The Monster of Florence (31 page)
T
he article in the
Atlantic Monthly
was published in July. A few weeks later the magazine received a letter on old-fashioned stationery, hand-typed on a manual typewriter. It was an extraordinary letter, written by Niccolò’s father, Count Neri Capponi, the head of one of Italy’s most ancient and illustrious noble families.
When I first met Niccolò, he had mentioned the reason for his family’s long success in Florence: they had never thrust themselves into controversy, remained discreet and circumspect in all their dealings, and never tried to be first. For eight hundred years the Capponi family had prospered by avoiding being “the nail that sticks out,” as Niccolò had put it in his drafty palace seven years earlier.
But now, Count Neri had broken with family tradition. He had written a letter to the editor. This was no ordinary letter, but a ripping indictment of the Italian criminal justice system from a man who was himself a judge and a lawyer. Count Neri knew whereof he spoke, and he spoke plainly.
THE COUNT CAPPONI
Sir
The travesty of justice undergone by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi is the tip of the iceberg. The Italian judiciary (which includes the public prosecutors) is a branch of the civil service. This particular branch chooses its members, is self ruling and is accountable to no one: a state within a state! This body of bureaucrats can be roughly divided into three sections: a large minority, corrupt and affiliated with the former communist party, a large section of honest people who are too frightened to stand up to the political minority (who controls the office of the judiciary), and a minority of brave and honest men with little influence. Political and dishonest judges have an infallible method of silencing or discrediting opponents, political or otherwise. A bogus, secret indictment, the tapping of telephones, the conversations (often doctored) fed to the press who starts a smear campaign which raises the sales, a spectacular arrest, prolonged preventive detention under the worst possible conditions, third degree interrogations, and finally a trial that lasts many years ending in the acquittal of a ruined man. Spezi was lucky because the powerful Florentine public prosecutor is no friend of the Perugia one and, I am told, “suggested” that Spezi be freed: the Perugia court, I am told, accepted the “suggestion”.
It may be of interest to know that miscarriages of justice in Italy (excluding acquittals with a ruined defendant) amount to four million and a half in fifty years.
Yours sincerely,
Neri Capponi
P.S. If possible I would ask you to withhold my signature or reduce it to initials because I fear reprisals on myself and my family. If withholding my signature is not possible, then go ahead, God will look after me! The truth must out.
The
Atlantic
printed the letter, with his name.
The British newspaper the
Guardian
also ran an article on the case and interviewed Chief Inspector Giuttari. He said I had lied when I claimed to have been threatened with arrest if I returned to Italy, and he insisted that Spezi and I were still guilty of planting false evidence at the villa. “Preston did not tell the truth,” he said. “Our recordings will prove this. Spezi,” he insisted, “will be prosecuted.”
The
Atlantic
article attracted the attention of a producer at
Dateline NBC
, who asked Mario and me to participate in a program on the Monster of Florence. I returned to Italy in September 2006 with some trepidation, traveling with the
Dateline NBC
film crew. My Italian lawyer had informed me that given Giuttari’s and Mignini’s legal troubles, it was probably safe to return, and NBC promised to raise hell if I were arrested at the airport. Just in case, an NBC television crew met me at the airport ready to capture my arrest on tape. I was glad to deprive them of that scoop.
Spezi and I took Stone Phillips, the show’s anchor, to the scenes of the crimes, where we were filmed discussing the murders and our own brush with Italian law. Stone Phillips interviewed Giuttari, who continued to insist that Spezi and I had planted evidence at the villa. He also criticized our book. “Evidently, Mr. Preston did not do the least bit of fact-checking . . . In 1983, when the two young Germans were killed, this person [Antonio Vinci] was in prison for another crime unrelated to the monster crimes.” Phillips managed a brief interview with Antonio Vinci, off camera. Vinci confirmed what Giuttari said, that he had been in prison during one of the Monster’s killings. Perhaps Giuttari and Vinci didn’t expect NBC to check the facts. In the show, Stone Phillips said, “We later checked his record and found that [Antonio] had never been in jail during any of the Monster killings. He and Giuttari were either mistaken or lying about that.”
Vinci was far more incensed about being accused of impotence than of being the Monster of Florence. “If Spezi’s wife were younger and prettier,” he told Phillips, “I’d show them who isn’t impotent—I’d show you right here, right now, on this table.”
At the very end of the program, Phillips asked Antonio Vinci a question: “Are you the Monster of Florence?”
“He locked eyes,” said Phillips, “gripped my hand, and said one word.
Innocente
.”
W
hile filming with
Dateline NBC
, Spezi and I had one experience in Italy that never made it on camera. Stone Phillips wanted to interview Winnie Rontini, the mother of Pia Rontini, one of the Monster’s victims, murdered at La Boschetta near Vicchio on June 29, 1984. While the crew waited by the parked vans in the town square, in the shadow of the statue of Giotto, Spezi and I walked down the street to the old Rontini villa to see if she was willing to be interviewed.
We gazed at the house in silent dismay. The rusty iron gate hung from a single hinge. Skeletonized shrubbery in the garden rattled in the wind, and dead leaves had piled up in the corners. The shutters were closed, the slats broken and hanging. A half dozen crows lined the roof peak, like so many black rags.
Mario punched the gate buzzer but no sound came. It was dead. We looked at each other.
“It doesn’t look like anyone lives here,” Mario said.
“Let’s knock on the door.”
We pushed open the broken gate with a groan of rust and stepped into the dead garden, our footfalls crunching dried leaves and twigs. The door to the villa was locked tight, its green paint cracked and peeling up in tiny rolls, the wood underneath splitting. The house buzzer was gone, leaving a hole with a frayed wire sticking out.
“Signora Rontini?” Mario called out. “Is anybody home?”
The wind whispered and chuckled about the deserted house. Mario pounded on the door, the sound of his blows echoing, in a muffled way, through the empty rooms within. With a flapping of wings, the birds took off, rising into the sky, their irritated cries like fingernails on a blackboard.
We stood in the garden, looking up at the abandoned house. The crows circled above, cawing and cawing. Mario shook his head. “In town they’ll know what happened to her.”
In the piazza, a man told us the bank had finally foreclosed on the house and Signora Rontini now lived on public assistance in housing for indigents near the lake. He gave us the address.
With a feeling of dread we searched for the housing project, finding it tucked behind the local Casa del Popolo. It was unlike anything an American might imagine as public housing, a cheerful building, stuccoed a pale cream, neat as a pin, with flowers on the windowsills and pretty views of the lake. We walked around to the back and knocked on the door to her apartment. She met us and showed us in, offering us seats in a tiny kitchen-dining area. Her apartment was the reverse of the dark, cadaverous house; bright and cheerful, it was filled with plants, knickknacks, and photographs. The sun streamed in the windows and warblers chirped and flitted about in the sycamore trees outside. The room smelled of fresh laundry and soap.
“No,” she said with a sad smile in response to our question, “I won’t be interviewed again. Never again.” She was dressed in a sparkling yellow dress, her dyed red hair carefully coiffed, her voice mild.
“We still hope to find the truth,” said Mario. “One never knows . . . this could help.”
“I know it might help. But I’m not interested in the truth anymore. What difference will it make? It won’t bring Pia or Claudio back. For a long time I thought knowing the truth would somehow make everything better. My husband died searching for the truth. But now I know it doesn’t matter and that it won’t help me. I had to let it go.”
She fell silent, her small, plump hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed, a faint smile hovering about her face.
We chatted some more and she told us matter-of-factly how she had lost the house and all she owned to bankruptcy. Mario asked her about some of the photographs on the walls. She rose and plucked one off, passing it to Mario, who then passed it to me. “That was the last photograph taken of Pia,” she said. “It was for her driver’s license a few months before.” She moved on to the next one. “This is Pia with Claudio.” It was a black-and-white photo of them smiling, arms about each other’s neck, utterly innocent and happy, she giving a thumbs-up to the camera.
She moved to the far wall. “This is Pia at fifteen. She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?” The hand moved along the wall. “My late husband, Renzo.” She unhooked a black-and-white photograph, gazed at it awhile, and handed it to us. We passed it around. It was a portrait of a vigorous, happy man, in the prime of life.
She lifted a hand and gestured toward the photographs, turning her blue eyes on me. “Just the other day,” she said, “I walked in here and realized that I was surrounded by the dead.” She smiled sadly. “I’m going to take these photographs down and put them away. I don’t want to be surrounded by death anymore. I’d forgotten something—that I’m still alive.”
We rose. At the door she took Mario’s hand. “You’re welcome to keep searching for the truth, Mario. I hope you find it. But please don’t ask me to help you. I’m going to try to live my last years without that burden—I hope you understand.”
“I understand,” said Mario.
We walked out into the sunlight, the bees droning in the flowers, the bright sun throwing a shimmering trail on the surface of the lake, the light spilling over the red-tiled roofs of Vicchio and flinging streamers of gold through the vineyards and olive groves beyond the town. The
vendemmia
, the grape harvest, was in progress, the fields full of people and carts. The air carried up from the vineyards the perfume of bruised grapes and fermenting must.
Another flawless afternoon in the immortal hills of Tuscany.
T
he trial of Francesco Calamandrei, for being one of the instigators behind the Monster killings, began on September 27, 2007.
Mario Spezi attended the first day of the trial, and he sent me a report by e-mail a few days later. This is what he wrote:
The morning of September 27 dawned unexpectedly cold after a month of dry heat. The real news that morning was the absence of spectators at the trial of a man alleged to be a mastermind behind the Monster. In the courtroom, where more than ten years before Pacciani had first been convicted and then acquitted, nobody was seated in the space reserved for the public. Only the benches reserved for journalists were occupied. I had trouble understanding the indifference of Florentines toward a person who, according to the accusation, was almost the very incarnation of Evil. Skepticism, incredulity, or disbelief of the official version must have kept spectators away.
The accused entered the courtroom taking hesitant little steps. He looked meek, even resigned, his dark eyes lost in unknowable thoughts, carrying with him the air of a retired gentleman, wearing an elegant blue overcoat and gray fedora, his obese body swelled with unhappiness and psychopharmacological drugs. He was half-supported by his lawyer, Gabriele Zanobini, and his daughter Francesca. The pharmacist of San Casciano, Francesco Calamandrei, seated himself on the front bench, indifferent to the flashes of the news photographers and the television cameras that swung his way.
A journalist asked him how he felt. He answered: “Like someone who has fallen into a film, knowing nothing of the plot or characters.”
The prosecutor’s office of Florence had accused Calamandrei of masterminding five of the Monster’s killings. They claim he paid Pacciani, Lotti, and Vanni to commit the crimes and take away the sex organs of the female victims so that he could use them for horrendous, but unspecified, esoteric rites. He stands accused of actually participating in the killings of the two French tourists at the Scopeti clearing in 1985. He is also charged with having ordered the killings in Vicchio in 1984, those of September 1983 in which the two Germans were killed, and those of June 1982 in Montespertoli. The prosecution is silent on the vexing question of who might have committed the other Monster killings.
The evidence against Calamandrei is risible. It consists of the delirious ravings of his schizophrenic wife, so desperately ill that her doctors have forbidden her to give testimony in the courtroom, and the same “coarse and habitual liars” known as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, who testified against Pacciani and his picnicking friends ten years before. Notably, all four of these algebraic witnesses are now dead. Only the serial witness Lorenzo Nesi remains alive, ready to remember whatever might be required.
Also arrayed against Calamandrei is a mountain of paper: twenty-eight thousand pages of the trial against Pacciani; nineteen thousand pages of the investigation of his picnicking friends; and nine thousand pages collected on Calamandrei himself: fifty-five thousand pages in all, more than the Bible,
Das Kapital
of Marx, Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
, the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
, and
Don Quixote
all put together.
In front of the accused, mounted high behind an imposing bar, was seated Judge De Luca in the place of the usual two magistrates and the nine members of the popular jury who comprise the Court of Assizes, the Tribunal reserved for judging the most serious crimes. In a surprise move, Calamandrei’s lawyer had asked for a so-called abbreviated trial, usually only requested by those who have admitted guilt in order to obtain a reduced sentence. Zanobini and Calamandrei asked for it for another reason entirely: “In order that the trial be conducted as rapidly as possible,” Zanobini said, “seeing that we have nothing to fear from the result.”
To the left of the pharmacist, on another bench in the front row, sat the public minister of Florence, Paolo Canessa, with another prosecutor. The two smiled and joked in low voices, perhaps to give an outward show of confidence, or perhaps to needle the defense.
Before the end of the day, Zanobini would wipe the smiles off their faces.
Zanobini launched into his case with fire, pointing out a technical but very embarrassing legal oversight by Canessa. He then attacked the Perugian branch of the Monster investigation, conducted by Public Minister Mignini, which had linked Calamandrei to the death of Narducci. “Almost all the results of the Perugian investigation are like so much wastepaper,” he said. “Allow me to give you an example.” He raised a sheaf of papers, which he said constituted a statement taken by Public Minister Mignini and kept under seal until now. “How is it possible that a magistrate would take seriously and believe a document like the one I will read to you now?”
As Zanobini began to read, the cameras swung from Calamandrei to . . . me. I couldn’t believe it, Doug, but I was the star of the document! This document was the so-called spontaneous statement of a woman who had been in contact with Gabriella Carlizzi. She repeated many of Carlizzi’s theories to Judge Mignini, claiming she had heard them years ago from a long-deceased Sardinian aunt who knew all the people involved. Mignini had it all written down, recorded, sworn, and signed. Despite the clear absurdity and lack of proof of the woman’s allegations, Judge Mignini had then slapped a seal of secrecy on the document, “given the gravity and sensitivity” of the accusations.
As Zanobini read the document in the gray courtroom of the Tribunale, I heard, along with everyone else, that I wasn’t really the son of my father. My real father—or so this woman claimed in her statement—was a famous musician of sick and perverse habits who had committed the first two killings of 1968; I heard that my mother had conceived me on a Sardinian farm in Tuscany; I heard that upon discovering the truth about my real father, I had carried on his diabolical work as a family tradition, becoming the “real Monster of Florence.” This crazy aunt claimed we were all conspiring together: me, the Vinci brothers, Pacciani and his picnicking friends, Narducci, and Calamandrei. From our diabolical association, she told Mignini, “each derives his own benefit: the voyeurs enjoyed their particular activities, the cultists used the anatomical parts taken from the victims for their rites, the fetishists conserved the pieces taken from the victims, and SPEZI, my aunt always told me, mutilated the victims with a tool known as a cobbler’s knife. . . . Certain fellow citizens of Villacidro told me, recently, that the writer Douglas Preston, Spezi’s friend, is connected to the American Secret Service.”
She explained to Mignini, “I hadn’t spoken of this up until now because I am afraid of Mario SPEZI and his friends. . . . When Spezi was arrested by you I gathered up my courage and decided to speak about it with Carlizzi, because I trusted her and I knew she sought the truth. . . .”
It was absurd stuff and I had to smile as Zanobini read the statement. But I felt no mirth; I couldn’t forget that I had ended up in prison partly because of Carlizzi’s black-hearted accusations.
The first day of Calamandrei’s trial ended with a clear win for the defense. Judge De Luca fixed the next three trial days for November 27, 28, and 29. Breaks of this length in trials are, unfortunately, the norm in Italy.
That was the end of the e-mail.
I called up Mario. “So I’m in the American Secret Service? Damn.”
“It was all reported in the press the next day.”
“What are you going to do about these absurd accusations?”
“I’ve already brought suit against the woman for defamation.”
“Mario,” I said, “the world is full of crazy people. How is it that in Italy, the statements of such people are taken down by a public minister as serious evidence?”
“Because Mignini and Giuttari will never give up. This is clear evidence they’re still out to get me, one way or another.”
As of this writing, Calamandrei’s trial continues, with an acquittal nearly certain, leaving the old pharmacist to live out what is left of his ruined life—one more victim of the Monster of Florence.
The Monster investigation grinds on with no end in sight. Spezi’s complaint against Giuttari for defamation was rejected by the Tribunal. He has heard nothing about his suit against Giuttari and Mignini for damages relating to the wrecking of his car. The Supreme Court ruling in Spezi’s favor allowed him to ask for damages for his illegal detention. Spezi asked for compensation in the amount of three hundred thousand euros; the lawyers for the state countered with forty-five hundred euros. Mignini is dragging his heels officially closing the investigation against Spezi, while at the same time claiming that Spezi cannot ask for any damages at all because the investigation is still open.
In November 2007, Mignini became involved in another sensational case, that of the brutal murder of a British student, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia. Mignini quickly ordered the arrest of an American student, Amanda Knox, whom he suspected of involvement in the murder. As of this writing, Knox is in Capanne prison, awaiting the outcome of Mignini’s investigation. It appears from press leaks that Mignini is spinning an improbable theory about Knox and two alleged co-conspirators in a dark plan of extreme sex, violence, and rape.
As if on cue, Perugian prosecutors were reported to be looking into a potential satanic sect angle, because the crime had occurred the day before the traditional Italian Day of the Dead. “I will give you ten to one odds,” said Niccolò, “that they will eventually drag the Monster of Florence into this.” I declined the wager.
Within a week of the murder, Gabriella Carlizzi had weighed in at her website:
Meredith Kercher: a brutal murder . . . Perhaps connected to the Narducci case and the Monster of Florence, to ask Satan for protection in exchange for a human sacrifice? For what purpose? In the end to save those under investigation in the Narducci case who are responsible for his homicide.
Giuttari was acquitted for falsifying evidence in the Monster case, but is now serving a suspended sentence after he was convicted of making false statements in an unrelated case.
On January 16, 2008, the first pretrial hearing took place for Giuttari and Mignini, accused of abuse of office and, in Mignini’s case, conflict of interest in favor of Giuttari. The public minister of Florence, Luca Turco, shocked the court with his blunt language. The two accused, he said, were “two diametrically different people.” Mignini was “on a crusade in thrall to a sort of delirium,” a person “ready to go to any extreme defending himself against anyone who criticized his investigation.” Giuttari exploited this form of delirium, Turco said, “for his own personal, vindictive interests beyond the bounds of his professional responsibilities.”
As Mignini left the courtroom after the hearing, he cried out to the waiting press, “I contest this!”
I remain a
persona indagata
in Italy for a series of crimes that are still, more or less, under judicial seal and secret. Not long ago I received a registered letter from Italy to my little post office in Round Pond, informing me that I had been denounced before the Tribunal of Lecco, a city in the north of Italy, for
diffamazione a mezzo stampa
, defamation through means of the press, a criminal offense. Curiously, the person or persons asking for the state to bring charges against me, and for what article or interview, were omitted from the document. To even know the name of my accuser and the crime I am supposed to have committed, I will have to pay thousands more euros to my Italian lawyer.
The question I am most often asked is this: Will the Monster of Florence ever be found? I once believed fervently that Spezi and I would unmask him. Now I’m not so sure. It may be that truth can disappear from the world completely, forever unrecoverable. History is replete with questions that will never be answered—among them, perhaps, the identity of the Monster of Florence.
As a thriller writer, I know that a crime novel, to be successful, must contain certain elements. There must be a killer who has a comprehensible motive. There must be evidence. There must be a process of discovery that leads, one way or another, to the truth. And all novels, even
Crime and Punishment
, must have an ending.
The fatal mistake that Spezi and I made was in assuming that the Monster of Florence case would follow this pattern. Instead, these were murders without motive, theories without evidence, and a story with no end. The process of discovery has led investigators so far into a wilderness of conspiracy theory that I doubt they will ever find their way out. Without solid physical evidence and reliable witnesses, any hypothesis about the Monster case will remain like a speech by Hercule Poirot at the end of an Agatha Christie novel, a beautiful story awaiting a confession. Only this is not a novel, and there won’t be a confession. Without one, the Monster will never be found.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the investigation would end up in a bizarre and futile search for a satanic sect dating back to the Middle Ages. The Monster’s crimes were so horrific that a mere man could not possibly have committed them. Satan, in the end, had to be invoked.
After all, this is Italy.