22. Sloppiness Leads to the Unraveling of a Family Murder Plot
Unfortunately for Beatrice Cenci and her accomplices, they did a sloppy job of covering their tracks. The fatal wound in the count’s head did not correspond to an injury sustained from a fall, and while Olimpio and Marzio had taken the bloody bed sheets, they had neglected to wipe blood spatters from elsewhere in the count’s bedroom. It did not take the investigators long to discover the murder of Francesco Cenci. Nor did it take them long to realize that his own family members committed the crime.
The papal authorities arrested Beatrice, her stepmother Lucrezia, her brothers Giacomo and twelve-year-old Bernardo, and her lover and hit man, Olimpio, and tossed them all in jail. The other hit man, Marzio, fled into the mountains, but they tracked him down. One of Count Cenci’s relatives executed him. The people of Rome, who knew just what kind of a horrible man Count Francesco Cenci had been, figured that he deserved his fate. They sympathized with Beatrice and her co-conspirators, and applauded her vengeance. However, the authorities saw things differently.
