The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  On January 25, 1984, Rotella sent out word that he would hold an important press conference at 10:30 a.m. in his office the following day. On the twenty-sixth his office was packed with reporters and photographers, most of whom were convinced they would hear the announcement of the release of Francesco Vinci.

  Rotella had a surprise in store for them. “The examining magistrate,” he read in his pompous voice, “with the agreement of the public minister of the province of Florence, has taken into custody two people for the crimes attributed to Francesco Vinci.”

  Two hours after the sensational press conference La Nazione was first on the newsstands with an extra edition. The headline spanned the entire front page.

  ARRESTED!

  THE MONSTERS ARE TWO

  Above the fold, under the nine-column headline, were plastered the paired photographs that offered to public opinion the faces of the alleged Double Monster: Giovanni Mele, Stefano’s brother, and Piero Mucciarini, his brother-in-law.

  Most Florentines looked at the newspaper photographs with skepticism. The dimwitted features of the two suspects did not strike them as consistent with the crafty, highly intelligent Monster they had imagined.

  The story of why the men were suspected quickly came out. At the end of his interrogation of Mele, Rotella had searched the man’s wallet and discovered a tiny piece of paper hidden in a fold. It was a kind of crude memory aid or list of talking points on how he should respond to questions posed by his interrogators. It had been written by his brother, Giovanni Mele, and given to him about two years earlier, when the news first broke connecting the obscure 1968 killing with the Monster of Florence. The writing was weak and tentative, the letters formed with the laboriousness of a second grader, half in capitals and half in cursive. The words were riddled with misspellings resulting from a confusion between Italian and the Sardinian language.

  When Rotella confronted Mele with the paper, he “confessed” that, yes, in fact, his two accomplices in 1968 had been his brother Giovanni and Piero Mucciarini, and that the latter had fired the killing shots—“or rather, no, it was my brother, I can’t remember, that was seventeen years ago.”

  Judge Rotella pored over these enigmatic phrases for days. After much effort, he finally believed he had deciphered them. In the original interrogation of the six-year-old Natalino after the 1968 killing, the little boy had spoken of an “Uncle Pietro or Piero” being present at the murder scene. The details Natalino gave indicated this was his uncle Piero Mucciarini, the baker. But Barbara Locci had a brother named Pietro, and Rotella interpreted the note as an instruction to mislead investigators into thinking that Natalino had spoken about that uncle instead. In other words, the paper warned Stefano to say in response to questioning, “I will speak finally, after having served my sentence. Regarding the report of Natalino that Uncle Pieto was at the scene, I can finally say that with me was my wife’s brother Pietro and that this was the ‘Pieto’ he was referring to. The ballistics tests would show he was the shooter.”

  In other words, the paper instructed Stefano to divert suspicion away from his sister’s husband, Piero Mucciarini, to his dead wife’s brother, Pietro. Rotella took this to mean that Piero Mucciarini must be guilty, along with Giovanni Mele, the author of the note. Otherwise, why try to divert suspicion? Quod erat demonstrandum: both of them were the Monster.

  If this logic seems hard to follow, join the club. Hardly anyone except Mario Rotella pretended to understand this convoluted chain of deduction.

  Rotella ordered a search of Giovanni’s house and car. It brought to light a scalpel, some strange leatherworking knives, ropes coiled up in the trunk of his car, a stack of pornographic magazines, suspicious notes on the phases of the moon, and a bottle with a perfumed liquid for washing the hands. The investigators gathered additional details from Giovanni’s ex-girlfriend, who revealed salacious details of his perverse sexual habits and the extraordinary dimensions of his member, so large it made normal sex difficult.

  All very suspicious.

  The “old” Monster, Francesco Vinci, was still being kept under lock and key. He was no longer considered the Monster, but Rotella believed he was withholding information. With the Double Monster and Vinci in prison, three members of the Sardinian clan were now incarcerated. Once again prosecutors launched into the old game of rumor and suspicion, in which the interrogators played one against the other, hoping to find a crack in the wall of Sardinian omertà.

  Instead, they opened up a crack in their own investigation.

  CHAPTER 15

  By this time, the number of prosecutors working on the Monster case had swelled to nearly half a dozen, of whom the most effective and charismatic was Piero Luigi Vigna. These prosecutors played a role much like assistant U.S. attorneys: they directed the investigation, oversaw evidence gathering and analysis, worked up a theory of the crime, and formulated strategies for prosecuting the guilty. In the Italian system, these prosecutors are independent of one another, each one responsible for a part of the case—specifically, the murders that occur when it is his turn to be “on call,” so to speak. (In this way the workload is spread among a group of prosecutors, each one taking the cases that occur on his watch.) In addition, another prosecutor holds the august title of pubblico ministero, public minister. This prosecutor (who is also usually a judge) represents the interests of the Italian state and argues the case in court. The public minister role in the Monster case changed a number of times during the course of the murders and investigations—as more murders occurred and more prosecutors came into the case.

  Overseeing all the prosecutors and the police and carabinieri investigators is the giudice istruttore, the instructing judge, or, more properly, the examining magistrate. In the Monster case the examining magistrate was Mario Rotella. His role was to supervise the actions of the police, prosecutors, and public minister and make sure all their activities were carried out legally, correctly, and backed by sufficient evidence. In order for the system to work, the prosecutors, the public minister, and the examining magistrate all had to agree, more or less, on the main thrust of the investigation.

  In the Monster case, Vigna and Rotella, the lead prosecutor and the examining magistrate, were very different personalities. It would be hard to find two men less suited to cooperating. Under the intense pressure to solve the case, they quite naturally began to disagree.

  Vigna held court on the second floor of the Tribunale in Florence, in a long file of rooms in a narrow corridor that in centuries past had been the cells of monks. Now these cells were the offices of the prosecutors. Here, in this ancient hall, journalists were always welcome, and they dropped in and joked with the prosecutors, who treated them as friends. Vigna himself had an almost mythical status. He had ended the plague of kidnapping in Tuscany with a simple method: when a person was kidnapped, the state immediately froze the victim’s family’s bank accounts, preventing the payment of a ransom. Refusing to travel with bodyguards, Vigna also listed his name in the telephone book and on his doorbell, like any common citizen, a gesture of defiance that Italians found admirable. The press ate up his pithy quotes, bons mots, and dry witticisms. He dressed like the Florentine he was, in smartly cut suits and natty ties, and in a country where a pretty face means a great deal, he was exceptionally good-looking, with finely cut features, crisp blue eyes, and an easy smile. His fellow prosecutors were equally charming. A brilliant new arrival, Paolo Canessa, was open and articulate. Silvia Della Monica, spunky and attractive, often regaled journalists with stories of her early cases. A journalist who entered the second floor of the Tribunale always came away with a notebook full of news and trenchant quotations.

  On the third floor, there were the same rows of monastic cells, but the atmosphere was entirely different. This was where Mario Rotella held court. He was from the south of Italy, an immediate cause for suspicion among Florentines. His old-fashioned mustache and thick black eyeglass frames made him look more like a greengrocer than
a judge. Refined, cultured, and intelligent, he was also a pedant and a bore. He spoke volumes in response to a journalist’s question without seeming to say anything. His complex phrases, rich in quotations taken from books of jurisprudence, were untranslatable for the average reader and often incomprehensible even to journalists. When journalists left Rotella’s offices, instead of a notebook full of tidbits and quotes easily assembled into an article, they had a miasmic swamp of words that defied any attempt at organization or simplification.

  Spezi recorded a typical exchange after the arrest of Giovanni Mele and Piero Mucciarini as the “Double Monster.”

  “You have proof?” Spezi asked Rotella.

  “Yes” was Rotella’s laconic response.

  Spezi pushed ahead, searching for a headline. “You have two men in jail: is it really true that both are the Monster?”

  “The Monster doesn’t exist as a concept. Someone exists who has reiterated the first killing,” replied Rotella.

  “Was the testimony of Stefano Mele the clincher?”

  “What Mele said was important. There are confirming points. We have not one but five important proofs, and I will only make them known when the moment arrives to send these two new accused persons in front of the Tribunale that will judge them.”

  The circumlocutions drove Spezi and the other journalists crazy.

  Only once did Rotella make a flat statement. “I can tell you one thing at least: Florentines can now rest easy.” In a sign that all was not well, he was immediately contradicted by one of the prosecutors on the floor below, who announced to the press that despite what they may have heard from upstairs, “I would cordially invite young people to find some other way of maintaining their health than taking the air of the countryside at night.”

  The public and the press didn’t buy the new Double Monster theory. As the summer of 1984 approached, tensions rose in Florence. The spiderweb of tiny roads and lanes that wound among the hills around the city were empty at night. A young advisor to the city, reacting to the increase in tension, proposed the creation of “villages of love,” pleasing places surrounded by gardens that would guarantee intimacy, with certain special services, fenced and furnished with a guard. The idea provoked a scandal, and some replied that Florence might as well open whorehouses. The man defended his idea. “The village of love is a way to affirm that each one of us has the right to a sexual life that is free and happy.”

  As the first warm days of 1984 tickled the city, anxiety began to climb. By this time the Monster had attracted worldwide attention: many newspapers and television stations aired special reports on the case, including the Sunday Times of London and Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo. Television documentaries were aired in France, Germany, and Britain. The interest abroad was not merely for the serial killings per se: it was a fascination with the main character in the Monster story—the city of Florence. To most of the world Florence wasn’t a real place where real people lived; it was one vast museum, where poets and artists had celebrated the beauty of the female form with its many Madonnas and the beauty of the male form with its proud Davids; a city of elegant palaces, villas perched in the hills, gardens, bridges, fine shopping, and excellent food. It was not a city of dirt, crime, noisy streets, polluted air, graffiti, and drug dealers—let alone serial killers. The presence of the Monster revealed that Florence was not the magical Renaissance city of the tourist brochures—it was tragically and squalidly modern.

  As the summer wore on, tensions became almost unbearable. Few in Florence believed the Monster was in jail. Mario Spezi checked his calendar and noted that there was only one Saturday night with no moon during the entire summer: the night of July 28 and 29. A few days before that weekend, Spezi ran into Chief Inspector Sandro Federico at police headquarters. After chatting a while, he said, “Sandro, I’m afraid this Sunday we might see everyone out in the countryside.”

  The policeman made devil’s horns with his fingers, to ward off evil.

  Sunday the twenty-ninth came and went peacefully. Early that Monday morning, the thirtieth, it was still dark when the telephone rang in Spezi’s house.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was a stupendous morning, crisp and clear, one that seemed a gift from the gods. Spezi found himself in an idyllic field of flowers and medicinal herbs outside the town of Vicchio, the birthplace of the artist Giotto, forty kilometers northeast of Florence.

  The corpses of the new victims, Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, had been discovered before dawn at the end of a little grassy track by friends who had been searching for them all night. She was nineteen and he had just turned twenty. The place was less than eight kilometers from the field in Borgo San Lorenzo where the Monster had killed his first two victims in 1974.

  Claudio was still inside the car, which had been parked by the side of a forested hill called La Boschetta, the Little Wood. Pia had been dragged a few dozen meters back into the open field, another exposed location less than two hundred meters from a farmhouse. She had suffered the same mutilation as the other female victims. But this time the killer had gone even further. He had ripped off—the word “removed” is not appropriate—her left breast. The time of death was established by a witness: a farmer had heard the shots at 9:40 p.m. and assumed it was the backfiring of a motor scooter.

  The new crime had occurred while all three main Monster suspects—Francesco Vinci, Piero Mucciarini, and Giovanni Mele—were in prison.

  The new double homicide provoked terror, confusion, and an outpouring of bitter recriminations against the police. The case once again hit the front pages of newspapers across Europe. It seemed to people that while the killer steadily added to his list of victims, the police did nothing but arrest suspects whose innocence was then demonstrated by the Monster striking again. Mario Rotella, however, refused to release the three jailed suspects. He was sure they had participated in the 1968 killing and therefore knew the identity of the Monster.

  The police and prosecutors involved in the case went into a panic. Vigna pleaded with the public: “Whoever knows must speak,” he said. “Certainly there are those who know and who, for whatever reason, aren’t talking. Someone with this kind of pathology must at least have left hints or signs in his family.”

  A fresh tidal wave of anonymous letters poured in, thousands of them, some written with letters cut from magazines, that filled one shelf after another in police headquarters, identifying the Monster as a neighbor, a relative, a friend with strange sexual habits, the local priest, or the family doctor. Once again, gynecologists found themselves targeted by many accusations. Other accusatory letters were signed, some even by well-known intellectuals, offering convoluted theories sprinkled with learned literary quotations and snippets of Latin.

  After the double homicide of Vicchio, the Monster of Florence became more than a criminal; he was transformed into a dark mirror reflecting the id of the city itself—its darkest fantasies, its strangest thoughts, its most appalling attitudes and prejudices. Many accusations claimed that behind the killings were esoteric or satanic cults. Various professors and self-appointed experts, who knew absolutely nothing about criminology or serial killers, offered their theories on television and to newspaper journalists. One “expert” echoed a commonly held belief that the Monster might be English. “This is a crime more typically English or of its near neighbor, Germany.” Another waxed eloquent about that theory, writing to the newspapers, “Imagine London. The City. A night thick with fog. A model citizen of London, irreproachable, all of a sudden leaps out of the murk and attacks an innocent young couple. Imagine the violence, the eroticism, the powerlessness, the torture . . .”

  The advice was never-ending. “You could easily trace, find, and arrest the killer; all you have to do is look in the right places: in the butcher shops and hospitals, since obviously we’re dealing with a butcher or a surgeon or nurse.”

  Another: “He is certainly a bachelor, of about forty; he lives with his mother who knows his ‘secret,
’ but his priest also knows about it from confession, as he attends church regularly.”

  The feminist interpretation: “The Monster is a woman, a genuine virago, of British origin, who teaches in a Florentine school where there are children up to thirteen years of age.”

  Hundreds of self-styled private detectives fell upon Florence from all parts of Italy, many with the solution to the crimes already in their pockets; some went about the Florentine hills at night armed to the teeth, looking for the Monster or posing with their guns for fearsome photographs, which were published in the papers.

  A number of people showed up at police headquarters claiming to be the Monster. One even managed to break into the radio frequency of the Florentine ambulance service to announce, “I am the Monster, and I will strike again.”

  Many Florentines were shocked at the outpouring of perversity, conspiracy thinking, and just plain old madness the Monster’s killings seemed to arouse in their fellow Florentines. “I never would have thought that in Florence there were such strange people,” said Paolo Canessa, one of the prosecutors involved in the investigation.

  “The fear is,” said Chief Inspector Sandro Federico bitterly, “that somewhere in this swamp of anonymous madness is the very clue we need—and we’ll miss it.”

  Many of the anonymous letters were written directly to Mario Spezi, the “Monstrologer” of La Nazione. One such missive, written in capital letters, stood out. Spezi wasn’t sure why, but it chilled him. It was the only one that, to him, had the ring of truth.

  I AM VERY CLOSE TO YOU. YOU WILL NEVER TAKE ME UNLESS I CHOOSE IT. THE FINAL NUMBER IS STILL FAR AWAY. SIXTEEN ARE NOT MANY. I DON’T HATE ANYONE, BUT I HAVE TO DO IT IF I WANT TO LIVE. BLOOD AND TEARS WILL RUN SOON. YOU WILL MAKE NO PROGRESS THE WAY YOU ARE GOING. YOU HAVE GOTTEN EVERYTHING WRONG. TOO BAD FOR YOU. I WILL MAKE NO MORE MISTAKES, BUT THE POLICE WILL. INSIDE OF ME, THE NIGHT WILL LAST FOREVER. I CRIED FOR THEM. EXPECT ME.