Emilia Basil killed her lover after threatening to tell her husband about their affair
Emilia Basil was known for offering Arabic stews and empanadas given her birthplace in Beirut, Lebanon. The woman was identified as “La Turca” and during the 1970s she opened a restaurant she named “Yamile” – an Arabic name meaning beautiful and graceful woman – where she had an entourage of customers who liked her food that on one occasion they did not identify as eating human flesh.
“La Turca” was married, but began an affair with Jose Petriella, an Italian migrant she met in San Cristobal, Argentina, where they both settled. When the man threatened Emilia after an argument, that he would tell her husband the truth about their secret affair, the woman decided it was best to kill him, and to leave no evidence, she would cook it to offer it to the diners of her restaurant.
The bond as lovers was to settle a debt.
In the 1940s, Emilia arrived from Lebanon to Argentina, then she met the father of her three daughters, Felipe Coronel, with whom she founded the restaurant that was in a compound owned by José Petriella. But business was not going well, so they negotiated with the owner with whom they reached an agreement so that they could keep a small part of the property.
The little income generated by the restaurant was not enough to pay off the debt in 1973, so Emilia began a sex-based relationship with Petriella to help pay for the property, according to TN reports. For several months the deal proved fruitful for the couple for a few months until problems began.
Petriella began to demand Emilia to hurry up and pay off her debt, but not with money, he wanted their sexual encounters to be more frequent, the mutually agreeable deal they had reached ended up changing into a sexual harassment affair. On March 24 of that year, “La Turca” decided to put an end to the situation.
This is how “La Descuartizadora” was discovered.
With the threat of intimacy or Petriella himself would go to her lover’s husband to tell him everything about their relationship, “La Turca” devised her plan to kill her now stalker. On their last date alone, Emilia threw her lover to bed and there she waited for the moment to strangle her lover with a cord, who died on the spot.
To get rid of her lover’s corpse, Emilia cut off parts of his body to become “La Descuartizadora” (The Dismemberer). With the remains of the meat she cut, the woman cooked them in pots to offer them in her Arab empanadas. The rest of her lover’s body, Emilia put it in a wooden box and there it remained for four days until a neighbor complained of a strange and strong odor.
While waiting for the cleaning service to remove the box with the body, the smell of death alerted the authorities who discovered only Petriella’s torso inside the box. Emilia was arrested and confessed to the crime, for which she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.