The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  The city of Florence printed thousands of posters, designed by the famous graphic artist Mario Lovergine, who drew a staring eye surrounded by leaves. “Occhio ragazzi! Watch out kids! Attention! Jeunes gens, danger! Atención chicos y chicas! Pericolo di aggressione! Danger of violence!” warned the poster. Using the same design, tens of thousands of postcards were printed up and passed out at tollbooths, railroad stations, campsites, youth hostels, and on public buses. Television spots reinforced the point.

  Despite their most diligent efforts, SAM investigators emerged from the Scopeti clearing with few fresh leads or new evidence. The pressure on them was enormous. Thomas Harris, in his novel Hannibal, recounted some of the techniques SAM used to try to catch the Monster. “Some lover’s lanes and cemetery trysting places had more police than lovers sitting in pairs in the cars. There were not enough women officers to go around. During hot weather male couples took turns wearing a wig and many mustaches were sacrificed.”

  The idea of offering a reward had earlier been rejected, but now it was resurrected by the prosecutor Vigna, who was convinced that the Monster enjoyed the protection of omertà, which could only be broken with a very large sum. It was a controversial idea. Rewards and bounties were never part of Italian culture, being something they knew only from American Westerns. Many feared it might incite a witch hunt or bring out a bunch of crazy bounty hunters. The decision was so controversial it had to be made by the prime minister of Italy himself, who set the reward at half a billion lire—a large sum at the time.

  The reward was posted, but no one stepped forward with information to claim it.

  As before, SAM was plagued with anonymous accusations and unfounded rumors that had to be followed up, no matter how unlikely. Among them was a letter the police received, dated September 11, 1985. It suggested that the police “question our fellow citizen, Pietro Pacciani, born in Vicchio.” The note went on, “This individual is said by many to have been in prison for having killed his own fiancée. He has a thousand skills: a shrewd man, cunning, a farmer with big clumsy feet but a quick mind. He keeps his entire family hostage, the wife is a fool, the daughters are never allowed out, they have no friends.”

  Investigators looked into it. It wasn’t true that Pacciani had killed his fiancée, but in 1951 he had killed a man he caught seducing his fiancée in a parked car and had served a long prison sentence for it. Pacciani lived in Mercatale, a half dozen kilometers from the Scopeti clearing. The police conducted a routine search of his house and found nothing of interest.

  Still, the old farmer’s name remained on the list.

  A few weeks later, a rumor made the rounds, this one from Perugia, a hundred and fifty kilometers away. A young doctor, Francesco Narducci, the scion of one of the city’s richest families, apparently committed suicide by drowning himself in Lake Trasimeno. Immediately rumormongers began speculating that Narducci had been the Monster, who, overcome with remorse, had done away with himself. A quick investigation showed there could be no truth to it, and investigators shelved it along with the other false leads that plagued the case.

  Meanwhile, in 1985, the investigation, under relentless pressure to show results, began to crumble. A rift between the lead prosecutor, Piero Luigi Vigna, and the examining magistrate, Mario Rotella, was widening.

  The disagreement centered on the Sardinian Trail investigation. Rotella was convinced that the gun used in the 1968 clan killing had never left the circle of Sardinians, and that one of them had gone on to become the Monster. His suspicions had settled on Salvatore Vinci, and he was painstakingly building the case against him with the help of the carabinieri. Vigna, on the other hand, felt the Sardinian Trail had reached a dead end. He wanted to throw everything out and start the investigation anew. The polizia, the police, agreed with Vigna.

  The special unit known as SAM was composed of both polizia and carabinieri allegedly working together. The problem was, the carabinieri and the police rarely got along and were often antagonistic to each other. The Polizia di Stato are a civilian agency and the carabinieri are a branch of the military; both are charged with domestic law enforcement. When a major crime occurs, such as a murder, often the two agencies will rush to the scene and each try to claim the crime as their own. One story, perhaps apocryphal, tells of a bank robbery in which both carabinieri and police chased down and caught the escaping criminals. An argument broke out in front of the robbers about who should get the collar, finally settled when they divided up the spoils, the police getting the robbers and the carabinieri hauling away the getaway car, cash, and guns.

  The disagreement between Vigna and Rotella, which became increasingly bitter, was kept a deep secret among the investigators for many years. Outwardly, the Sardinian Trail continued to be the major line of inquiry, but criticism of it, and of Judge Mario Rotella, began to grow.

  In 1985 Rotella briefly jailed Stefano Mele on trumped-up charges in a final effort to get him to talk. The move caused a chorus of complaints that Rotella was needlessly torturing a broken-down old man whose ravings had already caused untold damage to the investigation and to the individuals he accused. Rotella found himself out on a limb, isolated and under constant attack by the press. The largest newspaper of Sardinia, the Unione Sarda, savaged him on a regular basis. “It’s always the case,” the newspaper wrote, “that whenever the investigation of the Monster of Florence becomes stuck in the mud, they always resurrect the so-called Sardinian Trail.” Associations of Sardinian residents of Tuscany also took up the issue of racism, and a chorus of outrage from all sides assailed the investigation. Rotella’s pontifications and circumlocutions only made matters worse.

  But Rotella, who as examining magistrate in the Monster case held considerable power, plodded on. His brief arrest and interrogation of Stefano Mele, so roundly criticized, finally revealed one of the central mysteries in the case: why Stefano had protected Salvatore Vinci for so long, even at the cost of going to prison for fourteen years. Why had Mele acquiesced so meekly in being framed for the murders of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco, when the crime had been plotted, organized, and executed by Salvatore? Why had he remained silent during the trial, when Salvatore had the impudence to wear his wife’s engagement ring when taking the witness stand? Why, even after serving fourteen years in prison, did Mele refuse to tell investigators that Salvatore was one of his accomplices?

  The reason, Mele finally broke down and admitted, was shame. He had participated in Salvatore Vinci’s sex circus and was fond of sex with men, most especially with Salvatore himself. This was the terrible secret that Salvatore Vinci had held over Mele’s head for almost twenty years, enforcing his silence. This was how Vinci, back in 1968, had been able to reduce Mele to groveling and weeping with a single hard stare. He threatened to expose him as a homosexual.

  The double homicide of the French tourists in the Scopeti clearing would be the last known crime committed by the Monster of Florence. Although it would be a while before Florentines realized it, the string of murders that had terrorized them for so long had finally come to an end.

  The investigation, however, was just getting started. As time went on, it would become a monster in its own right, consuming all in its path, engorged and distended with the many innocent lives it had ruined.

  Nineteen eighty-five was only the beginning.

  CHAPTER 22

  By the end of 1985, Judge Mario Rotella was firmly convinced that Salvatore Vinci was the Monster of Florence. As he examined the files on Vinci, he became more and more frustrated with the many missed opportunities to nail him. For example, Vinci’s house had been searched right after the 1984 killing in Vicchio, and the police had found a rag in his bedroom, stuffed in a woman’s straw purse, covered with powder residues and spots of blood. Thirty-eight spots of blood. Rotella looked back through the records and saw that the rag had never been analyzed. Furious, he held it up as an egregious example of the incompetence of the investigation. The prosecutor in charge of tha
t evidence tried to explain: it was impossible to believe a man who already knew he was on the list of suspects would keep in his room such an obvious clue.

  Rotella demanded an examination of the rag. The lab it was sent to could not establish if the blood came from one or two blood groups, and the experts were unable to compare the blood on the rag to the blood of the victims of the 1984 crime because, incredibly enough, investigators had not conserved any blood from those victims. The rag was sent to the United Kingdom for further analysis, but the lab reported back that it had deteriorated beyond salvation. (Today, DNA testing might still recover important information from the rag, but so far we know of no plans to test it.)

  Rotella had another reason to feel frustration. For more than a year the carabinieri had been keeping Salvatore Vinci under tight surveillance, particularly on weekends. Knowing he was being followed, Salvatore had sometimes amused himself by running red lights or pulling other tricks to lose his trackers. And yet the very weekend of the double homicide in the Scopeti clearing, the carabinieri had inexplicably suspended the surveillance. Vinci suddenly found himself free to go where he pleased, unobserved. If the surveillance had continued, Rotella felt, perhaps the double killing might never have occurred in the first place.

  At the end of 1985, Rotella served Salvatore Vinci with an avviso di garanzia, a notification that he was the official suspect for sixteen homicides—all the killings from 1968 to 1985.

  Meanwhile, the main prosecutor, Piero Luigi Vigna, was becoming fed up with the officious, methodical Rotella and his obsessive pursuit of the Sardinian Trail. Vigna and the police were itching to start afresh, and they were waiting, quietly, for Rotella to make a false move.

  On June 11, 1986, Mario Rotella ordered the arrest of Salvatore Vinci for murder. To everyone’s great surprise, it was not for the Monster’s killings, but for the murder of his wife, Barbarina, on January 14, 1961, back in Villacidro. Rotella’s strategy was to convict Vinci of murder in a case that seemed simpler and easier to prove, and then to leverage that into a conviction against him for being the Monster of Florence.

  For two years, with Salvatore Vinci in prison, Rotella methodically prepared the case against him for the murder of his seventeen-year-old wife. The Monster did not kill again, which further persuaded Rotella that he had the right man.

  Salvatore Vinci’s trial for the murder of his wife began on April 12, 1988, in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. Spezi covered it for La Nazione.

  Vinci’s behavior in the dock was astonishing. Standing all the while, his tight fists wrapped around the bars of the cage in which he was locked, he responded with scrupulous care to the questions of the judges in a courteous, high, almost falsetto voice. During the breaks he conversed with Spezi and the other journalists on such themes as sexual freedom and the role of habeas corpus in a trial.

  His son, Antonio, who was then about twenty-seven years old, was brought into the courtroom to testify against his father. He was serving time for an unrelated offense, and he arrived with his hands shackled, his strong, extremely tense presence noted by all. Seated to the right of the judges, on the side opposite his father, the youth never once took off the huge black sunglasses that hid his eyes. His lips remained compressed, and the nostrils of his aquiline nose were dilated with hatred. Even protected by dark lenses, his face always remained fixated on his father, never once turning elsewhere in the courtroom. Throughout this his father remained immobile as he returned his son’s stare with a closed and enigmatic face. The two of them remained that way for hours, the courtroom filled with electricity from their taut and silent interaction.

  Antonio Vinci refused to speak a word. He just stared. Later, he told Spezi that if there hadn’t been carabinieri officers sitting between him and his father in the van as they were driven away, “I would have strangled him.”

  The trial came to a disastrous end. Salvatore Vinci was unexpectedly acquitted. The crime had taken place too long ago, witnesses had died and others couldn’t remember, physical evidence had disappeared, and very little could actually be proved.

  Vinci walked out of the courtroom a free man. He paused on the steps to speak to the press. “It was a very satisfying conclusion,” he said calmly, and walked on. He went into the interior mountains to visit his birthplace of Villacidro—and then, like a Sardinian bandit of old, he disappeared forever.

  The acquittal of Salvatore Vinci raised a firestorm of complaint against Rotella. It was the false move Vigna and his prosecutors had been waiting for, and they moved in like sharks, silently, with no fuss or publicity. For the next few years, a slow parrying with long knives would take place between Vigna and Rotella, the police and the carabinieri, so quietly conducted that it never came to the attention of the news media.

  After the acquittal, Vigna and the police went their own way, ignoring Rotella. They decided to throw out everything and start the Monster of Florence investigation all over again, from the beginning. Meanwhile, Rotella and the carabinieri kept the Sardinian Trail investigation going. The two investigations slowly became incompatible, if not mutually exclusive.

  Eventually, something would have to give.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Squadra Anti-Mostro was taken over by a new chief inspector of police, a man named Ruggero Perugini. A few years later, Thomas Harris would create a fictional portrait of Perugini in his novel Hannibal, giving him the thinly disguised fictional name of Rinaldo Pazzi. While researching the book, Harris had been a guest in Chief Inspector Perugini’s home in Florence. (It was said that Perugini was not pleased with Harris’s return on his hospitality, by having his alter ego gutted and hung from the Palazzo Vecchio.) The real chief inspector was more dignified than his sweaty and troubled counterpart in the film version, played by Giancarlo Giannini. The real Perugini spoke with a Roman accent, but his movements and dress, and the way he handled his briar pipe, made him seem more English than Italian.

  When Chief Inspector Perugini took over SAM, he and Vigna wiped the slate clean. Perugini started with the assumption that the gun and bullets had somehow passed out of the circle of Sardinians before the Monster killings began. The Sardinian Trail was a dead end and he had no more interest in it. He also viewed the evidence collected at the crime scenes with skepticism—and perhaps rightly so. The forensic examination of the crime scenes had been, in general, incompetent. Only the last was actually secured and sealed by the police. In the others, people came and went, picking up the shells, taking pictures, smoking and throwing their butts on the ground, trampling the grass, and shedding their own hair and fibers everywhere. Much of the forensic evidence that was collected—and there was precious little—was never properly analyzed, and some, like the rag, was lost or allowed to spoil. Investigators had not generally kept samples of the victims’ hair, clothing, or blood, to see if their presence might be associated with any suspects.

  Instead of plodding once again through the evidence and rereading the thousands of pages of interrogations, Perugini was smitten by the idea of solving the crime in the modern way—with computers. He was in love with the scientific methods used by the FBI to hunt serial killers. He finally dusted off the IBM PC given to SAM by the Ministry of the Interior and booted it up.

  He ran through it the names of every man between the ages of thirty and sixty in the province of Florence who had ever been picked up by the police, asking it to spit out all those persons convicted of sexual crimes. Then Perugini matched up their periods of incarceration with the dates of the Monster’s homicides, identifying those who were in prison when the Monster didn’t kill and out of prison when he did. He winnowed the list down from thousands to a few dozen people. And there, in the middle of this rarefied company, he found the name of Pietro Pacciani—the peasant farmer who had been denounced in an anonymous letter after the Monster’s final killings.

  Perugini then did another computer screening to see how many of these suspects had lived in or around the areas where the Monster h
ad struck. Once again Pacciani’s name surfaced, after Perugini generously expanded the definition of “in or around” to swallow most of Florence and its environs.

  The appearance of Pacciani’s name in this second screening again reinforced the anonymous message that had arrived on September 11, 1985, inviting the police to “question our fellow citizen Pietro Pacciani born in Vicchio.” In this way, the most advanced system of criminal investigation, the computer, was married to the most ancient system, the anonymous letter—both of which fingered the same man: Pietro Pacciani.

  Pietro Pacciani became Perugini’s preferred suspect. All that remained was to gather the evidence against him.

  Inspector Perugini ordered a search of Pacciani’s house and came up with what he considered further incriminating evidence. Prime among this was a reproduction of Botticelli’s Primavera, the famous painting in the Uffizi Gallery, which depicts, in part, a pagan nymph with flowers spilling from her mouth. The picture reminded Perugini of the gold chain lying in the mouth of one of the Monster’s first victims. This clue so captivated him that it became the cover of the book he would later publish about the case, which showed Botticelli’s nymph vomiting blood instead of flowers. Reinforcing this interpretation, Perugini took note of a pornographic magazine centerfold pinned up in Pacciani’s kitchen, surrounded by pictures of the Blessed Virgin and saints, showing a topless woman with a flower clamped provocatively between her teeth.

  Right after the Monster’s last double homicide, Pietro Pacciani had been sent to prison for raping his daughters. This, for Perugini, was another important clue. It explained why there had been no killings for the past three years.