About midnight, while a thunder-storm was raging, Virginia, accompanied by her usual associates, Ottavia, Benedetta, Silvia, and Candida, entered the room where the girl was confined.

They were followed by Osio, holding in his hand a heavy instrument of wood and iron, called _piede di bicocca_, which he had snatched up in the convent outhouse.

He found Caterina lying face downward on the bed, and smashed her skull with a single blow.

The body was conveyed by him and the nuns into the fowl-house of the sisters, whence he removed it on the following night by the aid of Benedetta into his own dwelling.

From evidence which afterwards transpired, Osio decapitated the corpse, concealed the body in a sort of cellar, and flung the head into an empty well at Velate.
The disappearance of Caterina just before the visitation of Monsignor Barca, roused suspicion; and, though a murder was not immediately apprehended, the guilty associates felt that the cord of fate was being drawn around them.