The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  Once in Tuscany, Salvatore found work as a bricklayer. Francesco spent most of his time in a bar outside of Florence that was an infamous hangout for Sardinian criminals. It was the unofficial headquarters of three famous Sardinian gangsters who had exported to Tuscany a classic Sardinian business: kidnapping for ransom. These men were partly responsible for the rash of kidnappings that plagued Tuscany in the late sixties and seventies. In one instance, when a ransom was slow in coming, they killed the victim, who was a count, and disposed of the body by feeding it to man-eating pigs—a detail Thomas Harris used to great effect in his novel Hannibal. Francesco Vinci, as far as we know, never took part in these kidnappings. He dedicated himself to petty holdups, theft, and another venerable Sardinian tradition, rustling livestock.

  Salvatore rented a room in a run-down house occupied by a Sardinian family named Mele, where Stefano Mele lived with his father, siblings, and wife, Barbara Locci. (In Italy, the wife traditionally keeps her maiden name after marriage.) Barbara Locci was slinky and sloe-eyed, with a flattened nose and thick, well-shaped lips. She favored skintight red skirts that showed off a full-bodied figure. When she was a teenager back in Sardinia, her deeply impoverished family had arranged for her to marry Stefano, who came from marginally better circumstances. He was much older than she, and on top of it uno stupido, a simpleton. When the Mele family had immigrated to Tuscany, she went along.

  Once in Tuscany, the very lively young Barbara set about ruining the Mele family’s honor. She often stole money from her in-laws and went out on the town seeking men, giving them money, and sneaking them back into the Mele home. Stefano was completely unable to control her.

  In an effort to put an end to her nocturnal adventures, the patriarch of the Mele family, Stefano’s father, put iron bars on the first-floor windows and tried to keep her locked in the house. It didn’t work. Barbara soon took up with their lodger, Salvatore Vinci.

  Barbara’s husband was no obstacle to the affair. He even encouraged it. Salvatore Vinci testified later, “He wasn’t jealous. He was the one who invited me to live in their house when I was looking for a place to live. ‘Come live with us!’ he said. ‘We’ve got a free room.’ ‘What about money?’ ‘Give whatever you can.’ So I moved into Mele’s house. And right away he brought me to meet his wife in bed. Then he urged me to take her to the movies. He said that it didn’t matter to him. Or he would go play cards at his social club and leave me alone with her in the house.”

  At one point Stefano’s motorbike was hit by a car and he was laid up in the hospital for several months recuperating. The following year Barbara bore him a son, Natalino, but anyone with the ability to count to nine could see that the paternity of Natalino was in grave doubt.

  Fed up with this blight on their honor, the patriarch of the family threw Stefano and his wife out of the house, along with Salvatore. Stefano and Barbara rented a hovel in a working-class suburb west of Florence, where she continued to see Salvatore, with the complete (and indeed enthusiastic) cooperation of her husband.

  “What was her attraction?” Salvatore testified later about Barbara. “Well, when she made love she certainly wasn’t a statue. She knew what kind of game it was, and she knew how to play it.”

  In the summer of 1968, Barbara left Salvatore and took up with his brother Francesco, the balente who played the macho man. With him, Barbara acted the part of a gangster’s moll, going to the Sardinian bar, joking with the tough guys, wiggling her hips. She dressed like a femme fatale. Once she went too far, at least for Francesco’s taste, and he seized her by the hair, dragged her into the street, and ripped off the offending dress, leaving her in the middle of a gaping crowd in only her slip and hosiery.

  At the beginning of August 1968, a new lover appeared on the scene: Antonio Lo Bianco, a bricklayer from Sicily, tall, heavily muscled, with black hair. He too was married, but that didn’t stop him from challenging Francesco: “Barbara?” he was reported to have said. “I’ll fuck her in a week.” Which he did.

  Now both Salvatore and Francesco had reason to feel angry and humiliated. On top of that, Barbara had just stolen six hundred thousand lire from Stefano, money he had received for the motorbike accident. The Vinci and Mele clan feared she would give it to Lo Bianco. They decided to get it back.

  The story of Barbara Locci was reaching its final chapter.

  The end came on August 21, 1968. A careful reconstruction of the crime, done years later, revealed what happened. Barbara went with her new lover, Antonio Lo Bianco, to the movies to see the latest Japanese horror flick. She brought along her son, Natalino, six years old. Afterwards the three of them drove off in Lo Bianco’s white Alfa Romeo. The car headed out of town and turned in to a little dirt road past a cemetery. They drove a few hundred feet and stopped next to a stand of cane, a place where they often went to have sex.

  The shooter and his accomplices were already hidden in the cane. They waited until Barbara and Lo Bianco began having sex—her on top, straddling him. The left rear window of the car was open—it was a warm night—and the shooter approached the car in silence, reached in the window with the .22 Beretta in hand, and took aim. The gun was poised a few feet above the head of Natalino, who was sleeping in the backseat. From almost point-blank range—there was powder tattooing—he fired seven shots: four into him and three into her. Each round was perfectly placed, penetrating vital organs, and they both died immediately. Natalino woke at the first shot and saw, in front of his eyes, the bright yellow flashes.

  In the magazine of the gun remained one more shot. The shooter handed the gun to Stefano Mele, who took it, pointed it at his dead wife’s body with an unsteady hand, and pulled the trigger. The shot, even from that close range, was wild and it struck the woman in the arm. No matter—she was dead and the shot had served its purpose: it had contaminated Stefano’s hand with powder that the paraffin-glove test, then in use, would certainly pick up. Mele, the simpleton, would take the fall for the rest. Someone searched the glove compartment for the missing six hundred thousand lire, but it wasn’t found. (Investigators would find it later, hidden elsewhere in the car.)

  The remaining problem was the child, Natalino. He couldn’t be left in the car with his dead mother. After the killing, he saw his father holding the gun and cried out, “That’s the gun that killed Mommy!” Mele threw the gun down and picked up his son, hoisted him to his shoulders, and set off walking. He sang a song to calm him down, “The Sunset.” Two and a half kilometers down the road, Stefano dropped him at the front door of a stranger’s house, rang the doorbell, and disappeared. When the homeowner leaned out the window, he saw a terrified little boy standing in the light of the front door. “Mama and Uncle are dead in the car,” the little boy cried in a high, quavering voice.

  CHAPTER 10

  Even at the time of the 1968 double homicide, the investigation uncovered many clues that a group of men had committed the killings, clues that were ignored or dismissed.

  The police back then had questioned the six-year-old Natalino closely, the only witness to the crime. His story was confused. His father had been there. At one point during his questioning, he said, “I saw Salvatore in the cane.” He quickly reversed that, saying it wasn’t Salvatore but Francesco, and then he admitted it was his father who told him to say it was Francesco. He described the “shadow” of another man at the crime scene and spoke vaguely about an “Uncle Piero” as also being present, a man who “parted his hair on the right and worked at night”—which must have been his uncle, Piero Mucciarini, who worked as a baker. Then he said he couldn’t remember anything.

  One of the carabinieri officers, frustrated by the child’s incessant contradictions, threatened him: “If you don’t tell the truth, I’ll take you back to your dead mother.”

  The only solid piece of information the investigators felt they had gotten from the boy was that he had seen his father at the crime scene with a gun in hand. As the wronged husband, he was the perfect suspect. They t
ook Stefano Mele in that very night and quickly demolished a pathetic alibi that he had been home sick. The paraffin-glove test revealed traces of nitrate powder between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, the classic pattern of someone who had recently fired a handgun. Even a simpleton like Mele realized that after the test, there was no point in further denial, and he confessed to being present at the scene of the crime. Perhaps it even dawned on him that he had been framed.

  Cautiously, fearfully, Mele told the carabinieri interrogators that Salvatore Vinci was the actual killer. “One day,” he said, “he told me that he had a pistol . . . It was him, he was the jealous lover of my wife. It was him, who, after she left him, threatened to kill her, he said it more than once. One day when I asked him to give me back some money, do you know what he said? ‘I’ll kill your wife for you,’ that’s what he said, ‘and that’ll even up the debt.’ He really said that!”

  But then, abruptly, Mele retracted his accusations against Salvatore Vinci and took full responsibility for the murder. As to what had happened to the gun, he never gave a satisfactory answer. “I threw it in the irrigation ditch,” he claimed—but a careful search that night of the ditch and the surrounding area revealed nothing.

  The carabinieri did not like his story. It seemed improbable that this man who had difficulty finding his way around a room would, by himself, have been able to find the scene of the crime, without a car, many kilometers from his house, ambush the lovers, and place seven shots into them. When they pressed him, Stefano once again turned the accusation against Salvatore. “He was the only one who had a car,” he said.

  The carabinieri decided to bring the two together to see what might happen. They picked up Salvatore and brought him down to the carabinieri barracks. Those present have said they never will forget that meeting.

  Salvatore entered the room, suddenly the balente himself, full of swaggering self-assurance. He stopped and subjected Mele to a hard, wordless stare. Bursting into tears, Mele threw himself on the ground at Salvatore’s feet, groveling and sobbing. “Forgive me! Please forgive me!” he cried. Vinci turned around and left, never having spoken a word. He possessed an inexplicable hold over Stefano Mele, the ability to enforce an omertà so powerful that Mele would risk life in prison rather than challenge it. Mele immediately retracted his accusations of Salvatore being the shooter and once again accused Salvatore’s brother Francesco. But when pressed, Mele finally went back to insisting he had committed the double murder all by himself.

  At this point the police and the examining magistrate (the judge who oversees the investigation) felt satisfied. Regardless of the particulars, the crime was solved in the main: they had the confession of the wronged husband, backed up by forensic evidence and the statements of his son. Mele was the only one charged with murder.

  During the trial in the Court of Assizes, when Salvatore Vinci was brought in to testify, an odd scene occurred. As he was gesturing and speaking, his hand caught the attention of the judge. On one finger he wore a woman’s engagement ring.

  “What is that ring?” the judge asked.

  “It’s Barbara’s engagement ring,” he said, looking not at the judge but giving Mele another hard stare. “She gave it to me.”

  Mele was convicted as the sole perpetrator of the double homicide and sentenced to fourteen years.

  In 1982, investigators began to compile a list of possible accomplices to the 1968 killing. On the list were the two Vinci brothers, Salvatore and Francesco, as well as Piero Mucciarini and the “shadow” mentioned by Natalino.

  Investigators felt sure that the gun had not been thrown in the ditch, as Stefano insisted. A gun used in a homicide is almost never casually sold, given away, or tossed. One of Mele’s accomplices, they felt, must have taken it home and carefully hidden it. Six years later, that gun had emerged from its hiding place, along with the same box of bullets, to become the Monster of Florence’s gun.

  Tracing the gun, they realized, was the key to solving the case of the Monster of Florence.

  The Sardinian Trail investigation zeroed in on Francesco Vinci first, because he was the balente, the cocky one, the guy with a rap sheet. He was violent, he had beaten up his girlfriends, and he hung around with gangsters. Salvatore, on the other hand, seemed quieter, a man who had always worked hard and stayed out of trouble. He had a spotless record. To the Tuscan police, who had no experience with serial killers, Francesco Vinci seemed the obvious choice.

  Investigators dug up bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence against Francesco. They established that he had not been far from the scenes of each crime on the dates they were committed. Between robberies, thefts of livestock, and escapades with women, he moved around a great deal. At the time of the 1974 double homicide in Borgo San Lorenzo, for example, they placed him near the scene, due to an argument between him and a jealous husband, in which his favorite nephew, Antonio, the son of Salvatore Vinci, also took part. At the time of the Montespertoli killing, Francesco had also been nearby, again visiting Antonio, who happened to live at that time in a little town six kilometers from the scene.

  A prime piece of evidence against Francesco, however, took a while to surface. In the middle of July, the carabinieri in a town on the southern Tuscan coast reported to investigators in Florence that on June 21 they had discovered a car hidden in the woods, covered with branches. They had finally gotten around to running the license plate and found it belonged to Francesco Vinci.

  This seemed highly significant: June 21 happened to be the day that Spezi and other journalists had published the (false) reports that one of the victims of the Montespertoli killings may have survived long enough to talk. Perhaps the news had spooked the Monster after all, prompting him to hide his car.

  The carabinieri took Vinci in and asked him for an explanation. He launched into a story about a woman and a jealous husband, but it didn’t make much sense and, furthermore, it didn’t seem to explain why he had hidden the car.

  Francesco Vinci was arrested in August of 1982, two months after the Montespertoli killings. At the time, the examining magistrate said to the press, “The danger now is that a new killing might happen, even more spectacular than before. The Monster, in fact, might be tempted to reassert his paternity claim to the killings by moving yet again into action.” It was a strange thing for a judge to say on the arrest of a suspect, but it showed a high level of uncertainty among the investigators that they had the right man.

  Fall and winter came, and there were no new killings. Francesco Vinci remained in custody. Florentines, however, did not rest easy: Francesco did not look like the intelligent and aristocratic Monster they had imagined; he was too much the image of a cheap hustler, ladies’ man, and macho charmer.

  All of Florence awaited with trepidation the arrival of the warm weather of summer, the time favored by the Monster.

  CHAPTER 11

  During that fall and winter of 1982–83, Mario Spezi wrote a book on the Monster of Florence case. Entitled Il Mostro di Firenze, it was published in May. It told the story of the case from the 1968 killings to the Montespertoli double homicide. The book was devoured by a public terrified of what the coming season might bring. But as the balmy nights of summer settled on the green hills of Florence, no new killings occurred. Florentines began to hope that perhaps the police had gotten the right man after all.

  In addition to writing a book and publishing articles on the Monster case, that summer Spezi wrote a puff piece about a young filmmaker named Cinzia Torrini, who had produced a charming little documentary about the life of Berto, the last ferryman across the Arno River—an ancient, wizened man who regaled his passengers with stories, legends, and old Tuscan sayings. Torrini was pleased by Spezi’s article, and she read his Monster book with interest. She called him to propose the idea of making a film on the Monster of Florence, and Spezi invited her to dinner at his apartment. It would be a late dinner, even by Italian standards, because Spezi kept journalistic hours.
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  And so it was that on the evening of September 10, 1983, Torrini found herself driving up the steep hill that led to Spezi’s apartment. As might be expected from a cinematographer, Torrini had a vivid imagination. The trees on either side of the road, she said later, looked like the hands of skeletons twisting and clawing in the wind. She could not stop herself from questioning her wisdom at going out in the heart of the Florentine hills on a moonless Saturday night to talk to someone about hideous crimes committed in the Florentine hills on moonless Saturday nights. Around one curve of the winding road, the headlights of her old Fiat 127 spotlighted a whitish thing in the middle of the narrow road. The “thing” spread itself, becoming enormous. It detached itself from the asphalt and rose, noiselessly, like a dirty sheet carried off by the wind, revealing itself to be a great white owl. Torrini felt a tightening of her stomach, because Italians believe, as the Romans did before them, that it is an ugly omen to encounter an owl in the nighttime. She almost turned around.

  She parked her car in the small parking area outside the huge iron gates of the old villa turned into an apartment building and rang the bell. As soon as Spezi opened the green door to his apartment, her sense of disquiet vanished. The place was welcoming, warm, and eccentric, with an old seventeenth-century gambling table, called a scagliola, used as a coffee table, old photographs and drawings on the walls, a fireplace in one corner. The dining table had already been set on the terrace, under a white awning, overlooking the twinkling lights sprinkling the hills. Torrini laughed at herself for the absurd uneasiness she had felt on the drive up and put it out of her mind.

  They spent much of the evening talking about the possibility of making a film on the case of the Monster of Florence.

  “It seems to me it would be difficult,” Spezi said. “The story lacks a central character—the killer. I have my doubts the police have the right man, the man they have in prison awaiting trial, Francesco Vinci. It would be a murder mystery without an ending.”