In 2012, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu released Beyond the Hills, a two-and-a-half-hour film with no musical score, no demon, and no exorcist standing under a streetlamp while the orchestra announces that evil has arrived. What it has instead is mud, cold rooms, black robes, prayer, and two young women named Alina and Voichita. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and a shared Best Actress prize for its two first-time leads. And almost everything in it happened.

Alina never existed. Not exactly. The young woman she was built from was named Maricica Irina Cornici, and in June of 2005 she died on a hillside in Vaslui County, in the poorest corner of eastern Romania, inside an unfinished religious community called the Holy Trinity monastery.

This episode walks the real case from the beginning. Irina's childhood in a Romanian orphanage af ...