2023-08-26 08:55:00
“Yamile” is a name of Arabic origin that means beautiful, graceful woman. This was also the name of the restaurant owned by Emilia “La Turca” Basil, the woman who became infamous in the 1970s as the “Dismemberer of San Cristóbal”, following it was discovered that she had murdered her lover and served her leftovers to diners in your business.
To untangle the macabre story, you can start at the end, on March 28, 1973. That day, a neighbor got fed up with the “bad smell” that came from the garbage that Basil threw at the door of the premises and denounced it. The horror would come to light a while later, when a couple of troops went to the place and found the origin of such a stench: hidden among the restaurant’s waste was the torso of a man.
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The investigation did not take long to reach “La Turca”, that woman born in Beirut who had become known in the neighborhood for the pots, stews and Arab empanadas that she cooked and served every noon to her clients, many of them employees of the then Teleonce (today Telefé), which was located a few blocks from “Yamile”.
Basil made no effort to dodge his punishment. As soon as they went for her, he confessed to the crime of José Petriella, a 60-year-old Italian immigrant with whom he had an extramarital affair. She said that she had killed him because he was threatening to tell her husband regarding him.
The case was solved. The cook had easily assumed responsibility for her in the act and she came to trial accused of the murder of her lover. She did not show any regret, but before the judge that she was going to decide her fate, she lamented: “I did not have anyone to take my packages in a car. That was my misfortune; if not, I can assure you that they would not discover me anymore”. Justice sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
“The Turk” Basil
Emilia Basil was born in Lebanon in 1911 and arrived in Argentina in the ’40s in search of a better future. She spent time and met Felipe Coronel Rueda, whom she married and had three daughters.
The family moved to a house on Garay street at 2200 and they also set up their restaurant there, but since the money they had at that time was not enough to cover the total value of the property, they “negotiated” that its original owner, “Tano” Petriella might continue living in a little room in the back until they paid off the debt.
By 1973, the business was not billing as well as it needed to be, and that was when Basil began a sexual relationship with Petriella, four years older than her and single. The deal worked well for the two for several months, until the early hours of Saturday, March 24 of that year. That was the day that “La Turca” mightn’t take it anymore and that Petriella “disappeared”.
The crime
Petriella had begun to complain. She not the money. What the “Tano” wanted was to see her more and more frequently. To such an extent that he began to harass her.
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But the straw that broke the camel’s back for Basil was when the man demanded that they have sexual relations once more under the threat of asking the husband for the full amount of the debt and, furthermore, revealing the relationship the two of them had.
So the cook first pushed her lover away and then, as he persisted in his attempt to get her to bed, she slipped a cord around his neck and squeezed with brutal force for little more than a minute. That was how long it took him to realize that Petriella was already dead.
The horror
According to the chronicles of the time, following strangling his lover, Basil put the body in a wooden box and four days later took it out to the street along with the rest of the garbage with the intention of getting rid of the evidence. .
Only, when her neighbor reported the foul smell and the police came to the scene, the only thing they found of Petriella was the torso. The fate of the rest of her remains was what made the case one of the most chilling in local history.
As it turned out, Basil had dismembered the rest of the body, boiled it in different pots and then served those remains as part of the dishes he offered to his restaurant customers.
The confession
“My husband and my daughters had nothing to do with it, they knew nothing. I went alone ”, were the first words that Basil uttered when he had to occupy the defendant’s dock before Judge Juan Carlos Liporace. He also clarified: “I did it and I would do it once more a thousand times.”
“I hanged him, dismembered and boiled his head three days in a row. I got tired of looking at her while she was boiling. She did it and she would do it once more, ”she reaffirmed in her statement“ La Turca ”.
If he had any regrets for what he had done, he didn’t show it. Instead, he did regret not having had a car to dispose of the body of his lover. If she had, he told her, it would have been the perfect crime.
It might have been, but it wasn’t. The Justice sentenced her to 10 years in prison for simple homicide and Emilia Basil was only released on parole in November 1979. She was never heard from once more.
Killer women
Emilia Basil also came to the small screen in the form of fiction. Her case became the fifth chapter of the first season of the Argentine television series Mujeres asesinas, which aired on Eltrece in 2005.
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