10 Cold-Blooded Details Surrounding Pupetta Maresca, The Vengeful Mob Wife Who Shot Down Her Husband’s Killer In Broad Daylight

6 /10 Vendetta!

The grieving wife, who had so dearly hoped to live in peace with her husband, was crushed on hearing the news.

She furthermore was sure that the police knew who her husband’s killer was (she knew!), but that they were unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

So, alongside her favorite brother, Ciro, Pupetta drove to Naples. On broad daylight, as her husband’s killer had done, the heavily pregnant woman opened fire on Esposito with the Smith & Wesson .38 that Simonetti had symbolically given to her on their wedding day when he pledged to change his life.

5 /10 Pregnant And Arrested

Two months later, she was found by the police and arrested, alongside Carlo Gaetano Orlando and her brother Ciro Maresca, and taken into custody in the prison of Poggioreale, Naples. There she gave birth to her and Simonetti’s child: a son, by the name of Pasquale Jr.

Only four years later she was finally put on trial, and by then, the public opinion had already divided itself into two groups: the Pupettisti, who supported her, and the Antipupettisti, who (to put it mildly) weren’t.

4 /10 And The Crowd Goes Wild!

But her trial, independently of the public debate on her actions, was universally considered a cause célèbre on account of her defiance against her judges.

In front of a massive audience (both inside and outside the courthouse, where the sound of microphones used inside reached the expectant crowd), she declared to the judges: “I would do it again!” upon which the audience broke into cheers.

Questioned on the events, she further stated why she had held the gun with two hands: “I was afraid I would miss.”

3 /10 Madame Camorra

Very soon, “Madame Camorra,” as she was nicknamed by the national and international press covering the events, started receiving hundreds of marriage proposals.

Even a now probably lost song was written about her, La Legge D’onore. The beautiful murderer received as well, however, a sentence of eighteen years in prison, alongside her brother’s twelve years and Carlo Gaetano Orlando’s thirty years.

She would later be pardoned in 1965, after which she married another Mafia boss and continued a career in crime.

2 /10 Pupetta Today

Today, Assunta “Pupetta” Maresca, an eighty-five-year-old woman, lives quietly between Castellammare and Sorrento’s apartments.

She has made some public apparitions, mostly to acknowledge films and series in which she has been portrayed as recently as 2013. Her son with Simonetti, Pasquale Jr., died in 1974 during an ambush.

He had pursued the same criminal career as his father; she still has her twins, Roberto and Antonella, with another Mafia figure, Umberto Ammaturo.

1 /10 A Popular Figure

Numerous works of art reference the life of Pupetta, out of which stand the 1958 film La Sfida (The Challenge), the 1967 film Delitto a Posillipo (Crime In Posillipo), in which she portrays herself in a modified account of the events that made her famous, and the 1982 TV film Il Caso Pupetta Maresca (The Case Of Pupetta Maresca), in which Alessandra Mussolini portrayed her, none other than the granddaughter of the ex-dictator of Fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini.