The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  Not a problem, Torrini explained. “The main character isn’t the killer: it’s the city of Florence itself—the city that discovers it harbors a monster within.”

  Spezi explained why he thought Francesco Vinci was not the Monster. “All they have against him is that he was a lover of the first woman killed, that he beats up his girlfriends, and that he’s a crook. In my view, these are elements in his favor.”

  “Why do you say that?” Torrini asked.

  “He likes women. He’s a big success with women, and that’s enough to convince me he isn’t the Monster. He hits them but he doesn’t kill them. The Monster destroys women. He hates them because he wants them and can’t have them. That’s his frustration, the thing that damns him, and so he possesses them physically in the only way he can, which is to steal the part most indicative of their femininity.”

  “If you believe that,” Torrini said, “then it must mean the Monster is impotent. Is that what you think?”

  “More or less.”

  “What do you make of the ritual aspects of the killings, the careful placement of the body? The stick from a grapevine inserted in the vagina, for example, which recalls the words of Saint John that the ‘vines which beareth not fruit He taketh away’? A killer who is punishing couples for having sex outside of marriage?”

  Spezi blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling and laughed. “That’s a bunch of twaddle. You know why he used an old piece of grapevine? If you look at the crime scene photos, you see that they were parked right next to a vineyard! He simply grabbed the closest stick he could find. To me, his use of a stick to violate a woman seems to confirm that he is not exactly Superman. He didn’t and probably can’t rape his victims.”

  Toward the end of the evening, Spezi opened his book and read the last page out loud. “Many investigators feel the case of the Monster of Florence is solved. But if, at the end of a dinner passed in pleasant company, you were to ask me what I thought, I would tell you the truth: that it is with a strong sense of unease that I answer the first ringing of the telephone on a Sunday morning. Especially if the previous Saturday evening was the night of the new moon.”

  After Mario set down his book, a silence fell on the terrace that overlooked the Florentine hills.

  And then the telephone rang.

  It was a lieutenant of the local carabinieri, one of Spezi’s contacts. “Mario, they’ve just found two people killed in a VW camper in Giogoli, above Galluzzo. The Monster? I don’t know. The dead are two men. But if I were you, I’d head over there for a look.”

  CHAPTER 12

  To reach Giogoli, Spezi and Torrini took a road that climbed a steep hill behind the great monastery of La Certosa. The road is called Via Volterrana, and it is one of the most ancient in Europe, built by the Etruscans three thousand years ago. At the top of the hill, Via Volterrana makes a gentle turn and runs straight along the ridgeline. Immediately on the right lies a second road, Via di Giogoli, a narrow lane running between mossy stone walls. The wall on the right encloses the grounds of the Villa Sfacciata, which belonged to the noble family Martelli. Sfacciata means “cheeky” or “impudent” in Italian, and the mysterious appellation went back five hundred years, to at least the time when the villa was home to the man who gave America its name.

  The left wall of Via di Giogoli encloses a large olive grove. About fifty meters from the beginning of the road, almost opposite the villa, stood a break in the wall, which allowed farm equipment access to the grove. The opening led to a level area that enjoyed a magical view of the southern Florentine hills, over which were sprinkled ancient castles, towers, churches, and villas. A few hundred meters away, on top of the closest hill, stood a famed Romanesque tower known as Sant’Alessandro a Giogoli. On the next hill rose an exquisite sixteenth-century villa called I Collazzi, half hidden behind a cluster of cypress trees and umbrella pines. It belonged to the Marchi family, one of whose heirs by marriage had become the Marchesa Frescobaldi. Being a personal friend of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, she had entertained the royal pair shortly after their marriage.

  Beyond this extraordinary view, the Via di Giogoli descended through torturous switchbacks through villages and small farms, ending in the monolithic working-class suburbs of Florence in the valley below. At night, those gray suburbs became a twinkling carpet of lights.

  It would have been hard to find a more beautiful place in all of Tuscany.

  Later—too late—the city of Florence would post a sign at this spot that said, in German, English, French, and Italian, “No parking from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. No camping for reasons of security.” On that evening, the night of September 10, 1983, there had been no sign, and someone had camped there.

  When Spezi and Torrini arrived, they found the full cast of characters in the Monster investigation. There was Silvia Della Monica, a prosecutor, with the head prosecutor, Piero Luigi Vigna, his handsome face so sunken and gray it looked almost collapsed. The medical examiner, Mauro Maurri, his blue eyes glittering, was working on the two cadavers. Chief Inspector Sandro Federico was also there, pacing about in a state of high nervous tension.

  A spotlight fixed to the top of a police car threw a spectral light across the scene, casting long shadows from the group of people arranged in a semicircle around the sky blue VW bus with German license plates. The stark light emphasized the ugliness of the scene, the scratches on the beaten-up old camper, the lines in the faces of the investigators, the screwlike branches of the olive trees looming against the black sky. To the left of the camper, the field sloped away into darkness toward a cluster of stone houses where, twenty years later, I would take up temporary residence with my family.

  When they arrived, the left door of the camper stood open and from inside could be heard, just concluding, the music from the film Blade Runner. The music had been playing all day long, without ceasing, as the tape player automatically looped the tape over and over. Inspector Sandro Federico approached and opened his hand, showing two .22 caliber shells. On the base was the same unmistakable mark made by the gun of the Monster.

  The Monster had struck again, and the number of his victims had now risen to ten. Francesco Vinci, still in jail, could not have committed the crime.

  “Why would he strike two men this time?” Spezi asked.

  “Take a look inside the camper,” said Federico, with a jerk of his head.

  Spezi went toward the van. Passing along its side, he noticed that in the high part of the little windows on the side, in a thin band where the glass was transparent, there were bullet holes. To look inside, he had to stand on his tiptoes. The killer, in order to aim properly, would have to have been taller than Spezi, at least five feet ten inches. He also noted bullet holes in the metal side of the van itself.

  Around the van’s open door stood a number of people; policemen in plainclothes, carabinieri, and crime scene investigators; their footprints lay everywhere on the dew-laden grass, obliterating any sign left by the killer. It was one more example, Spezi thought, of a botched crime scene.

  But before he looked inside the van, Spezi’s eye was arrested by something scattered about on the ground outside, pages ripped up from a glossy pornographic magazine entitled Golden Gay.

  A dim light filtered into the interior. The two seats in front were empty: immediately behind was the body of a young man with a thin mustache, his eyes glazed over, lying stretched out on a double mattress, his feet toward the rear of the van. The second body was in the back of the van, in the corner. It was still crouching as if to make itself as small as possible, petrified with terror, its hands clenched, its face covered by a cascade of long blond hair. The hair was streaked with blood, black and congealed.

  “Looks like a girl, don’t you think?” came the voice of Sandro Federico, shaking Spezi out of his surprise.

  “At first we were fooled, too. But it’s a man. It seems our friend made the same mistake. Can you imagine how he felt when he discovered it?”

  On Mo
nday, September 12, the papers screamed out the news:

  TERROR IN FLORENCE

  The Monster Chooses His Victims at Random

  The two victims, Horst Meyer and Uwe Rüsch, both twenty-four years old, had been traveling around Italy together and had parked their VW bus in this place on September 8. Their almost nude bodies had been discovered around seven o’clock the evening of September 10.

  By this time, Francesco Vinci had spent thirteen months in jail, and the public had come to believe he was the Monster of Florence. It seemed that once again, as with Enzo Spalletti, the Monster himself had demonstrated the innocence of the accused.

  The Monster of Florence was now international news. The Times of London devoted an entire Sunday section to the case. Television crews arrived from as far away as Australia.

  “Even after twelve victims,1 all we know is that the Monster is free and that his .22 caliber Beretta could kill again,” wrote La Nazione.

  Now that the Monster had killed while Francesco Vinci was in prison, his release seemed imminent. But as the days went by, Vinci remained incarcerated. Investigators suspected that the double homicide had been “made to order.” Perhaps, they theorized, someone close to Vinci wished to demonstrate that he couldn’t be the killer. The crime of Giogoli was anomalous, improvised, different. It seemed strange that the Monster would have made such a grave mistake, given their assumption that he took his time watching the couple having sex before killing them. And then he had killed on a Friday night, not a Saturday, as was his custom.

  A new examining magistrate had arrived in Florence shortly before the crime and was now in charge of the Monster investigation. His name was Mario Rotella. He chilled the public with one of his first public statements, in which he said, “We have never identified the so-called Monster of Florence with Francesco Vinci. For the crimes committed after the 1968 homicide he is only a suspect.” And then he added, causing a furor, “He is not the only such suspect.”

  One of the prosecutors, Silvia Della Monica, aroused even more confusion and speculation when she said, “Vinci is not the Monster. But neither is he innocent.”

  CHAPTER 13

  A few days following the Giogoli killings, there was a tense summit meeting in the prosecutor’s offices, on the second floor of a Baroque palace in Piazza San Firenze. (The palace is one of the few seventeenth-century edifices in the city—disparaged by Florentines as “new construction.”) They met in the small office of Piero Luigi Vigna, the air as thick as a Maremma fog. Vigna was in the habit of breaking his cigarettes in two and smoking both pieces, under the illusion that he was smoking less. Silvia Della Monica was there—small, blonde, herself surrounded by a self-generated cloud of smoke; also in attendance was a colonel of the carabinieri, who had brought two packs of his favorite Marlboros, and Chief Inspector Sandro Federico, who never ceased torturing a withered “toscano” cigar between his teeth. An assistant prosecutor smoked his way through pack after pack of tarry Gauloises. The only nonsmoker in the room was Adolfo Izzo, who merely had to breathe to acquire the habit.

  Federico and the carabinieri colonel presented a reconstruction of the Giogoli murders. Using diagrams and flow charts, they showed the sequence of events, how the killer had shot one of the men through the little window and then had fired through the sides of the van, killing the other man where he was crouching in the corner. The Monster then entered the van, fired some more rounds into them, and discovered his mistake. In a rage, he picked up a gay magazine and ripped it up, scattering the pieces outside, and left.

  The prosecutor, Vigna, expressed his view that the crime seemed anomalous, ad hoc and improvised—in short, that it had been committed not by the Monster, but by someone else trying to demonstrate the innocence of Francesco Vinci. The investigators suspected that Vinci’s nephew, Antonio, had committed the killings as a way to spring his beloved uncle from prison. (Antonio, you will recall, had been the baby saved from the gas back in Sardinia.) Unlike the rest of his family, he seemed tall enough to have taken aim through the clear stripe of glass at the top of the camper’s window.

  A plan of brutal subtlety was secretly put in motion. Sign of it appeared ten days after the Giogoli killings, when a small and apparently unrelated news item appeared in the back pages of the newspapers, reporting that Antonio Vinci, nephew of Francesco Vinci, had been arrested for illegal possession of firearms. Antonio and Francesco were extremely close, partners in many shady activities and sketchy adventures. The arrest of Antonio was a sign that the investigators were widening their exploration of the Sardinian Trail. The examining magistrate in the Monster case, Mario Rotella, and a lead prosecutor, Silvia Della Monica, were convinced that both Francesco and Antonio knew the identity of the Monster of Florence. They were convinced, in fact, that this terrible secret was shared by the entire clan of Sardinians. The Monster was one of them, and the others knew his identity.

  With both men in Florence’s Le Murate prison, they could now be played against each other, and perhaps broken. The suspects were kept apart, and artfully crafted rumors were circulated through the prison, designed to arouse suspicions and pit one against the other. A program of interrogation aimed at the two prisoners was set in motion, giving each one the impression that the other had talked. It was “let slip” to each that the other had made serious accusations against him, and that he could save himself only by telling the truth about the other.

  It didn’t work. Neither one talked. One afternoon, in the ancient interrogation room at Le Murate, the head prosecutor, Piero Luigi Vigna, was fed up. He decided to press Francesco Vinci as hard as he could. Vigna, handsome, dashing, and cultured, with the profile of a hawk, had in the course of his career faced down Mafia dons, murderers, kidnappers, extortionists, and drug kingpins. But he was no match for the small Sardinian.

  For half an hour the prosecutor hammered Vinci. With crisp logic, he wove a web of clues and evidence and deductions proving the man’s guilt. Then, all of a sudden, using a technique straight out of a Hollywood movie cliché, he shoved his face to within an inch of the black-bearded face of the Sardinian and screamed, spraying him with saliva:

  “Confess, Vinci! You’re the Monster!”

  Francesco Vinci remained utterly calm. He smiled and his carbon-black eyes twinkled. In a calm, low voice he responded with a question that seemed to have nothing to do with anything: “I beg your pardon, sir, but if you want a response from me, tell me first what that thing is on the table. If you please.” With a hand he indicated Vigna’s pack of cigarettes.

  The prosecutor, wanting to follow the man’s train of thought, said, “It’s a pack of cigarettes, obviously.”

  “I’m sorry, but isn’t it empty?”

  Vigna agreed that it was.

  “Then,” said the Sardinian, “it is not a pack of cigarettes. It was a pack of cigarettes. Now it is merely a pack. And now, may I ask another favor? Please take it in hand and crush it.”

  Curious to see where Vinci was leading, Vigna took up the pack and crushed it into a ball.

  “There!” said Francesco, showing a mouth full of white teeth. “And now it is no longer even a pack. Your evidence, sir, is like this: you can crush and mangle it to fit any theory you like, but it will always remain the same: empty speculation—never proof.”

  The nephew Antonio proved just as smart. Not only did he stand up to the interrogations, but at his trial for possession of unregistered firearms he acted as his own lawyer. He pointed out that the guns had not been found in his house, but some distance from it, and that no evidence had been presented that connected him with the firearms in question. Might they not have been planted, perhaps, as a way to imprison him so that he could be pitted against his uncle in a scheme of interrogation?

  He promptly won his case and was released.

  CHAPTER 14

  As time went on, it became increasingly difficult to justify the imprisonment of Franceso Vinci. With his nephew’s acquittal and the failure of inte
rrogators to get any of their questions answered, it was only a matter of time before they had to let him go.

  Frustrated at the lack of progress, the examining magistrate himself, Mario Rotella, decided to personally interrogate Stefano Mele and make one last attempt to extract information from him. Before making the journey to Verona, Rotella prepared himself well. In a heavy folder he collected a mass of testimony that he had gleaned from old interrogations regarding the 1968 murders, including statements made by little Natalino and his father, Stefano Mele, Mele’s brother and his three sisters, and a brother-in-law. He also collected telling statements from more recent interrogations of various participants. He was convinced that the 1968 crime was a clan killing, and that everyone who had participated knew who had taken home the gun. They all knew the identity of the Monster of Florence. Rotella was determined to break the wall of silence.

  The new interrogation took place on January 16, 1984. Rotella asked Mele if Francesco Vinci participated in the killings. Mele responded, “No, Francesco Vinci was not with me the night of August 21, 1968. I accused him only to get back at him for being the lover of my wife.”

  “Tell me, then: who was with you that night?”

  “Now I don’t remember.”

  He was clearly and deliberately lying. Somebody—the Monster, perhaps—had a tenacious hold over him. Why? What secret did Mele fear more than prison?

  Rotella returned to Florence. The press assumed his mission had failed. In reality he had in his file a scrap of paper, handwritten, much soiled, which had been folded and unfolded a hundred times, which he had found hidden in Stefano Mele’s wallet. It was a document he considered of the utmost importance.