Today, Neutaconkanut Hill is a land conservancy with great dedication being made to preserve its beautiful oak and hickory forests, its wildflowers and meadows, and the animal life that peacefully resides there. But peace wasn’t always found in Neutaconkanut Hill and what the land turned up wasn’t always beautiful.

The area was once the site of winter encampments for nomads, often referred to as “gypsies.” One man named Angelo Coppola – who may have been more of a general wanderer than a nomad – arrived in the area in March of 1923. Deciding to stake a career in gardening, he bought a plot of land on Ludlow Street from the J.W. Wilbur Company and settled down with his horse, chickens and several dogs. Everyone in the vicinity referred to Angelo as “Gypsy.”

The summer after his arrival, police learned that Angelo’s dogs were not licensed. The police chief went to the Ludlow Street property, which Angelo owned, to serve him with a warrant for the offense. Angelo was apologetic. Unable to pay for licensing his dogs, he promised he would get rid of them if the chief would refrain from arresting him. As the chief looked around, he was overcome with sympathy. Angelo took on odd jobs when he could find them but otherwise had no form of employment. He lived outside where he slept in a bed hidden within thick bushes and surrounded by flimsy walls of packing cases, and cooked on a stove he’d constructed out of rocks. A few hundred feet to the north was a well where he could access fresh water. The chief dropped the charges and left the property.

Over the next several weeks, the Johnston police were contacted numerous times by neighbors of Angelo’s who accused him of raiding their gardens at night. Several area farmers were furious regarding the alleged thefts but there was no proof pointed at the man they called Gypsy. Toward the end of that August, when scheduled payments on the Ludlow Street land were not forthcoming after the initial down payment of $200, an agent for the J.W. Wilbur Company contacted the Johnston Police and asked that an order be served upon Angelo, directing him to vacate the property for non-payment. An officer went to serve Angelo with the order to vacate but was unable to find him. An investigation into his whereabouts showed that no one had seen him for a few days.    

At about 5:30 on the night of Sept. 7, 39-year-old laborer Francesco Fegatelli went to fetch a drink of water from the well not far from Angelo’s secluded encampment. Francesco — an Italian native who stood just a bit over five feet tall and bore a distinctive mole on his forehead — lived in Silver Lake but operated a garden market on Ludlow Street. After lifting the well’s wooden cover, Francesco leaned forward to drop the pail down into the 15-foot deep hollow darkness which was filled without about three feet of water. Suddenly he stopped and stared. What appeared to be a pair of men’s shoes were sticking up above the water. He leaned down to get a better look and noticed legs on the other end of the shoes.

Francesco contacted the police who soon arrived at the scene. Twenty-four-year-old Bennie DeAngelis — a millhand who resided on Union Avenue — agreed to be lowered into the well so that he could tie a rope around the legs of the unknown victim. It was discovered that the body was weighted down with a heavy fieldstone tucked into the man’s trousers. Once the body had been pulled up and laid on dry land, identification became clear — the victim was Gypsy and he had been murdered. However it wasn’t the submersion in the well that had killed him. After the remains were transported to the funeral parlor of Benjamin Nardolillo on Pocasset Avenue, it was determined that the left part of his jaw had been torn away by a shot from a gun which was fired from a distance of 10 feet. It was estimated that Angelo had been placed in the well about two weeks earlier. Police suspected one of the angry farmers had gotten his revenge on the midnight garden raider.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.