The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  Later, it was suggested that Ferri had fallen into a clever trap. By presenting the witnesses in a deliberately offensive manner, Giuttari had provoked Ferri into refusing to hear them—thus creating grounds to appeal Ferri’s verdict to the Italian Supreme Court.

  It was eleven in the morning. By four in the afternoon, the rumors began to circulate that the appeals court was about to issue its verdict. In all the bars in Italy, the televisions were tuned to the same channel, while pro-Pacciani and anti-Pacciani factions faced off, arguing and laying bets. Many “I ♥ Pacciani” T-shirts were dusted off and donned for the occasion.

  Standing, his voice marked with age, President of the Court Ferri announced the absolute and unconditional acquittal of Pacciani for being the Monster of Florence.

  The shaky old peasant was freed. He later greeted well-wishers from the shabby window of his house, flanked by his lawyers, weeping and spreading his hands to bless the crowd, as if he were the pope.

  The public trial was finished, but the trial of public opinion continued. Giuttari’s timely arrest of Vanni and his courtroom gambit had done the trick. Pacciani had been acquitted of a crime that two people had seen him commit—his accomplices. There was a public uproar. Pacciani was guilty—he had to be. And yet the court had acquitted him. Ferri came under public criticism. Surely, many said, there must be some way to undo this travesty of justice.

  There was: Ferri’s refusal to hear the four witnesses. The Italian Court of Cassation (equivalent to the Supreme Court) took up the matter, vacated the acquittal, and opened the door for a new trial.

  Giuttari swung into action, marshaling the evidence, preparing for fresh indictments and a trial. Only this time, Pacciani was not a lone serial killer. He had accomplices: his picnicking friends.

  CHAPTER 28

  Spezi and other journalists immediately rose to the challenge of identifying the four “algebraic” witnesses. The veil of secrecy was easily rent. They turned out to be quite a collection of half-wits and lowlifes. Alpha was a mentally retarded man named Pucci. Gamma was a prostitute named Ghiribelli, in the final stages of alcoholism, known to turn a trick for a twenty-five-cent glass of wine. Delta was a pimp named Galli.

  Of them all, Beta would be the most important, as he had confessed to helping Pacciani murder the French tourists. His name was Giancarlo Lotti, and he came from the same town as Vanni, San Casciano. Everyone in San Casciano knew Lotti. They had given him the racist nickname Katanga, an Italian slang term that might be loosely translated as “Jungle Bunny,” even though he was white. Lotti was a sort of village idiot of the classic kind that have largely disappeared from the modern world, a man who subsisted on the charity of the village, who was fed, clothed, and housed by his fellow citizens, and who entertained all with his unwitting antics. Lotti hung about the town square, grinning and hailing people. He was often subjected to pranks and taunts by schoolboys. They used to chase him around: “Katanga! Katanga! Run! Run! Martians have landed on the soccer field!” And Lotti would happily start running. He maintained himself in a felicitous state of inebriation, consuming two liters of wine a day, more on holidays.

  Spezi, in search of information on Lotti, spent a long evening with the owner of the trattoria where Lotti got a free meal every evening. The owner regaled him with amusing stories. He told of the time that one of his waiters—the same fellow who every evening laid a free bowl of ribollita under the hangdog jowls and bloodshot eyes of the poor unfortunate—dressed up as a woman, with a pair of napkins for a hat and rags stuffed in his shirt for breasts. The waiter, thus decked out, strutted and sashayed in front of Lotti, winking at him lasciviously. Lotti was immediately smitten. “She” pretended to accept an appointment with him in the bushes the following night. The next evening Lotti returned to the trattoria, boasting loudly of his imminent conquest, and he ate and drank with gusto. Then the owner arrived, saying Lotti was wanted on the telephone. Lotti was astonished and pleased to receive a telephone call in a restaurant like a man of affairs. He swaggered to the phone, which in reality was manned by another waiter in the kitchen, who pretended to be the young lady’s father.

  “If you lay a finger on my daughter,” the alleged father roared, “I’ll smash your ugly mug!”

  “What daughter?” Lotti babbled, terrified, his knees shaking. “I swear I don’t know any daughter, you’ve got to believe me!”

  Everyone had a good laugh over that one.

  What was not so amusing was the story Lotti and the other algebraic witnesses had told Giuttari, which was soon leaked to the press.

  Pucci said that ten years ago, he and Lotti were returning to Florence on Sunday evening, September 8, 1985. This was the night investigators had decided the French tourists were killed, the night that Lorenzo Nesi claimed to have seen Pacciani with another man. They stopped at the Scopeti clearing to relieve themselves.

  “I remember well,” said Pucci, “that we saw a car of a light color stopped a few meters from a tent, and, to our view, two men who were inside that car got out of it and started to shout at us with menacing gestures, so much so that we went away. The two threatened to kill us if we didn’t go away immediately. ‘Why did you come here busting our balls, get the hell out or we’ll kill both of you!’ We were frightened and got out of there.”

  Pucci claimed that he and Lotti had stumbled across the scene of the Monster’s last crime at the very moment when it was being committed. Lotti corroborated the story and added that he clearly recognized both men. They were Pacciani and Vanni—Pacciani waving a pistol and Vanni clutching a knife.

  Lotti also implicated Pacciani and Vanni in the 1984 double murder in Vicchio. And then Lotti explained that it was no coincidence they had stopped in the Scopeti clearing that night to take a piss. He knew the crime was scheduled to take place, and he had stopped to assist in the killings. Yes, Lotti said, he had to confess it, he could hold back no longer—he was one of the murderers himself! Along with Vanni, he was one of the accomplices of the Monster of Florence.

  Lotti’s confession was of enormous importance to the police. As their star witness, he was well taken care of. They moved him into a secret place that much later was revealed to be police headquarters in Arezzo, a beautiful medieval town south of Florence. After living in the police barracks for many months, Lotti’s story, which had begun with many contradictions, began to line up with the facts already ascertained by the police. But Lotti was unable to give the investigators a single objective, verifiable piece of evidence that they didn’t already have. The first iteration of Lotti’s story, before he had spent months in Arezzo, didn’t match the evidence gathered at the crime scene. For example, he swore to having seen Vanni make the cut in the tent. Then he said Pacciani entered the tent through the cut. Kraveichvili jumped out in a flash past Pacciani, and the fat sixty-year-old man pursued him into the woods firing his gun, killing him with the pistol.

  None of this agreed with the evidence. The cut in the tent was only seven inches long, and it was made in the rain fly of the tent, not in the tent itself. Nobody could have entered through the cut. The shells had all been found at the front door of the tent. If it had happened as Lotti claimed, the shells would have been scattered along the path of pursuit. Lotti’s initial descriptions of the crime not only contradicted the evidence gathered in the Scopeti clearing, but also contradicted the psychiatric and behavioral analyses, the results of the autopsies, and the reconstructions of the crime.

  Even shakier was Lotti’s “confession” regarding the killing in Vicchio. Lotti said that the girl was only wounded by the first shots and that Vanni, so as not to dirty himself, had donned a long duster coat. Then, while she screamed, he pulled her out of the car, dragged her into the field of flowers and herbs, and finished her off with a knife. Again, none of this matched the evidence: the girl had been killed by the first shot, a bullet into the brain, and did not have the time even to cry out. The medical examiner had established that all the knife marks had b
een made post mortem. And there was no evidence at either crime of more than one killer at the scene.

  Finally, there was the fundamental question of when the killing of the French tourists had taken place. Investigators had settled on Sunday night as the night of the crime. Naturally, Lotti claimed it was Sunday, and Nesi’s testimony also involved Sunday night. But there was a great deal of evidence, including the testimony of Sabrina Carmignani, that suggested they had been killed Saturday night.

  Why would Lotti make a false confession? The answer isn’t hard to see. Lotti had gone from village idiot to star witness and co–Monster of Florence. He was the center of attention of the entire country, his picture on the front page of the newspapers, investigators hanging on his every word. On top of that, he had free room and board in Arezzo and perhaps even a liberal supply of wine.

  In addition to the central story, Giuttari and his interrogators took down testimony from the algebraic witnesses of Vanni’s sexual depravity. Some of this evidence was inadvertently hilarious. In one such story, the ex-postman had taken the bus to visit a whore in Florence. The bus driver took a curve a little fast, which caused a vibrator to fall out of Vanni’s pocket. It rolled and bounced around the bus as Vanni, scrabbling about on his hands and knees, tried to scoop it up.

  “The second investigation of the Monster of Florence has passed from an inquiry into serial killings committed by a single individual to a series of killings committed by more than one person,” the prosecutor Vigna told the press. Instead of a lone psychopathic killer, a band of Monsters had roamed the Tuscan countryside—the picnicking friends.

  Ghiribelli, the alcoholic prostitute, told investigators another story that would eventually loom large in the investigation. She claimed that Pacciani and his picnicking friends frequented the house of a self-styled druid or wizard (whose day job was that of pimp) where they held black masses and worshiped the devil. “In the room just as you entered,” said Ghiribelli, “there were old wax candles, a five-pointed star drawn on the floor with carbon, an unspeakable dirtiness and messiness everywhere, condoms, liquor bottles. On the sheets of the big bed there were traces of blood. There were spots as large as a piece of letter paper. These traces I saw every Sunday morning in 1984 and 1985.”

  The wizard-pimp she named had died ten years before, and it proved impossible to check Ghiribelli’s assertions. Nevertheless, Giuttari took it all down and pushed the case forward, convinced he was finally on the right track.

  The president of the appeals court, Francesco Ferri, the man who had acquitted Pacciani, watched the new investigation proceed with growing dismay and anger. He resigned his judgeship to write a book, entitled The Pacciani Case, which was rushed into print in late 1996.

  In his book, Ferri denounced the new investigation into the picnicking friends. “The worst thing,” Ferri wrote about Giuttari’s new witnesses, “is not the improbability of their accounts, their lack of believability, but the clear falsity of the accounts. These two individuals [Pucci and Lotti] . . . have described particulars of the homicides, of which they claim to be eyewitnesses, that do not in fact conform to the evidence revealed at the time. . . . It is certain that Pucci and Lotti are coarse and habitual liars. . . . It is very difficult to believe that their stories contain even the minimum basis of truth.”

  The judge continued, “It smells to high heaven. . . . It is stupefying, however, that no one has up to this time exposed the grave deficiencies of the stories of Pucci and Lotti, neither investigators, defense attorneys, or journalists. . . . The most extraordinary thing, however, and more extraordinary still that nobody has noted it, is that for months Lotti has been kept in custody in an undisclosed location, where he has slept, eaten and perhaps above all drunken, and possibly even received compensation, in a place beyond the reach of the press, like a golden hen from which they ask, from time to time, a golden egg. In this way the revelations dribble out, bit by bit, more or less contradictory.”

  The judge advanced an explanation. “The mental flexibility of the subjects, their complete absence of morality and the hope of gaining impunity or other advantage is enough to explain their contorted testimony.” Ferri concluded, “I could not remain quiet in the face of an investigation so far outside logic and justice, conducted with prejudice and equipped with confessions that are maintained at all cost.”

  Ferri, unfortunately, was not a compelling wordsmith, and he was innocent in the ways of publishing. He placed his book with a tiny publisher that had little distribution and which printed very few copies. The Pacciani Case sank like a stone, virtually unnoticed by the press or the public. The new investigation of the Monster of Florence, under the doughty captainship of Chief Inspector Michele Giuttari, sailed on, untroubled by Ferri’s accusations.

  In October of 1996, Vigna, the lead prosecutor in the Monster case, was appointed director of the Antimafia Investigation Department in Italy, the most powerful and prestigious law enforcement position in the country. (Perugini, you may recall, had earlier leveraged the Monster case into an appointment in Washington, D.C.) Others responsible for putting Pacciani on trial had also used the case as a springboard to greater things. Regarding the Monster investigation, a highly placed carabinieri officer entertained a unique theory of criminal justice that he shared with Spezi.

  “Have you ever considered,” he said, “that Pacciani’s trial might be nothing more than a case of the acquisition and management of power?”

  CHAPTER 29

  Pacciani remained free and technically innocent while Giuttari mustered up a new case against him. But the excitement was too much for the Tuscan peasant, and on February 22, 1998, the “sweet little lamb” dropped dead of a heart attack.

  It took no time at all for the rumor mill to declare that Pacciani had not died of a heart attack, but had in fact been murdered. Giuttari sprang into action and directed an exhumation of the peasant’s body. The remains were tested for poisoning. The results? His death was “compatible” with having been poisoned—by an excess of his own heart medicine. Doctors pointed out that patients, in the throes of a heart attack, often overconsume their heart medicine. But that was far too prosaic an explanation for Chief Inspector Giuttari, who theorized that Pacciani may have been murdered by a person or persons unknown, to keep him from telling what he knew.

  The trial of Pacciani’s picnicking friends, Vanni and Lotti, began in June of 1997. The evidence against them consisted of Lotti’s word, backed up by the feeble-minded Pucci, against Vanni’s ineffective and disorganized protestations of innocence. It was a sad spectacle. Vanni and Lotti were convicted of all fourteen Monster killings; Vanni was sentenced to life in prison and Lotti to twenty-six years. Neither the press nor Italian public opinion seemed skeptical of the idea that three quasi-illiterate inebriates of marginal intelligence could have successfully killed fourteen people over a period of eleven years with the goal of stealing the women’s sex organs.

  The trial, furthermore, never addressed the central motive: why had Pacciani and his picnicking friends stolen those sex organs? Chief Inspector Giuttari, however, had already embarked on an investigation of this very question. And he had an answer: behind the Monster killings lay a satanic cult. This shadowy cabal of wealthy and powerful people, seemingly beyond reproach, who occupied the highest positions in society, business, law, and medicine, had hired Pacciani, Vanni, and Lotti to kill couples in order to obtain the sex organs of girls for use as the obscene, blasphemous “wafer” in their Black Masses.

  To investigate this new theory, Chief Inspector Giuttari formed an elite police unit, which he called the Gruppo Investigativo Delitti Seriali, the Serial Killings Investigative Group, or GIDES. They set up shop on the top floor of a monstrous, modern cement structure called Il Magnifico, after Lorenzo il Magnifico, erected near the Florence airport. He assembled a crack team of detectives. Their sole mission: to identify and arrest the mandanti, the “masterminds” or instigators behind the killings of the so-called Mon
ster of Florence.

  Out of the Everest of evidence in the Monster case, Giuttari had pried out a few pebbles that he felt supported his new theory. First, Lotti had made an offhand statement, ignored at the time, that “a doctor asked Pacciani to do a few little jobs for him.” For Giuttari, this revived the old suspicion that a doctor was responsible for the killings—this time not as the killer himself, but as a mastermind. And then there was Pacciani’s money. After the old peasant died, it turned out he was rich. He owned two houses and had post office bonds worth more than the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars. Giuttari was unable to track the source of this wealth. This should not have been all that surprising—a large percentage of the Italian economy at the time was underground and many people had unexplained riches. But Giuttari ascribed a more sinister reason to Pacciani’s affluence: the peasant farmer had gotten rich from selling the body parts he and his picnicking friends had collected in their years of labor.

  In a later book on the case, Chief Inspector Giuttari explained his satanic sect thesis more particularly. “The best sacrifices for evoking demons are human sacrifices, and the death most favorable [emphasis his] for such sacrifices are those that occur during orgasm and are called mors iusti. A similar motive led to the killings of the ‘monster,’ who struck his victims while they were making love. . . . In that precise moment [of orgasm] powerful energies are released, indispensable for the person acting out satanic rituals, which bring power to himself and to the ritual he is celebrating.”

  Digging deep into medieval lore and legend, the chief inspector found a possible name for this sect: the School of the Red Rose, an ancient, almost forgotten diabolical order that had left its mark across centuries of Florentine history, a perverse Priory of Sion in reverse, all pentacles, black masses, ritual killings, and demonic altars. The school, some said, was a deviant offshoot of an ancient order, Ordo Rosae Rubae et Aurae Crucis, an esoteric Masonic sect connected to the English Golden Dawn, and, therefore, with Aleister Crowley, the most famous satanist of the last century, who called himself “the Great Beast 666” and who in the 1920s founded a church in Cefalù, Sicily, called the Abbey of Thelema. There, it was said, Crowley practiced perverted magical and sexual rituals involving men and women.