The Monster of Florence (8 page)
PREMISE: SECTION 1
FACTS RELATING TO THE SEVEN DOUBLE HOMICIDES COMMITTED IN THE AREA SURROUNDING FLORENCE BETWEEN 1974 AND 1985 BY PERSON OR PERSONS KNOWN AS THE ‘MONSTER.’
| 1985 | On the 9th September 1985, in the early hours of the afternoon, the carabinieri on duty in the Station of San Casciano Val di Pesa were informed that in a wooded area adjacent to Via degli Scopeti, a stretch of road linking San Casciano with the Via Cassia which runs between Siena and Florence, a body had just been found. The marshal commanding the station repaired immediately to the zone indicated with his men and established that the body was that of a young man who had received a number of gunshot wounds and knife wounds in various parts of his body. The body itself was partly hidden by shrub and a pile of empty paint tins which had been tossed on to it. In the clearing immediately above it and very close by stood a Volkswagen Golf. The car was white and had French numberplates: beside it a Canadian-style tent had been pitched. The tent showed a large rent in the cloth at the back. Inside lay the naked body of a young woman who likewise had received numerous gunshot and stab wounds. The woman’s body also showed evidence of mutilation, the pudenda and left breast having been removed. It was evident before the autopsy confirmed it, given the mutilation suffered by the female victim and the weapons used to perpetrate the crime, that this was the latest in a series of murders committed by the mysterious criminal which popular fancy had denominated ‘The Monster of Florence.’ It was also immediately evident that the firearm used was yet again the Beretta 22 Long Rifle, now responsible for 16 deaths. |
| 1968 | This weapon, an automatic pistol, of the type frequently used on firing ranges, was first identified after the murder in August 1968 of Belinda Muscas née Lubino and Amadeo Lo Russo to which Belinda Muscas’s husband Sergio Muscas confessed. Since Muscas was still serving his sentence when the present series of killings began, it may be assumed that the weapon changed hands after the ’68 murder. Muscas later retracted his confession though he was nevertheless condemned to life imprisonment. |
| 1974 | Six years after the 1968 murder, on Saturday 14th September 1974 in the Borgo San Lorenzo area to the north of Florence, Piero Galli and Sandra Palladini were murdered in their parked car. Notified by passers-by, the carabinieri arrived on the scene to find the half-naked body of the young man supine in the driver’s seat of a Fiat 127, later established as belonging to his father, whilst that of the girl, completely naked, lay outside and to the rear of the car. The contents of the girl’s handbag were scattered around. The bag was later discovered in a nearby field. The girl was supine with the upper and lower limbs spreadeagled and a vine branch inserted in the vagina. At first sight both victims appeared to have been stabbed to death with something in the nature of a screwdriver or an awl, but an autopsy later revealed that they had first been shot and then attacked with a knife. The man had received at least five bullet wounds from which he had died immediately. His stab wounds had been inflicted postmortem. The girl had received three bullet wounds in her right arm which had not killed her. She had then been killed with a knife. The autopsy revealed 96 clearly identifiable stab wounds, a few of them mortal but the rest inflicted postmortem, over the entire trunk but concentrated in the abdominal region in the pubic area. Ballistics reports identified the firearm as a Beretta 22 LR model 73 or 74 and the ammunition as Winchester H series with copper-coated lead bullets. The knife was estimated to be 10/12 cm long and 1.5 cm wide with a single-edged blade. No connection was made at this stage with the 1968 murder of so long before, particularly as the mutilation of the girl’s body indicated that the murderer or murderers in this case must clearly be maniacal and sexually deviant. |
| June 1981 | Seven years had gone by and the unsolved murder of 1974 was virtually forgotten when on Saturday 6th June 1981 at approximately 23.45 in Via dell’Arrigo, Scandicci, another young courting couple was murdered. The bodies of Gino Fani and Caterina Di Paola were discovered accidentally by a police sergeant taking a country walk near his home at 9 o’clock on the morning after the crime, together with his small son. The sergeant first noticed a Fiat Ritmo, dark red in colour, parked in the lane. Its doors were closed, but on the ground near the driver’s side lay a woman’s handbag with its contents scattered around it. Closer inspection revealed the driver’s window to be smashed. Sitting at the wheel of the car, the head turned inwards, was the body of a bearded young man with wounds in the throat. The sergeant gave the alarm and was joined by a squad car bringing his colleagues. Only after this did they discover, at the bottom of a steep bank falling away from the road, the body of a girl lying supine with legs apart. Her T-shirt and jeans were ripped and slashed revealing that the pubic area had been crudely excised. The body lay approximately 20 yards from the car but there were no signs of its having been dragged. The victims were transported to the Medico-Legal Institute where an autopsy revealed that both had died from gunshot wounds whilst still inside the car. Successively, the man had received three stab wounds, two of them near the neck and superficial, the third a deeper wound in the chest. The excision of the girl’s pudenda had been done with an extremely sharp knife. The clothing, particularly the belt, jeans and pants, had been slashed with great precision and decisiveness, denuding in one stroke the area to be excised without the slightest damage to the underlying skin. According to the pathologist, Professor Mario Forli, this implied some skill and experience on the part of the murderer. Further, the cleanness of the cuts excising the pudenda and the evenness indicated an ability in the use of cutting instruments and that in his opinion this constituted a point of considerable, even decisive importance. A witness saw a car, a red Taurus, parked a few metres from the scene of the crime that night. The ballistics reports indicated that the two people were killed by a minimum of seven wounds from a firearm and that the said firearm was a Beretta 22-calibre automatic pistol used in the Galli/Palladini murder of 1974. The ammunition was also of the same type, Winchester H, but in this case the bullets were not copper coated. |
| Oct 1981 | Only a very few months were to pass before the next murder of a courting couple. Silvio Benci and Sara Contini went out on the evening of Thursday 22nd October because there was to be a general strike the next day so they needn’t get up for work. At the end of their evening out, they parked their car in a country lane between the vineyards near Calenzano to the north of Florence. Their bodies were discovered lying on each side of their VW Golf, the man half naked and riddled with bullet and stab wounds; the girl lying supine near the edge of a ditch with similar wounds and the pubis excised. Dr. Forli concluded in his autopsy report that both had been shot through the front window on the passenger side of the car and that they were still alive when the first stab wounds were inflicted. The knife was single edged, approximately 3 cm wide and not less than 5–7 cm long. The bodies showed signs of having been dragged. The excision appeared to have been done with the same knife as the stabbing, but differed from the preceding murder in that it was done with considerably less precision and took in a much larger area so that the abdominal wall had been cut through all its layers, leaving a large area of the abdominal cavity exposed and part of the intestine punctured. Ballistics reports identified the same Beretta 22 used in the two preceding murders. A red Alfa GT was seen leaving the scene by two couples approaching it in search of somewhere to park. An Identikit was prepared from their description of the lone male driver. |
| 1982 | The murderer struck again on 19th June 1982 at approximately 23.45 in the countryside near Montespertoli to the south west of Florence. This time the victims of the Beretta 22 Long Rifle were Piero Merlini and Anna Montini, both residents of Montespertoli. They had parked in a little clearing off the country road where a stream ran parallel to the road on the opposite side. For the first time, the killer made a mistake. He failed to shoot the young man to death in seconds as he had always done before. Merlini, badly wounded but still capable of movement, managed to start his car and tried to drive away. In his panic-stricken attempt to back out of the clearing he overshot the road and backed his car into the stream where it stuck. The killer calmly following him, shot out the front lights with one bullet each. After emptying his pistol into the two victims he smashed the rear lights with some pointed object and removed the car keys which he tossed away. The killer was sufficiently disturbed by the episode as to leave without further damage to the bodies. In fact, Merlini was not dead. He died in hospital at 8 A.M. the following day without regaining consciousness. Nine cartridge cases were found at the scene, one inside the car, the rest in three groups, the first group of three in the clearing and mixed with fragments of glass from the left front car window, the second two, at the edge of the road just out of the clearing, and the third near the opposite side of the road. It was through this grouping of the cartridge cases that the dynamics of the killing were established. |
| 1983 | Little more than a year later, on the night of 9th September 1983, in a grassy clearing near Galluzzo to the south of Florence, two German boys, Herman Mainz and Ulrich Richter, were shot to death in their Volkswagen camper. Although the murder was committed with the same Beretta 22, no further damage was done to the bodies, possibly because the killer realized on entering the camper that he had made a mistake. Ulrich Richter had very long wavy blond hair and he may well have mistaken him for a girl. It should be mentioned here that at the time of the Mainz/Richter murder the Beretta had already been identified as that used in the Muscas/Lo Russo murder of 1968. |
| 1984 | Late in the evening of Sunday 29th July 1984, in Vicchio di Mugello to the north of Florence, a young couple, Carlo Salvini and Patrizia Renzetti, were murdered in their parked car. The murder showed all the characteristics of the previous ones: the new moon, the car parked in a country lane, a course of water nearby. The dead boy was found on the back seat of the car wearing only a vest and underpants. Not far from the car, behind a bush, lay the completely naked body of the girl, supine with legs apart. The pudenda and left breast had been cut away. The autopsy established that both victims had been shot through the car window and then attacked with the knife. The body of the girl, who had already taken off her jeans, was dragged by the ankles to a distance of about 10 yards. The killer had then removed her T-shirt and brassiere and ripped and cut away her pants. For the first time he cut away the left breast as well as the pudenda. The instrument was a single-edged knife with the same characteristics as that used in the previous mutilations. Ballistics reports established that the firearm used was the Beretta 22 Long Rifle series 70 of the previous killings. |
| 1985 | The last in this series of killings was the above-mentioned murder of the French couple, Nathalie Monde and Maurice Clément, camping in the San Casciano area in 1985. The autopsy carried out by Professor Forli on the woman’s body, which was closed inside the tent, showed that the victim had been hit by four bullets, three of which penetrated the skull, and one the thorax. The man had been hit by four bullets, one in the mouth, two in the upper left arm and one in the right elbow. All the shots were fired at close quarters, estimated at not more than 15–20 inches, some from outside the tent, some from inside, but all from the front opening. It is probable that the man was lying supine with the woman on top of him. The woman died from the gunshot wounds whilst still inside the tent but the man, who was only superficially wounded, attempted to escape. He succeeded in getting out of the tent and ran for approximately 30 yards in the direction of the woods before the killer overtook him and stabbed him to death. He was then lifted and thrown down the bank into the shrub where the body was discovered. According to the pathologist, the woman’s naked body was then dragged partially out of the tent by the feet and the pudenda removed with ample and decisive strokes. The left breast was then cut away with a technique similar to that used on Patrizia Renzetti. Finally, the body of the woman was put back into the tent. The whole operation is estimated to have been completed within 9 minutes. On the day following the crime, an envelope was delivered to the Public Prosecutor’s office, addressed to the only woman prosecutor to have worked on the case. The address was formed from letters cut from a magazine and contained a spelling mistake. Inside was a sheet of paper folded and glued at its edges. Inside the paper container was a small polythene bag. The bag contained a cube of flesh from Nathalie Monde’s left breast. |
A thread of gilding glittered through the clean green and white marble of San Miniato for a moment and then the façade was swallowed in evergreen as the car neared the top of the avenue. The city spread itself below them to the right. It must have rained yet again during the night and the pattern of red roofs glowed this morning in the mild November sunshine.
“River’s swollen,” remarked Ferrini. “You can always tell by that yellowy colour and the thick shine on it. I saw some film once of the flood. Did you ever see it?”
“Yes. I saw it.”
“Buses being tossed along through the streets like they were matchwood. The place looks better from up here.”
More than anything it looked so quiet and sleepy, its towers and domes rising out of the terra-cotta tapestry in the tepid, misty light. The truth was that they were obliged to drive this way because they would otherwise have been trapped in the snarling filth of the traffic down there for hours. Ferrini turned away to look at Guarnaccia, silent behind his dark glasses.
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