In the park on the evening of June 6, 2000, the three girls made Mainetti kneel and shouted abuses at her. One girl beat the sister with a brick and another pushed her head repeatedly into a wall.
They took turns stabbing Mainetti 19 times with a kitchen knife. They had, according to Italian media reports, intended to stab her 18 times, six times each, to form by their violence the number 666.
Sr. Mainetti prayed throughout the attack and asked God to forgive the girls for their actions.
Her last words, according to some accounts of her death, were “Lord, forgive them.”
Mainetti was the superior of the Sisters of the Cross convent in Chiavenna, which was devoted to helping juvenile delinquents. The girls who killed Mainetti, however, had no prior history of crime or violence.
They confessed that they had originally planned to kill the parish priest, but decided that because he was larger, it would prove too difficult. Investigators said the girls’ notebooks were filled Satanic writings, and that they had made a blood oath some months earlier.
The killers have since been freed from prison, and have started families — changing their names and moving to large Italian cities, according to Corriere della Serra.
Their victim was born Teresina Elsa Mainetti in Colico, Italy on August 20, 1939. She was the youngest of ten children; her mother died in childbirth. She entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Cross at 18 years old.
She dedicated her life to children, young people, and families in the towns of Vasto, Rome, and Parma before moving to Chiavenna in 1984.
Mainetti was well known in her small town for her social and charitable commitment to dispossessed youth and poor people.
