The ROTHSCHILD and the SNOWSTORM

Four decades after Jeannette May's remains were found on an Italian mountainside, the authorities have reopened the investigation into who or what-killed the former Lady de Rothschild.Was it a kidnapping? A mafia hit? Or have the rumors been wrong all along?

-  JOE POMPEO

In America we have 48 Hours and Dateline. In Italy they have Quarto Grado, a lurid crime newscast that promises viewers "journalistic analysis of some of the most recent and perhaps too quickly forgotten unsolved mysteries." One such unsolved mystery came roaring back to life this past November, when Quarto Grado delivered a tantalizing scoop during a segment titled "Il Giallo della Baronessa"--the mystery of the baroness.

"For years it was filed away," the narrator proclaimed, "almost buried, under the same snow that fell at the time on the Sibillini Mountains, where it all began. A double murder of two women, the former English baroness Jeannette Bishop, ex-wife of the banker Rothschild, and her assistant, Gabriella Guerin. An unsolved mystery, at least until now."

Quarto Grado had learned that officials were reopening the case, dormant since 1989. A prosecutor had arranged new hearings for 20 witnesses in Sarnano, a remote town about 150 miles northeast of Rome in the mountainous province of Macerata.

"Today the investigation returns to those mountains," the segment concluded. "The moment of truth has arrived."

For more than four decades intrigue has shrouded the strange tale of Jeannette Bishop May and Gabriella Guerin, who disappeared in a snowstorm one night and were found dead more than a year later. Their story was a media sensation in Italy and England, with conspiratorial elements that wouldn't feel out of place in a Dan Brown thriller: a Christie's heist, a Sardinian kidnapping gang, the apparent mafia murder of a banker, and the disappearance of a teenage girl, each tied to the Vatican. Not to mention the fact that Jeannette had once been married to one of the world's richest men, from one of the world's most powerful families: Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.