The Monster of Florence (22 page)
A
s the Monster investigation heated up, the phone calls from Mario became a regular occurrence. “Did you read the papers this morning?” he would ask me. “Stranger and stranger!” And we would enjoy another coffee up at my place, poring over the news, shaking our heads. At the time, I found it all amusing, even charming.
Spezi was not so charmed. He wanted, more than anything, for the truth in the Monster case to come out. His dedication to unmasking the Monster was a passion. He had seen the dead victims; I had not. He had met most of the families and seen the damage to them. I had wiped away a few tears on leaving Winnie Rontini’s dark house, but Spezi had been wiping away tears for more than twenty years. He had seen the lives of innocents ruined by false accusations. What I found deliciously peculiar and even quaint, he found deadly serious. To see the investigators wandering ever deeper into a wilderness of absurdity pained him greatly.
On April 6, 2002, with the press standing by, the coffin of Francesco Narducci was exhumed and opened. His body was inside, instantly recognizable even after seventeen years. A DNA test confirmed it.
This blow to their theories did not stop GIDES, Giuttari, and the public minister of Perugia. Even in the lack of a substituted corpse they found evidence. The body was
too
recognizable for someone who had spent five days in the water and then another seventeen in a coffin. Giuttari and Mignini promptly concluded that the body had been substituted
again.
That’s right—Narducci’s real body, hidden for seventeen years, had been put back in the coffin and the other body removed, because the conspirators knew ahead of time that the exhumation was coming.
The body of Narducci was shipped off to the medical examiner’s office in Pavia to see if it showed signs of murder. That September, the results came in. The medical examiner reported that the left horn of the laryngeal cartilage had been fractured, which made it “more or less probable” that death resulted from a “violent mechanical asphyxiation produced from the constriction of the neck (either from manual strangulation or from strangulation by other homicidal means).”
In other words, Narducci had been murdered.
Once again the newspapers had a field day.
La Nazione
trumpeted:
MURDER IS THEORIZED BURNING SECRETS
Was Narducci murdered because he knew something or had seen something that he must not see? Almost all the current investigators are by now convinced of the story of secret sects and masterminds behind the double homicides executed by Pacciani and his picnicking friends. . . . A group of persons, around ten, ordered the killings by henchmen composed of Pacciani and his picnicking friends. . . . The search into secret, deviant, and esoteric groups dedicated to horrendous “sacrifices” has even drawn in investigators from Perugia.
Once again, Spezi and I marveled at the banquet of half-baked and ill-formed speculations that constituted press coverage of the case, printed as the wide-eyed truth by journalists who knew absolutely nothing of the history of the Monster of Florence, who had never heard of the Sardinian Trail, and who merely parroted whatever investigators or the prosecutor’s office leaked. The conditional tense was hardly ever used, as were qualifiers such as “alleged” and “according to.” Question marks were thrown in only for sensationalistic effect. Spezi once again bemoaned the sorry state of Italian journalism.
“Why,” he said, “would Narducci’s killers concoct such an elaborate scheme of murder? Haven’t these journalists asked themselves that obvious question? Why not just drown him and make it look like suicide? Why substitute bodies once, and then yet again? And where on earth did the second body come from? The original ME who examined Narducci’s cadaver, along with his family, friends, and all the people in that photograph who saw the dead body insist it was Narducci. They
still
insist it was Narducci! Were
all
these people in on the conspiracy?” He shook his head sadly.
I read the rest of the article with growing disbelief. The credulous reporter at
La Nazione
never explored any of the obvious discrepancies with the story. He went on to write that the “saponification of the cadaver (internal organs, skin, and hair were in a good state of preservation) was not compatible with immersion in water for five days.” More support for the substitution theory.
“What does this mean, ‘not compatible’?” I asked Spezi, putting aside the paper. It was a phrase I had seen again and again in the Monster investigation.
Spezi laughed. “Compatible, not compatible, and incompatible are the baroque inventions of Italian experts who don’t want to take responsibility. Using ‘compatible’ is a way to avoid admitting they haven’t understood anything. Was the bullet in Pacciani’s garden inserted into the Monster’s pistol? ‘It is compatible.’ Was that laryngeal break inflicted by someone who intended to kill? ‘It is compatible.’ Was the painting done by a monstrous psychopath? ‘It is compatible.’ Perhaps yes, perhaps no—in short, we don’t know! If the experts are chosen by the investigators, they say their results are ‘compatible’ with the theories of the prosecution; if they are chosen by the defendants they say that their results are ‘compatible’ with the theories of the defense. That adjective should be outlawed!”
“So where’s this going?” I asked. “Where will it end up?”
Spezi shook his head. “The very thought scares me.”
M
eanwhile, in the picturesque little town of San Casciano, Giuttari opened up yet a new front in the search for the masterminds behind the Monster killings. San Casciano seemed to lie at the very heart of the satanic sect; it was only a few kilometers from Villa Verde, the Villa of Horrors; it had been home to the hapless postman, Vanni, and the village idiot, Lotti, convicted as Pacciani’s accomplices.
Spezi called me one morning. “Have you seen the paper? Don’t bother buying it, I’m coming over. You won’t believe this.”
He entered the house, visibly upset, the paper clutched in his hand, Gauloise dangling from his lip. “This is a bit too close to home.” He slapped the paper on the table. “Read this.”
The article announced that the home of a man named Francesco Calamandrei, the ex-pharmacist of San Casciano, had been searched by GIDES. Calamandrei was suspected of being one of the masterminds behind the Monster killings.
“Calamandrei is an old friend of mine.” Spezi said. “He’s the man who introduced me to my wife! This is utterly absurd, patently ridiculous. The man wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Spezi told me the man’s story. He had met Calamandrei back in the mid-sixties, when both were students, Spezi studying law and Calamandrei studying pharmacology and architecture. A brilliant student, Calamandrei was the son of San Casciano’s only pharmacist, which in Italy is a well-paid and high-status profession, all the more so for the Calamandrei family, because San Casciano was a wealthy town with only one pharmacy. Calamandrei cut quite a figure in those days, tooling around Florence in a sleek Lancia Fulvia Coupé, tall, elegant, and handsome, impeccably dressed in the Florentine style. He had a dry, cutting Tuscan sense of humor and always seemed to have a new girlfriend more beautiful than the last. Calamandrei introduced Mario to his future wife, Myriam (“I’ve got a nice Belgian girl for you, Mario”), at a famous restaurant; afterwards they all piled into Calamandrei’s car and set off on a crazy trip to Venice to play baccarat in the casino. Calamandrei was an expression of that brief period in Italian history known as
La Dolce Vita
, captured so memorably on film by Fellini.
At the close of the sixties Calamandrei married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She was a small, high-strung woman with red hair. They had a grand wedding in San Casciano, which Mario and Myriam attended. A few days later the newlyweds stopped by Spezi’s house while heading off on their honeymoon. Calamandrei was driving a brand-new cream-colored Mercedes 300L convertible.
That was the last Spezi saw of him for several decades.
He ran into him by chance twenty-five years later and was shocked by the change in his friend. Calamandrei had become morbidly obese and suffered from a deep depression and declining health. He had sold the pharmacy and taken up painting—tragic, anguished pictures, not created with paintbrushes and canvas, but with objects such as rubber hoses, sheet metal, and tar, sometimes putting real syringes and tourniquets in his paintings, and often signing them with his social security number, because, he said, that’s all people were in modern Italian society. His son had become a drug addict and then a thief to support his habit. Desperate and not knowing what else to do, Calamandrei had gone to the police and denounced his own son, hoping a stint in prison might shake him up and lead to a turnaround. But the boy continued to take drugs after his release, and then disappeared completely.
What had happened to his wife was equally tragic. She had succumbed to schizophrenia. Once, at a dinner party at a friend’s house, she began screaming and breaking objects, stripped off all her clothes, and ran naked into the street. She was hospitalized after that, the first of many such hospitalizations. She was finally declared mentally incompetent and committed to a sanatorium, where she remains to this day.
In 1991, Calamandrei divorced her. She then wrote a letter to the police accusing her husband of being the Monster of Florence. She claimed to have found pieces of the victims hidden in the refrigerator. Her letter—which was completely mad—was duly checked out by investigators at the time and dismissed as absurd.
But Chief Inspector Giuttari, sorting through old police files, came across the wife’s handwritten statement, in a strange orthography that sloped ever upward toward the top of the page. To Giuttari, “pharmacist” was close enough to “doctor.” The fact that Calamandrei had once been a wealthy and prominent resident of San Casciano, the presumed center of the satanic cult, only whetted Giuttari’s interest. The chief inspector opened an investigation of him and several other leading citizens of the town. On January 16, 2004, Giuttari asked for a warrant to search the pharmacist’s house; he received it on the seventeenth; on the eighteenth at dawn Giuttari and his men rang the buzzer of the door on Piazza Pierozzi in San Casciano.
On the nineteenth the story of the Monster of Florence was once again all over the news.
Spezi could only shake his head in wonder. “I don’t like the way this is moving at all.
Mi fa paura.
It makes me afraid.”
Back in Perugia, the inquiry into Narducci’s death moved along at a brisk pace. The investigators realized that in order for the bodies to have been switched twice, a large and powerful conspiracy among influential people must have taken place. The public minister of Perugia, Judge Mignini, was determined to unmask it. And in short order he did. Once again, the newspapers, including even the sober
Corriere della Sera
, dedicated entire pages to it. The news was sensational: the ex–chief of police of Perugia at the time of Narducci’s death had, it was alleged, conspired with a colonel in the carabinieri and with the family’s lawyer to prevent the truth of Narducci’s death from coming out, all working in concert with the father of the dead doctor, his brother, and the doctor who had signed the death certificate. Among their crimes were conspiracy, racketeering, and destruction and hiding of a human corpse.
Beyond the conspiracy to cover up the Narducci murder, the investigators also had to show that Narducci had a connection to Pacciani, his picnicking friends, and the village of San Casciano, where the satanic cult seemed to be centered.
They succeeded in this as well. Gabriella Carlizzi made a statement to the police asserting that Francesco Narducci had been initiated into the Order of the Red Rose by his father, who was trying to resolve certain sexual problems in his son—the same diabolical sect, Carlizzi claimed, active for centuries in Florence and its environs. Police and prosecutors seemed to accept Carlizzi’s statements as solid, actionable evidence.
As if on cue, Giuttari and his GIDES squad produced witnesses swearing to have seen Francesco Narducci hanging around San Casciano and meeting with Calamandrei. It took a while for the identity of these new witnesses to come out. When Spezi first heard the names, he thought it was a bad joke: they were the same algebraic witnesses, Alpha and Gamma, who had been the surprise witnesses at Pacciani’s appeal trial many years before—Pucci, the mentally retarded man who claimed to have witnessed Pacciani killing the French couple, and Ghiribelli, the alcoholic prostitute who would turn a trick for a glass of wine. And then a third witness popped out of the woodwork—none other than Lorenzo Nesi! This was the same fine fellow who had so conveniently remembered Pacciani and a companion in a “reddish” car a kilometer from the Scopeti clearing on Sunday night, the alleged night of the murder of the French tourists.
These three witnesses had earth-shaking new information to impart, which all of them had forgotten to mention eight years earlier when they had first stunned Italy with their extraordinary testimony.
Ghiribelli claimed that the “doctor from Perugia,” whose name she did not know, but whose face she recognized as Narducci’s from a photograph, came to San Casciano almost every weekend. How could she forget it? She proudly told investigators she had had sex with him four or five times in a hotel and “for each trick he gave me three hundred thousand lire.”
In the offices of GIDES, they showed the mentally retarded Pucci photographs of various people and asked him if he had ever seen them before and where. Pucci’s recall was phenomenal, crystal clear even when reaching back twenty years, even if he didn’t know their names. He recognized Franceso Narducci, “tall and thin, kind of faggoty.” He recognized Gianni Spagnoli, brother-in-law of the drowned doctor. He recognized one of the most notable physicians of Florence arrested for child molestation, who had been included in the photo lineup because investigators believed the satanic sect was into pedophilia. He recognized a respected dermatologist and a distinguished gynecologist of San Casciano, both of whom had also fallen under suspicion for being members of the cult. He recognized Carlo Santangelo, the phony ME who liked to wander around cemeteries at night. He recognized a young African-American hairstylist who had died several years before in Florence from AIDS.
But most crucially to the investigation, he recognized the pharmacist of San Casciano, Francesco Calamandrei.
Pucci wasn’t stingy with the particulars. “I saw all these people together in San Casciano, in the Bar Centrale under the clock. I can’t say if on every occasion I saw them together because it happened that I would see them separately, but anyway these were people who saw each other a lot.”
Lorenzo Nesi, the serial witness, also recognized these people and added another. He had seen, palling around with this motley crowd, none other than Prince Roberto Corsini, the nobleman killed by a poacher, who, like Narducci, had been the subject of rumors that he was the Monster.
Gamma, the prostitute Ghiribelli, told another story, one that involved the Villa Sfacciata, near where I lived in Giogoli, across the lane from where the two German tourists had been killed. “In 1981,” she said, as recorded in an official statement taken by the police, “there was a doctor who was doing experiments in mummification in the villa . . . Lotti also talked about this place on many occasions and always in the eighties, when we went there. He told me that inside, without saying where, there were murals covering entire walls with paintings just like those done by Pacciani. Lotti always told me that this villa had a laboratory underground, where the Swiss doctor did his mummification experiments. I’ll explain it better: Lotti said that this Swiss doctor, following his travels in Egypt, got hold of an old papyrus that explained how to mummify bodies. He said the papyrus was missing a piece relating to the mummification of the soft parts and, I mean, among them the sex organs and the breasts. He told me this was why the girls were mutilated in the murders of the Monster of Florence. He explained to me that in 1981 the daughter of this doctor was killed and the death was not reported, so much so that the father had said that he had to go back to Switzerland to explain her absence. The mummification process required that he keep the body of his daughter in that underground laboratory.”
Perhaps remembering the embarrassment of the plastic bats and cardboard skeletons, investigators decided not to search the Villa Sfacciata for the Pacciani frescoes, underground laboratory, and mummified daughter.