The Monster of Florence (2 page)
I
n 1969, the year men landed on the moon, I spent an unforgettable summer in Italy. I was thirteen. Our family rented a villa on the Tuscan coast, perched on a limestone promontory above the Mediterranean. My two brothers and I spent the summer hanging around an archaeological dig and swimming at a little beach in the shadow of a fifteenth-century castle called Puccini’s Tower, where the composer wrote
Turandot
. We cooked octopus on the beach, snorkeled among the reefs, and collected ancient Roman tesserae from the eroding shoreline. In a nearby chicken coop I found the rim of a Roman amphora, two thousand years old, stamped with an “SES” and a picture of a trident, which the archaeologists told me had been manufactured by the Sestius family, one of the richest mercantile families of the early Roman republic. In a stinking bar, to the flickering glow of an old black-and-white television set, we watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon while the place erupted in pandemonium, the longshoremen and fishermen hugging and kissing each other, tears streaming down their rough faces, crying, “
Viva l’America! Viva l’America
!”
From that summer on, I knew that I wanted to live in Italy.
I grew up to become a journalist and writer of murder mysteries. In 1999, I returned to Italy on assignment for
The New Yorker
magazine, writing an article about the mysterious artist Masaccio, who launched the Renaissance with his commanding frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence and then died at twenty-six, allegedly poisoned. One cold February night, in my hotel room in Florence overlooking the Arno River, I called my wife, Christine, and asked her what she thought of the idea of moving to Florence. She said yes. The next morning I called a real estate agency and began looking at apartments, and in two days I had rented the top floor of a fifteenth-century palazzo and put down a deposit. As a writer, I could live anywhere—why not Florence?
As I wandered around Florence that cold week in February, I started to plot the murder mystery I would write when we moved there. It would be set in Florence and involve a lost painting of Masaccio.
We moved to Italy. We arrived on August 1, 2000, Christine and I, with our two children, Isaac and Aletheia, aged five and six. We first lived in the apartment I had rented overlooking Piazza Santo Spirito and then we moved into the country, to a tiny town called Giogoli in the hills just south of Florence. There we rented a stone farmhouse tucked into the side of a hill at the end of a dirt lane, surrounded by olive groves.
I began researching my novel. Since it was to be a murder mystery, I had to learn all I could about Italian police procedure and murder investigation. An Italian friend gave me the name of a legendary Tuscan crime reporter named Mario Spezi, who for more than twenty years had worked the
cronaca nera
desk (“black story,” or crime beat) at
La Nazione
, the daily paper of Tuscany and central Italy. “He knows more about the police than the police themselves,” I was told.
And so it was that I found myself in the windowless back room of Caffè Ricchi, on Piazza Santo Spirito, sitting across from Mario Spezi himself.
Spezi was a journalist of the old school, dry, witty, and cynical, with a highly developed sense of the absurd. There was absolutely nothing a human being could do, no matter how depraved, that would surprise him. A shock of thick gray hair surmounted a wry, fine-looking leathery face, with a pair of canny brown eyes lurking behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He went about in a trench coat and a Bogart fedora, like a character out of Raymond Chandler, and he was a great fan of American blues, film noir, and Philip Marlowe.
The waitress brought in a tray with two black espressos and two glasses of mineral water. Spezi exhaled a stream of smoke, held his cigarette to one side, downed the espresso with one sharp movement, ordered another, and placed the cigarette back on his lip.
We began chatting, Spezi speaking slowly for the benefit of my execrable Italian. I described to him the plot of my book. One of the main characters was to be a carabinieri officer, and I asked him to tell me how the carabinieri operated. Spezi described the structure of the carabinieri, how they differed from the police, and how they conducted investigations, while I took notes. He promised to introduce me to a colonel in the carabinieri who was an old friend. Finally we fell to chatting about Italy and he asked me where I lived.
“A tiny town called Giogoli.”
Spezi’s eyebrows shot up. “Giogoli? I know it well. Where?”
I gave him the address.
“Giogoli . . . a lovely, historic town. It has three famous landmarks. Perhaps you already know of them?”
I did not.
With a faint smile of amusement, he began. The first was Villa Sfacciata, where one of his very own ancestors, Amerigo Vespucci, had lived. Vespucci was the Florentine navigator, mapmaker, and explorer who was the first to realize that his friend Christopher Columbus had discovered a brand-new continent, not some unknown shore of India, and who lent his name Amerigo (Americus in Latin) to this New World. The second landmark, Spezi went on, was another villa, called I Collazzi, with a façade said to be designed by Michelangelo, where Prince Charles stayed with Diana and where the prince painted many of his famous watercolors of the Tuscan landscape.
“And the third landmark?”
Spezi’s smile widened. “The most interesting of all. It’s just outside your door.”
“There’s nothing outside our door but an olive grove.”
“Precisely. And in that grove one of the most horrific murders in Italian history took place. A double homicide committed by our very own Jack the Ripper.”
As a writer of murder mysteries, I was more intrigued than dismayed.
“I named him,” Spezi said. “I christened him
il Mostro di Firenze
, the Monster of Florence. I covered the case from the beginning. At
La Nazione
the other reporters called me the paper’s ‘Monstrologer.’ ” He laughed, a sudden irreverent cackle, hissing smoke out from between his teeth.
“Tell me about this Monster of Florence.”
“You’ve never heard of him?”
“Never.”
“Isn’t the story famous in America?”
“It’s completely unknown.”
“That surprises me. It seems . . . an almost
American
story. And your own FBI was involved—that group Thomas Harris made so famous, the Behavioral Science Unit. I saw Thomas Harris at one of the trials, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. They say he based Hannibal Lecter on the Monster of Florence.”
Now I was really interested. “Tell me the story.”
Spezi downed his second espresso, lit another Gauloise, and began to talk through the smoke. As his story gathered steam, he slipped a notebook and a well-worn gold pencil from his pocket and began to diagram the narrative. The pencil cut and darted across the paper, making arrows and circles and boxes and dotted lines, illustrating the intricate connections among the suspects, the killings, the arrests, the trials, and the many failed lines of investigation. It was a long story, and he spoke quietly, the blank page of his notebook gradually filling.
I listened, amazed at first, then astonished. As a crime novelist, I fancied myself a connoisseur of dark stories. I had certainly heard a lot of them. But as the story of the Monster of Florence unfolded, I realized it was something special. A story in a category all its own. I do not exaggerate when I say the case of the Monster of Florence may be—just
may
be—the most extraordinary story of crime and investigation the world has ever heard.
Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples—fourteen people in all—were murdered while making love in parked cars in the beautiful hills surrounding Florence. The case had become the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. Close to a hundred thousand men were investigated and more than a dozen arrested, many of whom had to be released when the Monster struck again. Scores of lives were ruined by rumor and false accusations. The generation of Florentines who came of age during the killings say that it changed the city and their lives. There have been suicides, exhumations, alleged poisonings, body parts sent by post, séances in graveyards, lawsuits, planting of false evidence, and vicious prosecutorial vendettas. The investigation has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing to different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined.
Despite the longest manhunt in modern Italian history, the Monster of Florence has never been found. When I arrived in Italy in the year 2000 the case was still unsolved, the Monster presumably still on the loose.
Spezi and I became fast friends after that first meeting, and I soon shared his fascination with the case. In the spring of 2001, Spezi and I set out to find the truth and track down the real killer. This book is the story of that search and our eventual meeting with the man we believe may be the Monster of Florence.
Along the way, Spezi and I fell into the story. I was accused of being an accessory to murder, planting false evidence, perjury and obstruction of justice, and threatened with arrest if I ever set foot on Italian soil again. Spezi fared worse: he was accused of being the Monster of Florence himself.
This is the story that Spezi told.
The Story of Mario Spezi
T
he morning of June 7, 1981, dawned brilliantly clear over Florence, Italy. It was a quiet Sunday with blue skies and a light breeze out of the hills, which carried into the city the fragrance of sun-warmed cypress trees. Mario Spezi was at his desk at
La Nazione
, where he had worked as a reporter for several years, smoking and reading the paper. He was approached by the reporter who usually handled the crime desk, a legend at the paper who had survived twenty years of covering the Mafia.
The man sat on the edge of Spezi’s desk. “This morning I have a little appointment,” he said. “She’s not bad-looking, married . . .”
“At your age?” Spezi said. “On a Sunday morning before church? Isn’t that a bit much?”
“A bit much? Mario, I’m a Sicilian!” He struck his chest. “I come from the land that gave birth to the gods. Anyway, I was hoping you could cover the crime desk for me this morning, hang around police headquarters in case something comes up. I’ve already made the calls, nothing’s going on. And as we all know”—and then he spoke the phrase that Spezi would never forget—“nothing ever happens in Florence on a Sunday morning.”
Spezi bowed and took the man’s hand. “If the Godfather orders it, I shall obey. I kiss your hand, Don Rosario.”
Spezi hung around the paper doing nothing until noon approached. It was the laziest, deadest day in weeks. Perhaps because of this, a feeling of misgiving that afflicts all crime reporters began to take hold—that something might be happening and he’d be scooped. So Spezi dutifully climbed into his Citroën and drove the half mile to police headquarters, an ancient, crumbling building in the old part of Florence, once an ancient monastery, where police officials had their tiny offices in the monks’ former cells. He took the stairs two at a time up to the office of the chief of the mobile squad. The loud, querulous voice of the chief, Maurizio Cimmino, echoed down the hall from his open door, and Spezi was seized with dread.
Something
had
happened.
Spezi found the chief in shirtsleeves behind his desk, soaked with sweat, the telephone jammed between chin and shoulder. The police radio blared in the background and several policemen were there, talking and swearing in dialect.
Cimmino spied Spezi in the door and turned to him fiercely. “Jesus Christ, Mario, you here already? Don’t go busting my balls, all I know is there’s two of them.”
Spezi pretended to know all about whatever it was. “Right. I won’t bother you anymore. Just tell me where they are.”
“Via dell’Arrigo, wherever the fuck that is . . . somewhere in Scandicci, I think.”
Spezi piled down the stairs and called his editor from the pay phone on the first floor. He happened to know exactly where Via dell’Arrigo was: a friend of his owned the Villa dell’Arrigo, a spectacular estate at the top of the tiny, twisting country road of the same name.
“Get out there quick,” his editor said. “We’ll send a photographer.”
Spezi left the police headquarters and tore through the deserted medieval streets of the city and into the Florentine hills. At one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the entire population was at home after church, getting ready to sit down to the most sacred meal of the week in a country where eating
in famiglia
is a hallowed activity. Via dell’Arrigo climbed up a steep hill through vineyards, cypresses, and groves of ancient olive trees. As the road mounted toward the steep, forested summits of the Valicaia hills, the views became expansive, sweeping across the city of Florence to the great Apennine Mountains beyond.
Spezi spotted the squad car of the local carabinieri marshal and pulled off next to it. All was quiet: Cimmino and his squad hadn’t arrived, nor had the medical examiner or anyone else. The carabinieri officer guarding the site knew Spezi well and did not stop him as he nodded a greeting and walked past. He continued down a small dirt path through an olive grove to the foot of a lonely cypress. There, just beyond, he saw the scene of the crime, which had not been secured or sealed off.
The scene, Spezi told me, would be forever engraved in his mind. The Tuscan countryside lay under a sky of cobalt blue. A medieval castle, framed by cypress trees, crowned a nearby rise. In the vast distance, in the haze of early summer, he could spy the terra-cotta vault of the Duomo rising above the city of Florence, the physical embodiment of the Renaissance. The boy seemed to be sleeping in the driver’s seat, his head leaning on the side window, eyes closed, face smooth and untroubled. Only a little black mark on his temple, which lined up with a hole in the spiderwebbed window, indicated that a crime had occurred.
On the ground, in the grass, lay a straw purse, wide open and upside down, as if someone had rummaged through it and flung it aside.
He heard the swish of feet in the grass and the carabinieri officer came up behind him.
“The woman?” Spezi asked him.
The cop gestured with his chin behind the car. The girl’s body lay some distance away, at the foot of a little embankment, amid wildflowers. She had also been shot and lay on her back, naked except for a gold chain around her neck, which had fallen between her parted lips. Her blue eyes were open and seemed to be looking up at Spezi with surprise. Everything was unnaturally composed, immobile, with no signs of struggle or confusion—like a museum diorama. But there was a singular horror: the pubic area below the victim’s abdomen simply wasn’t there anymore.
Spezi turned back and found the cop behind him. The man seemed to understand the question in Spezi’s eyes.
“During the night . . . the animals came . . . And the hot sun did the rest.”
Spezi fumbled a Gauloise out of his pocket and lit it in the shade of the cypress. He smoked in silence, standing halfway between the two victims, reconstructing the crime in his head. The two people had obviously been ambushed while making love in the car; they had probably come up here after an evening dancing at Disco Anastasia, a hangout for teenagers at the bottom of the hill. (The police would later confirm this was the case.) It was the night of the new moon. The killer would have approached in the dark, silently; perhaps he watched them make love for a while, and then struck when they were at their most vulnerable. It had been a low-risk crime—a cowardly crime—to shoot two people imprisoned in the small space of a car at point-blank range, at a time when they were completely unaware of what was going on around them.
The first shot was for him, through the window of the car, and he may never have known what happened. Her end was crueler; she would have realized. After killing her, the murderer had dragged her away from the car—Spezi could see the marks in the grass—leaving her at the bottom of the embankment. The place was shockingly exposed. It lay right next to a footpath that ran parallel to the road, out in the open and visible from multiple vantage points.
Spezi’s musings were interrupted by the arrival of Chief Inspector Sandro Federico and a prosecutor, Adolfo Izzo, along with the forensic squad. Federico had the easygoing manner of a Roman, affecting an air of amused nonchalance. Izzo, on the other hand, was in his first posting and he arrived wound up like a spring. He leapt out of the squad car and charged up to Spezi. “What are you doing here, sir?” he asked angrily.
“Working.”
“You must leave the premises immediately. You can’t remain here.”
“Okay, okay . . .” Spezi had seen all he wanted to see. He shoved his pen and notebook away, got in his car, and drove back to police headquarters. In the hallway outside Cimmino’s office he ran into a police sergeant he knew well; they had been able to do each other favors from time to time. The sergeant slipped a photograph out of his pocket and showed it to him. “You want it?”
It was a picture of the two victims, in life, sitting on a stone wall with their arms around each other.
Spezi took it. “I’ll bring it back to you later this afternoon, after we’ve copied it.”
Cimmino gave Spezi the names of the two victims: Carmela De Nuccio, twenty-one years old, who worked for the Gucci fashion house in Florence. The man was Giovanni Foggi, thirty, employed by the local electric utility. They were engaged to be married. A policeman on his day off, enjoying a Sunday morning walk in the country, had found the two bodies at ten-thirty. The crime had occurred a little before midnight, and there was a witness of sorts: a farmer who lived across the road. He had heard a tape of John Lennon’s “Imagine” coming from a car parked in the fields. The song had been interrupted all of a sudden, in the middle. He hadn’t heard any shots from what was evidently a .22 pistol, judging from the shells that were left at the scene of the crime—Winchester series “H” rounds. Cimmino said the two victims were clean, they had no enemies, excluding the man Carmela left when she began dating Giovanni.
“It’s frightening,” Spezi said to Cimmino. “I’ve never seen anything like it around here . . . And then, to think what the animals did—”
“What animals?” Cimmino interrupted.
“The animals that came during the night . . . That bloody mess . . . in between the girl’s legs.”
Cimmino stared at him. “Animals my ass! The killer did that.”
Spezi felt his gut freeze. “The killer? What did he do, stab her?”
Inspector Cimmino answered matter-of-factly, perhaps as a way to keep the horror at bay. “No, he didn’t stab her. He cut out her vagina . . . and took it away.”
Spezi didn’t immediately understand. “He took her vagina away? Where?” As soon as the question was out he realized how stupid it sounded.
“It’s simply not there anymore. He took it away with him.”