The Monster of Florence (5 page)
T
he evening of Thursday, October 22, 1981, was rainy and unseasonably cool. A general strike had been scheduled for the following day—all shops, businesses, and schools would be closed in protest of the government’s economic policies. As a result it was a festive evening. Stefano Baldi had gone to the house of his girlfriend, Susanna Cambi, eaten dinner with her and her parents, and taken her out to the movies. Afterwards, they went parking in the Bartoline Fields west of Florence. It was a familiar place for Stefano, who had grown up in the area and played in the fields as a child.
By day the Bartoline Fields were visited by old pensioners who planted tiny vegetable gardens, took the air, and passed the time gossiping. By night there was a continual coming and going of cars with young couples in search of solitude and intimacy. And naturally there were Peeping Toms.
In the middle of the fields, a track dead-ended among vineyards. That is where Stefano and Susanna parked. In front of them rose the massive, dark shapes of the Calvana Mountains, and behind came the faint rumble of traffic on the autostrada. That night the stars and crescent moon were covered with clouds, casting a heavy darkness over everything.
At eleven the next morning, an elderly couple who had come to water their vegetable garden discovered the crime. The black VW Golf blocked the track, and the left-hand door was closed, the window a solid web of cracks, the right-hand door wide open—exactly the arrangement found at the previous two double homicides.
Spezi arrived at the scene of the crime shortly after the police. Again, the police and carabinieri made no effort to secure the site or seal it with crime tape. Everyone was milling around, making bad jokes—journalists, police, prosecutors, the medical examiner—jokes devoid of humor in a useless attempt to stave off the horror of the scene.
Shortly after his arrival, Spezi spotted a colonel he knew from the carabinieri, dressed in a natty jacket of gray leather buttoned to his neck to keep out the autumn chill, chain-smoking American cigarettes. The colonel had in his hand a stone that he had found twenty meters from the murder scene. In the form of a truncated pyramid, it was about three inches on a side and made of granite. Spezi recognized it as a doorstop of a type often found in old Tuscan country houses, used during the hot summers to hold open the doors between rooms to aid in the circulation of air.
Turning the stone over in his hands, the colonel approached Spezi. “This doorstop is the only thing I’ve found at the site of any possible significance. I’m taking it back as evidence, since it’s all I’ve got. Maybe he used it to break the car window.”
Twenty years later that banal doorstop, collected by chance in a field, would become the center of a new and bizarre investigation.
“Nothing else, Colonel?” Spezi asked. “Not a trace? The ground is soaking wet and soft.”
“We found the footprint of a rubber boot, of the Chantilly type, on the ground next to the row of grapevines that run perpendicularly to the dirt track, right next to the Golf. We’ve inventoried the print. But you know as well as I do that anyone could have left that bootprint . . . just like this rock.”
Spezi, remembering his duty as a journalist to observe with his own eyes and not report secondhand, went with great reluctance to look at the female victim. Her body had been dragged more than ten meters from the car and worked on in a place that was, as in the previous homicides, surprisingly exposed. She was left in the grass, her arms crossed, with the same mutilation as before.
The victims were examined by Medical Examiner Mauro Maurri, who concluded that the cuts to the pubic region had been made with the same notched knife that resembled a scuba knife. He noted that, as in the previous killings, there was no evidence of rape, no molestation of the body or presence of semen. The mobile squad collected nine Winchester series H shells from the ground and two more inside the car. An examination proved that all had been fired by the same gun used in the previous two double homicides, with the unique mark on the rim made by the firing pin.
Spezi asked the chief of the mobile squad about the apparently anomalous fact that a Beretta .22 can only hold nine rounds in its magazine, and yet there were eleven shells at the scene. The chief explained that a knowledgeable shooter can force a tenth round into the magazine and, with another preloaded in the chamber, turn a nine-shot Beretta into an eleven.
The day after the killing, Enzo Spalletti was released.
It would not be an exaggeration to use the word “hysteria” to describe the reaction to this fresh double homicide. The police and carabinieri were swamped with letters, anonymous and signed, which had to be followed up. Doctors, surgeons, gynecologists, and even priests were among those accused, along with fathers, sons-in-law, lovers, and rivals. Up to this time Italians had considered serial killers a northern European phenomenon, something that happened in England, Germany, or Scandinavia—and, of course, in America, where everything violent seemed to be magnified tenfold. But never in Italy.
Young people were terrified. The countryside at night was utterly deserted. Instead, certain dark streets in the city, especially around the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte above Florence, were packed with cars, bumper to bumper, the windows plastered with newspapers or towels, young lovers inside.
After the killings, Spezi worked nonstop for a month, filing fifty-seven articles for
La Nazione
. He almost always had the scoop, the breaking news first, and the newspaper’s circulation skyrocketed to the highest point in its history. Many journalists took to following him around, trying to discover his sources.
Over the years, Spezi had developed many devious tricks for prying information out of the police and prosecutors. Every morning he would make the rounds of the Tribunale and the prosecutor’s offices, to see if anything new had turned up. He hung around the hallways, chatting to the lawyers and policemen, picking up crumbs of information. He also called Fosco, the medical examiner’s technical assistant, asking if any interesting stiffs had arrived, and he put in a call to a contact in the fire department, because sometimes firemen were called to the scene of a crime to recover a body, particularly if the corpse was floating in water.
But Spezi’s finest source of information was a little man who labored in the bowels of the Tribunale building, an insignificant fellow with an insignificant job, completely overlooked by the other journalists. He was charged with dusting and keeping in order the tomes into which were written, every day, the names of people who were
indagato
—that is, under investigation—and the reasons why. Spezi had arranged for this simple functionary to receive a complimentary subscription to
La Nazione
, of which he was inordinately proud, and in return he allowed Spezi to thumb through the books. To keep this mother lode of information secret from the journalists who tailed him, Spezi would wait until 1:30 p.m., when the journalists had gathered in front of the Tribunale to go home to lunch. He would duck into a side street that led by crooked and devious ways to a back entrance to the Tribunale and visit his secret friend.
When Spezi had gathered a few tantalizing pieces of a story—enough to know it was a good one—he would drop by the prosecutor’s office and pretend he knew all about it. The prosecutor in charge of the case, anxious to find out just how much he did know, would engage him in conversation, and by skillful parrying, bluff, and feint, Spezi would be able to confirm what he’d been told and fill in the gaps of the rest, while the prosecutor’s worst fears would be realized, that the journalist knew everything.
The young defense lawyers who came and went from the Tribunale were a final, indispensable source of information. They were desperate to get their names into the papers; it was a critical part of advancing their careers. When Spezi needed to lay his hands on an important file, such as a trial transcript or an inquest, he would ask one of the lawyers to get it for him, hinting at a favorable mention. If the man hesitated, and the file were crucial enough, Spezi would threaten him. “If you don’t do me this favor, I’ll see to it that your name won’t appear in the newspapers for at least a year.” It was a complete bluff, as Spezi had no such power, but a terrifying prospect to a naïve young lawyer. Thus intimidated, the lawyers sometimes let Spezi carry home entire sets of files from an investigation, which he would spend the night photocopying and return in the morning.
There was never a shortage of news in the Monster investigation. Even in the absence of new developments, Spezi always found something to write about in the rumors, conspiracy theories, and general hysteria surrounding the case.
The wildest rumors and unlikeliest conspiracy theories abounded, many involving the medical profession, and Spezi wrote about them all. An unfortunate headline in
La Nazione
fed the feeding frenzy: “The Surgeon of Death Is Back.” The headline writer meant to throw out a sensational metaphor, but many people took it literally, and the rumors intensified that the killer must be a doctor. Many physicians suddenly found themselves the subject of vicious rumors and searches.
Some of the anonymous letters police received were specific enough that they felt obliged to investigate, raid, and search certain doctors’ offices. They tried to inquire discreetly, to avoid generating more rumors, but in a small city like Florence every investigation seemed to become public, fueling the hysteria and the perception that the killer was a doctor. Public opinion began to gel around a portrait of the Monster: he was a man of culture and breeding, upper-class, and above all a surgeon. Hadn’t the medical examiner stated that the operation performed on Carmela and Susanna had been done with “great ability”? Hadn’t there been talk that the operation might have been done with a scalpel? And then there was the cold-blooded and highly calculated nature of the crimes themselves, which hinted at a killer of intelligence and education. Similar rumors insisted the killer must be a nobleman. Florentines have always harbored a suspicion of their own nobility—so much so that the early Florentine republic barred them from holding public office.
A week after the killing in the Bartoline Fields, a sudden flood of telephone calls came pouring in to the police, to
La Nazione
, and to the prosecutor’s office. Colleagues, friends, and superiors of a prominent gynecologist named Garimeta Gentile were all demanding confirmation of something all of Florence was talking about, but that the press and police refused to admit: that he had been arrested as the killer. Gentile was one of the most prominent gynecologists in Tuscany, director of the Villa Le Rose clinic near Fiesole. His wife, rumor went, had found in his refrigerator, tucked away between the mozzarella and the rucola, the terrible trophies he had taken from his victims. The rumor had started when someone told police that Gentile had hidden the pistol in a safe-deposit box; the police searched the box in great secrecy, finding nothing, but bank employees began to gossip and the word went out. Investigators denied the rumor in the most strenuous terms, but it continued to grow. A disorderly crowd assembled in front of the doctor’s house and had to be dispersed by the police. The head prosecutor finally had to go on television to scotch the rumor, threatening to lodge criminal charges against those spreading it.
Late that November, Spezi received a journalistic prize for work he had done unrelated to the case. He was invited to Urbino to collect the prize, a kilo of the finest white Umbrian truffles. His editor allowed him to go only after he promised to file a story from Urbino. Away from his sources and not having anything new to write about, he recounted the histories of some of the famous serial killers of the past, from Jack the Ripper to the Monster of Düsseldorf. He concluded that Florence now had its very own monster—and there, amid the perfume of truffles, he gave the killer a name:
il Mostro di Firenze
, the Monster of Florence.
S
pezi became
La Nazione
’s full-time Monster of Florence correspondent. The Monster case offered the young journalist a dazzling wealth of stories, and he made the most of it. As investigators pursued every lead, no matter how unlikely, they churned up dozens of odd happenings, curious characters, and bizarre incidents that Spezi, a connoisseur of human foible, seized on and wrote up—stories that other journalists passed over. The articles that fell from his pen were highly entertaining, and even though many involved wacky and improbable events, all were true. Spezi’s articles became famous for their dry turns of phrase and that one wicked detail that remained with readers long after their morning espresso.
One day he learned from a beat cop that investigators had questioned and released an odd character who had been passing himself off as a medical examiner. Spezi found the story charming and pursued it for the paper. The man was “Dr.” Carlo Santangelo, a thirty-six-year-old Florentine, of pleasing appearance, a lover of solitude, separated from his wife, who went about dressed in black wearing eyeglasses with smoked lenses, gripping a doctor’s bag in his left hand. His card read:
Prof. Dr. Carlo Santangelo
Medical Examiner
Institute of Pathology, Florence
Institute of Pathology, Pisa – Forensic Section
In the ever-present doctor’s bag were the tools of his profession, a number of perfectly honed and glistening scalpels. Instead of maintaining an established residence, Dr. Santangelo preferred to pass his days in various hotels or residences in small towns near Florence. And when he chose a hotel, he made sure it was near a small cemetery. If there was a room with a view of the tombstones, so much the better. Dr. Santangelo’s face, eyes covered with thick dark lenses, had become familiar to the staff of OFISA, the most prominent funeral establishment in Florence, where he often passed his hours as if on important business. The doctor with the dark lenses doled out prescriptions, saw patients, and even ran a psychoanalysis business on the side.
The only problem was, Dr. Santangelo wasn’t a medical examiner or pathologist. He wasn’t even a physician, although he seems to have taken it upon himself to operate on live people, at least according to one witness.
Santangelo was unmasked when a serious car accident took place on the autostrada south of Florence, and somebody remembered that in a hotel nearby there lived a doctor. Dr. Santangelo was fetched to provide first aid, and all were amazed to hear that he was none other than the medical examiner who had performed the autopsies on the bodies of Susanna Cambi and Stefano Baldi, the Monster’s latest victims. At least that was what several employees of the hotel said they had heard directly from Dr. Santangelo himself, when he had proudly opened his bag and showed them the tools of his profession.
Santangelo’s peculiar claim got back to the carabinieri, and it didn’t take them long to find out that he was no doctor. They learned of his predilection for small cemeteries and pathology rooms, and, even more alarming, his penchant for scalpels. The carabinieri promptly hauled Santangelo in for questioning.
The phony medical examiner freely admitted to being a liar and spinner of tall tales, although he wasn’t able to explain his love for cemeteries at night. He hotly denied as libel, however, the story his girlfriend told of how he had broken off a night of passionate lovemaking by taking a dose of sleeping pills, saying this was the only way he could resist the temptation to leave his bed of love to take a turn around the tombstones.
The suspicion that Dr. Santangelo was the Monster lasted only a moment. For every night of a double homicide, he had an alibi from the employees of the hotel where he was staying. The doctor, witnesses confirmed, went to bed early, between eight-thirty and nine, in order to rise at three in the morning when the cemeteries called. “I know I do weird things,” Santangelo told the magistrate who questioned him. “Sometimes it’s occurred to me that I might be a little bit crazy.”
The Santangelo story was just one of the many delightful pieces Spezi wrote as the paper’s official “Monstrologer.” He wrote about the many channelers, tarot card readers, clairvoyants, geomancers, and crystal-ball gazers who offered police their services—and some of whom were actually hired by the police and deposed, the transcripts of their “readings” duly witnessed, notarized, and filed. In middle-class living rooms across the city, an evening would sometimes end with the host and his guests seated around a three-legged table with a small glass upside down on top, questioning one of the Monster’s victims and receiving his or her cryptic replies. The results were often sent to Spezi at
La Nazione
, to the police, or circulated feverishly among groups of believers. Next to the official police investigation, there developed a parallel one into the world beyond, which Spezi covered to the great amusement of his readers, as he told of attending readings and séances in graveyards with clairvoyants intent on speaking to the dead.
The case of the Monster so shook the city that it even seemed to revive the long-dead spirit of the dark monk of San Marco, Savonarola, and his thunderings against the decadence of the age. There were those who seized on the Monster as a way to once again declaim against Florence and its presumed moral and spiritual depravity, its middle-class greed and materialism. “The Monster,” wrote one editorial correspondent, “is the living expression of this city of shopkeepers, sinking into an orgy of narcissistic self-indulgence perpetrated by its priests, power brokers, puffed-up professors, politicians, and various self-appointed hacks. . . . The Monster is a cheap middle-class vindicator who hides behind a façade of bourgeois respectability. He is simply a man with bad taste.”
Others thought the Monster must be, literally, a monk or priest. One wrote in a letter to
La Nazione
that the shells found at the scenes of the killings were old and discolored “because in a monastery an old pistol and some bullets could have been lying around forgotten in some dark corner almost forever.” The letter writer went on to point out something that had already been widely discussed among Florentines: that the murderer might be a Savonarola-like priest visiting the wrath of God upon young people for their fornication and depravity. He pointed out that the woody piece of a grapevine stuck into the first victim might be a biblical message recalling the words of Jesus that the “vines which beareth not fruit He taketh away.”
Police detectives also took the Savonarola theory seriously, and quietly began looking into certain priests known to have odd or unusual habits. Several Florentine prostitutes told police that from time to time they entertained a priest with rather eccentric tastes. He paid them generously, not for normal sex, but for the privilege of shaving off their pubic hair. The police were interested, reasoning that here was a man who enjoyed working with a razor in that particular area. The girls were able to give the police his name and address.
One crisp Sunday morning, a small group of police and carabinieri in plainclothes, led by a pair of magistrates, entered an ancient country church perched among cypresses in the lovely hills southwest of Florence. The committee was received in the sacristy, where the priest was in the act of dressing in his robes, taking up the sacred vestments with which he was about to say Mass. They showed him a warrant and told him the reason for their visit, stating their intention to search the church, grounds, confessionals, altars, reliquaries, and tabernacle.
The priest staggered and almost fell to the floor in a faint. He didn’t try even for a moment to deny his nocturnal avocation as a barber for ladies, but he swore in the strongest terms that he wasn’t the Monster. He said he understood why they had to search the premises, but he begged them to keep the reason for their visit secret and delay the search until after he had said Mass.
The priest was allowed to celebrate Mass before his parishioners, joined by the policemen and investigators, who sat through the service looking and acting just like city folk out enjoying a country Mass. They kept a close eye on the priest so as not to run the risk that, during the service, he might make away with some vital clue.
The search took place as soon as the parishioners had filed out, but all the investigators carried away was the priest’s razor, and he was soon cleared.