Post by cruororism on Oct 17, 2003 14:06:28 GMT
Never has a serial killer had a more beautiful and cultured backdrop on which to act out his horrendous fantasies.
The Monster of Florence carried out his grisly murders over a 17-year period in camping grounds and lovers' lanes in the serene Tuscan countryside surrounding Florence, the jewel of the Italian renaissance.
What makes the case of The Monster (Il Mostro) so fascinating are the conspiracy theories involving well-connected and seemingly respectable doctors and artists and the whiff of the occult which persist to this day.
In August 2001 the Florentine authorities reopened the case amid speculation they were investigating a group of up to a dozen wealthy Italians who orchestrated the ritualistic killings by manipulating a trio of voyeuristic peasants.
It is no coincidence the author of Silence of The Lambs, Thomas Harris, chose to set much of the sequel, Hannibal, in Florence. Harris had sat through the trial of Pietro Pacciani - who was convicted of seven of the eight murders but later freed on appeal, only to die mysteriously before he could face a retrial - and kept himself up to date on the twists and turns in the case.
In the novel he chose to relocate Dr Hannibal Lecter to Florence, where he takes up a job as the custodian of the Capponi Library's priceless collection of renaissance manuscripts and artworks while continuing to harbour and act out his depraved fantasies.
The killings begin
The real killings began one hot night in the summer of 1968 but at the time they appeared to be nothing more than a domestic tragedy. Barbara Locci, from the town of Lastra a Signa, a few miles down the River Arno from Florence, was found shot dead in the Alfa Romeo car in which she had been cavorting with her lover, Antonio Lo Bianco.
Locci, 32, was a notoriously promiscuous housewife, who had taken several lovers and was known locally as The Queen Bee. On the night of 21 August 1968 she had gone to the cinema with Lo Bianco and her young son Natalino. The boy had fallen asleep in the back of the car so Locci and Lo Bianco had driven to a quiet spot to make love.
The killer crept up on them and fired eight shots.
He then picked up the boy - who must have been woken by the gunfire - and carried him to a nearby farm before fleeing into the darkness.
Natalino knocked on the door of the farmhouse and told the farmer: "My mother and my uncle are dead."
The carabinieri immediately suspected Locci's husband, a cuckold called Stefano Mele, and when they arrived at his home they found him with a suitcase already packed as if about to make a quick getaway.
Mele was interviewed and, after initially pointing the finger at one of Locci's numerous lovers, he confessed and incriminated a friend, Salvatore Vinci, claiming he had lent him a gun. Mele later retracted his entire confession and began blaming Vinci's brother, Francesco, who had also been "intimate" with Locci.
His frequent changes of story did not enamour him to the police or the judges and in 1970 he was found guilty and jailed for 14 years, a lenient sentence which was partly due to the belief that he was insane.
Then there was another double killing ...
The killings at Signa had been forgotten by 1974. Then, one moonless night in September teenage lovers Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini parked up in their Fiat 127 overlooking the River Sieve in Borgo San Lorenzo, a few miles north of Florence.
They were enjoying a romantic time until someone fired ten shots at them. But on this occasion the murderer went further. He stabbed Gentilcore twice and then lifted Pettini out of the little car and began slashing at her with a knife. All in all she received 96 knife wounds.
This time there were no obvious suspects.
One man had walked into a police station and confessed to the murders but he turned out to be mentally unstable and was unable to describe in detail how the killings had been carried out. The police, unaware of the link with the 1968 murder and unable to find any viable suspects, filed it away unsolved.
The turning point
Seven years later, on another warm summer's night, there was another double slaying. On 6 June 1981 someone fired eight shots into a Fiat Ritmo car containing Giovanni Foggi and his lover, Carmela De Nuccio. Again the killer had the time and the inclination to develop his perversions.
This time the female victim was lifted from the car, laid in a ditch and stabbed in the abdomen and had her genital region completely removed with a degree of surgical deliberation. As in the 1974 murders her purse was emptied onto the ground beside the car.
The similarities with the Gentilcore and Pettini case were glaringly obvious and the carabinieri immediately set about comparing the Winchester bullets found in all four bodies. Sure enough they had been fired from the same .22 Beretta pistol and came from the same batch of ammunition. Florence suddenly had a serial killer on its hands.
But still no-one made the connection with the 1968 crimes.
Police soon honed in on Enzo Spalletti, a peeping tom who had told his wife he had read about the murder of Foggi and De Nuccio in the newspaper, even though they were not reported until the following day. He was arrested and taken into custody pending a trial.
Freeing the scapegoats
Four months later Spalletti was freed from jail when another couple were murdered - a crime he plainly could not have committed.
The victims, Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi, had been shot dead at a beauty spot north west of Florence and she had suffered similar indignities as Carmela De Nuccio. The following summer another couple were targeted as they put their clothes back on after having sex in a car parked up in Montespertoli, south west of Florence.
Antonella Migliorini died instantly but Paolo Mainardi, 22, survived the initial burst of gunfire. He turned the Seat car's ignition key, slammed it into reverse but ended up in a ditch. The killer, with the sort of coolness and callousness seen in a thousand Hollywood films, strolled over, shot out the car's headlights, pulled the car keys from Paolo's feeble grasp and threw them into the darkened undergrowth.
The fatally injured young mechanic survived until the next morning but died in hospital and was unable to give the police any vital clues.
Mistaken identity
A few days after the murder of Mainardi and Migliorini, Sergeant Francesco Fiore recalled the murder of Locci and Lo Bianco, committed in 1968 when he was assigned to Signa. Sgt Fiore insisted the shells from The Monster's crimes be compared with the 1968 murders - tests revealed they came from a single box of 50 Winchester bullets and had been fired from the same weapon, a Beretta .22-calibre pistol.
Were the police finally making the right connnections, or would this monster continue his killing spree?
The carabinieri did not immediately free Stefano Mele but assumed he must have had an accomplice, who had continued the murders after his incarceration. They interviewed Mele again but he continued to claim his complete innocence.
In August 1982 police arrested Francesco Vinci, who Mele had first accused 14 years earlier, but events were soon to prove his innocence. When the killer struck again in September 1983 he chose two men although it seems certain he believed one was a woman because of his long hair.
Wilhelm Horst Meyer and his friend Uwe Rusch Sens, both 24, were asleep in a Volkswagen camper van when The Monster paid them a visit. He fired through the window killing the German holidaymakers instantly.
Vinci had been in custody at the time but his lawyer failed to persuade judges to release him on the grounds that he clearly could not have carried out the latest murders. State Prosecutor Mario Rotella continued to work on the basis that the crimes were committed by a gang of Sardinian-born peasants, of which Mele had been a member.
They arrested his brother Giovanni, and Stefano's friend Piero Mucciarini, who remained in custody until a few months after the next murders - of Claudio Stefanacci and Pia Rontini - in July 1984.
Last killing
The Monster of Florence finally ended his killing spree on 8 September 1985. He slashed open a tent on a campsite at San Casciano, south of Florence, and fired several shots into the bodies of French tourists Jean Michel Kraveichvilj and Nadine Mauriot. Kraveichvilj managed to get to his feet and scrambled out of the tent but he was chased and stabbed to death after getting only a few yards.
The killer returned to the tent, dragged out Mauriot's body and began to mutilate her. The following day an envelope arrived at the office of the public prosecutor. Inside was a sheet of paper folded and, and inside that was a small plastic bag containing a cube of flesh from Mauriot's body.
The killer was taunting the police.
Back to square one
In 1986 the authorities finally admitted their strategy of focusing on the "Sardinians" was wrong. They began again from scratch and questioned 100,000 people in an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery.
By 1991 several leads seemed to point in the direction of Pietro Pacciani, a farm labourer with convictions for murder, wife-beating and sexual molestation.
Anecdotal evidence suggested Pacciani, and another man Mario Vanni, were involved in occult ceremonies at a house in San Casciano, using female body parts and presided over by a mysterious doctor.
Pacciani finally went on trial in November 1994 and Italy was gripped by the televised proceedings. The 69-year-old protested his innocence but he was convicted of 14 murders largely on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to life.
He was dragged from court screaming: "I am as innocent as Christ on the cross".
In February 1996 an appeal court cleared Pacciani but later that year he was ordered to face a retrial.
