Murder on the New Moon

by Johnny Sharp

  Investigators thought that the killer was then taken by surprise. The male occupant of the tent, who was behind her and only suffered superficial bullet wounds, bolted and tried to escape.

  Kraveichvili was an amateur sprinter, and it seems unlikely that he would have been caught given a clear run, but… yet again, the Monster found fortune on his side.

  The young Frenchman ran straight into bushes and was evidently caught by the assailant, as blood on the tree branches showed he was stabbed in the back, chest and stomach, then had his throat slit from behind (hence the large spray of blood).

  Once again the killer had come perilously close to a victim escaping, but had coolly and calmly dispatched his prey before returning to the tent to complete his grisly post-mortem ritual.

  All of this, of course, was deduced by investigators from the Squadra Anti-Mostro (Anti-Monster Squad, abbreviated SAM), which by now was a dedicated team of detectives, ballistics and forensics experts who had been given the unenviable task of tracking down this elusive maniac.

  Yet even after investigators sealed off the area up to a radius of half a mile, for once preventing any contamination of the murder scene, they were still left with uncertainties, which would prove pivotal.

  Initially, Professor Mauro Maurri, the chief medical examiner, had estimated that death could have occurred either the previous night or on the night of September 7, but that examination of the victims’ stomach contents confirmed that death had happened no more than three hours after a last meal of pasta, tomato sauce and probably some kind of meat.

  Did they die on Saturday or Sunday night? This question would become ever more important in the hunt for Il Mostro.

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  Chapter 12—The Final Insult

  We have noted that the killer, who now appeared to have claimed as many as 16 victims over two decades, had benefited from some fairly fortuitous strokes of luck.

  This particular double murder didn’t go as planned, and not just in terms of having to chase after a male victim and finish him off with a frantic struggle and a slit throat instead of the usual clinical bullet to the head. The Monster didn’t want his latest atrocity to be discovered that way.

  Instead, he wanted his foul handiwork to be first exposed when the only female prosecutor in the case, Silvia della Monica, opened her morning mail on Tuesday, September 10.

  Around 10:30 AM, she received a letter addressed to the misspelled “Procura della Republica” (the latter word is spelled with two b’s in Italian), containing a piece about an inch square of Nadine Mauriot’s breast, wrapped in tissue and cellophane.

  Silvia della Monica

  Portrait

  Inquiries revealed the package would have been mailed before midday on the Monday from the town of San Piero a Sieve, another of the small towns dotted around the Chianti vineyards and sun-baked countryside that formed the killer’s hunting ground.

  If the Monster had intended to shake up one of the prosecutors, he succeeded. Della Monica immediately hired bodyguards who remained at her side day and night, and she decided to have nothing more to do with the case.

  She joined a lengthy list of individuals now permanently scarred by the madness engulfing the city and its environs.

  Most frustratingly, the sender of the package had shown the kind of meticulous attention to covering his tracks that was now a trademark of the Monster.

  No fingerprints or saliva traces were found on the letter, as he had used adhesive to seal it. Aside from the familiar bullet shells dotted around the crime scenes, there was again precious little for investigators to work with. There was, however, one potential clue—a footprint from a size 11 shoe found near the couple’s tent, the same size as that found at the Stefano Baldi/Susanna Cambi murder scene back in October 1981. Again, the shoe suggested that the killer was of above-average height.

  The print was fairly deep, suggesting that, if it had indeed come from the killer, it had been made when he was carrying the woman’s body out of the tent. (Investigators concluded he had performed the incisions inside the tent and then left the body on display in the usual manner.)

  Meanwhile, a less sinister but no less significant piece of correspondence would arrive in the hands of investigators the very next day. The letter claimed to know exactly who the Monster was: A convicted killer, rapist and by anyone’s standards, a monstrous individual.

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  Chapter 13—Two Major Suspects

  It had now been four years since Florentines first realized they had a serial killer in their midst. As news of yet another double homicide hit the newsstands, the volatile mixture of panic and public outrage bubbled up again.

  A controversial reward of 500 million lire (around $350,000) was offered for information leading to the capture of a suspect. With the local rumor mill having long since gone into overdrive, the investigation was hampered even further by floods of anonymous tips, rumors and wild theories from citizens claiming to name a culprit or explain the origin of this seemingly incessant series of double murders.

  Such leads had to be looked into, of course—one vital piece of information among a thousand red herrings could be the key to cracking the case, and with precious little else in the way of evidence, investigators knew they would have to use any help they could get. After all, these murders had been committed in public places and increasingly occurred in a climate where anyone acting strangely or prowling around the hills would surely find it hard to go unnoticed.

  If the area really was teeming with voyeurs, undercover police and local residents on the look-out for anything unusual, someone would surely have seen something significant. Wouldn’t the killer have ended up with blood on his clothes? Could the killer’s friends, partners or family have seen something?

  One letter, which arrived on Wednesday, September 11, 1985, advised police to “question our fellow citizen Pietro Pacciani, born in Vicchio.” The note went on to claim that the man had been in prison for murdering his fiancée, and that he was a “shrewd, cunning man” with “a thousand skills” who kept a rule of terror over his own family.

  Pietro Pacciani

  On closer inspection, it turned out that Pacciani was a farmer who lived a mere four miles from the site of the final murder, and that he had indeed served a lengthy sentence for murder, although it was a crime of passion—he had actually killed a traveling salesman who had been having an affair with his fiancée.

  A search of the man’s property revealed nothing, however, and given that he was a shambling, diminutive alcoholic who had turned 60 earlier that year and suffered from a string of serious health problems, detectives found it hard to match his puffy, weathered face with their collective mental image of the killer.

  Instead, the stern, no-nonsense magistrate in charge of the case, Mario Rotella, decided that the key to solving the case must still lie with the Sardinian clan. The Islanders certainly seemed as if they were behind the 1968 double murder, and they looked the most likely candidates to have come into possession of the .22 Beretta and those distinctive Winchester “H” series bullets.

  Once again, Rotella called in the hapless Stefano Mele for questioning. The decrepit old Sardinian had taken the sole rap for the 1968 murder of his wife and her lover, but his son had told police at the time that others were at the scene. In court, one of those thought to have been involved, Barbara’s former lover, Salvatore Vinci, had appeared to intimidate Mele into withdrawing any accusations of involvement. According to Mario Spezi in his and Douglas Preston’s book The Monster of Florence, Salvatore audaciously wore Barbara’s engagement ring on his little finger while on the witness stand.

  The move to further grill Mele was condemned in the media, particularly among Sardinians, who felt that this amounted to persecution of a much-maligned island race. However, Spezi claims that privately, Mele finally broke down and admitted Salvatore Vinci’s role in the murder, explaining that Mele had enjoyed homosexual relations with Sal
vatore, and that Vinci had threatened to expose this secret (a big deal in such a traditional community back in 1968) if Mele tried to implicate him in the double murder.

  Strong evidence, then, that Salvatore, the middle child of three Vinci brothers who came to Florence from Villacidro, Sardinia, back in 1961, had been involved in, and quite possibly instigated, the 1968 killings.

  The more Mario Rotella looked into this charismatic, cocky individual’s background, the more he became convinced that this was the man they had been looking for all along.

  What was more, even before he arrived in Florence, Salvatore Vinci had almost certainly committed another murder.

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  Chapter 14—A Mother’s Mysterious Death

  On January 14, 1961, the small community of Villacidro in southwest Sardinia was shocked to hear that 17-year-old Barbarina Vinci, the wife of Salvatore Vinci, had been found dead in her bed, having apparently committed suicide by turning on the propane gas supply. The couple’s 1-year-old son, Antonio, was safe, having been moved into the kitchen.

  The 24-year-old Salvatore was widely suspected of killing his young wife. He was known to treat her with cruelty, beating and almost starving her, while Barbarina, who had only married Salvatore after becoming pregnant with his child (the result, it was rumored, of rape, with convention forcing her to marry), had secretly rekindled a previous relationship, something Salvatore had discovered a few weeks before Barbarina’s untimely death.

  The thuggish Francesco Vinci and elder brother Giovanni were also far from popular in Villacidro, and few were sorry to see the trio pack their bags for Florence later in 1961.

  After settling in Tuscany, Salvatore married again, and introduced his new wife, Rosina, to some of his more unusual habits. He had an insatiable sexual appetite, and enjoyed orgies with both men and women, ideally at the same time. Into this web of debauchery came the simple, suggestible Stefano Mele and his equally malleable wife, Barbara Locci.

  Rotella’s team also established that a .22 Beretta pistol had been stolen from one of Vinci’s relatives in Villacidro shortly before the brothers left the island.

  Curiously, in 1984, a string of brutal murders of prostitutes took place in and around the center of Florence. On the surface, they had little in common with the Monster killings—the women had all been killed in their own apartments, without any of the ritualistic dismemberment suffered by the corpses found in the hills surrounding the city. According to Mario Spezi, the killer used a knife that appeared similar to the one used in the Monster killings, yet no forensic comparison was ever attempted. At the site of the final murder, investigators noted that the radiator had recently been repaired by a firm called Quick House Repair. The owner of that firm? Signor Salvatore Vinci.

  That revelation prompted investigators to make the 48-year-old an official suspect for the murders of the prostitutes and put him under close surveillance. To Rotella’s dismay, the Sardinian’s apartment had been searched after the 1984 murder of Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, and a bloodstained rag stuffed inside a woman’s straw purse had been found there. Forensic tests had been inconclusive, and besides, no blood samples had been taken from the prostitutes in order to compare them.

  Nonetheless, the circumstantial evidence surrounding this suspect was starting to look very intriguing indeed. Might it be enough to prove that Salvatore Vinci really was Il Mostro?

  In June 1986, Salvatore Vinci was taken into custody, and although Rotella and his team reluctantly concluded that they did not have enough evidence to build a successful case against him for any of the Monster murders, they did have enough to try him for the 1961 murder of his wife.

  Once he was behind bars, they reasoned, he could perhaps be persuaded to tell them a little more of what he knew about the murders of 16 others during the decades since.

  The star witness for the prosecution at the court in the Sardinian capital, Cagliari, was Vinci’s only son, Antonio, who was then 27. He had been the 1-year-old baby moved out of the room in his cot as his mother inhaled the poisonous gas. During the intervening years, Antonio, who had been named after her mother’s lover, grew to hate his father with a passion, and more than once threatened to kill him. Yet blood still seemed to be thicker than water, as Antonio Vinci, wearing handcuffs as he was still serving time for an unrelated offense, simply glared at his father from behind dark glasses and said nothing.

  Other witnesses were barely any more useful to the prosecution, while the defendant was composed and impressive in the dock. Despite having been held for nearly two years, he walked out of the court a free man.

  Worse still, after his acquittal in the spring of 1988, he returned to his birthplace of Villacidro and promptly disappeared. To this day, there is no trace of the whereabouts of the man Mario Rotella was convinced had killed at least 17 people.

  Florence had also heard no more from Il Mostro. Coincidence? Or further proof that the worst serial killer in Italian history had been allowed to vanish into the hills just as suddenly and mysteriously as he had emerged?

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  Chapter 15—Leaving the Sardinian Trail Behind

  The Monster may have vanished, but the suspects were rapidly disappearing too. Literally so, it seemed, in the case of Salvatore Vinci, and physically in the case of his brother Francesco—the youngest Vinci brother’s body would be found in the boot of a burnt-out car in 1993, along with that of a criminal associate.

  Some still speculate that Francesco’s death could be connected to the Monster case. Given that he was demonstrably unable to have committed the 1983 or 1984 killings having been in custody at that time (as explained in Chapter 7 and 8), pinning guilt on him would surely be a difficult task, unless he was one of a pair of killers. Most observers believe his death was the result of a gangland feud rather than anything more significant where this case was concerned.

  Either way, after Salvatore’s acquittal, many involved in the case lost faith in Judge Rotella. The SAM serial killer task force resolved to follow its own inquiries under a new leader, Chief Inspector Ruggero Perugini. Working closely with Chief Prosecutor Piero Luigi Vigna, Perugini decided the pista sarda, or Sardinian trail, which pursued the clan of islanders as the key to the whole case, had come to a dead end. They had to start again from scratch. Because traditional policing methods had drawn a blank, they would look to newer forms of crime detection.

  Perugini was a fan of the FBI’s computerized, scientific approach to investigating serial killer cases, and instead of once again plowing through the endless files and paperwork accumulated on the case, he asked the FBI to provide him with a detailed profile of the likely killer. He also made a list of suspects based on his assumption that the killer would have previous convictions for sex crimes, would be familiar with the areas where the murders took place, and would, of course, have been at liberty to commit them at the times they took place.

  The list was gradually whittled down, and one name kept cropping up: Pietro Pacciani.

  Investigators dug out that anonymous letter from September 1985. Although this man would have been 60 years old at the time of the final murder, did the letter not describe him as a “shrewd, cunning man” with “a thousand skills”? It also depicted him as “a farmer with big clumsy feet but a quick mind.”

  Of course, he had a previous conviction for a crime that seemed intriguingly similar. As a 26-year-old back in 1951, he had killed a traveling salesman caught in flagrante delicto with his 16-year-old intended, and then raped the girl beside his dead body. It was a long time ago, but the circumstances of Pacciani’s crime caught Perugini’s eye: Two lovers in a parked car, near Vicchio, close to the site of two of the Monster killings, with Pacciani lying in wait in the bushes. Furthermore, the act had been triggered, according to Pacciani’s own testimony, by his rage at seeing his girlfriend exposing her left breast to the salesman.

  Her left breast. The Monster had hacked off the very same body part fr
om the body of his last two victims.

  The FBI profile had talked of the killer’s need for possession of women. Could that intense obsession have been inflamed by this incident all those years ago?

  There was no doubt about Pacciani’s propensity for extreme violence. He eventually served 13 years in prison for the crime all those years before.

  As if that didn’t paint a repulsive enough picture of the man, the anonymous correspondent’s accusation that Pacciani practically enslaved his wife and daughters was corroborated by the fact that soon after the date of the last Monster murder, he was convicted of raping both his own daughters and served four years in prison.

  Given these vile revelations, the fact that the rest of the FBI’s profile of the likely killer bore little resemblance to Pacciani seemed relatively immaterial. In the US crime bureau’s report, handed to Perugini in August 1989, they proposed that the killer would be working alone, would be sexually impotent and would have an intense hatred of women, but would probably not have a record of anything more serious than a petty crime or two such as arson or theft. The killer would have been living alone at the time of the killings, with his own car, but would have little contact with women from his own peer group.

  Still, the documents did stress that the analysis was “not to be considered a substitute for a complete and well-conceived investigation and it should not be considered conclusive.”

  This disclaimer was evidently taken onboard—the report’s findings were about to be quietly disregarded.

  Botticelli’s Primavera

  A new search of Pacciani’s home revealed nothing that conclusively tied him to any of the killings or murder scenes, but investigators found plenty that Perugini regarded as highly incriminating. There was a reproduction of Botticelli’s famous Primavera painting, and the flowers spilling from the mouth of the nymph, Perugini would argue, explained the symbolism of the necklace found in the mouth of Stefania Pettini at the first murder scene back in 1974. A flower gripped in the teeth of a soft-porn centerfold pinned on his wall was seen as similarly significant.