IN HER STATEMENTS TO INVESTIGATORS, the surviving girl said that the tenor of the rest of the night remained unchanged. It was one in the morning, or possibly later, and in the meantime Subdued had returned from Rome.
“Angelo came back into the bathroom. He assured us that he’d let us go, but then he said that if Jacques wanted him to, he’d have to kill us. With Angelo was his friend. They forced me to take his penis in my mouth. He got mad and told me that I didn’t know how to do a single thing right. A short while later they told me to call my friend. ‘We need to take one of these girls’ virginity.’ We begged them to let us go and they laughed, they were making fun of us.”
Then Subdued placed his member in R.L.’s mouth and pledged to Angelo that he would take her virginity. In the meantime, Angelo was fondling D.C. but said he wouldn’t be up to deflowering her.
They locked them back in the bathroom, naked, until the morning. After a nap, around dawn, they moved the car out of the villa’s courtyard, worried that the gardener might show up and see it. R.L. continued screaming and moaning, and Subdued threatened the girls with his belt, unfastening it from his trousers, cursing and shouting, “Shut up, the two of you, or I’ll kill you,” while Angelo kept a pistol trained on them. They moved the girls from one bathroom to another, still naked, and then put them back in the first bathroom. Until the afternoon of Tuesday, September 30, that’s the way things went in the villa at Monte Circeo, or that’s the point at which they remained fixed, as if rerunning repeatedly the same brief clips: the boys threatened the kidnapped girls, made them come out of the bathroom, first one then the other, then one of the boys would force one of the girls to take his member in her mouth, the girls would beg, the phone would ring. Subdued thought that the most serious thing they’d done hadn’t been to beat the girls up or force them to perform fellatio, but to lock them in the bathroom. It turned it into a case of kidnapping. But they absolutely had to wait until Jacques got there. In the meantime, the girls, locked in the bathroom, had caused a minor disaster . . .
AND THE MINOR DISASTER WAS THAT, it’s unclear exactly how, the faucet on the bathroom sink broke. In these vacation homes, the plumbing doesn’t get much use, the pipes oxidize and corrode, the washers crumble. The water sprays out of the broken faucet and floods the bathroom. The young men fly into a rage and start slapping their prisoners around. Then, again under the threat of the pistol, for the umpteenth time, they transfer the two young women to the other bathroom, this one also windowless.
UNTIL AROUND FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON, the stalemate is broken by the arrival of Jacques, the Marseillais, from Rome. The future Legionnaire. Jacques immediately takes control of the situation. He talks with the girls (without any French accent, of course), reassures them, and explains to them that no more harm will be done to them, as long as they swear they won’t breathe a word about what’s happened so far. “If you don’t want to go to bed with me, I won’t insist.” Then, though, he tells them that they have to make love with each other, in front of him. He forces them to embrace and touch each other. Then he chooses R.L. and leads her into a bedroom. Angelo keeps the other girl with him and once again tries to penetrate her. He lunges on top of her, crams a pillow over her face, while Subdued starts kicking her. D.C. shrieks in pain and fear, and no matter how hard Angelo might try, rubbing his sex against the girl’s pudendum and manipulating it to obtain an erection, he can’t manage to penetrate her. Angrily, he tells his accomplice to take care of it, but Subdued refuses. “I don’t like this one.”
From behind the closed door of the room where Jacques has taken the other girl, her screams can be heard. Subdued assumes that Jacques is deflowering her, opens the door, and sees R.L. on the bed and Jacques on top of her. They’re both naked. The girl is shrieking with pain. Subdued shuts the door again.
WHEN SHE EMERGED FROM THE ROOM, R.L. had blood between her thighs. She was bewildered, her legs wobbly. “Can I go get washed up?” she asked in a toneless voice. Jacques, completely naked, ordered the other girl to come with him, and told the other men to take the girl he had just raped to the top floor. He was gentle with D.C., he kissed her and told her not to worry, they would take the two of them home after putting them to sleep. In the meantime, outside, it was getting dark. The occupants of the villa didn’t notice because the shutters had been closed the whole time, since the previous afternoon.
THE LEGIONNAIRE PULLED OUT some vials. He also had a length of surgical tubing, for use as a tourniquet, and a syringe. He went back down to the ground floor, taking D.C. with him, opened the box of vials, broke four of them into an ashtray, filling it with a red liquid, drew it into the syringe, and injected it into the girl’s arm. Then he went upstairs to do the same with the other prisoner, who was confined on the top floor. After that, he went back downstairs and gave D.C. a second injection because the first one hadn’t had any effect. What effect was it supposed to have? Put her to sleep? Kill her? Then he went back up to the top floor. In the meantime, Angelo was playing with the tourniquet, and saying: “You can’t guess how many people I’ve strangled with these things.”
THE TWO MEN ON THE GROUND FLOOR started to get dressed again. They let D.C. put on her pants. After being subjected to further maltreatment, more of the same, D.C. passed out. They took advantage of the opportunity to go clean up a little and mop up the water from the leak in the bathroom. But when they go back to the living room, they realize that the girl is awake and has dialed the phone and is holding the receiver in her hand. She’s called 113, the Italian 911. “Hello, they’re murdering me . . .” Subdued rushed over to her, grabbed the phone out of her hand, hung up, and then kicked her in the face. The girl’s blood sprayed onto the wall behind the phone, staining it. She got up and tried to rush toward the outside door, which was unlocked, but Subdued beat her to it and, using a tool he’d found in the yard, hit her on the head and at various places all over her body. The tool was a steel-reinforced club. The Legionnaire, who had come back down to the ground floor, ordered them to hurry and dial other phone numbers so that it wouldn’t be possible to trace the last call from the villa. The others hastened to do as he said. Then Angelo took the belt from his pants and wrapped it around D.C.’s neck. He dragged her around the house. She screamed. “If you scream again, I’ll throttle you.” Evidently, she continued to scream and Angelo choked her, tighter and tighter, until the belt broke. Then he hit her with the pistol butt, while Subdued went on beating her with the steel-tipped club.
ON THE TOP FLOOR of the villa at Monte Circeo, R.L. was drowned in the bathtub. Aside from the other evidence found, during the autopsy, in the respiratory passageways (a thick mucus, foam, and froth plug, massive emphysema caused by pulmonary hyperexpansion, subpleural hemorrhagic petechiae—all phenomena typical of drowning rather than a slower asphyxiation), the ecchymosis and swelling on her face could also be attributed to the violent and repeated immersion of R.L.’s head in the bathtub.
SO ONE OF THE GIRLS was dead before the group began its trip back to Rome. The second girl showed no signs of life. They had beaten her so hard and so long that they were exhausted. Subdued kicked her one last time to see whether she was alive or dead. During his depositions, he would claim that he’d seen her move, though just barely. She was bleeding badly. To keep from getting blood on themselves, Angelo and Subdued wrapped the body in plastic sheeting, but it kept slipping out of their hands, sliding around, so they put the body back down and wrapped it in a blanket. Then they took it to the trunk of the Fiat 127, which had been driven back to the villa’s courtyard, and shut the trunk, leaving the keys in the lock. As proof that they thought she was still alive, Subdued tells the investigators that in the past he had even locked his dog in the trunk, when he went hunting with his father in Manziana, and that enough air got in for it to breathe. Then they went back into the house to do a quick cleanup, mopping the blood off the floor and wiping it off the walls. The Legionnaire alone would take care of transporting R.L.’s corpse down
stairs and placing it in the trunk. They started off in two cars, Subdued’s Fiat 127, with the two young women in the trunk, and the yellow Mini Minor belonging to the Legionnaire, alias Jacques the Marseillais. On the way back to Rome, Angelo rode with him. They stopped to buy a couple of cans of Coca-Cola. Then, when they had almost reached Viale Pola, Angelo moved over to the Fiat 127.
DURING THE TRIP BACK, the girl who was still alive tried shaking the other girl with her elbow, but she remained inert. Pressed against her, in the darkness of the car trunk, D.C. couldn’t even figure out where R.L.’s head and feet were. But she understood that she was dead. In any case, she refrained from calling her name and speaking to her for fear that the two men might hear her. She heard one of them saying: “Shhh, what good little sleepers these two are . . .” and “Silence! We have two dead women here.”
THE VERSION OF THE CR/M provided by Angelo is dreamlike, somnambulistic, and yet still full of details, annotations, and interpretations and descriptions of states of mind, real or fictitious. Aside from telling, in all likelihood, a considerable array of lies to the investigators, Angelo candidly confesses all the lies that were told to the young women. But he may be lying even when he confesses to the lies. They are, so to speak, lies squared. Not only the lies that were necessary to lure them into the trap; during the long phase of the kidnapping, while the young women were being held captive, he invents a bunch of stories, embellishments, he likes to exaggerate, invert, or romanticize human interactions, introducing moments of intimacy and something approaching naïveté that give a certain color to his personality. His shifts in mood and attitude are sudden and wild. When the actual kidnapping begins, Angelo narrates that moment as if there were uncontrollable forces at work inside him that overwhelmed his very conscience. “I didn’t realize that by locking the girls in the bathroom our friendship would be damaged and that that would mean the end of any dialogue with them.” Dialogue? Dialogue?! (Ah, that word so beloved of the priests and the school run by priests that he and I had both attended until the previous year . . .) The dialogue had come to an end in spite of him, and to his chagrin. The realization that he was committing a crime had passed through Subdued’s mind, but not Angelo’s; and so he doesn’t give his friend time to hesitate and think it over, he pushes the girls into the bathroom and locks the door.
From that moment on, all sorts of anxiety and concern spangle the night. “I thought my mother might be crying. Every time that I came home late, I found the family worried, all of them just a wreck.” “I had left word for my father that I was staying with a friend of mine, at his villa at Monte Circeo, and that the next day I’d be going to the American market [flea market] in Latina,” where you could buy used shirts and jeans like new for a handful of lire, but you had to go very early. When, at dawn, he unlocks the bathroom door and finds the two girls inside, naked and terrified, on their knees begging to be allowed to leave, he justifies himself by telling them he can’t do as they ask because in the meantime other men who are wanted by the law have arrived, and are upstairs in the villa, so he can’t reveal the presence of the two hostages to them, otherwise things would just be so much the worse for them. “At this point I started to get the impression that the girls no longer believed the stories I was telling them.”
BUT THE SEQUENCE OF LIES and fantasies traced back to the very outset. Aside from the story of the Marseille gang and the Bulgari kidnapping, when the girls ask for the first time to be taken back home, otherwise they won’t know what to tell their parents if they get back late, how they’ll be able to explain, Angelo suggests that they just tell them a lie, that is, that they had been forced into a car by a bunch of thugs who had taken them to a pine grove. That is, he recommends that they gin up a fairy tale that just happens to be a chilling copy of the truth: as if they weren’t him and Subdued, he invents a bunch of thugs and kidnappers to help the young women find a way out of their unpleasant quandary. To stir them to pity, he tells them that his mother died of heartbreak when he was in prison in Marseille. He gets irritated when the home phone keeps ringing and it might be the Legionnaire’s parents calling, or the Legionnaire himself calling to let them know that his parents are arriving. So it’s probably best not to answer. He asks the two girls “as a joke, in a humorous tone” to have sex with each other: and that’s because, according to him, R.L. had confessed to him that she had a weakness for girls, and for D.C. in particular. Even though he feels riddled with anguish and dark thoughts, among them emerges the awareness that he’s going to spend the night away from home, which will make his parents worry: “But, now that I was here, I might as well enjoy the night.”
IF HE DOESN’T BEHAVE in an entirely rational manner, it’s because he’s sleep-deprived. He continually steps away for a brief nap. He says that he didn’t have the pistol, his accomplice had it, then he doubts his own statement: “I don’t know where he got the pistol and whether he really had told me that or whether I’d imagined it. Sometimes I imagine things that I believe are true, things that refer to higher levels, meaning emotions.” Angelo in fact confesses that he is very sentimental and emotional: he never quite recovered from the way a troubled relationship ended, a romance with a girl he loved, nor from the “collapse of his political ideals.” He’s afraid of this and that, he’s alarmed, tense. Then, however, he promises D.C., “Now I’m going to take your virginity,” and his friend piles on, but just to scare her a little, “No, I’ll deflower you, but with a broom handle.” After Jacques arrives, his tension seems to subside somewhat and a strange disinterest takes over concerning the ending of an affair that has been dragging on for too long already. He is struck only by certain details: the phone that flies out of D.C.’s hands when Subdued hits her, the dog that Subdued took “to Manziana,” locked in the trunk, his revulsion at the blood on D.C.’s face, after she has been kicked repeatedly. He’s almost chivalrous when he asks the young woman if she’d rather be put to sleep with an injection, “or if you like with a blow to the head.” On Via Pontina, when the Legionnaire’s Mini Minor stops “right in front of a police station” and Angelo gets out to buy the cans of Coca-Cola, he forgets to collect the change from the barista. “I’m sure that the people in the bar noticed my condition, I was a wreck, and they were looking at me.” He always feels eyes on the back of his neck.
Once he’d returned to Rome, his wanderings in the few hours between September 30 and October 1 are too random and intricate to be described without inducing confusion. Angelo wanders like a robot, starving and exhausted, he passes and repasses through Viale Pola, the last time without even noticing that where they had left the Fiat 127, the Carabinieri are now gathering, he’s just looking for a water fountain where he can wash his face, “because my head was exploding.”
11
AH, YES, GOOD MANNERS. They guaranteed a net savings of time and mental energy: by observing them you eliminated all doubts and pointless hesitations. Nothing creates greater anxiety than uncertainty about the right thing to say or do, exposing yourself on positions that few others will support or share.
(The same thing happens with bad manners.)
Going along, in any case, entails a lower cost than standing out for going your own way. And even if everyone likes the idea of being considered a nonconformist, a dispassionate reckoning would show us that most of the times that we wandered away from the majority consensus, we’ve turned out to be wrong. The effort to distinguish ourselves led us astray from the path of justice; rather than imitating the others when they spoke the truth, we chose to swear to the false.
THE THREE PILLARS OF ANY EDUCATION, any upbringing, were these: persuasion, threat, punishment. But more than pillars, they were phases. If the first one worked, then there was no need to apply the successive phases. If the first two phases were sufficient, then the last one remained unutilized. But if after the explanations—reasonable—and the threats—disproportionate—the subject remained adamant, unmoved, then it was necessary to punish him. The c
hapter of punishments had not yet been drawn up because in that period there were no longer any valid, well-tested ones, none that could be applied without a second thought, such as a whipping or bed without dinner, and the punishments of modern pedagogy were still in an experimental phase. We were raised during the interval when everything was allowed and where, for the same infraction (a bad grade in math or a lie or a theft), among families that were otherwise quite similar to one another, in one family you might be punished by being sent to your room, in another by having your allowance cut or being grounded for the week, and in a third by the suspension of expensive gifts or your favorite foods, or else with straight-armed smacks to the face, verbal sarcasm (“You’re a pathetic moron, a mental defective”), or else with the exaction of the simple promise “I won’t do it again,” and the matter was closed. Alongside these common approaches, which parents made use of on a fairly random basis, there were a few others, custom-tailored, personalized.
The most singular case might have been the writer who, having made the ideological decision never to punish his daughter, punished himself instead. He would stand in the doorway of his daughter’s bedroom, look her right in the eye, and list her misdeeds in a brokenhearted yet chilly voice (“You smoke hash, I know you do, even though I begged you not to . . .”), and then he’d start banging his forehead against the doorjamb. Bam, bam, bam, gently at first, then bam-bam-BAM! harder and faster.
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