The Monster of Florence

by Magdalen Nabb

  Nine cartridge cases were found at the scene, one inside the car, the rest in three groups, the first group of three in the clearing and mixed with fragments of glass from the left front car window, the second two, at the edge of the road just out of the clearing, and the third near the opposite side of the road. It was through this grouping of the cartridge cases that the dynamics of the killing were established.

  1983 Little more than a year later, on the night of 9th September 1983, in a grassy clearing near Galluzzo to the south of Florence, two German boys, Herman Mainz and Ulrich Richter, were shot to death in their Volkswagen camper. Although the murder was committed with the same Beretta 22, no further damage was done to the bodies, possibly because the killer realized on entering the camper that he had made a mistake. Ulrich Richter had very long wavy blond hair and he may well have mistaken him for a girl.

  It should be mentioned here that at the time of the Mainz/Richter murder the Beretta had already been identified as that used in the Muscas/Lo Russo murder of 1968.

  1984 Late in the evening of Sunday 29th July 1984, in Vicchio di Mugello to the north of Florence, a young couple, Carlo Salvini and Patrizia Renzetti, were murdered in their parked car. The murder showed all the characteristics of the previous ones: the new moon, the car parked in a country lane, a course of water nearby. The dead boy was found on the back seat of the car wearing only a vest and underpants. Not far from the car, behind a bush, lay the completely naked body of the girl, supine with legs apart. The pudenda and left breast had been cut away. The autopsy established that both victims had been shot through the car window and then attacked with the knife. The body of the girl, who had already taken off her jeans, was dragged by the ankles to a distance of about 10 yards. The killer had then removed her T-shirt and brassiere and ripped and cut away her pants. For the first time he cut away the left breast as well as the pudenda. The instrument was a single-edged knife with the same characteristics as that used in the previous mutilations.

  Ballistics reports established that the firearm used was the Beretta 22 Long Rifle series 70 of the previous killings.

  1985 The last in this series of killings was the above-mentioned murder of the French couple, Nathalie Monde and Maurice Clément, camping in the San Casciano area in 1985. The autopsy carried out by Professor Forli on the woman’s body, which was closed inside the tent, showed that the victim had been hit by four bullets, three of which penetrated the skull, and one the thorax. The man had been hit by four bullets, one in the mouth, two in the upper left arm and one in the right elbow. All the shots were fired at close quarters, estimated at not more than 15–20 inches, some from outside the tent, some from inside, but all from the front opening. It is probable that the man was lying supine with the woman on top of him. The woman died from the gunshot wounds whilst still inside the tent but the man, who was only superficially wounded, attempted to escape. He succeeded in getting out of the tent and ran for approximately 30 yards in the direction of the woods before the killer overtook him and stabbed him to death. He was then lifted and thrown down the bank into the shrub where the body was discovered.

  According to the pathologist, the woman’s naked body was then dragged partially out of the tent by the feet and the pudenda removed with ample and decisive strokes. The left breast was then cut away with a technique similar to that used on Patrizia Renzetti. Finally, the body of the woman was put back into the tent. The whole operation is estimated to have been completed within 9 minutes.

  On the day following the crime, an envelope was delivered to the Public Prosecutor’s office, addressed to the only woman prosecutor to have worked on the case. The address was formed from letters cut from a magazine and contained a spelling mistake. Inside was a sheet of paper folded and glued at its edges. Inside the paper container was a small polythene bag. The bag contained a cube of flesh from Nathalie Monde’s left breast.

  Four

  A thread of gilding glittered through the clean green and white marble of San Miniato for a moment and then the façade was swallowed in evergreen as the car neared the top of the avenue. The city spread itself below them to the right. It must have rained yet again during the night and the pattern of red roofs glowed this morning in the mild November sunshine.

  “River’s swollen,” remarked Ferrini. “You can always tell by that yellowy colour and the thick shine on it. I saw some film once of the flood. Did you ever see it?”

  “Yes. I saw it.”

  “Buses being tossed along through the streets like they were matchwood. The place looks better from up here.”

  More than anything it looked so quiet and sleepy, its towers and domes rising out of the terra-cotta tapestry in the tepid, misty light. The truth was that they were obliged to drive this way because they would otherwise have been trapped in the snarling filth of the traffic down there for hours. Ferrini turned away to look at Guarnaccia, silent behind his dark glasses.

  “You don’t look too suited. Disapprove of his Nibs’s speech this morning, did you?”

  “I can’t say I understood it.”

  “You were here in the eighties, surely?”

  “Well,” admitted the Marshal, “I was, but I had better things to do than follow all the ins and outs of some Instructing Judge’s squabble with the Public Prosecutor’s office.”

  “In that case, take my advice. Get the ins and outs of it sorted now or you’ll put your foot in it and that wouldn’t do at all, not with our friend Simonetti at the helm. Where do we go first? Scandicci, I suppose, if they’re turning here.”

  There were four cars in the procession, all of them unmarked. All of the passengers were in plain clothes. They didn’t want to attract too much attention as they visited the scenes of the Monster’s crimes. Simonetti had actually called him the Monster, which had surprised the Marshal, though, of course, he did so himself, as everyone did. He had no other name. Simonetti’s explanation had been plausible enough. The rest of his speech, too, had been plausible enough but the Marshal, whilst admitting he didn’t understand it, hadn’t believed it either.

  “I feel bound to make a purely lexical observation before going any further. If I have used, and continue to use, the term ‘Monster’ during the investigation to indicate the author of the crimes, this is for merely practical, time-saving purposes and is absolutely devoid of any moral weight, much less of critical weight. No value judgement is implied.

  “I would also remind you that the official clearing of the names of all the Angius family by the Instructing Judge formerly involved in this investigation means that the line of enquiry involving the Sardinian group connected with the nineteen sixty-eight murder of Belinda Muscas and Amadeo Lo Russo is now closed. The Instructing Judge’s report was punctilious, comprehensive and highly detailed and it was from him that we were given to understand that the confusing, contradictory and, I might say, evanescent elements of that story never had and can never have any value in a court of law.

  “Nevertheless, the conviction for this murder in nineteen seventy of Belinda Muscas’s husband, Sergio Muscas, should not necessarily be regarded as definitive despite his confession, later retracted. The convicted man, even whilst insisting on his own guilt, clearly demonstrated that the crime could not have been perpetrated in the manner he described and that one or more persons other than himself must have been involved. This is clearly not the moment to try to get to the bottom of what might or might not have been a crime of passion, just as it might or might not have been some sort of settling of accounts between rival Sardinian clans.

  “Sufficient to say that for the purpose of our present investigation the Sardinian line is irrelevant, given that the Beretta twenty-two, the only solid fact which connects that crime to those of the Monster could only too easily have changed hands between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen seventy-four.”

  And that was that. The “Instructing Judge formerly involved” and his years of fruitless struggle were consigned to the archives. The Marsh
al knew too little about it all to have any real opinion on the matter. He did, however, have a real opinion about Simonetti who was making signs at their driver now from the larger car slowing down in front.

  “Surely we’re not here …?” The Marshal peered out. They were still on an asphalted road.

  “He’s pointing out the disco, here to the right.”

  A strange pagoda-shaped building set in a garden at a fork in the road.

  “They left there about eleven and drove on up the hill here to park.” The cars picked up speed again between an olive grove high on their left and orchards and vineyards sloping down to their right.

  “Here we are.” The cars were slowing again and turning into a narrow country lane.

  “Have you been here before?” The Marshal felt around for his hat, remembered he wasn’t in uniform and opened the car door.

  “In the good old days when I was a marshal I worked on this case for a bit, eighty-one and again in eighty-three. This one was eighty-one.”

  They left the cars and walked a little further along the gravelly ochre lane, breathing in the sweet, damp air that still smelled faintly of wine lees. To one side of them tiny black and green beads ripened among silvery olive branches and on the other, red and yellow leaves fell from the vines as tiny birds searched for the treasure of some forgotten bunch of grapes, withered and sweet with a bloom of mildew on them.

  “The boy’s body was in the car, as you know …” Simonetti consulted his clipboard, loaded with maps and photographs. “And the girl’s body lay here. Now, there are two possible versions: one is that, since the body wasn’t dragged, he carried her this distance before working on her with the knife. The other is that she was trying to escape and he caught up with her here.”

  “Excuse me …?” It was young Lieutenant Bacci who had travelled in the last car and was now standing behind the Marshal. “I understand she’d been hit by five bullets so does that mean the first hypothesis is the more likely—?”

  “I’ll make one thing clear,” Simonetti said with a smile hardly consonant with his words. “I’m not interested in hypotheses. There have been enough hypotheses in the past about these crimes to last us all a lifetime. If we don’t know something for sure, we don’t know it. Full stop. And while we’re about it, I’ll say a word on another, to some extent related, subject. If you look around you, you’ll see that the scene of the crime consists of a country lane, some trees and bushes, a nearby stream. The crime was committed between ten and twelve on a night of the new moon. You will find that these conditions will be the same at every one of the seven scenes we visit and we’ve heard enough hypotheses about that to last us a lifetime, too. I am not interested in occult explanations of any of these conditions and I’m telling you this because the idiotic explanations of these things didn’t come from the newspapers as one might reasonably expect, but from people calling themselves serious investigators. As far as this enquiry is concerned, the new moon is the darkest time of the month when a lurking murderer can reasonably expect not to be seen lurking. Likewise he needs bushes or vines to hide behind just as he needs water to wash off the blood after his butchering activities. And since couples who park their cars to make love do so in a quiet country lane and not, as a rule, on the motorway, I think that deals with the matter.”

  Simonetti began to move towards his car. Ferrini made a wry face at the Marshal and murmured, “A perfectly sane explanation. Pity we’re dealing with a maniac …”

  But the Marshal was watching the unfortunate Bacci who had provoked the tirade and had to resist giving the lad a comforting pat on the shoulder. Bacci was his superior officer. His poor young face was white.

  They drove on across the hills, taking in all the sites to the south of Florence, Montespertoli, Gli Scopeti, Galluzzo. As they drove, the mist on the hills thickened and the smudge of the city visible in the valley far below became fainter and fainter until, just after eleven, it began to rain. At the last scene to the south, near Galluzzo, their feet were sinking into the already well-moistened ground and fat raindrops dislodged the last of the glowing leaves from the vines. In the distance, the bruised sky was punctuated by black cypresses and umbrella pines. Beneath their wet boots, plastic carrier bags were trodden in with cigarette packets, syringes, bits of used condoms, and scraps of pages torn from pornographic magazines.

  They used the motorway to bypass the city and reach the hills to the north. The Marshal continued to stick close to Ferrini who, every so often, was able to pass him some titbit of remembered information that hadn’t figured in the written synopsis they had been given.

  “That was when they arrested Sassetti, a Peeping Tom. Remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “He was chatting in the bar early on Sunday morning about the Monster having struck again when nobody had found the bodies. Well, he’d found them, of course. He made no bones about his Saturday night activities but he never said a word about what he’d seen or found. They say he was terrified of something. Can you imagine what he could have been frightened of that was worse than being in prison accused of being the Monster?”

  “Not really …”

  “Me neither. They had to let him out, of course, in October when the Monster did for these two here.”

  They were now standing around a stone cross marking the spot where Silvio Benci and Sara Contini had been found. It stood between rows of vines and carried their names and the legend: THEY DIED FOR LOVE, OCTOBER 22, 1981.

  The six men were standing with their backs to the lane where their cars were parked whilst Simonetti consulted his clipboard. To their right loomed the great bulk of the Calvana, the mountain plateau which divided this area from Prato to the north. It was a cold and inhospitable-looking mass at the best of times. Banks of dirty cloud rolled along its flat top and its slopes looked so dark a blue as to be almost black. The Marshal glanced back at the cross and then up at the menacing wet mass.

  “The Sardinian line of enquiry …” murmured Ferrini, reading his thoughts.

  Up there, as they both knew, Sardinian bandits and shepherds inhabited lightless, long-abandoned cottages. There they made their cheeses, hid machine guns, pistols, chloroform, kidnap victims. The police couldn’t get anywhere near them without being spotted half an hour before their arrival and the ground was too rough and stony to land a helicopter. It was a sinister place, as sinister as the place marked by the stone cross. Prosecutor Simonetti kept his back turned to it and continued his perfectly sane account of how a man attacked two complete strangers and took away with him parts of the woman’s body.

  “In this case the mutilation was more vicious and more extensive, exposing as it did a large part of the intestine and even perforating it. A large lump of subcutaneous fat was found stuck to the inside of the girl’s thigh. Gentlemen, at this point I think we should break for lunch.”

  In the restaurant, the Marshal noted that the young policeman who, up to now, had never opened his mouth, was sticking as close to Bacci as he himself was to Ferrini. He was evidently attempting to get some sort of conversation going with Bacci without attracting any attention, but Bacci, no doubt still stinging from Simonetti’s tirade earlier, was pretty unresponsive. The two police investigators were equally silent but for different reasons. From what the Marshal knew of them they weren’t the type to waste breath on hypotheses, much less polite chatter. They saved their breath for the moment when they could use it to say, “I arrest you …” and in the meantime used it to cool their pasta. One of them had an angry-looking scar on the back of the hand turning his fork, which was almost certainly the result of a stray bullet. The Marshal reached for the grated cheese and wondered with an inward sigh what Teresa and the boys were having for lunch.

  The light was dying when they reached the last scene, which, in fact, was that of the first of the maniac’s crimes in 1974. The rain was coming down more heavily now so that shoulders and feet were soaked and tempers short.

  “Marsh
al …?”

  “Lieutenant.”

  Bacci had been eyeing the Marshal for some time, as the latter well knew, before deciding to speak.

  “I just wondered …” He glanced to his right where Simonetti was talking intensely with one of the investigators who every now and then nodded and looked about him as he listened. “You don’t mind if I ask your advice?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It’s just that … You’ve worked with him before, haven’t you?”

  “Once.” There was no need to name him. “Just forget it. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I can’t really help worrying. This is such a very important case and, apart from that, the fact that we’re working together with the police means we really ought to try to put up a good show. Don’t you agree?”

  The Marshal began moving towards the car.