The reference to sixteen victims was puzzling, when by that time the double murder near Vicchio made it only twelve (fourteen if you counted the 1968 killings). It suggested another sick fantasist. But someone remembered that in the preceding year, in Lucca, another pair of lovers were killed in their car. The gun wasn’t a .22 Beretta and there wasn’t any mutilation. That crime was never officially attributed to the Monster of Florence, but to this day it remains unsolved.
Rumor continued to run riot in Florence until an incident seemed to crystallize public opinion. On the afternoon of August 19, 1984, almost three weeks after the Vicchio killing, Prince Roberto Corsini disappeared in the vast forest surrounding the family castle of Scarperia, a dozen kilometers from Vicchio. The scion of the last surviving princely line in Tuscany, Prince Roberto came from an ancient and wealthy family. The Corsinis had given the world a pope, Clement XII, and had built a huge and beautiful palace in Florence, on the banks of the Arno River. Inside the Palazzo Corsini, the family preserved the sumptuous throne room of their family pope, along with a priceless collection of Renaissance and Baroque art. While the family had run short of cash in latter years—so much so that most of the Palazzo Corsini has not yet been wired for electricity—over the course of centuries the Corsinis had accumulated enormous estates. Roberto’s grandfather, Prince Neri, used to brag that he could ride horseback from Florence to Rome—about three hundred kilometers—without leaving his own land.
Prince Roberto was a brusque and silent man who had no love of the social life or the obligations of an aristocrat. He preferred to live in the family castle in the country, seeing only a few intimate friends. He never married and didn’t seem to have any particular female friends. Among those who knew him well, he was affectionately referred to as “the Bear” for his gruff and solitary ways. For others he was simply strange.
Around four in the afternoon on the Sunday of August 19, 1984, Prince Roberto left some German friends staying at his castle and went alone into the surrounding forest. He wasn’t armed but he carried a pair of binoculars. When he didn’t return by nine in the evening, his friends became alarmed and called his relatives and then the carabinieri in the neighboring town of Borgo San Lorenzo. The carabinieri and his friends combed the woods for most of the night. When the search was suspended, no trace of the prince had been found.
At dawn, the search of the enormous estate resumed. One of his friends spied a branch covered with blood. The man pushed his way into a ravine next to a roaring brook, and there he discovered the prince’s broken eyeglasses. A little farther ahead the grass was stained red. Lodged in the muck of the streambank he found the prince’s binoculars. A few feet ahead he found a pheasant killed by a shotgun. And then he came across the dead prince himself, facedown, his lower body in the water, his head wedged in a clefted rock by the current.
The man turned the body over: the prince’s face had been obliterated by a shotgun blast at point-blank range.
The rumors swept Florence like wildfire. That the Monster seemed to be clever, cunning, cool, and meticulous had long suggested to some he was a wealthy nobleman. The mysterious killing of a prince known to be strange, who lived alone in a dark and sinister castle in the very area where several Monster killings had taken place, left no doubt in many people’s minds: Prince Roberto Corsini had been the Monster of Florence.
Neither investigators nor the press had given the slightest indication that the prince’s murder was connected to the Monster of Florence. Public opinion interpreted this silence as further proof of the man’s guilt: naturally a great and powerful family like the Corsinis would protect their reputation at all costs. Wasn’t it convenient for the family that the prince, being the Monster, was now dead and could never be brought to trial and sully their name?
Two days later a second mysterious event gave the rumors new life. The Corsini castle was broken into, but apparently nothing was taken. No one could fathom why burglars would break into a place that was already swarming with police conducting a murder investigation. Rumor had it that the break-in wasn’t by thieves, but by people hired to make away with some important, and perhaps quite gruesome, items in the castle before the police found them.
The rumors continued to grow, even after the prince’s murderer was caught four days later—and confessed. He was a young poacher who had been stalking pheasant on the estate. The prince spied him just after he had bagged a bird, and gave chase. The poacher said he had tried to shoot the prince in the legs to foil the pursuit, but Corsini, seeing the shotgun pointed at him, ducked in a gesture of self-defense and received the blast full in the face.
Absurd, said public opinion. Nobody kills a man for so little. The story could not possibly be true—it was, indeed, more proof that the Corsini family was engaged in a cover-up. What’s more, the poacher story didn’t explain the mysterious break-in at the castle two days later.
From the grand rooms of the Florentine aristocracy to gossip in working-class trattorie, a complicated tale—the real story—made the rounds. Prince Roberto Corsini was the Monster of Florence. His family had found out and had done everything they could to cover it up. But someone else—nobody knew who—had also discovered the terrible secret. Instead of reporting it to the police, this person had kept it to himself and blackmailed the prince, periodically extracting large payments for keeping his secret. That Sunday, August 19, twenty days after the Vicchio murders, the two had made an appointment on the banks of the stream, where they argued. A furious struggle had broken out and the blackmailer shot the prince.
There was, it was said, yet another person who knew that Corsini was the Monster. The blackmailing continued, this time directed against the family. But in order for the blackmail to function properly, the blackmailers needed proof that Prince Roberto was the Monster; grisly proof hidden in the depths of the castle. This explained the break-in: the thieves needed to get their hands on evidence, probably the Beretta, maybe the unfired Winchester series H rounds, and God knows even the trophies that the Monster had cut from the victims.
This rumor, the fruit of the warped imagination of Florence, was utterly false, patently unbelievable, and completely unsupported by anything published in the papers or reported by investigators. The fantasy lasted over a year, until reality destroyed it in the most decisive way possible: with another killing.
CHAPTER 17
By the end of 1984, the case of the Monster of Florence had become one of the most visible and talked about criminal investigations in Europe. A French intellectual and member of the Academy, Jean-Pierre Angremy, who in those years was consul in Florence, became fascinated with the story and published a novel, Une Ville Immortelle. The Italian writer Laura Grimaldi wrote a celebrated novel about the case, The Suspicion. Madgalen Nabb, the English mystery writer, wrote a book, The Monster of Florence. It was the beginning of a literary outpouring that would see the publication of many nonfiction books and novels based on the case. It even caught the attention of Thomas Harris, who incorporated the Monster story into his novel Hannibal, sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. (In Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter has moved to Florence, where he lives under the pseudonym of “Dr. Fell.” He works as the curator of the archives and library of the Capponi family palace, after having created the job opening by murdering his predecessor.) The largest Japanese publishing house asked Spezi to write a book on the Monster, which he did. (It is still in print, in its sixth edition.) More than a dozen books have been published about the Monster case—as well as a horrific comic book aimed at teenage boys, called Il Monello (The Scamp), which aroused a furor. The creator had wisely avoided signing his name to it.
Inevitably, films were made about the case, and in 1984 two were being shot at the same time. The first director preferred to give the players fictitious names to avoid legal difficulties, but the second film was a straight documentary that offered up an opinion at the end—that the Monster came from an incestuous family, and that his mother knew he was the ki
ller. Most Florentines were incensed when they learned the filmmakers were shooting at the actual scenes of the crimes. The parents of the victims hired a lawyer to block the documentary. They weren’t able to stop it from being made, but the effort produced an odd ruling: a judge declared that the film could be shown anywhere in Italy but Florence.
The police and carabinieri responded to the public outcry by reorganizing the investigation around a special unit, the Squadra Anti-Mostro, or SAM, led by Chief Inspector Sandro Federico. SAM took over much of the fourth floor of police headquarters in Florence. Enormous resources and funds were put at its disposal, including one of those new machines that seemed almost miraculous in its ability to find the answer to any problem: an IBM PC computer. But for a while it sat unused; nobody knew how to operate it.
Around the time of the Vicchio killing, another serial killer appeared to strike Florence. Six prostitutes were murdered in quick succession in the city center. Even with the Monster killings, homicide was still rare in Florence and the city was shocked. Although the MOs of the crimes were different from one another and from the Monster killings, certain elements led the police to think they might be connected. All the prostitutes were murdered in their apartments where they conducted business. The killings were markedly sadistic and the killer or killers never took jewelry or money. Robbery was not a motive.
The medical examiner, Mauro Maurri, who had been in charge of the autopsies of the Monster’s victims, was perplexed when he examined the wounds of one of the murdered women, killed with a knife after having been tortured. To Dr. Maurri, the knifework on the victim resembled the wounds on some of the Monster’s victims, and was perhaps done with a scuba knife.
Was it possible that the Monster was killing in other ways, choosing different victims?
“I don’t know,” said Maurri when Spezi posed the question. “It would be worth the trouble to do comparative examinations between the knife wounds on the cadavers of the prostitutes and those of the Monster’s victims.”
Investigators, for unknown reasons, never requested the comparative examination.
The last prostitute killed lived in a hovel in Via della Chiesa, then a poverty-stricken street in the Oltrarno district of Florence. The apartment was furnished with a few shabby pieces of furniture, the walls covered with simple drawings done by her daughter, whom the state had taken away a few years earlier. They found the prostitute stretched on the floor, next to the window. The killer had used a sweater to tie her arms as in a straitjacket, and had suffocated her by pushing a cloth down her throat.
The police combed every inch of the apartment for clues. They noted that the water heater had been repaired recently and that the firm, Quick House Repair, had affixed its label to the work. One of the detectives, seeing the name and making an important connection, returned to the room where Chief Inspector Sandro Federico was still examining the body of the murdered prostitute.
“Dottore,” he said excitedly, “come into the next room; there’s something very interesting.”
The Quick House Repair outfit, he knew, was owned by Salvatore Vinci.
CHAPTER 18
This discovery prompted the investigators to finally take a closer look at Salvatore Vinci. He was the man whom Stefano Mele had first named as his accomplice in the murder of 1968. Rotella believed that Salvatore was the fourth accomplice in the 1968 killing, who participated along with Piero Mucciarini, Giovanni Mele, and (perhaps) Francesco Vinci. Since three of them had been in prison during the last Monster killing in 1984, Salvatore was the only remaining possibility.
When investigators began looking into Vinci’s background, they quickly heard the rumors that he had murdered his wife, Barbarina, back in the town of Villacidro. Rotella reopened the investigation into her death, this time treating it as a homicide, not a suicide. In 1984 investigators traveled to Sardinia where, amid the wild beauty and grinding poverty of Villacidro, they began to uncover the past of a person who seemed quite capable of being the Monster of Florence.
Barbarina was just seventeen years old when she died in 1961. She had been dating a boy named Antonio whom Salvatore detested, and Salvatore had ambushed her in a field and raped her, possibly as a way to humiliate Antonio. She became pregnant and Salvatore had “done his duty” and married her. Everyone in town said that he mistreated her, that he beat her and didn’t give her enough money to eat, just enough to buy milk for the baby. The baby was her only happiness. She named him Antonio, after her great love, and continued to see her first lover on the sly.
That name and the baby were a thorn in Salvatore’s pride; it was said he doubted he was even the father. With the passing of the years, a hatred would grow between father and son, between Salvatore and Antonio, that would become pitiless and absolute.
The murder of Barbarina—if it was one—had its origin in November of 1960, when someone surprised her and her lover Antonio in the countryside and took pictures of them. The betrayal became common knowledge in town. Salvatore, in that ancient land of Sardinia ruled by the Barbagian code, had two ways to recover his honor—he could either throw his wife out or kill her.
At first it seemed he would take the former way out. He told her she had to leave, and she began looking for work that would take her away. At the beginning of January 1961, she received a letter from a nun at an orphanage offering to take her and her child in if she, in exchange for room and board, would wait on tables at the orphanage. She had to present herself on January 21.
She never arrived.
On the evening of January 14, 1961, Barbarina was alone with her baby in the tiny house she occupied with Salvatore. He was out as usual, at the local bar drinking vermentino and playing billiards.
At dinnertime Barbarina found that the propane tank was empty and she couldn’t scald milk for the baby. She asked a neighbor if she could use her stove. It was an insignificant episode, but a few hours later this would become important in refuting what would become the official version of the death of Barbarina—suicide by propane gas. If the tank was empty three hours before she died, and there had been no way to fill it up, how could there have been enough gas in it to kill her?
That evening, just before midnight, Vinci left his brother-in-law at the bar and returned to the house. He later said that he had found the door locked from the inside and had opened it with a hard shove. He turned on the light to see that Antonio’s cradle, with the eleven-month-old baby sleeping inside, which would normally have been in the bedroom, had been moved into the kitchen. The door to the bedroom was closed from the inside, and this, he said, worried him. Especially because, he added, he could see light under the door despite the late hour.
“I knocked once and called out to Barbarina,” he said several hours later to the carabinieri, “but no one answered. I immediately thought that she was with her lover and so I ran out of the house, fearing an attack.”
If this pusillanimous behavior, running away in terror from a man who was cuckolding him in his own bed, seems unlikely today, it appears even more absurd when applied to a twenty-four-year-old Sardinian male in 1961. Salvatore ran to his father-in-law’s house and went with him to get his friend at the bar, who happened to be Barbarina’s brother. Together they went back to the house.
Years later, one townsperson reflected the general view: “He was only looking for witnesses to his staged suicide.”
In front of his father-in-law and brother-in-law, Salvatore opened the door with a simple light shove, the door not offering the slightest resistance. Salvatore promptly shouted that he could smell the odor of gas, although no one else could. The propane tank had been moved next to the bed, the valve open, the tube snaking into the pillow on which Barbarina’s head lay. It seemed that Barbarina had killed herself with the tank of propane that, a few hours earlier, had not even contained enough to scald milk. But nobody at the time took note of this discrepancy, not the carabinieri, the medical examiner, or her friends. Nor did the medical examiner trea
t as significant the bruising around her neck or the faint scratches on her face, as if she had struggled before succumbing to suffocation.
In reopening the case, investigators uncovered all these clues and more that convinced them Salvatore had murdered his wife.
Rotella tried to determine if Salvatore had brought a .22 Beretta with him from Villacidro to Tuscany when he emigrated. Investigators in Villacidro were able to determine that in 1961 there were eleven .22 Berettas in the town, and one of them had indeed been stolen just before Salvatore Vinci left for Tuscany. It belonged to an aged relative of Vinci’s who had brought it back from Holland after a stint working there. An investigation conducted in Amsterdam by Interpol could not find the original source of the gun.
At the same time, investigators on the mainland looked into Salvatore Vinci’s life after he had arrived in Tuscany in 1961. They found even more evidence that made them think he might be the Monster. It turned out that Salvatore Vinci was a man who, in his sexual tastes and activities, would have aroused envy in the Marquis de Sade.
“We were newly married,” Rosina, his new wife, told the carabinieri, “when one evening Salvatore arrived home with a couple of friends and said they would be guests for the night. Fine. Later, when I got up to go to the bathroom, I heard whispering from the room where the couple was sleeping and I recognized my husband’s voice. I went in and what did I see? Salvatore in bed with those two! Of course I got mad. I said to the woman and her husband—if he even was her husband—to get out quick. And do you know what Salvatore did? He erupted in a terrifying fury, grabbed me by the hair, and forced me to kneel in front of those two and beg their forgiveness! And,” she went on, “it wasn’t at all over. Another time he introduced me to another young couple, who had just married, and we began to see them. One evening we stayed and slept in their house. And so, that night, I felt a cold hand touching me and I heard a strange sound, as if something fell down. I went to light the lamp and heard my husband’s voice telling me not to do it, that nothing had happened. Another hour passed and I felt the same touch again, on my leg, and this time I jumped up and turned on the light. Well, in my bed, in addition to my husband, was also his friend Saverio! I jumped up and went into the kitchen all dazed, trying to understand what was going on. It was then that Salvatore joined me. He tried to calm me down, he said that there was nothing surprising, nothing at all strange, and he invited me to come back to bed. And then, a day later, he began talking about it some more, telling me that he had already had a threesome with Gina, the wife of his friend, and he said for me to do the same thing, that it would be fun, and that on the continent it was the thing to do. So anyway, in the end I found myself in bed with Saverio and Salvatore, who first had sex with me and then with his friend. This went on for a while. If I protested, he hit me. He forced me to have sex with Saverio while he watched, and then we made a foursome. And when it was this way, Salvatore and Saverio were touching each other, caressing each other, each taking their turn as first the man and then the woman, in front of me and Gina! And from that time on Salvatore began to bring me to the homes of his friends, even casual acquaintances, and I had to be with them. He took me to porn films, he’d have his eye on someone, and then he’d introduce me and then perhaps I’d have to have sex with them in the car, but especially at home. And it was worse for me when, in that period, his son Antonio arrived from Sardinia, who was only four years old. They called him Antonello then. I was afraid that he would witness some of these perverse doings with other couples, and our fights, and when he mistreated me.”
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