enough for her to write regularly to the Ministry of Justice asking for her freedom. Others did too, though the outcry from her initial sentencing had mostly died down in the meantime, and the prison's staff themselves described her as a model prisoner.

This was enough for her to be released on parole just eleven years into her sentence, but afterward, Angelina's story became more unclear. There is no formal record for her movements after she left Kingston, or information on when, if at all, she reunited with her four children (the fifth, sadly, passed away not long after their birth). It doesn't appear that she broke the law ever again in a serious way, but there is also no record of any other part of her life.

Despite all this news coverage, Angelina's story could very well have faded from public memory. This all happened during the early 1900s, so there is hardly any evidence beyond descriptions of the event from newspapers and the like, and even most pictures of Angelina's likeness are sketched recreations. Something happened to prevent that, however, as in 2005 Angelina's story was adapted into a movie adapting the events, named Finding Angelina.

The movie was filmed in the Sault itself within just two weeks, and even starred some local actors. Originally shown at film festivals and other events within the country, Angelina's story managed to reach across countries for a second time, as the movie's popularity grew enough to appear in a Los Angeles film festival and be distributed internationally. Appropriately enough, it even received a run in Canadian theatres, including the Sault's local one.

Finding Angelina also has the distinction of helping to locate some information of what happened to the woman herself after leaving Kingston prison. Not long after the film itself was shot, but before it had been released on DVD, the filmmakers were able to locate her grave in St. Mary's Cemetery in Kingston, as it seems she spent the last parts of her life in that area. Ironically, despite the fervor her initial sentence arose, her gravesite was mostly abandoned when the filmmakers found it, and nearly overgrown with weeds. Whether she reunited with her children at any point seems to unfortunately still be unknown.

Angelina's story is a very fascinating one, as it happened just at the right time to become a microcosm of women's issues in that period, and arguably showed the character of a lot of people depending on how they felt about the situation. With that in mind, arguably the most fascinating part of Angelina's story is how little it tells us about Angelina herself. We know what she did and why, but almost nothing about what she was thinking, or what kind of person she
was. The title Finding Angelina feels very appropriate, then, as while the title may have been literal, it feels like the true character behind these events still hasn't been found, and may not ever be.