Murder on the New Moon

by Johnny Sharp

  The killer (or, some would later speculate, killers) drove away with the child, and then left him to knock on a stranger’s door for help. The stunned resident called the police, and the boy led them to the murder scene.

  Some 14 years later, when they revisited the files of that murder, they would find, to their surprise, that the physical evidence had not been disposed of after the case went cold, as was the rather naïve customary practice in Italy back then. The bullet shells retrieved from the scene were still there, and guess what? They turned out to be distinctive Winchester “H” Series bullets, fired from a .22 Beretta with a defective firing pin.

  Back in 1968, the first port of call for detectives looking for a culprit had been Stefano Mele. The scenario wasn’t hard to picture: A jealous, publicly humiliated husband finally losing patience with his errant spouse and taking violent revenge.

  Stefano Mele

  Police Photo

  At first, however, the Sardinian immigrant pointed to a number of fellow members of his clan from the island, including two brothers, Francesco and Salvatore Vinci. After forensic evidence was found on him indicating that he had recently fired a gun, Mele broke down and confessed to the double murder. He claimed to have discarded the murder weapon in an irrigation ditch, although it was never found despite extensive searching. He was subsequently sentenced to 14 years in jail, a light sentence based on “infirmity of mind.”

  So if Mele had fired the same gun that Il Mostro had been using, where was he on the nights of the four double murders committed with it? The answer was simple: In jail. Or, in the case of the last murder, in a halfway house near Verona, an establishment for recently released prisoners who had nowhere else to go. Mele could not have committed the last four double murders.

  Attention duly switched to his associates and Barbara Locci’s lovers—in particular, the Sardinian brothers Francesco and Salvatore. They were the middle and youngest of three Sardinian brothers who had arrived in Tuscany in the early 1960s, as many did in those days, looking for work.

  The thuggish Francesco had links to the criminal fraternity and had been convicted of a number of offenses, including violence against women. Several years before the murder, Salvatore was invited to move into the Mele household and had begun a long affair with Barbara, apparently with the blessing of her rather suggestible husband.

  Francesco Vinci

  Police Photo

  Earlier in 1968, however, she had taken up with Francesco, and then soon after that, with Antonio LoBianco—an outsider as far as their Sardinian social set was concerned. Could the Vinci brothers, along with Mele, have murdered Barbara and her lover in a clan killing?

  None of the Sardinians was talking, but investigators took a keen interest when they discovered that a car belonging to Francesco Vinci had been found abandoned and hidden in woods near the coast. It had happened on the day that the reports had come out claiming that the killer’s last victim may have given police important details. Did the cocky, bearded Francesco have something to hide? He was found to have been living not far from each of the murders at the time they were committed. He was known for violence against women. He was certainly capable of murder, and he could quite conceivably have got his hands on the same gun that killed his former lover some 14 years previously. Surely, the net was closing on The Monster of Florence.

  Francesco was arrested and, after he could offer no convincing alibi for his behavior, charged with the murders. As another hot Tuscan summer came and went without any further double murders, it began to look more and more like the Monster had finally been caged.

  Then, just as the days began to shorten and the dark nights began to draw in, everything changed yet again…

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  Chapter 8—Another Mistake?

  As the moonless Friday night of September 9 came around, relatively few local couples were returning to their old romantic spots. However, Florence and its surrounding areas still attracted millions of foreign visitors every summer, many of whom remained blissfully aware of the hysteria that had been escalating there over the previous year or two.

  Wilhelm Horst Meyer and Uwe Rusch Sens, a pair of 24-year-old Munster University students traveling around in a battered old VW camper van, wouldn’t have felt they had much to worry about, even if they had closely followed the case. Up to this point, male pairings didn’t seem to be the maniac’s prey of choice.

  That weekend, however, the Monster would give notice that no one was safe.

  The two German men had arrived on Thursday September 8, probably intending to spend the weekend in the area overlooking the hills at Giogoli. They parked there on Friday night, and anyone could see why it would be hard to leave. The view is simply breathtaking. Alas, they would not live to see much more of it.

  At 7 PM on Saturday September 10, just as twilight was descending, local residents noticed a German camper van with its windows shattered. Peering inside, they found the bodies of the two partially clothed young men. At first, those arriving at the scene, such as La Nazione journalist Mario Spezi, mistook one of the victims, who had long blond hair, for a girl.

  Horst Meyer & Uwe Rusch Sens

  Victims

  From that moment, investigators and media alike seemed to accept the theory that the Monster had erred again and mistaken the pair for a male/female couple.

  Near the van, ripped-out pages of a glossy pornographic magazine were found on the ground. However, this was between 50 and 100 feet away (depending on which account you read) and there were no fingerprints on them. Another account said that the magazine was found on the other side of a wall, suggesting it had been left there by a voyeur, or placed there by the killer.

  It was entitled Golden Gay, and it didn’t take a masterpiece of deduction to conclude that it must have belonged to the occupants of the VW van, and that they themselves were, as the title suggests, homosexual. As we will discuss later, though, this assumption might just be a significant misconception.

  Investigators concluded that unlike the previous murders, where the couple was attacked while in the act of lovemaking or afterward, the killer crept up on the pair while they were asleep in the van. They were woken by shots through the windows and body of the van, and once the inside light was switched on, they were both killed by several bullet wounds to the head and body, some of them fired from outside.

  More significant in terms of clues to the assailant’s identity was the angle at which the bullets appeared to have hit the men and the bullet holes in the small windows around the top of the vehicle. These clues suggested that the killer must have been a man of at least 5’10” in height, unless the killer had taken an unnatural shooting stance (and it seems unlikely that he would risk affecting his aim in such a way).

  Van at Crime Scene

  Police Photo

  As in the previous cases, the contents of the vehicle seemed to have been ransacked, but just as with the previous year’s double killing, there were no stab wounds. This change suggested the killer had either been disturbed in the act and forced to flee or felt confident the pair were dead from the gunshots. Alternatively, perhaps his rage was not sufficiently piqued to merit such a final act of violence.

  Whatever conclusions could be drawn from all of this, one thing was plain: Once again, the man in police custody suspected of being the Monster could not have committed these latest murders.

  However, Francesco Vinci would not get away that easily.

  Prosecutor Silvia della Monica concluded, with a rather Orwellian leap of logic, “Vinci is not the Monster. But neither is he innocent.”

  Investigators still believed Francesco Vinci knew more about these murders than he had let on. The unsavory Sardinian was kept in custody just in case he might be persuaded to impart that information.

  Besides, there was a popular theory among the investigating team that someone had committed these murders in order to demonstrate Francesco’s innocence. Could they have been one of his cri
minal acolytes?

  Suspicion fell on Francesco’s nephew, Antonio Vinci, the 24-year-old estranged son of Salvatore. In some ways, he fit the profile. Unlike the diminutive Francesco, he would have been tall enough to shoot the German victims through the bus window. He and his uncle were good friends and both had served time in prison.

  Antonio was arrested and charged with possession of firearms. The guns concerned may not have been those used in the Monster killings, but they would serve to suggest he was capable of using such weapons. Many believe the move was engineered to bring him into custody, where he would be accused of being the Monster and played off against his uncle. Could this new ploy finally crack the case and prove that the Monster was, in fact, a two-headed beast?

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  Chapter 9—A Mysterious Note

  However persuasive the investigators’ theory was about a two-man Monster partnership, neither suspect was giving an inch to his interrogators. Francesco contemptuously dismissed the accusations, quite justifiably, as based on precious little evidence, while Antonio went so far as to conduct his own counsel on the firearms charges and, after pointing to the fact that they were discovered away from his home and there was no real evidence to link him to them, he was acquitted.

  The examining magistrate, Mario Rotella, was one of several involved in the investigation who remained convinced that the Sardinian clan held the key to the Monster’s identity, and he decided to go back to the man originally convicted for the 1968 murder, when that now-infamous .22 pistol had first left its deadly calling cards.

  Beretta .22 cal Model 74 Pistol

  www.gunbroker.com

  When he paid Stefano Mele a visit in January 1984, the decrepit-looking old jailbird claimed he “did not remember” what had happened that night nearly 16 years previously—a scarcely credible claim that only hardened Rotella’s belief that he was protecting one of his cohorts for reasons still too murky to fathom.

  However, upon finding a crumpled note of paper in Mele’s wallet, Rotella thought he might have made a breakthrough. The badly misspelled note said something roughly translated as, “report of Natalino regarding uncle Pieto… that you would have said the name after serving the sentence… now it is shown from ballistic test of the shots fired.”

  “Natalino” was Mele’s son, who had been the 6-year-old child in the back seat of the car when the shots were fired, and who also claimed (marginally more convincingly than his father) to have no memory of the night in question. However, when interrogated back at the time of the murder, the child had claimed that among those present were an “Uncle Pieto,” and other details in his statement indicated that he was referring to Piero Mucciarini, the baker husband of Mele’s sister.

  Rotella thought the notation meant that Mele had been instructed by the author of the note to suggest the boy meant Barbara Locci’s brother Pietro, and thereby throw investigators off the scent.

  Stefano Mele’s brother Giovanni was arrested on suspicion of having written the note, along with Piero Mucciarini.

  The newspapers splashed a sensational headline: “There Are Two Monsters.”

  Not for the first, or the last time, the strongest possible evidence would emerge to suggest they were wrong: Two more bodies.

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  Chapter 10—A New Atrocity

  By the summer of 1984, 19-year-old Pia Rontini was still relatively new to her job as a barmaid at La Nuova Spiaggia in her hometown of Vicchio, 17 miles northeast of Florence, and she was still not used to some of the less-welcome attention she received from customers.

  She confided to a friend that one man in particular appeared to follow her after she left work. Some weeks later, a restaurant owner in nearby San Piero a Sieve would tell of seeing a man watching Pia intently one afternoon around that time as she enjoyed a drink with her 20-year-old fiancé, Claudio Stefanacci.

  Piazza in San Piero a Sieve

  Photo by sailko

  Such incidents may have seemed a little odd, but not enormously significant, nor did the moment at around 9:40 PM on the night of July 28, when a farmer living a few miles outside Vicchio heard several loud bangs from a scooter backfiring.

  At least, that’s what he thought he heard.

  In the hours that followed, Claudio’s mother became alarmed that her son had not returned home, and called Pia’s family. When they said they hadn’t seen the pair since just after 9 PM, Signora Stefanacci contacted the couple’s friends. Some of the youngsters who had seen Claudio and Pia earlier knew they had been heading out into the night for a romantic drive. These young people also knew what terrible dangers lurked for couples brave enough to venture into those hills in search of intimacy.

  They headed out to look for their friends, and when the increasingly frantic search finally ended by some woods known as La Boscetta in the early hours of the morning, their worst fears were confirmed.

  Inside Claudio’s sky-blue Fiat Panda they found the young student, shot three times and repeatedly stabbed. A short distance away, in an open field only a couple of hundred meters from the farmer’s home, they found Pia. The Monster’s trademark mutilation had been performed on her partially clad body, and this time, there was a sickening new horror to behold. He had hacked off the girl’s left breast.

  Pia Rontini & Claudio Stefanacci

  Victims

  The Monster was still at large, and his murderous rituals were becoming even more twisted.

  At least there was more evidence for investigators to go on. Knee prints had been found in the dust on the car door at around 24 inches high, suggesting, again, a man of 5’10” or more.

  Almost immediately, the now-familiar sense of shock among the local community darkened into fury at the authorities’ evident failure to catch the killer, although their arrest list had long since reached double figures.

  The pressure on the police was intense. Perhaps inevitably, it led to conflict among those tasked with bringing the Monster to justice. Public opinion had reached a rather arbitrary consensus that the killer must be some kind of medical practitioner, perhaps a gynecologist.

  In such a deeply religious country, popular suspicion was also widespread that some form of occult rituals could explain the mutilation of the victims. Meanwhile, the apparent cunning and cool execution of the killer’s work led many to conclude that the killer must be from the upper echelons of society, perhaps an intellectual or high-ranking professional.

  The interest in the case was so intense that some even took to roaming the woods vigilante-style in the hope of catching the killer in the act. The elusiveness of this phantom-like figure was so enduring that they probably had as much chance as traditional crime-prevention agencies of finally catching the Monster.

  Unless, of course, the killer was someone that you could just walk by in any situation and never, for a second, suspect that he might be up to no good.

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  Chapter 11—The Last Act

  If visitors were considerably scarcer in the Florentine hills by the mid-1980s, the area was far from deserted. Signs in several languages, which warned would-be campers and parking couples of “danger of violence,” never quite spelled out in detail the exact nature of that risk—no city gaining major revenue from the tourist industry would want to advertise to potential foreign visitors that a serial killer was stalking their holiday destination. So it was still far from uncommon for campers, particularly foreign tourists, to save a few lire on an official campsite by pitching their tents in the woods.

  Among those who frequented the woods around Florence were mushroom pickers. Two such nature lovers stopped in a clearing off via Scopeti, the winding road through the woods near Tavarnuzze, on the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 9, 1985. They noticed a foul smell, accompanied by the loud buzz of numerous flies, and at first they assumed that a dead animal was the source. They soon realized that the smell was coming from the direction of a tent pitched in a nearby clearing in front of
a parked car with foreign number plates.

  Nadine Jeanine Gisele Mauriot

  Victim

  Although they found no one in the tent, the smell led them into nearby bushes, where they soon found the decomposing, mutilated body of 36-year-old Nadine Mauriot, a shoe shop owner from Audincourt, France. Just like the Monster’s previous victim, her pubic area had been cut out and removed, and her left breast had also been torn off.

  Nearby, underneath the blood-spattered branches of a tree and crudely half-concealed with various bits of trash, they found the body of 25-year-old Jean-Michel Kraveichvili, his throat cut and his body studded with stab wounds.

  Jean-Michel Kraveichvili

  Victim

  Worse discoveries were to come.

  In the couple’s car, they found a child seat in the back. Had the Monster had claimed his 17th and youngest victim?

  Frantic inquiries followed, and after several uncertain hours, investigators established that Nadine Mauriot’s daughter was actually staying with relatives back in France.

  The woman had separated from her husband some months before and was coming to the end of a holiday in Tuscany with her new boyfriend, Jean-Michel.

  Examining the scene, investigators soon pieced together the likely chain of events.

  The slash in the tent had been made to alert the couple to the killer’s presence, and as soon as the woman opened the tent to investigate, she was shot in the head.