The Monster of Florence (10 page)
B
y this time, the number of prosecutors working on the Monster case had swelled to nearly half a dozen, of whom the most effective and charismatic was Piero Luigi Vigna. These prosecutors played a role much like assistant U.S. attorneys: they directed the investigation, oversaw evidence gathering and analysis, worked up a theory of the crime, and formulated strategies for prosecuting the guilty. In the Italian system, these prosecutors are independent of one another, each one responsible for a part of the case—specifically, the murders that occur when it is his turn to be “on call,” so to speak. (In this way the workload is spread among a group of prosecutors, each one taking the cases that occur on his watch.) In addition, another prosecutor holds the august title of
pubblico ministero
, public minister. This prosecutor (who is also usually a judge) represents the interests of the Italian state and argues the case in court. The public minister role in the Monster case changed a number of times during the course of the murders and investigations—as more murders occurred and more prosecutors came into the case.
Overseeing all the prosecutors and the police and carabinieri investigators is the
giudice istruttore
, the instructing judge, or, more properly, the examining magistrate. In the Monster case the examining magistrate was Mario Rotella. His role was to supervise the actions of the police, prosecutors, and public minister and make sure all their activities were carried out legally, correctly, and backed by sufficient evidence. In order for the system to work, the prosecutors, the public minister, and the examining magistrate all had to agree, more or less, on the main thrust of the investigation.
In the Monster case, Vigna and Rotella, the lead prosecutor and the examining magistrate, were very different personalities. It would be hard to find two men less suited to cooperating. Under the intense pressure to solve the case, they quite naturally began to disagree.
Vigna held court on the second floor of the Tribunale in Florence, in a long file of rooms in a narrow corridor that in centuries past had been the cells of monks. Now these cells were the offices of the prosecutors. Here, in this ancient hall, journalists were always welcome, and they dropped in and joked with the prosecutors, who treated them as friends. Vigna himself had an almost mythical status. He had ended the plague of kidnapping in Tuscany with a simple method: when a person was kidnapped, the state immediately froze the victim’s family’s bank accounts, preventing the payment of a ransom. Refusing to travel with bodyguards, Vigna also listed his name in the telephone book and on his doorbell, like any common citizen, a gesture of defiance that Italians found admirable. The press ate up his pithy quotes, bons mots, and dry witticisms. He dressed like the Florentine he was, in smartly cut suits and natty ties, and in a country where a pretty face means a great deal, he was exceptionally good-looking, with finely cut features, crisp blue eyes, and an easy smile. His fellow prosecutors were equally charming. A brilliant new arrival, Paolo Canessa, was open and articulate. Silvia Della Monica, spunky and attractive, often regaled journalists with stories of her early cases. A journalist who entered the second floor of the Tribunale always came away with a notebook full of news and trenchant quotations.
On the third floor, there were the same rows of monastic cells, but the atmosphere was entirely different. This was where Mario Rotella held court. He was from the south of Italy, an immediate cause for suspicion among Florentines. His old-fashioned mustache and thick black eyeglass frames made him look more like a greengrocer than a judge. Refined, cultured, and intelligent, he was also a pedant and a bore. He spoke volumes in response to a journalist’s question without seeming to say anything. His complex phrases, rich in quotations taken from books of jurisprudence, were untranslatable for the average reader and often incomprehensible even to journalists. When journalists left Rotella’s offices, instead of a notebook full of tidbits and quotes easily assembled into an article, they had a miasmic swamp of words that defied any attempt at organization or simplification.
Spezi recorded a typical exchange after the arrest of Giovanni Mele and Piero Mucciarini as the “Double Monster.”
“You have proof?” Spezi asked Rotella.
“Yes” was Rotella’s laconic response.
Spezi pushed ahead, searching for a headline. “You have two men in jail: is it really true that
both
are the Monster?”
“The Monster doesn’t exist as a concept. Someone exists who has reiterated the first killing,” replied Rotella.
“Was the testimony of Stefano Mele the clincher?”
“What Mele said was important. There are confirming points. We have not one but five important proofs, and I will only make them known when the moment arrives to send these two new accused persons in front of the Tribunale that will judge them.”
The circumlocutions drove Spezi and the other journalists crazy.
Only once did Rotella make a flat statement. “I can tell you one thing at least: Florentines can now rest easy.” In a sign that all was not well, he was immediately contradicted by one of the prosecutors on the floor below, who announced to the press that despite what they may have heard from upstairs, “I would cordially invite young people to find some other way of maintaining their health than taking the air of the countryside at night.”
The public and the press didn’t buy the new Double Monster theory. As the summer of 1984 approached, tensions rose in Florence. The spiderweb of tiny roads and lanes that wound among the hills around the city were empty at night. A young advisor to the city, reacting to the increase in tension, proposed the creation of “villages of love,” pleasing places surrounded by gardens that would guarantee intimacy, with certain special services, fenced and furnished with a guard. The idea provoked a scandal, and some replied that Florence might as well open whorehouses. The man defended his idea. “The village of love is a way to affirm that each one of us has the right to a sexual life that is free and happy.”
As the first warm days of 1984 tickled the city, anxiety began to climb. By this time the Monster had attracted worldwide attention: many newspapers and television stations aired special reports on the case, including the Sunday
Times
of London and
Asahi Shimbun
of Tokyo. Television documentaries were aired in France, Germany, and Britain. The interest abroad was not merely for the serial killings per se: it was a fascination with the main character in the Monster story—the city of Florence. To most of the world Florence wasn’t a real place where real people lived; it was one vast museum, where poets and artists had celebrated the beauty of the female form with its many Madonnas and the beauty of the male form with its proud Davids; a city of elegant palaces, villas perched in the hills, gardens, bridges, fine shopping, and excellent food. It was not a city of dirt, crime, noisy streets, polluted air, graffiti, and drug dealers—let alone serial killers. The presence of the Monster revealed that Florence was not the magical Renaissance city of the tourist brochures—it was tragically and squalidly modern.
As the summer wore on, tensions became almost unbearable. Few in Florence believed the Monster was in jail. Mario Spezi checked his calendar and noted that there was only one Saturday night with no moon during the entire summer: the night of July 28 and 29. A few days before that weekend, Spezi ran into Chief Inspector Sandro Federico at police headquarters. After chatting a while, he said, “Sandro, I’m afraid this Sunday we might see everyone out in the countryside.”
The policeman made devil’s horns with his fingers, to ward off evil.
Sunday the twenty-ninth came and went peacefully. Early that Monday morning, the thirtieth, it was still dark when the telephone rang in Spezi’s house.
I
t was a stupendous morning, crisp and clear, one that seemed a gift from the gods. Spezi found himself in an idyllic field of flowers and medicinal herbs outside the town of Vicchio, the birthplace of the artist Giotto, forty kilometers northeast of Florence.
The corpses of the new victims, Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, had been discovered before dawn at the end of a little grassy track by friends who had been searching for them all night. She was nineteen and he had just turned twenty. The place was less than eight kilometers from the field in Borgo San Lorenzo where the Monster had killed his first two victims in 1974.
Claudio was still inside the car, which had been parked by the side of a forested hill called La Boschetta, the Little Wood. Pia had been dragged a few dozen meters back into the open field, another exposed location less than two hundred meters from a farmhouse. She had suffered the same mutilation as the other female victims. But this time the killer had gone even further. He had ripped off—the word “removed” is not appropriate—her left breast. The time of death was established by a witness: a farmer had heard the shots at 9:40 p.m. and assumed it was the backfiring of a motor scooter.
The new crime had occurred while all three main Monster suspects—Francesco Vinci, Piero Mucciarini, and Giovanni Mele—were in prison.
The new double homicide provoked terror, confusion, and an outpouring of bitter recriminations against the police. The case once again hit the front pages of newspapers across Europe. It seemed to people that while the killer steadily added to his list of victims, the police did nothing but arrest suspects whose innocence was then demonstrated by the Monster striking again. Mario Rotella, however, refused to release the three jailed suspects. He was sure they had participated in the 1968 killing and therefore knew the identity of the Monster.
The police and prosecutors involved in the case went into a panic. Vigna pleaded with the public: “Whoever knows must speak,” he said. “Certainly there are those who know and who, for whatever reason, aren’t talking. Someone with this kind of pathology must at least have left hints or signs in his family.”
A fresh tidal wave of anonymous letters poured in, thousands of them, some written with letters cut from magazines, that filled one shelf after another in police headquarters, identifying the Monster as a neighbor, a relative, a friend with strange sexual habits, the local priest, or the family doctor. Once again, gynecologists found themselves targeted by many accusations. Other accusatory letters were signed, some even by well-known intellectuals, offering convoluted theories sprinkled with learned literary quotations and snippets of Latin.
After the double homicide of Vicchio, the Monster of Florence became more than a criminal; he was transformed into a dark mirror reflecting the id of the city itself—its darkest fantasies, its strangest thoughts, its most appalling attitudes and prejudices. Many accusations claimed that behind the killings were esoteric or satanic cults. Various professors and self-appointed experts, who knew absolutely nothing about criminology or serial killers, offered their theories on television and to newspaper journalists. One “expert” echoed a commonly held belief that the Monster might be English. “This is a crime more typically English or of its near neighbor, Germany.” Another waxed eloquent about that theory, writing to the newspapers, “Imagine London. The City. A night thick with fog. A model citizen of London, irreproachable, all of a sudden leaps out of the murk and attacks an innocent young couple. Imagine the violence, the eroticism, the powerlessness, the torture . . .”
The advice was never-ending. “You could easily trace, find, and arrest the killer; all you have to do is look in the right places: in the butcher shops and hospitals, since obviously we’re dealing with a butcher or a surgeon or nurse.”
Another: “He is certainly a bachelor, of about forty; he lives with his mother who knows his ‘secret,’ but his priest also knows about it from confession, as he attends church regularly.”
The feminist interpretation: “The Monster is a woman, a genuine virago, of British origin, who teaches in a Florentine school where there are children up to thirteen years of age.”
Hundreds of self-styled private detectives fell upon Florence from all parts of Italy, many with the solution to the crimes already in their pockets; some went about the Florentine hills at night armed to the teeth, looking for the Monster or posing with their guns for fearsome photographs, which were published in the papers.
A number of people showed up at police headquarters claiming to be the Monster. One even managed to break into the radio frequency of the Florentine ambulance service to announce, “I am the Monster, and I will strike again.”
Many Florentines were shocked at the outpouring of perversity, conspiracy thinking, and just plain old madness the Monster’s killings seemed to arouse in their fellow Florentines. “I never would have thought that in Florence there were such strange people,” said Paolo Canessa, one of the prosecutors involved in the investigation.
“The fear is,” said Chief Inspector Sandro Federico bitterly, “that somewhere in this swamp of anonymous madness is the very clue we need—and we’ll miss it.”
Many of the anonymous letters were written directly to Mario Spezi, the “Monstrologer” of
La Nazione
. One such missive, written in capital letters, stood out. Spezi wasn’t sure why, but it chilled him. It was the only one that, to him, had the ring of truth.
I AM VERY CLOSE TO YOU. YOU WILL NEVER TAKE ME UNLESS I CHOOSE IT. THE FINAL NUMBER IS STILL FAR AWAY. SIXTEEN ARE NOT MANY. I DON’T HATE ANYONE, BUT I HAVE TO DO IT IF I WANT TO LIVE. BLOOD AND TEARS WILL RUN SOON. YOU WILL MAKE NO PROGRESS THE WAY YOU ARE GOING. YOU HAVE GOTTEN EVERYTHING WRONG. TOO BAD FOR YOU. I WILL MAKE NO MORE MISTAKES, BUT THE POLICE WILL. INSIDE OF ME, THE NIGHT WILL LAST FOREVER. I CRIED FOR THEM. EXPECT ME.
The reference to sixteen victims was puzzling, when by that time the double murder near Vicchio made it only twelve (fourteen if you counted the 1968 killings). It suggested another sick fantasist. But someone remembered that in the preceding year, in Lucca, another pair of lovers were killed in their car. The gun wasn’t a .22 Beretta and there wasn’t any mutilation. That crime was never officially attributed to the Monster of Florence, but to this day it remains unsolved.
Rumor continued to run riot in Florence until an incident seemed to crystallize public opinion. On the afternoon of August 19, 1984, almost three weeks after the Vicchio killing, Prince Roberto Corsini disappeared in the vast forest surrounding the family castle of Scarperia, a dozen kilometers from Vicchio. The scion of the last surviving princely line in Tuscany, Prince Roberto came from an ancient and wealthy family. The Corsinis had given the world a pope, Clement XII, and had built a huge and beautiful palace in Florence, on the banks of the Arno River. Inside the Palazzo Corsini, the family preserved the sumptuous throne room of their family pope, along with a priceless collection of Renaissance and Baroque art. While the family had run short of cash in latter years—so much so that most of the Palazzo Corsini has not yet been wired for electricity—over the course of centuries the Corsinis had accumulated enormous estates. Roberto’s grandfather, Prince Neri, used to brag that he could ride horseback from Florence to Rome—about three hundred kilometers—without leaving his own land.
Prince Roberto was a brusque and silent man who had no love of the social life or the obligations of an aristocrat. He preferred to live in the family castle in the country, seeing only a few intimate friends. He never married and didn’t seem to have any particular female friends. Among those who knew him well, he was affectionately referred to as “the Bear” for his gruff and solitary ways. For others he was simply strange.
Around four in the afternoon on the Sunday of August 19, 1984, Prince Roberto left some German friends staying at his castle and went alone into the surrounding forest. He wasn’t armed but he carried a pair of binoculars. When he didn’t return by nine in the evening, his friends became alarmed and called his relatives and then the carabinieri in the neighboring town of Borgo San Lorenzo. The carabinieri and his friends combed the woods for most of the night. When the search was suspended, no trace of the prince had been found.
At dawn, the search of the enormous estate resumed. One of his friends spied a branch covered with blood. The man pushed his way into a ravine next to a roaring brook, and there he discovered the prince’s broken eyeglasses. A little farther ahead the grass was stained red. Lodged in the muck of the streambank he found the prince’s binoculars. A few feet ahead he found a pheasant killed by a shotgun. And then he came across the dead prince himself, facedown, his lower body in the water, his head wedged in a clefted rock by the current.
The man turned the body over: the prince’s face had been obliterated by a shotgun blast at point-blank range.
The rumors swept Florence like wildfire. That the Monster seemed to be clever, cunning, cool, and meticulous had long suggested to some he was a wealthy nobleman. The mysterious killing of a prince known to be strange, who lived alone in a dark and sinister castle in the very area where several Monster killings had taken place, left no doubt in many people’s minds: Prince Roberto Corsini had been the Monster of Florence.
Neither investigators nor the press had given the slightest indication that the prince’s murder was connected to the Monster of Florence. Public opinion interpreted this silence as further proof of the man’s guilt: naturally a great and powerful family like the Corsinis would protect their reputation at all costs. Wasn’t it convenient for the family that the prince, being the Monster, was now dead and could never be brought to trial and sully their name?
Two days later a second mysterious event gave the rumors new life. The Corsini castle was broken into, but apparently nothing was taken. No one could fathom why burglars would break into a place that was already swarming with police conducting a murder investigation. Rumor had it that the break-in wasn’t by thieves, but by people hired to make away with some important, and perhaps quite gruesome, items in the castle before the police found them.
The rumors continued to grow, even after the prince’s murderer was caught four days later—and confessed. He was a young poacher who had been stalking pheasant on the estate. The prince spied him just after he had bagged a bird, and gave chase. The poacher said he had tried to shoot the prince in the legs to foil the pursuit, but Corsini, seeing the shotgun pointed at him, ducked in a gesture of self-defense and received the blast full in the face.
Absurd, said public opinion. Nobody kills a man for so little. The story could not possibly be true—it was, indeed, more proof that the Corsini family was engaged in a cover-up. What’s more, the poacher story didn’t explain the mysterious break-in at the castle two days later.
From the grand rooms of the Florentine aristocracy to gossip in working-class trattorie, a complicated tale—the
real
story—made the rounds. Prince Roberto Corsini was the Monster of Florence. His family had found out and had done everything they could to cover it up. But someone else—nobody knew who—had also discovered the terrible secret. Instead of reporting it to the police, this person had kept it to himself and blackmailed the prince, periodically extracting large payments for keeping his secret. That Sunday, August 19, twenty days after the Vicchio murders, the two had made an appointment on the banks of the stream, where they argued. A furious struggle had broken out and the blackmailer shot the prince.
There was, it was said, yet another person who knew that Corsini was the Monster. The blackmailing continued, this time directed against the family. But in order for the blackmail to function properly, the blackmailers needed proof that Prince Roberto was the Monster; grisly proof hidden in the depths of the castle. This explained the break-in: the thieves needed to get their hands on evidence, probably the Beretta, maybe the unfired Winchester series H rounds, and God knows even the trophies that the Monster had cut from the victims.
This rumor, the fruit of the warped imagination of Florence, was utterly false, patently unbelievable, and completely unsupported by anything published in the papers or reported by investigators. The fantasy lasted over a year, until reality destroyed it in the most decisive way possible: with another killing.