The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  Eventually Rosina had had enough and ran away to Trieste with another man.

  “I can say to you,” another of Salvatore’s girlfriends told the police, “that Salvatore was the man, the only man, who fully satisfied me in terms of sex. He had strange ideas, but what of it? . . . He liked to make love to me while a man did it to him from behind . . .”

  Salvatore Vinci picked up the players for his orgies where he could, with the help of his girlfriends, luring them from truck stops on the autostrada, in the red-light districts, and in the Cascine Park on the outskirts of Florence. His sexuality, according to those who knew him, knew no bounds. He would have sex with almost anyone, man or woman, and employed a wide range of accessories, including vibrators, zucchinis, and eggplants. If a woman was reluctant, he slapped her around a bit to get her in the mood.

  When Barbara Locci arrived, everything became easier. Salvatore had finally found a woman who fully shared his appetite and tastes. She was so effective at attracting men and boys to orgies that Salvatore began calling her the “Queen Bee.”

  In the middle of all this, in the same small house, Salvatore’s son, Antonio Vinci, was growing up. The young boy heard the rumors that his mother’s death wasn’t a suicide but a murder, and that his father had done it. Antonio had become deeply attached to Rosina, the second wife of Salvatore. When she fled to Trieste, for Antonio it was like losing his mother all over again. And once again it was his father’s fault. He eventually left home and spent much of his free time with his uncle Francesco who became a substitute father to him. This same Antonio would later be arrested on weapons charges, in an attempt to get his uncle Francesco to talk.

  The dual investigations in Villacidro and Tuscany convinced Mario Rotella and his carabinieri investigators that they had finally found their man. Salvatore Vinci had been the fourth accomplice at the killing of Barbara Locci. He probably owned a .22 Beretta. He had the only car among the conspirators. He brought the gun to the murder scene, he was the main shooter, and he took the gun home with him. The investigation confirmed he was a cold-blooded killer and sexual maniac.

  Salvatore Vinci was the Monster of Florence.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the middle of all the sound and fury, certain facts stood above the fray, unshakably true, obtained by solid police work and expert analysis.

  The first of these was the analysis of the pistol. No fewer than five ballistics analyses were done, and the answer was always the same: the Monster used one gun, a .22 Beretta that was “old and worn,” with a defective firing pin that left an incontrovertible mark on the base of each shell. The bullets were the second fact. They were all Winchester series H rounds. All the bullets fired in the crimes had been taken from the same two boxes. This was demonstrated by an examination with a scanning electron microscope of the “H” stamped on the base of each shell—all had the same micro-imperfections, indicative that they were stamped by the same die. The die, which was regularly replaced when it began to wear out, also proved that both boxes were put on sale before the year 1968.

  Each box contained fifty cartridges. Counting from the first crime in 1968, after the gun had shot fifty shells from one box, the killer opened a second box. The first fifty were copper-jacketed rounds, and the second were lead. Nothing was ever found that suggested a second gun had been used at the scenes of the crimes or that there was more than one killer. Indeed, the bodies of the victims had all been moved by dragging, which suggested there was no second person around to help lift.

  It was the same for the knife used by the killer. Every expert analysis concluded that a single knife had been employed, extremely well honed, with a particular mark or notch in it, and three sawteeth below that of about two millimeters in depth. Some experts speculated it was a pattada, the typical knife used by Sardinian shepherds, but the majority of experts spoke, with some uncertainty, of a scuba knife. The experts agreed that the excisions were so nearly identical that they had been made by the same right-handed person.

  Finally, the Monster avoided touching his victims, except when necessary, and stripped them by cutting their clothes off with the knife. There was never any sign of rape or sexual molestation.

  The psychological experts all agreed on the Monster’s psychopathology. “He always works alone,” wrote one expert. “The presence of others would take away all flavor from the author of these crimes, which are fundamentally crimes of sexual sadism: the Monster is a serial killer and he only acts alone. . . . The noted absence of any sexual interest not connected to the excision, makes one think of an absolute impotence, or a marked inhibition of coitus.”

  In September 1984, Rotella finally freed the “Double Monsters” Piero Mucciarini and Giovanni Mele, who had been in prison during the Vicchio killings. Two months later, he released Francesco Vinci, who had also been in prison during the last Monster killings.

  The pool of suspects had been reduced to one: Salvatore Vinci. They put his house under observation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. His telephone was tapped. When he left his front door, he was often followed.

  As the winter passed and the next summer neared—the summer of 1985—a huge feeling of dread built among the investigators and the Florentine public. Everyone was certain that the Monster would strike again. The new elite unit charged with investigating the Monster, the Squadra Anti-Mostro, worked with feverish activity but continued to make little progress.

  When Francesco Vinci was released from prison, Mario Spezi, who had often maintained his innocence in his articles, was invited to the homecoming celebration at Vinci’s house in Montelupo. Spezi accepted the unusual invitation, hoping to snag an interview on the side. The tables were heaped with spicy salami, strong Sardinian sheep cheese, vermentino di Sardegna, and fil’e ferru, the potent grappa of the island. At the end of the party, Vinci agreed to an interview with Spezi. He answered the questions with reserve, intelligence, and excessive caution.

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-one. Or so I believe.”

  The interview was unenlightening, except for one answer that stayed with Spezi for many years. Spezi asked him what he imagined the real Monster to be like.

  “He is very intelligent,” Vinci said, “someone who knows how to move at night in the hills even with his eyes closed. One who knows how to use a knife much better than most. One,” he added, fixing his glittering black eyes on Spezi, “who once upon a time experienced a very, very great disappointment.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The summer of 1985 was one of the hottest in recent memory. A serious drought gripped Tuscany, and the hills of Florence lay stunned and prostrate under the sun, the ground cracking, the leaves turning brown and falling from the trees. The city’s aqueducts began to dry up, and priests led their congregations in fervent prayer to the Lord for rain. Along with the heat, fear of the Monster hung over the city like a stifling blanket.

  September 8 was another hot, cloudless day in what seemed like an endless string of them. But for Sabrina Carmignani it was a fine day, the day of her nineteenth birthday—a day she would never forget.

  That Sunday, around five o’clock, Sabrina and her boyfriend pulled into a small clearing in the woods just off the main road to San Casciano, which was called the Scopeti clearing after the name of the road passing it. The dirt clearing was hidden from Via Scopeti by a curtain of oaks, cypresses, and umbrella pines, and it was well known to young people as a good place to have sex. It lay in the heart of the Chianti countryside, almost within view of the ancient stone house where Niccolò Machiavelli spent his years of exile writing The Prince. Today this area of villas, castles, beautifully tended vineyards, and small towns forms one of the most expensive stretches of real estate in the world.

  The two young people parked their car next to another, a white VW Golf with French plates. In the center of the rear seat, attached by the seat belts, they noted a child’s car seat. A few meters in front of the Volkswagen stood a small dome tent,
of a metallic blue. The light struck it in such a way that it was possible to see a human outline in its interior.

  “A single person,” said Sabrina later, “who was stretched out and perhaps sleeping. The tent seemed shaken up, almost collapsed; the entrance was dirty and there were a lot of flies, and there was a foul dead smell.”

  They didn’t like the look of things and turned around to leave. As they eased out of the clearing, another car was just turning in from the main road. The driver backed up to allow them to pass. Neither Sabrina nor her boyfriend noted the make of the car or saw the person inside.

  They had just missed discovering the Monster’s new victims.

  A day later, at two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, September 9, an avid mushroom forager drove into the Scopeti clearing. As soon as he stepped out of his car, he was assaulted by “a strange odor along with a loud buzzing of flies. I thought that around there somewhere was a dead cat. Around the tent I didn’t notice anything. Then I went toward the thicket of bushes on the opposite side. And in that moment I saw them: two naked feet sticking out of the greenery . . . I didn’t have the courage to go any closer.”

  The newly created squad, SAM, launched into action. The victims were two French tourists who had camped in the Scopeti clearing. For the first time the scene of a Monster crime was properly secured. SAM sealed off not only the Scopeti clearing, but an area one kilometer in diameter surrounding it. The discovery of a child’s seat in the back of the car caused investigators great anguish for some hours, until inquiries to France established that the little daughter of the murdered woman was back in France in the care of relatives.

  A helicopter landed at the sealed crime scene carrying on board a famous criminologist who had earlier prepared a psychological and behavioral profile of the Monster. Journalists and photographers were grudgingly allowed in but had been corralled behind a red-and-white plastic fence strung between trees a hundred yards away, under the watchful eyes of two policemen in a ready stance, armed with machine guns. The journalists were angry at not having their usual access. Finally, the assistant prosecutor allowed one, Mario Spezi, to examine the scene and report back to all the others. Spezi climbed over the plastic barrier under the furious gaze of his colleagues. When he saw the Monster’s most recent horror, he felt envy for those he had left behind.

  The female victim was Nadine Mauriot, thirty-six years old, who owned a shoe store in Montbéliard, France, not far from the French-Swiss border. She had separated from her husband and for some months had been living with Jean-Michel Kraveichvili, twenty-five years old, an enthusiast of the hundred-meter dash, which he practiced with the local athletic squad. They had taken a camping trip through Italy, and on Monday would have had to be back in France for Nadine’s daughter’s first day of school.

  On hearing the news of the murders, Sabrina and her friend immediately went to the carabinieri to report what they had seen on Sunday afternoon, September 8. The girl recounted exactly the same story years later, in front of a judge of the Corte d’Assise. Twenty years later, in an interview with Spezi, Sabrina was still certain that she had not mistaken the date, given that that Sunday was her birthday.

  Her testimony related in a critical way to the date the crime had been committed. It had direct bearing on whether the French couple had been murdered Saturday night, as the evidence suggested, or Sunday night, as investigators would later insist. Her testimony was inconvenient to them, so it was completely ignored—then and now.

  There was another weighty clue that the two were killed on Saturday night: if the French couple expected to be home in time to see Nadine’s daughter off to her first day of school, they would already have to be driving back to France on Sunday.

  The condition of Mauriot’s cadaver on that Monday afternoon was frightful. Her face, grotesquely swollen and black, was unrecognizable. The heat had had devastating effects, amplified by being enclosed in a tent, and the body was covered with maggots.

  SAM investigators reconstructed how the final killing took place. It was, in a word, horrifying.

  The killer had crept up to the dome tent of the two French tourists, who were nude and making love. He advertised his presence by making a seven-inch cut in the fly of the tent with the tip of his knife—without, however, piercing the inner tent. The noise must have frightened the two lovers. They unzipped the door to see what it was. The Monster had already positioned himself, gun at the ready, and as soon as they peered out they were struck by a hail of bullets. Nadine was killed immediately. Four rounds struck Jean-Michel—one in a wrist, one in a finger, one in an elbow, and one grazing his lip, leaving him relatively unscathed.

  The young athlete leapt up and charged out the door, perhaps bowling over the Monster in the process, and tore off running in the dark. If he had turned left, a few steps would have taken him to the main road where he might have been saved. But he ran straight ahead, toward the woods. The Monster ran after him. Jean-Michel vaulted a sort of bushy hedge that divided the clearing in two, pursued by the Monster. The Monster reached him in twelve meters, stabbed him in the back, chest, and stomach, and then cut his throat.

  Observing the cadaver still under the bushes, Spezi noted that the lowest leaves of the tree above the dead body, six feet up, were splattered with blood.

  Having killed Jean-Michel, the Monster returned to the tent. He pulled Nadine out by the feet and performed the two mutilations, removing her vagina and left breast. Then he dragged the body back into the tent and zipped it up. He hid the man’s body under trash he collected around the clearing and put the plastic lid of a paint bucket over his head.

  Despite diligent evidence collecting in the Scopeti clearing, SAM came up almost empty-handed. It appeared to have been an almost perfect crime.

  On Tuesday, a letter arrived at the prosecutor’s offices, addressed with letters cut from a magazine.

  Inside the envelope, wrapped in tissue paper, was a piece of breast cut from the French tourist.

  The letter had been mailed sometime that weekend in a little town near Vicchio, and it entered the postal system on Monday morning.

  Silvia Della Monica was the only woman investigator in the Monster case. The arrival of this missive changed her life. It completely terrified her. She immediately resigned from the case and was assigned two bodyguards, who remained in her locked office even at work, for fear that the killer might be a person who could mingle with the people entering the Palazzo di Giustizia and gain access to her office. It was the end of her involvement in the case.

  The letter, reproduced in the papers, caused a storm of speculation, because the killer had misspelled the Italian word “REPUBBLICA,” using only one “B” instead of two. Was it merely the spelling error of an ignorant person, or did it indicate that the Monster was a foreigner? Among the Romance languages of Europe, only in Italian is the word “Republic” spelled with two “b”s.

  For the first time, the Monster had made an effort to hide the two bodies. That, combined with the mailing of the note, would have forced a desperate search by the authorities for the victims, if the bodies hadn’t already been found. This suggests a reason why the Monster changed his MO—it was a carefully designed plan to humiliate the police.

  It almost worked.

  CHAPTER 21

  After the Scopeti killing, the mayors of Florence and the surrounding towns launched a campaign of prevention. Although the young people of Florence were so thoroughly traumatized that the idea of parking outside the city walls after sunset was now unthinkable, there were still millions of foreigners who poured into Tuscany every year with campers and tents who were unaware of the risk. Throughout the areas where people often camped, signs in multiple languages were posted warning of the danger of remaining there between dusk and dawn. But the mention of a serial killer was carefully avoided, so as not to scare away tourists completely.