Murder most foul
June 9, 2004
Eight double murders have been attributed to the "Monster of Florence". But is just one man to blame? Or a satanic sect? Tobias Jones reports on the latest disturbing developments in a 36-year mystery.
The story of the Monster of Florence has gripped and horrified Italy for almost four decades.
It's a chilling tale with an extraordinary cast: wizards, doctors, chemists, thuggish peasants, the secret services.
At every twist, there's evidence of macabre sexual and supernatural practices. In all, there were 16 murders, always of courting couples, always at night, usually in their cars; many more if you count the "satellite murders" and suspicious suicides at the fringes of the case.
Almost a dozen men have been named, by the press and police, as the Monster; several have committed suicide (the most recent in January this year) before being posthumously cleared.
But now, almost 36 years since the first killing, one dogged policeman in Florence believes he's on the brink of solving the case; within months, he says, we may finally know the identity of the Monster of Florence.
The policeman, Michele Giuttari, is a Sicilian who found fame as the chief investigator of the Mafia bombs that ripped through Florence in 1993. Since May 2003, he has headed a 10-man "anti-Monster taskforce".
"These crimes," he says, "are unique throughout the world for their cruelty and ferocity. They are black, brutal crimes."
And they are crimes that speak to a worldwide, and fearful, fascination with the occult: Giuttari has hinted that the murders involved a satanic sect.
"There are certainly," he says cautiously, "ritualistic aspects, which seem to have a relevance: the fact that the same weapon was always used; the fact that the female bodies were never touched by a hand, but only by a blade — even the clothes were cut away with a knife; the fact that the tombs of the victims have frequently been defaced and commemorative crosses vandalised. All these things make an investigator curious."
A satanic sect, the hypothesis runs, commissioned the murders in order to obtain intimate parts of female flesh for use in depraved rituals in the Tuscan countryside; esoteric stone circles (and a curious granite pyramid) found at some of the murder sites hint at black magic.
Giuttari's theory tallies with the thesis developed in a report prepared for the Italian secret services in 1985. Written by Francesco Bruno, the most famous criminologist in Italy, the report was, inexplicably, never passed to the police; Giuttari came upon it only two years ago.
Both men now believe the report may have been buried to protect a Monster who had powerful allies.
Nineteen years on, Bruno stands by his conclusion: the murders had a "mystical, almost religious motivation. The killer acted only on certain days, in certain areas. He was almost a moralist, punishing unmarried couples; he killed before sex began. And he always killed the woman on the ground, sacrificing her to Mother Earth. It was a kind of purification."
Local people are more sceptical. Any new "revelation" is met with understandable suspicion — each previous "breakthrough" has proved embarrassingly inadequate.
In the absence of any convincing narrative to explain the murders, dietrologia (conspiracy theorising) has become the only tool available.
Today, if you walk in the countryside surrounding Florence, the scene is arcadian.
There are olive groves, cypresses and poplars on the gentle hills; you can see and smell the rosemary, laurel and rucola. There is nothing, other than the occasional crucifix on the side of a clearing or footpath, to remind you of the murders.
The story begins (or so everyone thought) in September 1974. A Fiat 127 is parked by the river Sieve, just to the north of Florence.
Like millions of young Italians living at home with their parents, Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini are about to make love in a car.
As the couple undress, eight bullets end their lives. Stefania is dragged from the car and stabbed 97 times; 70 of the wounds follow the outline of her vagina, in which the killer places a vine shoot.
When the couple's bodies are found the next day, the only hard evidence is the eight Winchester H-series cartridges at the scene of the crime.
It is a vile murder but, seemingly, an isolated one. But in June 1981, the Monster strikes again, this time to the south-west of the city.
Giovanni Foggi and Carmela de Nuccio have parked under a cypress tree and are undressing. Once again, the couple are shot.
Then the murderer drags Carmela from the car and commits the act that will become his gruesome signature: he removes her labia.
When the bodies are found the following morning, the same Hseries cartridges are there, along with something to which, at the time, no attention is paid: a coloured granite pyramid 15 metres from the scene of the crime.
This time the police appear to make a breakthrough. Before the crime has even been discovered, 40-year-old Vincenzo Spalletti recounts details of the murder to his friends. Such knowledge appears to be explained by only one thing, and Spalletti is arrested on June 17.
What emerges from his interrogation shocks the city: surrounding the couples making love in what Italians call the camporella are, it turns out, hundreds of voyeurs, equipped with microphones and infrared cameras.
Spalletti has clearly seen something; so, possibly, have dozens of others. But no one comes forward with information, and while Spalletti is still in custody, the Monster strikes again.
It is September 1981; at Calenzano, to the north-west of Florence, Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi are murdered in their black Golf.
Again, Winchester H-series cartridges are found; again, the woman is mutilated. And now forensic tests show that in each crime the same weapon has been used: a .22 Beretta rifle.
As panic grips the city, hundreds of old scores are settled: exlovers are denounced, anonymous letters reveal sordid sexual secrets. The police are overwhelmed with useless leads.
The Monster strikes again in June 1982. This time, the male driver, initially only wounded, manages to manoeuvre his Seat 147 back on to the main road before he and his companion are killed but, due to the visibility of the location, not mutilated.
Suddenly, a senior policeman recalls an almost identical crime way back in 1968; a couple had been murdered to the west of Florence as they made love in a car.
Forensic tests reveal that H-series Winchester bullets were fired from exactly the same weapon used in the subsequent Monster murders.
The 1968 murder only serves to complicate matters; the murdered woman, Barbara Locci, had indeed been in the car with a lover — one of dozens.
The snag for those investigating the Monster crimes is that her husband, Stefano — like her, and like many of her lovers, a Sardinian — had been convicted of the 1968 murder and had been in prison ever since.
Clearly, he cannot have committed the later crimes; people begin to suspect that he hadn't even committed the original one.
So begins what is called the pista Sarda, the Sardinian line of inquiry. All of Locci's violent and possessive lovers are questioned; one, Francesco Vinci, is arrested and accused of all the killings.
But while he is in custody, the Monster strikes again; in September 1983, at Giogoli, he kills two more people. This time, though, it's a gay couple from Germany in a Volkswagen camper van. (One of the murdered men had long, blond hair; he may have been mistaken for a woman.) Vinci is released.
In July 1984, another couple are murdered, and again the woman is mutilated. The last double murder occurs in September 1985. A French couple are undressing in their tent at San Casciano.
They appear not to have noticed the posters stuck up all over the area. "Watch out, kids," the warning reads in seven languages. "You could be attacked."
Not only is the woman mutilated, but part of her breast is posted to the sole woman on the police team. As in all the other cases, Hseries Winchester cartridges had been fired from a Beretta .22 rifle.
Initially, the evidence against Pietro Pacciani appeared compelling. The subject of an anonymous tip-off to police in 1992, he lived in San Casciano, the hill town outside which the last couple had been murdered.
In the 1950s, he had murdered a man who was wooing his girlfriend (he then forced her to have sex with him next to the man's corpse).
He later married, and was convicted of raping his two daughters. Police bugged his house, then raided his property. They found a German-made notebook, which may have belonged to one of the murdered Germans; and they found, in Pacciani's garden, an H-series cartridge.
Pacciani was brought to trial, and the public was hypnotised by an explosive courtroom performance from a bullish, theatrical peasant.
Equally mesmerised was Thomas Harris, author of the Hannibal Lecter books; after attending the trial, he set his sequel to The Silence of the Lambs in Florence.
In November 1994, Pacciani was sentenced to life for seven of the eight double murders; he was acquitted of the 1968 murder.
But in February 1996, he was cleared on appeal. This was no surprise to many journalists and criminologists: the cartridge found in his garden appeared all too convenient, almost as if it had been placed there; the German notepad contained passages written by Pacciani long before the Germans' murder; there was no trace of the famous murder weapon.
Just days before Pacciani's successful appeal, two of his closest friends were arrested. The trial of Giancarlo Lotti and Mario Vanni was another insight into the sexual underworld of Tuscany.
The two coarse, ageing men would go to the city to visit prostitutes and participate in orgies at the house of a practitioner of black magic called Salvatore Indovino, who died shortly after the last murder.
Indovino, apparently, offered his services as a magician to young couples, assuring them that the surest way to cement their relationship was to make love in public; all they had to do was tell him the time, place and number-plate. Vanni and Lotti, the accusation went, did the rest.
The two received life sentences for the last five murders in March 1998. A month earlier, Pacciani had died, a higher court having overturned his acquittal. His retrial was pending.
It is an outcome many observers find highly unsatisfactory. These critics believe that Pacciani, Lotti and Vanni had played a part in some murders, but not in all of them. Evidence was scant, to say the least.
And there were too many loose ends and too many other inexplicable murders. Francesco Vinci, the former Sardinian suspect, had been murdered along with a friend in 1993, burnt to death in the locked boot of an old Volvo. Pacciani had been in custody at the time.
Two weeks later, a mother and son (the mother was a former lover of Vinci's) were also burnt to death while locked in a car.
In May 1994, another woman, friendly with Vinci's son, was murdered. While in prison, Pacciani alluded to these killings, hinting that the real Monster was still at large, murdering anyone who had any information.
"For any investigator," says Giuttari, "one coincidence is one too many. Here there are dozens."
Now, though, Giuttari says that he's on the verge of a real breakthrough. "What really impeded the investigation for decades," he says, "was the idea that we were looking for a single, isolated serial killer.
"The change in our philosophy meant we looked instead for a group, a team of killers. Because it's obvious from the evidence that a different hand committed different crimes.
"The rifle passed from hand to hand. There was an organisation behind these murders in which it appears the executioners were paid."
He cites the fact that Pacciani — a part-time gardener who had served long jail sentences — had two houses, and 50 million lire of savings (around $A45,000), as evidence that someone was paying Pacciani handsomely.
Another turning point in Giuttari's investigations came in 2002. Police tapping the phones of a loan-sharking ring in Umbria heard one borrower being threatened: "If you don't pay up, you'll end up like the doctor on (Lake) Trasimeno" — clearly a reference to Francesco Narducci, a 36-year-old doctor found dead in the lake in 1985.
Witness statements declare that Narducci had a flat outside Florence, that his refrigerator held body parts and that he was a member of an esoteric group named the "Red Rose".
Some police had long suspected a medic's involvement in the Monster killings; Vanni even said that "a doctor had commissioned little jobs".
It was suggested that the organisation behind the murders had disposed of Narducci to prevent him talking.
The police toiled on. Then, at the end of January this year, a well-known doctor from Florence was formally given notice that he was under investigation, as was a retired chemist from San Casciano, whose house was raided by police.
Both men's lawyers deny that their clients had any involvement with the killings.
Gianluca Monastra, the author of an eloquent book on the killings, is convinced by the theory of commissioned murders.
"For years any evidence which didn't fit with the individual serial killer profile was brushed under the carpet.
"I do believe that there were people operating at a higher level who in a sense 'remote-controlled' the murderers. It would be a plausible explanation, even if extreme and extraordinary."
The criminologist, Francesco Bruno, however, remains dismissive of the theory. The problem, according to Bruno, is that Giuttari is having to build his investigation on "erroneous judicial foundations", namely the convictions of Pacciani's friends, Vanni and Lotti. They don't fit Bruno's profile of a single, cold and calculating killer.
"Giuttari is fishing in the right waters," Bruno says, "amongst the strange world of satanism, but he's very far from catching the right person, if he's even still alive.
"Everything so far has been village gossip and building on old material."
Bruno believes the Beretta .22 passed from the Sardinian circle after the 1968 crime and that the following 14 murders were all committed by one, lone killer.
Meanwhile, Giuttari has just published a novel; in an unfortunate coincidence, names of suspects in the Monster case emerged just around publication date.
The "novel" (about a detective called Michele investigating gruesome murders in Tuscany) shot up the bestseller lists. Fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, are becoming blurred — but that, after all, is the Italian way.
