The Monster of Florence (6 page)
D
espite the huge success of his journalistic career chronicling the Monster case, all was not well for Spezi. The savagery of the crimes preyed heavily on his mind. He began to have nightmares and was fearful for the safety of his beautiful Flemish wife, Myriam, and their baby daughter, Eleonora. The Spezis lived in an old villa that had been converted into apartments high on a hill above the city, in the very heart of the countryside stalked by the Monster. Covering the case raised many unanswerable and excruciating questions in his mind about good and evil, God, and human nature.
Myriam urged her husband to seek help, and finally he agreed. Instead of going to a psychiatrist, Spezi, a practicing Catholic, turned to a monk who ran a mental health practice out of his cell in a crumbling eleventh-century Franciscan monastery. Brother Galileo Babbini was short, with Coke-bottle glasses that magnified his piercing black eyes. He was always cold, even in summer, and wore a shabby down coat beneath his brown monk’s habit. He seemed to have stepped out of the Middle Ages, and yet he was a highly trained psychoanalyst with a doctorate from the University of Florence.
Brother Galileo combined psychoanalysis with mystical Christianity to counsel people recovering from devastating trauma. His methods were not gentle, and he was unyielding in the pursuit of truth. He had an almost supernatural insight into the dark side of the human soul. Spezi would see him for the duration of the case, and he told me that Brother Galileo had saved his sanity, perhaps his life.
The night of the killing in the Bartoline Fields, a couple driving through the area had passed a red Alfa Romeo at a bottleneck in one of the narrow, walled roads so common to the Florentine countryside. The two cars had to inch past each other, and the couple had gotten a clear look at the occupant of the other car. He was a man, they told police, so nervous that his face was contorted with anxiety. They furnished a description to a forensic Identi-Kit team, which used it to create a portrait of a hard-faced man with coarse features. A deeply scored forehead surmounted a strange face with large, baleful eyes, a hooked nose, and a mouth as tight and thin as a cut.
But the prosecutor’s office, fearful of the climate of hysteria gripping Florence, decided to keep the portrait secret for fear it would unleash a witch hunt.
A year went by after the murder in the Bartoline Fields, and the investigation made no progress. As summer 1982 approached, anxiety gripped the city. As if on schedule, on the first Saturday of summer with no moon, June 19, 1982, the Monster struck again in the heart of the Chianti countryside south of Florence. His two victims were Antonella Migliorini and Paolo Mainardi. Both were in their early twenties and they were engaged to be married. They spent so much time together that their friends teased them with the nickname Vinavyl, a popular brand of superglue.
The couple came from Montespertoli, a town legendary for its wines and white truffles, as well as for several stupendous castles that crowned the surrounding hills. They spent the early part of the evening with a large gathering of young people in the Piazza del Popolo, drinking Cokes, eating ice cream, and listening to pop music that on warm Saturday nights blared from the ice-cream kiosk.
Afterwards, Paolo managed to persuade Antonella to take a drive in the countryside, despite her oft-stated terror of the Monster. They headed off into the velvety Tuscan night, taking a road that paralleled a rushing torrent that poured from the hills. They passed the gates of the gigantic crenellated castle of Poppiano, owned for nine hundred years by the counts of Gucciardini, and turned into a dead-end lane, the crickets shrilling in the warm night air, the stars twinkling overhead, two dark walls of fragrant vegetation on either side providing privacy.
At that moment, Antonella and Paolo were in the almost exact geographical center of what might be called the map of the Monster’s crimes, past and future.
A reconstruction of the crime detailed what happened next. The couple had finished making love and Antonella had moved into the rear seat to put her clothes back on. Paolo apparently became aware of the killer lurking just outside the car, and he stamped on the accelerator and reversed the car at high speed from the dead-end track. The Monster, taken by surprise, fired into the car, striking Paolo’s left shoulder. The terrified girl threw her arms around her boyfriend’s head, gripping so tightly that later the clasp of her watch was found tangled in his hair. The car backed out of the lane, shot across the main road, and went into the ditch on the opposite side. Paolo threw the car into forward and tried to drive out, but the rear wheels were firmly stuck in the ditch and spun uselessly.
The Monster, standing on the opposite side of the road, was now bathed in the full glare of the car’s headlights. He coolly took aim with his Beretta and shot out each headlight, one after the other, with two perfectly placed rounds. Two shells remained by the side of the road to mark the point where he had taken aim. He crossed the road, threw open the door, and fired two more rounds, one into each of the victims’ heads. He yanked the boy out of the car, slipped into the driver’s seat, and tried to rock the car out of the ditch. It was stuck fast. He gave up and, without committing his usual mutilation, fled up a hillside next to the road, tossing the car keys about three hundred feet from the car. Near the keys, investigators found an empty medicine bottle of Norzetam (piracetam), a dietary supplement sold over the counter, which was popularly believed to improve memory and brain function. It couldn’t be traced.
The Monster took an enormous risk committing the crime next to a main road on a busy Saturday night, and he had saved himself only by acting with superhuman coolness. Investigators later determined that at least six cars had passed in the hour in which the crime had occurred. A kilometer up the road, two people were jogging, taking advantage of the cool night air, and next to the turnoff to Poppiano Castle another couple had parked by the side of the road and were chatting with the interior light on.
The next passing car stopped, thinking there had been a road accident. When medics arrived, the girl was dead. The boy was still breathing. He died in the hospital without regaining consciousness.
The next morning, a prosecutor on the case, Silvia Della Monica, called Mario Spezi and a few other journalists into her office. “You’ve got to give me a hand here,” she said. “I’d like you all to write that the male victim was taken to the hospital alive and that he may have said something useful. It might be a waste of time, but if it frightens someone and causes him to make a false move, who knows?”
The journalists did as requested. Nothing came of it—or so it seemed at first.
That same day, after a long and contentious meeting, the magistrates in charge of the case decided to release the Identi-Kit portrait of the suspect drawn up after the previous double homicide in the Bartoline Fields. On June 30, the brutal face of the unknown suspect appeared on front pages across Italy along with a description of the red Alfa Romeo.
The reaction boggled investigators. Sacks of mail and countless phone calls flooded the offices of the police, carabinieri, prosecutors, and local newspapers. Many people saw in that crude and vicious face a rival in business or love, a neighbor, a local doctor or butcher. “The Monster is a professor of obstetrics, ex-chief of the Department of Gynecology of the Hospital of——,” went one typical accusation. Another was certain it was a neighbor whose “first wife left him, then a girlfriend, and then another girlfriend, and now he lives with his mother.” The police and carabinieri were paralyzed trying to follow up every lead.
Dozens of people found themselves the object of scrutiny and suspicion. The day the portrait was published, a menacing crowd formed in front of a butcher shop near the Porta Romana of Florence, many clutching newspapers with the portrait. When a new person joined the crowd, he would go into the butcher shop to see for himself, then join the crowd milling in front. The butcher shop had to close for a week.
On that same day, a pizza-maker in the Red Pony pizzeria also became the target of suspicion because he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Identi-Kit. A group of boys began making fun of him by coming into the pizzeria with the portrait, putting on a show of comparing it to him, and then rushing out as if in terror. The next day, after lunch, the man cut his own throat.
The police received thirty-two phone calls identifying a certain taxi driver from the old San Frediano quarter of Florence as the Monster. A police inspector decided to check the person out; he called the taxi company and contrived for the driver to pick him up and take him to police headquarters, where his men surrounded the cab and ordered the driver out. When the taxi driver emerged, the men were astonished: the man matched the Identi-Kit portrait so perfectly that it could have been a photograph of him. The inspector had the cabbie brought to his office, and to his surprise the man heaved a great sigh of relief. “If you hadn’t brought me down here,” he said, “I’d have come myself just as soon as my shift was over. Ever since that picture was published it’s been total hell. I’ve had nothing but clients who suddenly want to get out of the cab in the middle of the ride.” An investigation quickly determined that the taxi driver could not have committed the crimes—the resemblance was a coincidence.
A huge crowd attended the funeral of Paolo and Antonella, the two victims. Cardinal Benelli, the archbishop of Florence, gave the homily, turning it into an indictment of the modern world. “Much has been said,” he intoned, “in these recent tragic days of monsters, of madness, of crimes of unimaginable viciousness; but we know well that madness does not arise out of nowhere; madness is the irrational and violent explosion of a world, a society, that has lost its values; that every day becomes more inimical to the human spirit. This afternoon,” the cardinal concluded, “we stand here, mute witnesses to one of the worst ever defeats of all that is good in mankind.”
The engaged couple were buried one next to the other, the only photograph ever taken of them together placed between their tombs.
Among the avalanche of accusations, letters, and telephone calls that arrived at carabinieri headquarters in Florence, one odd letter stood out. Inside an envelope was nothing more than a yellowed, tattered clipping from an old article published in
La Nazione
, which told of a long-forgotten murder of a couple who had been making love in a car parked in the Florentine countryside. They had been shot with a Beretta pistol firing Winchester series H rounds, the shells having been recovered at the scene. Someone had scrawled on the clipping, “Take another look at this crime.” The most chilling thing about the clipping was the date it had been published: August 23, 1968.
The crime had been committed fourteen years before.
D
ue to a serendipitous bureaucratic error, the shells collected from that old crime scene, which should have been tossed out, were still sitting in a nylon pouch in the dusty case files.
Each one bore on the rim the unique signature of the Monster’s gun.
Investigators reopened the old case with a vengeance. But they were immediately confounded: the 1968 double murder had been solved. It had been an open-and-shut case. A man had confessed and was convicted of the double homicide, and he could not be the Monster of Florence, as he had been in prison during the first killings and had lived since his release in a halfway house, under the watchful eye of nuns, so feeble he could barely walk. There was no possible way for him to have committed any of the Monster’s crimes. Nor was his confession false—it contained specific, accurate details of the double homicide that only a person present at the scene could have known.
On the surface, the facts of the 1968 killing seemed simple, squalid, even banal. A married woman, Barbara Locci, had been having an affair with a Sicilian bricklayer. One night after going to the movies, they had parked on a quiet lane afterwards to have sex. The woman’s jealous husband had ambushed them in the middle of the act and shot them to death. The husband, an immigrant from the island of Sardinia named Stefano Mele, was picked up a few hours later. When a paraffin-glove test indicated he had recently fired a handgun, he broke down and confessed to killing his wife and her lover in a fit of jealousy. He was given a reduced sentence of fourteen years due to “infirmity of mind.”
Case closed.
The pistol used in the killing had never been recovered. At the time Mele claimed to have tossed it in a nearby irrigation ditch. But the ditch and the entire area had been thoroughly searched the night of the crime and no pistol had been found. At the time, nobody had paid much attention to the missing gun.
Investigators converged on the halfway house near Verona where Mele was living. They questioned him relentlessly. They wanted to know, in particular, what he had done with the gun after the killings. But nothing Mele said made any sense; his mind was half gone. He constantly contradicted himself and gave the impression he was hiding something, his demeanor watchful and tense. They could get nothing of value from him. Whatever secret he was hiding, he was hiding it so tenaciously that it looked like he would take it to the grave.
Stefano Mele was housed in an ugly white building on a flat plain near the Adige River, outside the romantic city of Verona. He lived with other ex-convicts who, having discharged their debt to society, had nowhere to go, no family, and no possibility of gainful employment. The priest running this goodly institution suddenly found himself, among his other pressing concerns, with the additional duty of protecting the diminutive Sardinian from packs of hungry journalists. Every red-blooded journalist in Italy wanted to interview Mele; the priest was equally determined to keep them away.
Spezi, the Monstrologer of
La Nazione
, was not as easily deterred as the rest. He arrived there one day with a documentary filmmaker, on the pretense of shooting a documentary on the halfway house’s good work. After a flattering interview with the priest and a series of fake interviews with various inmates, they finally ended up face-to-face with Stefano Mele.
The first glimpse was discouraging: the Sardinian, although not old, paced about the room, taking tiny, nervous steps with rigid legs, almost as if he was about to topple over. To move a chair was almost a superhuman feat for him. An expressionless smile, frozen on his face, revealed a cemetery of rotten teeth. He was hardly the picture of the cold-blooded killer who, fifteen years before, had murdered two people with efficiency and sangfroid.
The interview, at the beginning, was difficult. Mele was on guard and suspicious. But little by little he relaxed, and even began to warm to the two filmmakers, glad to have finally found sympathetic listeners in whom he could confide. He finally invited them back to his room, where he showed them old photographs of his “missus” (as he called his murdered wife, Barbara) as well as pictures of their son, Natalino.
But whenever Spezi approached the old story of the crime of 1968, Mele became vague. His answers were long and rambling, and he seemed to be spouting out whatever came into his head. It seemed hopeless.
At the end, he said something odd. “They need to figure out where that pistol is, otherwise there will be more murders . . .
They
will continue to kill . . .
They
will continue . . .”
When Spezi left, Mele gave him a gift: a postcard showing the house and balcony in Verona said to have been the place where Romeo confessed his love to Juliet. “Take it,” Mele said. “I’m the ‘couple man’ and this is the most famous couple in the world.”
They will continue . . .
Only after he left did the peculiar use of the plural pronoun strike Spezi. Mele had repeatedly used “they” as if referring to more than one Monster. Why would he think there were several? It seemed to imply that he had not been alone when his wife and her lover were killed. He had accomplices. Mele evidently believed that these accomplices had gone on to murder more couples.
That was when Spezi realized something that the police had also learned: the 1968 killing had not been a crime of passion. It had been a group killing, a clan killing. Mele had not been alone at the scene of the crime: he had accomplices.
Had one or more of those accomplices gone on to become the Monster of Florence?
The police began to investigate who might have been with Mele on that fateful night. This stage of the investigation delved deeply into the strange and violent Sardinian clan to which Mele belonged. It became known as the
Pista Sarda
, the Sardinian Trail.