Boots Explode When Heels Clicked

This dubious story appeared in a handful of American newspapers in 1951.

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,820670,00.html

Time, 12 February 1951

ITALY: The Exploding Boots

The ladies liked Lieut. Gualtiero Gualtierotti, a handsome cavalryman with a toothbrush mustache and a roving eye. Behind his jingling spurs he left a trail of broken hearts. One day in 1936 a pair of black riding boots was delivered to his apartment in Rome. Said an accompanying note, written in a feminine hand: "To Rome's best pair of legs, from an admirer.”

In vain Gualtierotti tried to discover who had sent the boots. He was still puzzling three months later when he was promoted to captain and transferred to another regiment in Brescia, 275 miles away, There, for the first time, he pulled on his shiny new boots and marched off to report to his commanding officer. The interview was brief. Gualtierotti sprang to attention, clicked his heels, and was blown to bits.

For 14 years Italian police sought to discover who had sent Gualtierotti a pair of boots with nitroglycerin concealed in the hollowed-out heels. Last week police had their murderer—Gualtierotti's cousin Pier Luigi Tamburlani. Tamburlani confessed after a Rome bootmaker, interviewed by police about another case, recalled making a pair of hollow-heeled boots for Tamburlani in late 1936. Tamburlani told the bootmaker that the heels had to be hollow because the boots were intended for an official who needed a hiding place for secret documents.

Motive for the crime: revenge. Tamburlani blew up Gualtierotti because the heel-clicking captain had seduced Tamburlani's fiancee, then cast her off. The girl killed herself.

La Stampa, 30 January 1951. Thanks to Paolo Toselli for retrieving this item.

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“Out of the Grave,” Haunted Thrills #11, Farrell Comics, Sep. 1953. A cobbler in a Nazi prison camp, forced to make boots from his son’s skin, secretly plants explosive in the heels. https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16880

John Bond, The Hazards of Life and All That, Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1996. “The factory worker who reported the following improbable accident had no doubts as to its cause. He worked in a nitroglycerine factory, and alleged that a batman in the Prussian army had discovered a new use for the explosive. If wiped over black boots it made the leather supple and gave a good shine without hard buffing. Unfortunately, when the batman’s booted officer saluted a superior he clicked his heels hard and in the explosion that followed lost both legs.”