The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  However, the murder of Horst Meyer and Uwe Senes brought to light some other common features of the crimes. The killer usually struck on a Friday or Saturday night, when the moon was hidden by the clouds. The victims had all spent their last evenings at a discotheque—except Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco who had been to the cinema. The killer had also rifled through the woman’s belongings. Was he looking for something that might contect him to the victim? Or was he hunting for some macabre souvenir?

  Although Francesco Vinci had been in custody at the time of the murder of Horst Meyer and Uwe Senes, his lawyer failed to persuade the judges to release him, even though he clearly could not have committed the latest murders. State Prosecutor Mario Rotella now believed that the crimes were committed by a gang of Sardinian-born peasants, of which Mele and Vinci were members. They arrested Mele’s brother Giovanni Mele and a friend Piero Mucciarini. Both remained in custody until a few months after the next murders.

  Other bizarre theories were doing the rounds. Religious historian Massimo Introvigne pointed out that Florence, home of Dante’s “Inferno”, had long been linked to sorcery. Occult sects, he said, were stalking lovers’ lanes to commit ritual murders. Detectives had already toyed with the idea that the killer had taken the women’s genitals to be used as a trophy by some religious cult.

  There was more unsettling news. Shortly after the murder of the two German campers, the paramedic who had accompanied Paolo Mainardi to the hospital in 1982 got another phone call from the killer, demanding to know that Mainardi had said before he died. Disturbingly, the paramedic was in Rimini at the time. How did the killer know he was on holiday and how did he know where to contact him?

  At 9.40 p.m. 29 July 1984, 18-year-old sales girl Pia Rontini and 21-year-old university student Claudio Stefanacci were parked in a sky-blue Fiat Panda off a provincial road between Dicomano and Vicchio, just north of Florence. They were just about to make love when the killer began firing at them.

  Claudio’s body was found on the backseat of his car wearing only underpants and a vest. He had been shot four times and stabbed ten times. Not far from the vehicle, behind some bushes, lay the naked body of Pia. She had been shot twice and stabbed twice in the head. The killer had then dragged her by the ankles some ten yards into the bushes. As before she had been left in a spread-eagled position and her genitals had been excised. This time the killer had also cut off her left breast and slashed her body more than a hundred times. The police then asked, did the removal of the left breast have any occult significance? Or was the killer becoming more sadistic?

  Again the knife used was single-edged. Both victims had been shot through the car window. The weapon was the familiar .22 Beretta automatic and the bullets matched those used in the previous crimes. No fingerprints were recovered from the scene and detectives had come to believe that the killer wore surgical gloves during the murders. Sixteen years had passed since the first murder and, despite the arrest of four suspects, the police were no closer to stopping the “Monster of Florence”.

  The killer struck again over a year later. On 8 September 1985, he murdered a French couple as they camped in the San Casciano area just south of Florence. The murderer slashed open their tent and fired several shots into the bodies of 25-year-old Jean-Michel Kraveichvili and 36-year-old Nadine Mauriot. According to the medical examiner, they had been making love at the time with the man lying on his back and the woman on top of him.

  Nadine Mauriot had been shot four times. Three bullets had penetrated her skull; a fourth had passed through her throat. Kraveichvilj had also been hit four times—twice in the upper arm, once in the mouth and once in the right elbow. Even so, he managed to get to his feet and scrambled out of the tent but, after about 30 yards, the killer caught up with him and stabbed him to death. Then he pushed him down a bank into some bushes. The killer then returned to the tent, dragged out Nadine Mauriot’s body and began to mutilate it.

  According to the medical examiner, the shots were fired at a close range—no more than 20 inches. Once again the woman’s genitals and left breast were removed. It was estimated that this would have taken around ten minutes. In that time, he was not disturbed.

  Soon after detectives thought they had got lucky. A copper-jacketed Winchester bullet was found on the pavement in front of a hospital nearby. The idea that the killer used surgical gloves and his evident interest in dissection lead the police to question the hospital staff. But no suspect emerged and the trail went cold again.

  The following day an envelope arrived at the office of assistant public prosecutor Silvia Della Monica. The address was made up of letters cut from a newspaper or magazine in the style of a ransom note. It contained a single spelling mistake. Inside the envelope was a folded sheet of paper that had been glued along its edges. Inside the paper was a small plastic bag. Inside that was a cube of flesh cut from Nadine Mauriot’s missing breast. The killer was now taunting the authorities.

  In 1986 the police admitted their strategy of focusing on the Sardinian peasant gang was wrong. They began again from scratch and, over the next eight years, questioned over 100,000 people.

  By 1991 several leads seemed to point in the direction of Pietro Pacciani, a 68-year-old semi-literate farm labourer in San Casciano whose hobbies included hunting and taxidermy. In 1951, Pacciani had killed a travelling salesman he had caught sleeping with his fiancée. He had stabbed the man 19 times. He had then stomped the man to death and sodomized his corpse. Released from prison after 13 years, he married, but was jailed again from 1987 to 1991 for wife-beating and the sexual molestation of his two young daughters.

  Anecdotal evidence suggested that Pacciani was involved in the Satanic group with Giancarlo Lotti, Giovanni Faggi and Mario Vanni—all well known voyeurs who haunted local lovers’ lanes. Pacciani and Vanni were also said to have participated in black masses, using female body parts, at the house in San Casciano. Nurses at a clinic where Pacciani had worked as a gardener claimed he told them a mysterious doctor presided over these occult ceremonies.

  Florence’s head of detectives, Michele Giuttari, had his doubts. He believed that the semi-literate Pacciani was not organized enough to have planned the crimes and too slipshod to have got away with them. Nevertheless, on 17 January 1993, Pacciani was arrested.

  Pietro Pacciani finally went on trial on 1 November 1994 charged with 14 counts of murder—the 1968 murder of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco were left off the indictment. Determined to vindicate themselves, the prosecutors demanded that the trial be televized. It became compulsive viewing. Although the evidence was grisly—one police guard collapsed during a particularly gory session—the case against Pacciani was largely circumstantial. Throughout he protested his innocence. Nevertheless, he was convicted of 14 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. As he was dragged from court, he screamed: “I am as innocent as Christ on the cross.”

  In February 1996 the court of appeal overturned Pacciani’s conviction after the public prosecutor admitted the evidence against him was unsound. But just hours before Pacciani was released, his friends 70-year-old Mario Vanni, 54-year-old Giancarlo Lotti and 77-year-old Giovanni Faggi were arrested for their involvement in five of the double murders.

  Detectives had returned to the theory that the Monster of Florence was not just one killer but a gang. According to the police Lotti confessed that he and Pacciani were responsible for the killings. On 12 December 1996, the Court of Cassation cancelled Pacciani’s acquittal and ordered a new trial.

  Pacciani never made it to his retrial for the Monster of Florence murders. On 23 February 1998, he was found dead, face down on the floor of his home with his shirt up around his neck and his trousers down around his ankles. His face was blue and disfigured, and the police thought that the 71-year-old Pacciani had died of a heart attack. But the post-mortem revealed that a combination of drugs had caused his death. The investigating magistrate, Paolo Canessa, believed that Pacciani was silenced in case he rev
ealed more details about the murderous cult at his retrial.

  On 24 March 1998, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti were sentenced for their involvement in five of the double murders. Vanni got life; Lotti 26 years. Giovanni Faggi was acquitted.

  That should have been the end of it. But in 1994 Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, had attended Pacciani’s trial and he set his third Hannibal Lecter book Hannibal in Florence. While this was being filmed in the city, it stirred memories of the Monster of Florence and people began to ask, if Pacciani had been murdered, surely the Monster of Florence himself, if he was an individual, or another member of one of the gang, if he was not, was still at large. As it is, the case remains officially unsolved.

  Mexico’s Juarez Ripper

  In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, directly across the border from El Paso, Texas, there is a killing spree that has lasted for more than a decade and shows no sign of abating. In February 2005, Amnesty International put the body count at over 370, with more than 400 potential victims listed as missing. That year alone the death toll topped 28, according to the BBC. Even so, in August 2006, Mexico’s Federal Government dropped its investigation.

  The first official victim of El Depredador Psicópata—or “the Juarez Ripper”—was Alma Chavira Farel, whose body was found on 23 January 1993 in an empty lot in a middle-class neighbourhood of Campestre Virreyes. She had been raped both vaginally and anally, beaten and strangled. There was a bruise on her chin and she had a black eye. She was wearing a white sweater with a design on it and short blue pants. No mutilations were reported at the time, but later victims were said to have suffered slashing wounds to their breasts similar to those of Chavira. In all likelihood she was not the killer’s first victim at all. Juarez is a city of transients where disappearances exceed recorded homicides each year.

  No one is sure how many people live in Ciudad Juarez. Official estimates hover around one million, while there are probably more like two million people there at any one time. Many are street people who don’t show up in the official statistics. For others, it is a stopping-off place on their way to the US which lies just across the Rio Grande. It is also home to numerous drug traffickers and other criminals who use it as a temporary base for cross-border operations.

  Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has set up over 330 maquiladoras in Juarez. These are factories that use cheap labour to produce goods to sell over the border. The wages range between US$3 and US$5 a day. Nevertheless thousands of young uneducated female workers from southern Mexico, known collectively as maquilladoras, flock to work in these factories. The owners prefer hiring women because they are less trouble. They also put up with the squalid work conditions, sexual harassment and violent shanty towns where they are forced to live. Some 70 percent of the labour force is female.

  This piques Mexican men’s traditional Latin machismo. It also drives men into crime or to find work in the other traditional male preserve—the police force. However, the police earn so little that bribery is an accepted practice and there is enough drug money flowing through the city to ensure that the legal system is thoroughly corrupt. Any offence can be overlooked for the right price. Largely individual murders are overlooked, but it was hard to hide that the overall murder rate for women in Juarez is twice that of Mexico as a whole. The rate for women aged between 15 and 24 in Juarez is five times that of the rate in Tijuana, another border town, and more than ten times that of El Paso on the US side.

  In May 1993, a second victim was added to the Juarez Ripper’s list when a body was found on the slopes of Cerro Bola, a hill that carried a sign saying: “Read the Bible.” She had been raped and strangled. A third corpse appeared in June; she had been stabbed and the body set on fire. On the 11th, another anonymous victim was found partially naked in the playground of Alta Vista High School on the way to a dirt road at the edge of the Rio Grande. She had been tied to a stake, raped, stabbed and had her head beaten in.

  By the end of the year, 16 more murders had been added. The last, on 15 December, was “solved”, along with three others—though the Juarez police had an unfortunate reputation for torturing confessions out of innocent suspects. In the dozen cases that remain unsolved, five of the victims remain unidentified. At least four were raped. Four had been stabbed to death and four strangled. One had been shot and one beaten to death. In two cases, the body was so badly decomposed that a cause of death could not be established.

  The following year the Juarez police had eight unsolved murder cases involving women. In three other cases they named “probable suspects”, but none of them were arrested. Three of the victims remain unidentified today. The ages of those identified ranged from 11 to 35. In the cases where the cause of death could be determined, one was beaten to death, one burned alive, two were stabbed and six strangled. At least four of the victims were also raped. State criminologist Oscar Maynez Grijalva was already warning that, in at least some of the cases, a serial killer was at work.

  His words would be remembered the following year when a killer began to reveal a signature. Three of the four bodies found in September 1995 had their left nipple bitten off or their right breast severed. By then, at least 19 women had been slain—making 1995 the worst year yet. Eight of the victims are still unidentified. At least four had been raped. Where the cause of death was established, one was shot, one stabbed and six strangled. Again in two cases, “possible suspects” were named and the police claimed to have “solved” one of the murders. In October, they arrested Abdul Latif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist living in one of Juarez’s wealthier neighbourhoods.

  Sharif was arrested in 1995 after a prostitute accused him of raping her at his home. She claimed that Sharif also threatened to kill her and dump her corpse in Lote Bravo, a desert region south of town where the bodies of other victims were found. But these charges were dropped after the police had discovered that Sharif had dated 18-year-old Elizabeth Castro Garcia, who had been found raped and murdered in August.

  In custody Sharif allegedly confessed to five El Depredador Psicópata murders. But publicly he has always maintained that he was innocent.

  “They are pinning this all on me because I am a foreigner,” he claimed. “I’m just a drunk, I’m not a murderer.”

  Sharif was born in Egypt in 1947. Later, he claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, sodomized by his father and other male relatives. In 1970, he emigrated to America and settled in New York City. He was known for drunken womanizing. Lovers thought him charming and funny. Years after the event, it was said he had an obsessive interest in young girls.

  Sacked for suspected embezzlement in 1978, he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. A former friend there named John Pascoe claimed that, on a deer-hunting expedition, Sharif tortured a wounded buck. Pascoe also claimed that girls seen in Sharif’s company often disappeared later, though no missing person reports tied to Sharif ever surfaced. The friendship ended in 1980, Pascoe said, after he found possessions of a “missing” girl in Sharif’s home and a spade caked in mud on the porch.

  By 1981, Sharif had moved to Palm Beach, Florida. A talented chemist and engineer, Sharif was hired by the oil company Cercoa Inc., who gave him his own department. But then on 2 May 1981 he beat and raped a 23-year-old woman neighbour, later claiming that it was consensual sex that got a little rough. Afterwards, he showed remorse, saying: “Oh, I’ve hurt you. Do you think you need to go to a hospital?”

  Cercoa hired a top lawyer for Sharif’s defence who plea bargained the rape charge down to sexual battery and five years’ probation, though the law called for the deportation of aliens conviction of crimes involving “moral turpitude”. On 13 August, the night before he was to plead guilty, he attacked a second woman in her home in West Palm Beach. This time he kicked and threatened to kill her, before asking her to fix him a drink and for another date the following night.

  The prosecutor of the first case was not informed of the second and, as soon as Sharif was paroled,
he was rearrested, then bailed again. On 11 January 1982, Sharif was sentenced to 45 days in jail for the second attack and Cercoa finally sacked him.

  Sharif moved to Gainesville, Florida, where he set up a company and was married briefly. The short-lived marriage ended in divorce when he beat his bride unconscious. On 17 March 1983, he beat and repeatedly raped a 23-year-old college student who answered his ad for a live-in housekeeper, telling her: “I will bury you out back in the woods. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” He was arrested and held without bail pending trial. Sharif escaped from the Alachua County jail, but was soon recaptured. However, other women who had told the police that he was terrorizing them now refused to co-operate further in case he escaped again. On 31 January 1984 Sharif was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for rape. The prosecutor told local reporters that Sharif would be deported when he was released, though the authorities were seeking to tie him to unsolved murders in Florida and New Jersey. In January 1977, the body of a pretty 30-year-old brunette called Sandra Miller had been found at the side of the road. She had been killed by a single stab wound. Sharif worked at a chemical plant just two miles from the remote farmhouse where Miller lived with her five-year-old daughter and Sharif and Miller used the same bar. He was a prime suspect in the case

  However, when Sharif was paroled in October 1989, he was not deported. Instead, he moved to Midland, Texas, when he got a job with Benchmark Research and Technology. His work there was so exceptional that the US Department of Energy singled him out for praise, and he was photographed shaking hands with US Senator Phil Gramm.