The judge ordered the clerk to show Cocchi his confession. The clerk scrambled to complete it, then handed it over. It was dated June 25, 1917. Cocchi signed it.
When they were done, Cocchi seemed relieved. “I feel myself acquitted morally, but I am ready to undergo the legal penalty of my country,” he said. Cocchi had two requests. He wanted to see his father so that he might relate a message to his wife in America. He also wanted to see the newspapers of the day. The judge refused both. Once he and his clerk left, Cocchi stood up and walked to the far end of his cell. Readying himself, Cocchi took a breath. He ran as fast as he possibly could and launched himself, headfirst, into the opposing stone wall.
*
In America, news of Cocchi’s confession was met with towering black headlines. People wanted him deported directly to the chair at Sing Sing with no stops between. As soon as Cocchi’s confession was made public, Maria Cocchi announced that she had more to say. This time, she was questioned by the assistant DA, John T. Dooling. She had not been arrested following the discovery of Ruth’s body, but she had been detained. She was not sure what the difference was. Her eyes were dark and heavy from not sleeping. Her husband, for he was still that word to her, had been found halfway around the world. The first time she tried to testify, she was too agitated. She fainted and had to rest. Maria was still being held with her one-year-old daughter and it was taking its toll. She was going to “tell everything.”
For four hours, Maria talked in a loud, rapid pitch. She was in a greatly excited state. She told of her husband’s many love affairs, both perceived and real, and his flirtations with the girls on the street. When Dooling pushed her on her husband’s whereabouts on the day Ruth Cruger disappeared, Maria remembered that Edward Fish had begged her to let him stay in the bicycle shop alone after Alfredo had fled to Italy. Maria told him no. Maria also told Dooling that within forty-eight hours after her husband’s disappearance someone had forcibly entered the motorcycle shop at night. She thought it was Henry’s Cruger’s private detectives, but now she wasn’t so sure.
In Italy, Cocchi was recovering from his head injury in his cell. His jailers took away any towels, suspenders, bedsheets, and utensils left in the room. They threatened him with a straitjacket. His guard detail was increased. There were also rumors that certain factions of Cocchi’s family were going to try to help him escape. There had been only one escape in the fifty-year history of the prison. Just three years ago, a lone prisoner succeeded in twisting free the iron bars in his window. The prisoner got to the roof and leaped to the nearby church tower, where he concealed himself in the confine until he could slip away into the Italian night.
Because of Cocchi’s suicide attempt, the judge had ordered Professor Augusto Murri, Italy’s famous nerve specialist, to gauge the prisoner’s fragile mental state. Murri subjected Cocchi to an extensive examination. “The prisoner is now physically in a bad condition and mentally weak,” Murri concluded. But his conclusions were clear: “Although he has spoken of suicide, he hasn’t the courage to commit it,” said Murri.
As Cocchi lay in his cell, dazed and slowed, taking turns mumbling to himself and singing out loud, his friends and family in Italy started a fund to halt his extradition. Cocchi had earlier confessed to a friend that he was terrified of the American electric chair and all the souls it had sucked dry. Some wondered if his fear of the chair might have been the cause of his detailed confession in the first place. If found guilty in Italy, he would face a long imprisonment, but he would remain alive.
In the wake of Cocchi’s confession, the Bologna police began a thorough investigation of his mysterious life. When Cocchi left Italy ten years before, he was in love with Maria Magrini, a servant to the Cocchi family in Bologna. Alfredo promised Maria that he would marry her if she followed him to America. Cocchi left, and she eventually did follow, with a female friend in tow. Alfredo and Maria were married soon after, on October 3, 1907. Days later, Maria Cocchi accused her new husband of cheating on her. Cocchi wrote a long letter to his family confessing to numerous vague misdeeds, but he promised to mend his ways. “She’s so jealous,” he wrote of his new bride.
There was also some uncertainty as to how Cocchi had even made it back across the Atlantic. Cocchi said that he sailed on the French ship Manchester, under the name Louis Lerdi. No one asked for his passport. Other evidence put him on the Giuseppe Verdi from Jersey City using someone else’s passport, though the picture was of Cocchi, taken at a New York photographer’s office a week after Ruth disappeared. Cocchi supposedly made efforts to escape from the ship at several ports but finally succeeded at Naples. All of these different stories claimed to be true.
Last November, Cocchi had written his family to say that he was thinking of returning home to join the colors of the Italian army. Shortly after Ruth vanished, a letter arrived at the Italian Cocchis from Maria. She said that Alfredo had eloped with a girl who was eighteen years old and had taken all of her money, all fifteen dollars of it. She worried about Athos, who was “almost dead from privation and fright.”
In his private office, Judge Zucconi seemed disturbed. He was keenly aware of contradictions in Cocchi’s confession. What Cocchi had described in his cell was an instantaneous crime of passion. What they had found in New York was the work of something else. Which man did they have in that cell? The picture they were learning of Cocchi in Italy was that of “an unbalanced adventurer with anarchistic tendencies.” A close investigation of letters revealed that Cocchi was suffering from “a horrible type of degeneracy manifested by attacks on children.” Zucconi couldn’t trust him, so he couldn’t underestimate him.