The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (60 page)

Stefano Baldi was found next to the car. Half-naked, he appeared to have been shot and stabbed many times. Susanna Cambi was lying on the other side of the car. Her wounds were similar to Baldi’s – only her genitals had been excised like those of Carmela de Nuccio.

The medical examiner concluded that both victims had been shot through the front windscreen of the car, but were both still alive when they were stabbed. The same .22 Beretta as before had been used. The knife used to stab the victims had a single-edged blade, between 5 and 7 cm long and approximately 3 cm wide.

The instrument used on Susanna Cambi’s genitals appeared to be the same as the one used on Carmela De Nuccio, but the murderer seemed to have been rushed. The killer had performed the operation with less precision and a larger area was excised. He had cut through the abdominal wall and punctured the intestine.

The press now dubbed the killer the “Monster of Florence” and two separate couples came forward and reported that they had seen a lone male driver speeding from the crime scene in a red Alfa GT. However, despite the growing press coverage no further leads were forthcoming.

The following summer another couple were targeted. On 19 June 1982, 20-year-old Antonella Migliorini and her boyfriend, 22-year-old mechanic, Paolo Mainardi, were making love in a parking spot off the Via Nuova Virgilio, near Montespertoli, 12 miles south west of Florence. They were just putting their clothes back on when the killer appeared out of the bushes and started shooting.

Antonella Migliorini died instantly but Paolo Mainardi survived the initial burst of gunfire. Although badly injured, he started the Seat, switched on the headlights and slammed the car into reverse. But he ended up in a ditch. The killer walked over, shot out the headlights and emptied the pistol into the wounded driver. Then he pulled out the ignition keys and threw them into the undergrowth.

When he left, Paolo Mainardi was still alive. Unfortunately he was not found until the next morning and died a few hours later, without regaining consciousness and before he was able to give the police any vital clues. However, Silvia della Monica, the prosecutor assigned to the case, persuaded the newspapers to report that Paolo Mainardi was alive when he reached hospital and that he had given a description of the killer before he died. All of the reporters agreed, and the information appeared in the afternoon paper.

The idea was to rattle the killer. It worked. After the afternoon paper hit the streets, one of the paramedics who had accompanied Paolo Mainardi to the hospital received two telephone calls from a person who first claimed to be with the prosecutor’s office. The second time he identified himself as the killer and he wanted to know what Mainardi had said before he died.

A few days later, police Sergeant Francesco Fiore made the connection to the 1968 murder of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco, when he had been seconded to Montespertoli from Signa, ten miles away. Francesco began to wonder if there was a connection with the crimes of the Monster. At his insistence, the bullets were compared. They matched. Not only had all the bullets been fired by the same .22 Beretta and were the same distinctive Australian batch, they all came from a single box of 50 shells. It was clear that the Monster of Florence had killed Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco in 1968 or, at least, was using the same weapon and bullets.

Plainly Stefano Mele, Locci’s jealous husband, could not be the Monster since he had been in jail ever since. But he was not released. The Carabinieri simply assumed that he had an accomplice in the original crime who had continued killing after Mele was imprisoned. They interviewed Mele again, but he continued to claim his complete innocence and refused to co-operate with the investigators. Nevertheless, in August 1982 police arrested Francesco Vinci, who Mele had first accused 14 years before.

On 9 September 1983, Wilhelm Horst Meyer and his friend Uwe Rusch Sens, both 24, were asleep in a Volkswagen camper van some 19 miles south of Florence when the Monster paid them a visit. He fired through the window, killing the German holiday-makers instantly. There were no mutilations to the bodies, so the police did not immediately associate the murders with the Monster. It was only when ballistics found that the bullets were from the same batch as those used in the other killings that the connection was made.

The police wondered whether the killer had changed his pattern. Or perhaps he had simply made a mistake. One of the victims had long blonde hair and could have been mistaken for a girl, especially at night. There were reports that the two men were homosexual lovers, though there is no evidence to that effect. It may also have been, when the killer realized that he did not have a dead girl on his hands, that he abandoned his plans to stab and mutilate the bodies.

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 revealed 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.