| The Monster of Florence | |
| Alias: | Il Mostro (The Monster), The Surgeon of Death, Il Mostro di Firenze, The Monster of Florence |
| Victims: | 16 |
| Country: | Italy |
| Beginyear: | 21 August 1968 |
| Endyear: | 8 September 1985 |
| Capture Status: | Judicial measures:
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The Monster of Florence (Italian: Il Mostro di Firenze) is the name commonly used by the Italian media for a non-definitively identified serial killer active within the Metropolitan City of Florence between 1968 and 1985. The Monster murdered 16 victims, usually young couples secluded in search of intimacy, in wooded areas during new moons.[1] Several connected persons have been convicted for involvement in the murders, yet the exact sequence of events, the identity of the main actor and the motives remain unclear.
Law enforcement conducted several investigations into the cases over several years. In 2000, courts convicted two individuals for four of the double homicides. They had been charged with being part of an alleged group of murderers which became known in the popular press as the "Snack Buddies" (Compagni di merende), following the notorious and absurdly comical courtroom protestation of one of the suspects that the group were merely friends who on frequent occasion innocently consumed "snacks" together in local bars and restaurants. Multiple weapons were used in the murders, including a .22 caliber Beretta handgun and a knife, and in half of the cases, a large portion of the skin surrounding sex organs was excised from the bodies of the female victims.
On the night of 21 August 1968, mason worker Antonio Lo Bianco (29) and homemaker Barbara Locci (32) were shot to death with a .22 handgun in Signa, a small town to the west of Florence. The couple were attacked in their car while Locci's son, Natalino Mele (6), lay asleep in the backseat. Upon waking up and finding his mother dead, the child fled in fright and reached a nearby house.
Locci, a native of Sardinia, had been well known in the town, receiving the nickname ape regina ("Queen Bee"). Her older husband, Stefano Mele, was eventually charged with the murder and spent six years in prison. However, while he was imprisoned, another couple was murdered apparently with the same gun. Several lovers of Locci's were suspected to be perpetrators of the crime. Even Stefano stated on several occasions that one of them had killed her, but no evidence was found, as other murders were committed while they were in prison.
In 1982, the murders of Lo Bianco and Locci were linked to the more recent murders based on a tip from an anonymous writer, who had possibly signed himself Un cittadino amico ("a friendly citizen") in a letter to police. On 20 July 1982, examining magistrate Vincenzo Tricomi found five bullets and five shell casings inappropriately stored in a folder among records of Mele's case file.[2]
Authorities were unable to reconstruct the chain of custody of those pieces of evidence and did not request a scientific comparison, even though it would have been necessary to check whether they matched the ballistic report from 1968. As the spent cartridges were fired by a gun used in four similar crimes, their presence in the Mele's case file suggested to law enforcement officers that the perpetrator of the more recent double murders was connected with them.[2]
On 15 September 1974, teenaged sweethearts Pasquale Gentilcore (19), a barman, and Stefania Pettini (18), an accountant, were shot and stabbed in a country lane near Borgo San Lorenzo while having sex in Gentilcore's Fiat 127. They were not far from a notorious discothèque called Teen Club, where they were supposed to spend the evening with friends. Pettini's corpse had been violated with a grapevine stalk and disfigured with 97 stab wounds.
Some hours before the murder, Pettini had disclosed to a close friend that a weird man was terrifying her. Another friend of Pettini's recalled that a strange man had followed and bothered the two of them during a driving lesson a few days before. Several couples of lovers who used to "park" in the same area where Gentilcore and Pettini were murdered stated that particular area was frequented by voyeurs, a pair of them acting very oddly.
On 6 June 1981, warehouseman Giovanni Foggi (30) and shop assistant Carmela De Nuccio (21) were shot and stabbed near Scandicci, where the engaged couple both lived. De Nuccio's body was pulled out of the car and the killer cut out her pubic area with a notched knife. The next morning, a young voyeur, paramedic Enzo Spalletti (30), spoke about the murder before the corpses had been discovered. He spent three months in jail and was charged with murder before the perpetrator exonerated him by killing again.
On 23 October 1981, workman Stefano Baldi (26) and telephonist Susanna Cambi (24), who were engaged, were shot and stabbed in a park in the vicinity of Calenzano. Cambi's pubic area was cut out like De Nuccio's. An anonymous caller phoned Cambi's mother the morning after the murder to "talk to her about her daughter." A few days before the murder, Susanna had told her mother that somebody was tormenting her and even chasing her by car.
On 19 June 1982, mechanic Paolo Mainardi (22) and dressmaker Antonella Migliorini (20) were shot to death just after having sex in Mainardi's car on a provincial road in Montespertoli. This time the killer did not have the time to mutilate the female victim, as the road was relatively busy. Several passing motorists had seen the car parked at the side of the road after its interior light had turned on. Mainardi was still alive when found, but died some hours later in hospital due to serious injuries.
Mainardi is believed to have heard or seen the killer approaching and attempted to drive away, only to lose control of his car and drive into a ditch on the other side of the road. Another reconstruction of the events suggests that, after shooting the couple, the killer drove Mainardi's car for a few meters to hide the vehicle and the bodies in a woodland area nearby, only to lose control of the car and abandon it in the ditch where it was discovered by a motorist only a few minutes later.[3]
On 9 September 1983, Wilhelm Friedrich Horst Meyer (24) and Jens Uwe Rüsch (24), two students from Osnabrück, West Germany, were visiting Italy to celebrate an important scholarship Meyer had just won. They were found shot to death in their Volkswagen Samba Bus in Galluzzo. Rüsch's long blond hair and small build could have deceived the killer into thinking he was a female. Police suspected that the students were gay lovers based on pornographic materials found at the scene.
On 29 July 1984, law student Claudio Stefanacci (21) and barmaid Pia Gilda Rontini (18) were shot and stabbed in Stefanacci's Fiat Panda parked in a woodland area near Vicchio. The killer removed Rontini's pubic area and left breast. There were reports of a strange man who had been following the couple in an ice cream parlour some hours before the murder. A close friend of Rontini recalled that she had confided that she had been bothered by "an unpleasant man" while working at the bar.
On the night of 7–8 September 1985, Jean Michel Kraveichvili (25), a musician of Georgian ancestry, and tradeswoman Nadine Mauriot (36), both from Audincourt, France, were shot and stabbed while sleeping in their small tent in a woodland area near San Casciano. Kraveichvili was killed a short distance away from the tent while trying to escape. Mauriot's body was mutilated. Because the killer had murdered two foreigners, there was not yet a missing persons report.
The killer sent a taunting note, along with a piece of Mauriot's breast, to the state prosecutor, Silvia Della Monica, stating that a murder had taken place and challenging local authorities to find the victims. A person picking mushrooms in the area discovered the bodies a few hours before the letter arrived on Della Monica's desk.
It was not until the Foggi-De Nuccio murders in 1981 that the police realized the killings were connected. A newspaper article about the Gentilcore-Pettini murder from 1974 caused the police to perform a ballistics test and confirm the same gun had been used in both murders.[4] Reporter Mario Spezi coined the moniker "Monster of Florence".
After the 1982 murders, police leaked false information that Mainardi had regained consciousness before dying in the hospital. Soon after, an anonymous tip called for the police to relook at the Lo Bianco-Locci murder from 1968; it was quickly determined that the same gun had been used.[5] The confession and conviction of Locci's husband, Stefano Mele, was subsequently revisited, as Mele had been imprisoned during the later murders. Mele's statements in police interviews were inconsistent, shifting the blame among his Sardinian relatives and acquaintances.[6]
Francesco Vinci was arrested first. He was a former lover of Locci's whose car had been found hidden on the day the false Mainardi information had been leaked. Francesco was kept in custody for over a year, even during the 1983 murders.[7] Examining magistrate Mario Rotella instead widened the net, arresting Mele's brother and brother-in-law, Giovanni Mele and Piero Mucciarini. The 1984 murders occurred when the three suspects were in custody, so the police released them.[8]
Rotella focused on Francesco's brother Salvatore Vinci, another lover, and former lodger of Barbara Locci's. Vinci's first wife had died in a fire in Sardinia, ruled a suicide although rumored to be a murder. After the final Monster murder in 1985, Rotella arrested Vinci and charged him with the murder of his wife, intending to move from there to the other killings attributed to the Monster. The trial in Sardinia instead acquitted Vinci, who walked free. By this point, chief prosecutor Pier Luigi Vigna thought the Sardinian trail was spent, and wanted to look into the possibility of the gun having been picked up by an unknown party after its use in the 1968 murder. In 1989, Rotella was forced to officially clear all the Sardinian suspects and withdraw from the case.[9]
This line of investigation has become known in Italian press and literature about the case as the "Pista Sarda," the Sardinian trail.
With the use of computer analysis and anonymous tips, a new suspect, Pietro Pacciani, was found. Pacciani had been convicted both for rape and domestic abuse of his two daughters, and for the 1951 murder of a man who had relations with his ex-girlfriend, for which he served thirteen years in prison. Inspector Ruggero Perugini found incriminating evidence, such as similarities between the 1951 murder and the Monster killings, as well as a reproduction of Primavera by Botticelli and another painting thought to be by Pacciani. The only physical evidence against Pacciani was an unfired bullet of the same brand as the Monster's, found in Pacciani's garden at the end of a lengthy search, later discovered to be planted evidence by the police.[10]
Pacciani was controversially convicted in his initial trial in 1994. At his appeal, the prosecutor took Pacciani's side, citing a lack of evidence and poor police work. As a result, Pacciani was acquitted and released in 1996. Perugini's successor Michele Giuttari tried to introduce new witnesses at the final hour, but was denied.[11] A new trial for Pacciani was ordered by the Supreme Court, but he died in 1998 before it could begin. Instead, two alleged accomplices were tried, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti.
Vanni had been a witness at Pacciani's trial, where he famously claimed the two of them merely to be "Snack Buddies" (Compagni di Merende), a term that entered Italian vernaculum. Lotti had been one of Giuttari's surprise witnesses, claiming to have seen Pacciani and Vanni commit the 1985 murder. After many more sessions of questioning, he had begun to incriminate himself in the murders as well. Both were convicted and condemned to life imprisonment, though their sentences have been widely criticized and many consider the murders to be unsolved.[12]
The sentences condemning the "snack buddies" are mainly based on the much discussed testimonies of Pucci and, above all, Lotti. This prevented the identification of a certain, organic, and global motive that was valid for all crimes. In fact, Lotti, before mentioning the mysterious "doctor," had changed his version several times on the reasons why Pacciani and Vanni had killed. Initially, in 1996, Lotti declared "that the crimes were acts of anger due to sexual approaches that the victims would have rejected."[13] Instead, a year later, he provided another version of the motive, stating that Pacciani's intention was to kill and then feed the "fetishes" to his daughters.[14]
In 2001, Giuttari, now chief inspector for the police unit GIDES (Gruppo Investigativo Delitti Seriali, Investigative Group for Serial Crimes), announced that the crimes were connected to a satanic cult allegedly active in the Florence area. In his testimony, Lotti had spoken of a doctor who had hired Pacciani to commit the murders and collect the genitalia of the women for use in rituals. Giuttari justified this partly on the discovery of a pyramidal stone near a villa where Pacciani had been employed. The stone, Giuttari suggested, was indicative of cult activity. Critics, such as Spezi, found this idea laughable, given that such stones are commonly used as doorstops in the surrounding area.[15] The villa was searched, but nothing was found.[16]
The acquaintances of Pacciani and Vanni during the years of the murders fueled a line of investigation into possible esoteric motives and rites linked to satanism underlying the crimes. In particular, Pacciani and Vanni frequented Salvatore Indovino, a self-styled occultist and fortune teller originally from Catania, at a farmhouse located in the countryside of San Casciano, where, according to local rumours, orgies and rites took place. During the searches carried out by the State Police at Pacciani's home, at least three books linked to black magic and Satanism were found.[17]
The so-called esoteric trail is also linked to the large sums of money that Pacciani came into possession of during the years of the crimes, which gave rise to the idea that the "snack buddies" acted on behalf of personalities who remained unknown.
The checks carried out by the State Police highlighted that Pacciani, before the crimes attributable to the Monster of Florence, was in modest economic conditions and did not inherit assets that could justify the sums of money considered for the most part out of league for a simple farmer like him. Mario Vanni also came to have important figures at his disposal, although to a much lower extent than those of Pacciani. Pacciani, a modest farmer, even had 157 million lire at his disposal (corresponding, in 1996, to 117,069.52 euros in 2018) in cash and interest-bearing postal vouchers, as well as having purchased a car, two houses and completely renovated his home.
Arguments against Pacciani as a murderer hired by mysterious unknown instigators point out that the farmer, in addition to renting an apartment, carried out many odd jobs and was known for his stinginess, as underlined by Giuseppe Alessandri in the book The Legend of Vampa. Furthermore, the alleged accomplice Lotti was far from rich given that in the 1980s and 1990s he found odd jobs and accommodation only thanks to the help of the town priest, being at all effects a destitute unemployed person. Even Vanni, despite the figures found in his accounts, died in a modest provincial retirement home.[18]
In 2010, Pier Luigi Vigna, former Florence prosecutor who dealt with the case, declared himself skeptical about the existence of a possible second level of instigators, demonstrating the fact that the investigations following those of the "snacks buddies" have not had any developments .[19]
Based on Lotti's statements regarding a doctor as one of the instigators, Giuttari, the chief prosecutor of Perugia Giuliano Mignini and Gabriella Carlizzi, editor-in-chief of the magazine L'Altra Repubblica, speculated that a pharmacist, Francesco Calamandrei, and a deceased physician from Perugia, Francesco Narducci, had been involved in the secret society ordering Pacciani and the others. Calamandrei was put on trial while Narducci's body was exhumed.[20]
Francesco Narducci, a young doctor from a bourgeoisie family of Perugia, disappeared while on board his boat at Lake Trasimeno and was found dead in the lake a few days later on October 13, 1985, a month after the Monster's last double crime. Identification was handled by unorthodox means and burial was hastened according to magistrate Giuliano Mignini.[21] In 2001, a telephone interception during an anti-usury investigation made references to the Monster of Florence and a satanic cult, leading the Perugia prosecutor's office to an investigation on the doctor's death due to the public gossip about him. While Mignini claimed the intercepted phone calls made references to Narducci as well, those didn't occur until months after the investigation had been opened and its existence leaked to the public[22] [23]
The Perugia Public Prosecutor's Office hypothesized that an unknown body was passed off as the deceased doctor at identification, and no post-mortem was carried out when the body was recovered from the lake. In June 2002, the buried body was exhumed and identified as Narducci, after which Mignini postulated a second body switch. A post-mortem was carried out, which demonstrated the presence of injuries compatible with strangulation. This directly contradicted the death certificate and the original news regarding Dr. Narducci's death reporting the causes of death by drowning.[23] The Narducci family was investigated for criminal conspiracy and concealment of evidence. Furthermore, a friend of Narducci, the lawyer Alfredo Brizioli, was also accused of trying to force the medical examiner to draw up a false opinion on the doctor's death. The trial process ended with the complete acquittal sanctioned by the Supreme Court. In the end, Calamandrei was completely exonerated and nothing incriminating was found at the time regarding Narducci.[20]
During the process, journalist Mario Spezi was arrested by Mignini. Spezi had been investigating his own favored suspect, a son of Salvatore Vinci. Mignini claimed he did so to obstruct the investigation into Calamandrei and Narducci's sect, to which he claimed Spezi belonged. After international outcry, Spezi was set free, his arrest declared illegal. Giuttari and Mignini were indicted for abuse of office. GIDES was dissolved, and no active investigation of the Monster of Florence remains.[24]
In 2018, the "esoteric lead", and in particular the direct involvement of Francesco Narducci in the murders of the Monster of Florence resurfaced during the investigation into the disappearance of the Rossella Corazzin in the Belluno area in 1975, as stated in the final draft of the report of the Bicameral Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission. The story originates from some statements by Angelo Izzo, one of the perpetrators of the Circeo massacre.[25] The Commission stated that the evidential framework collected deserves further investigation.[26]
In 2017, Francesco Amicone, a freelance journalist, conducted an investigation on his own that led him to find a connection between the Monster of Florence and the Zodiac Killer cases.[27] Amicone's inquiry has been published in Italian magazine Tempi, newspapers Il Giornale and Libero, and his blog ostellovolante.com since 2018.[28] [29] [30]
Amicone's suspect was Joseph aka Giuseppe Bevilacqua (Totowa, NJ, 20 December 1935 - Sesto Fiorentino, Italy, 23 December 2022) a former ABMC superintendent at the Florence American Cemetery in Italy, who testified to the Pacciani Trial. In 2017, Amicone found out that Bevilacqua had a 20-year military career when he retired from the Army to move to Florence in July 1974.
Between May 26 and August 10, Bevilacqua and Amicone had seven meetings of circa two-three hours, as it was found by the Florence ROS Carabinieri in 2018.[31] During a phone call on September 12, 2017, Bevilacqua implied his responsibility in both the Monster of Florence and the Zodiac Killer case, agreeing to Amicone's request to turn himself in. However, Bevilacqua later changed his mind. The conversation was not recorded.
During the meetings in 2017, Bevilacqua told Amicone he was an undercover CID investigator operating in California at the time of Zodiac's activities in 1969 and 1970, and participated in the CID inquiry on the so-called "Khaki Mafia", which involved SMA William O. Wooldridge, other Army sergeants,[32] and firms from Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in Reno, Nevada.
Following a complaint against Bevilacqua by Amicone dated March 1, 2018, the journalist's first news articles on the "Monster-Zodiac connection" were published by tempi.it and Il Giornale in May 2018. Bevilacqua denied the admission of guilt and filed a lawsuit.[33] Despite this, Amicone did not stop accusing him.
Amicone says that Bevilacqua might have had access to a case file of a double murder near Florence in 1968 where bullets and shell casings had been improperly stored.[34] and that Bevilacqua replaced the pieces of evidence with spent cartridges shot by the gun he would use in the Monster's homicides in order to link his future crimes to those murders for which he had an alibi. Italian authorities collected Bevilacqua's DNA in late 2020.
In 1968 Bevilacqua was in Vietnam, but according to Amicone he could have had access to Stefano Mele's trial file where bullets and shell casings of the Signa murder had been improperly stored and switch them to attribute the crime to himself. The hypothetical mislead would have taken place in the early 1970s, while Bevilacqua was serving in Italy at Camp Darby. In this regard, in 2021 Amicone attached to an addition to the complaint against Bevilacqua a report containing 21 interviews with ballistics experts and the results of a test at the range.[35] According to Amicone, the report would show that the bullets and casings from the Monster's gun found in the Mele file may not be the same as in 1968, providing a reconstruction of the possible mislead.[36]
In 2021, at Florence assistant attorney Luca Turco's request, the investigation into Bevilacqua resulting from Amicone's inquiry was dismissed, and the journalist charged for defamation due to a complaint from Bevilacqua.[37]
In November 2023, Bevilacqua's DNA profile was sent by Amicone to the authorities that investigate the Zodiac case according to the journalist.[38]