The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  A paragraph was dedicated to the letter that contained the piece of a victim’s breast, mailed to the magistrate Silvia Della Monica. “The letter may indicate that the aggressor was attempting to mock the police, suggesting that the publicity and attention of this case were important to him, and indicating a growing sense of security on his part.”

  And about the pistol used by the Monster, the FBI wrote that “for him, perhaps, the pistol was a fetish.” The use of the same firearm and boxes of bullets was all part of the ritualized nature of the killing, and probably included specific clothing and other accessories used only for killing, and kept well hidden at other times. “The overall behavior of the aggressor at the scene, including his use of certain accessories and instruments specific to the crime, suggests that the ritual inherent in this series of aggressions is so important to him that he must repeat the offense in the identical manner until he reaches satisfaction.”

  None of it sounded like Pacciani, so the FBI report was ignored and suppressed.

  In the three years from 1989 to 1992, Perugini and his investigators became increasingly frustrated that they could not gather enough evidence to charge Pacciani. They finally decided to organize a massive twelve-day search of the peasant’s miserable house and property.

  In April of 1992 Perugini and his men launched what would become the longest and most technologically advanced property search in Italian history. From 9:50 a.m. on April 27 to noon on May 8, 1992, a well-armed squad of elite investigators searched Pacciani’s hovel and garden: they examined the walls inch by inch, sounded under the paving stones, searched in every possible gap and cavity, looked in every drawer, turned over furniture, beds, chairs, sofas, closets, and bureaus, lifted the roof tiles one by one, excavated with backhoes almost three feet deep in the soil of the garden, and penetrated with ultrasound every square millimeter of the land surrounding the house.

  Firemen went over the place with their special knowledge. Representatives of private firms wielded metal detectors and heat-sensing equipment. There were technicians who filmed with precision the places that were being searched. There was a doctor on hand to check on the health of Pacciani, as they feared the excitable peasant might have a heart attack during the search. They brought in an expert in “diagnostic architecture,” able to pinpoint the location in a seemingly solid, load-bearing wall where, for example, one might hide a niche or cavity.

  At 5:56 p.m. on April 29, when the exhausted police had already decided to abandon the search “under a sky that promised rain,” a discovery was made. Ruggero Perugini would later write about this triumphant moment in his book A Normal Enough Man (the book that depicted the Botticelli nymph on the cover, vomiting blood). “I caught in the light of the late afternoon an almost imperceptible gleam in the earth,” the chief inspector wrote.

  It was a Winchester series H cartridge, completely covered with oxidation. It had not been fired, and so the base did not bear the Monster’s signature firing-pin mark. It did, however, bear marks that indicated it had been inserted into a firearm. It was analyzed by ballistics experts who concluded that it was “not incompatible” with having been inserted into the Monster’s gun. “Not incompatible” was as far as they would go despite (as one expert complained later) having been relentlessly pressured.

  But it was enough. Pacciani was arrested on January 16, 1993, and charged with being the Monster of Florence.

  CHAPTER 25

  The trial of Pietro Pacciani began on April 14, 1994. The courtroom bunker was overflowing with a public divided between those who thought him guilty and those who maintained his innocence. Girls paraded around in T-shirts that read in English, “I Pacciani.” There was a veritable caravansary of photographers, filmmakers, and journalists, in the middle of which, protected and led by Chief Inspector Ruggero Perugini, was the writer Thomas Harris.

  A trial is perfect theater: a restricted time period, a shut room, recitations by subject, fixed roles—the prosecutor, the lawyers, the judges, the accused. There was no trial that was purer theater than Pacciani’s. It was melodrama worthy of Puccini.

  The peasant farmer rocked and sobbed during the proceedings, sometimes crying out in his antique Tuscan dialect, “I am a sweet little lamb! . . . I am here like Christ on the cross!” At times he would rise to his full diminutive height, pull forth from a hidden pocket a little icon of the Sacred Heart, and wave it in the judges’ faces while the president of the court banged his gavel and told him to sit down. At other times he erupted in anger, face on fire, spittle flying from his lips, cursing a witness or condemning the Monster himself, invoking God with his hands joined and eyes rolled to heaven, hollering, “Burn him in hell forever!”

  After only four days of the trial, Spezi broke the first big story. A central piece of evidence against Pacciani was his bizarre painting—the one with the centaur and the seven crosses—which psychologists said was “compatible” with the psychopathic personality of the Monster. The actual image had been kept under wraps, but Spezi had finally managed to extract a photograph of it from the prosecutor’s office. It took him only a few days to find the actual painter—a fifty-year-old Chilean artist named Christian Olivares, exiled to Europe during the Pinochet era. Olivares was outraged when he heard that his painting was being used as evidence against a serial killer. “In this painting,” he told Spezi, “I wanted to present the grotesque horror of a dictatorship. To say it is the work of a psychopath is ridiculous. It would be like saying the Disasters of War by Goya indicated he was a madman, a monster who needed to be locked up.”

  Spezi called up Perugini. “Tomorrow,” he told the chief inspector, “my paper will publish an article saying that the painting that you attributed to Pacciani was not painted by him, but by a Chilean artist. Would you care to comment?”

  The article was a major embarrassment. Vigna, the chief prosecutor, tried to play down the painting. “It was the mass media that exaggerated its importance,” he said. Another prosecutor, Paolo Canessa, tried to minimize the damage by explaining that “Pacciani did sign the painting and told some of his friends that it was his own dream.”

  The trial marched on for six more months. In a corner of the courtroom, cameras with zoom lenses focused in on Pacciani and the witnesses arrayed against him. The images were projected on a screen on the left-hand side of the court, so that even those in poor seats could follow the drama. Every night the highlights of the trial were replayed on television, attracting huge audience numbers. Everyone gathered around the television at dinnertime, watching a drama in installments better than any soap opera.

  The high point came when it was time for Pacciani’s daughters to speak from the witness stand. All of Tuscany was glued to the television for their testimony.

  Florentines have never forgotten the sight of the two daughters (one of whom had joined a convent) weeping as they told, in excruciating detail, how they had been raped by their father. In front of everyone passed a picture of Tuscan country life very different from Under the Tuscan Sun. Their testimony portrayed a family in which the women endured insults, drunken abuse, beatings with a stick, and sexual violence.

  “He didn’t want daughters,” said one daughter, weeping. “Once Mamma had a miscarriage and he knew that it was a boy. He said to us, ‘You both should have died and he live.’ Once he gave us the meat of a groundhog to eat that he had taken for its skin. He beat us when we didn’t want to go to bed with him.”

  None of this had anything to do with the Monster of Florence. When the questioning did turn in that direction, the two daughters weren’t able to recall a single damning fact—a glimpse of the gun, a spot of blood, an incautious word dropped during his nightly drinking bouts—that could connect their father with the double homicides of the Monster of Florence.

  The prosecutors lined up their meager scraps of evidence. The bullet and a rag were presented. A plastic soapdish found at Pacciani’s house was put forward. (The mother of one of the victims said that she
thought it looked like one belonging to her son.) A photograph of Botticelli’s nymph was propped up in the courtroom, next to a blow-up of the victim with the gold chain in her mouth. A German-made block of sketching paper, also found in Pacciani’s house, was advanced as evidence, with relatives saying they thought the German couple might have had one like it. Pacciani claimed he had found it in a Dumpster years before the killing, and notes Pacciani had jotted in it did clearly date to well before the murder. Prosecutors maintained that the wily peasant had added the notes later to divert suspicion. (Spezi pointed out in an article that it would have been far simpler for Pacciani to have thrown the incriminating sketchbook in the fireplace.)

  Among the witnesses were Pacciani’s old pals from the Casa del Popolo, the communist-built social club and meeting hall for working-class people in San Casciano. His friends were mostly country bumpkins, uneducated, ruined by bad wine and whoring. Among them was a man named Mario Vanni, a dimwitted ex-postman of San Casciano, who had been nicknamed Torsolo, “Apple Core,” by his fellow citizens—in other words, the part of the apple that is no good and is thrown away.

  In the courtroom Vanni was confused and terrified. In answer to the first question (“What is your current occupation?”) instead of answering, he immediately launched into a quavering explanation that, yes, he knew Pacciani, but they were only “picnicking friends” and nothing more. In order to avoid making mistakes the postman had obviously memorized that phrase with which he answered almost every question, whether relevant or not. “Eravamo compagni di merende,” he kept repeating, “We were picnicking friends.”

  We were picnicking friends. With those words, the unfortunate postman invented a phrase that would enter the very lexicon of the Italian language. Compagni di merende, “picnicking friends” is now a colloquial expression in Italian referring to friends who pretend to be doing something innocent when in fact they are bent on dark, murderous misdeeds. The phrase became so popular that it even has its own Italian Wikipedia entry.

  “We were picnicking friends,” Vanni continued to repeat after every question, his chin dipping, his eyes squinting about the vast courtroom.

  The prosecutor became more and more irritated with Vanni and that phrase. Vanni went on to retract everything that he had said in his earlier interrogations. He denied hunting with Pacciani, denied various statements he had made, and ended up denying everything, swearing he knew nothing, protesting loudly that he and Pacciani were picnicking friends and nothing more. The president of the court finally lost his temper. “Signor Vanni, you are what we call reticent, and if you continue this way you risk being charged with false testimony.”

  Vanni continued to whine, “But we were just picnicking friends,” while the courtroom audience laughed and the judge banged his gavel.

  His behavior on the witness stand aroused the suspicions of a police officer named Michele Giuttari, who would later take over the Monster investigation from Chief Inspector Perugini. Perugini had been rewarded for capturing the Monster (i.e., Pacciani) by being given the plummiest of postings: he had been sent to Washington, D.C., to became the liaison officer between the Italian police and the American FBI.

  Giuttari would take the Monster investigation to a new, spectacular, level. But for now he was waiting in the wings, watching and listening, and developing his own theories of the crimes.

  The day arrived in the trial that the Italians call the “twist”—that Perry Mason moment when a key witness mounts the stand and seals the fate of the accused. This witness in the Pacciani trial was a man named Lorenzo Nesi, thin and smarmy, with slicked-back hair and Ray-Bans, shirt unbuttoned, gold chains dangling among his chest hair, a smooth talker and small-time ladies’ man. Whether it was for the love of attention or the desire to be on the front page, Nesi would become a veritable serial witness, popping up when most needed and suddenly recalling events buried for years. This was his debut appearance; there would be many more.

  In his first deposition, spontaneously given, Nesi said that Pacciani had boasted to him of having gone hunting at night with a pistol to shoot pheasants resting in the trees. This was taken as another damning piece of evidence against Pacciani, because it showed the peasant, who denied having a pistol, owned one after all—no doubt “that” pistol.

  Twenty days later, Nesi suddenly remembered something else.

  On Sunday evening, September 8, 1985, the alleged night of the murder of the two French tourists, Nesi was returning from a trip and was forced to take a detour past the Scopeti clearing because the Florence-Siena superstrada, his usual route, was blocked by construction. (It was later determined, however, that the work interrupting the superstrada occurred on the following weekend.) Between approximately nine-thirty and ten-thirty in the evening, Nesi said, he was about a kilometer from the Scopeti clearing when he stopped at an intersection to let a Ford Fiesta pass. The car was of a rosy or reddish color, and he was ninety percent certain it was driven by Pacciani. There was on board a second individual he didn’t know.

  Why hadn’t he reported this ten years ago?

  Nesi replied that at the time he was only seventy to eighty percent certain, and that you should only report things you are certain of. Now, however, he had become ninety percent certain of his identification, and that, he figured, made it certain enough to be reported. The judge praised him later for his scrupulosity.

  One wouldn’t normally think that Nesi, being a small dealer in sweaters, would mistake a color. But he had gotten wrong the color of Pacciani’s car—it was not “rosy or reddish,” it was dead white. (Perhaps Nesi was thinking back to the red Alfa Romeo reported by witnesses that led to the infamous Identi-Kit portrait.)

  Nevertheless, Nesi’s testimony put Pacciani within a kilometer of the Scopeti clearing on Sunday night, and that was enough to seal the peasant’s fate. The judges convicted Pacciani of murder and condemned him to fourteen life sentences. In their opinion, the judges explained Nesi’s mistake by the fact that the reflection of the taillights at night made the white car look red. They acquitted Pacciani of the 1968 murders, as prosecutors had presented no evidence linking him with that crime, beyond the fact that it was committed with the same gun. The judges never addressed the question of how, if Pacciani had nothing to do with that killing, he had come into possession of the gun.

  At 7:02 p.m. on November 1, 1994, the president of the court began to read the verdict. All the national networks in Italy interrupted their programming to bring the news. “Guilty of the murder of Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini,” the president of the court intoned, “guilty of the murder of Giovanni Foggi and Carmela De Nuccio, guilty of the murder of Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi, guilty of the murder of Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini, guilty of the murder of Fredrich Wilhelm Horst Meyer and Uwe Jens Rüsch, guilty of the murder of Pia Gilda Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, guilty of the murder of Jean-Michel Kraveichvili and Nadine Mauriot.”

  As the judge’s stentorian voice boomed out the final “guilty,” Pacciani placed his hand upon his heart, closed his eyes, and murmured, “An innocent dies.”

  CHAPTER 26

  One chilly February in 1996, Mario Spezi crossed the little piazza toward the carabinieri barracks in the village of San Casciano. He was out of breath, and not just because of the Gauloises he smoked unceasingly; he was wearing a massive and exceedingly ugly overcoat, in garish colors, dangling with zippers, belts, and buckles that served no purpose except to obscure the real function of the garment. A small button near the collar was a microphone. Behind the silly plastic label on the breast was a video camera. Between the outer material and the lining was a recorder, a battery, and wires. The electronic apparatus hidden among the stuffing did not emit even a faint buzz. A technician from the television station had activated it inside the church of the Collegiata di San Cassiano, behind a stone column between the confessional and the baptismal font. There had been no one in the Collegiata, aside from an old lame woman kneeling
on the prayer stand in front of a forest of plastic candles that spread their electric light against the darkness.

  In the two years since Pacciani had been convicted, Spezi had written many articles casting doubt on the peasant’s guilt. But this one promised to be the scoop to end all scoops.

  The video camera would run for an hour. In those sixty minutes Spezi had to convince Arturo Minoliti, the marshal of the carabinieri barracks of San Casciano, to talk. He had to get the man to tell him the truth about Perugini’s discovery of the cartridge in Pacciani’s vegetable garden. Minoliti, as the local carabinieri official, had been present during the twelve-day search, the only one there not connected with SAM or the police to witness the recovery of the infamous cartridge.

  Spezi had always had deep misgivings about this type of journalism, and he had often sworn he would never do it. It was dirty, it was shaking down someone for a scoop. But just before entering the barracks, where Minoliti was waiting, his scruples vanished like holy water on the tip of a finger. Taping Minoliti surreptitiously was, perhaps, the only way to arrive at the truth, or at least a piece of it. The stakes were high: Spezi was convinced that Pacciani was innocent, and that a huge miscarriage of justice had taken place.

  Spezi stopped in front of the entrance to the barracks and turned so that his breast would film the sign that read “Carabinieri.” He pressed the buzzer and waited. A dog barked somewhere and an icy wind cut his face. He didn’t even think for a minute that he ran the risk of being discovered. The desire for a scoop made him feel invincible.