When Lo Bianco and Barbara, with Natalino in her arms, appeared and drove off in Antonio’s car, Mele and Vinci followed. They stopped at the cemetery just outside Signa. When they started to make love, Vinci pulled out the gun and handed to him, Mele said.
Mele then walked up to the car and started firing, continuing until the gun was empty. Afterwards they drove to the bridge in Signa and threw the gun in the Arno, then went home.
“I killed my wife and her lover because I was tired of continually being humiliated,” Mele concluded. “My wife had been cheating on me for a number of years, but it was only a few months ago that I decided to do away with her.”
There were great holes in this confession. The most glaring was that he had failed to mention how Natalino had turned up at the farmhouse. If the boy had been woken by the gunfire, surely he would have recognized his own father. Nevertheless Mele was formally arrested and held pending formal charges.
The police then tried to find the weapon, but when a prosecutor questioned Mele about the gun again, he changed his story. Instead of throwing it in the Arno, Mele said, he had given it back to Salvatore Vinci. Soon after Mele retracted his entire confession and began accusing Vinci’s brother Francesco of the double murder. It was Francesco who had owned the weapon, Mele said, and Francesco who had killed Barbara and her lover.
This change of story did not help him in court and, in 1970, Mele was found guilty of the double murder and jailed for 14 years—a lenient sentence was handed down on the grounds of partial insanity. And that was thought to be the end of it. Then there was another double murder.
On the moonless night of 14 September 1974, with Stefano Mele safely in jail, 19-year-old Pasquale Gentilcore and 18-year-old Stefania Pettini parked up in Pasquale’s father’s Fiat 127 overlooking the River Sieve in Borgo San Lorenzo, just north of Florence and 18 miles from Signa. They were enjoying a romantic moment when someone began firing at them. The next day a passer-by found the car and called the police.
Detectives found the half-naked body of Pasquale Gentilcore in the driver’s seat. He was peppered with gunshot wounds. Copper-jacket shell casings surrounded the scene and there was no evidence of a struggle.
Outside the car to the rear was the naked body of Stefania Pettini. She had been stabbed and mutilated. Her corpse was posed with her arms and legs spread-eagled, and a branch protruded from her lacerated vagina. Her handbag was found in a nearby field, its contents scattered.
A post mortem showed that Pasquale had been shot five times, killing him. Stefania had been shot three times, but she had still been alive when the killer carried her from the car and slashed her. She had died of one of 96 stab wounds inflicted on her naked body. The knife had a single-edged blade 1.5 cm wide and between 10 and 12 cm long. The gun was a model 73 or 74,. 22 automatic Beretta, while the bullets were of a distinctive Winchester type made in Australia in the 1950s.
A mentally unstable man named Giuseppe Francini walked into the police station and confessed to the murders, but he was unable to describe in detail how the killings were carried out. The police also suspected Guido Giovannini, a voyeur reported to have been spying on couples in the area, and 53-year-old self-proclaimed healer Bruno Mocali. But they could find no evidence linking either man to the crime, and they were eventually ruled out. The perpetrator was plainly a sexual deviant maniac, but the police, who had not yet made the link to the 1968 murder and with no clues or leads to pursue, filed the case away as unsolved.
Seven years later, on another warm summer’s night, there was another double murder. On 6 June 1981 an unknown gunman fired eight shots into a Fiat Ritmo. Inside were 30-year-old Giovanni Foggi and his lover, 21- year-old Carmela de Nuccio. The following morning, a police sergeant on a country walk with his young son spotted the copper-coloured Ritmo parked at the roadside. The sergeant then noticed a woman’s handbag was lying beside the driver’s side door with its contents scattered on the ground. Taking a closer look, he noticed that the driver’s side window had been smashed. At the wheel was a young man whose throat seemed to have been slashed.
When detectives arrived, they found the body of a female victim in a ditch some 20 yards away from the car. She had been stabbed in the abdomen and her T-shirt and jeans were slashed. Her legs were spread and her genital region cut out and removed. It seems the perpetrator had had plenty of time to perform this crude surgery. There were no witnesses and no tracks.
The post mortem demonstrated that both had died of multiple gunshot wounds while in the car. The young man had then been stabbed once in the chest and twice in the neck. The woman’s dead body had then been carried to the ditch. The medical examiner concluded that the girl’s genitals had been excised with an extremely sharp instrument, which the killer plainly had some knowledge of using.
Ballistics revealed that the bullets came from a .22-calibre automatic pistol. Again they were the same distinctive Winchester rounds. Veteran detectives quickly made the connection with the Gentilcore and Pettini case. The bullets from all four bodies matched. Florence, it seemed, had a serial killer on its hands—though still no one had made the connection with the 1968 crime.
The red Ford of peeping Tom Enzo Spalletti had been seen parked nearby. When questioned he gave a confused alibi. Detectives’ interest was further piqued by the fact that he mentioned a copper-coloured Ritmo and two dead bodies to his wife at 9.30 a.m. on the morning they had been discovered, telling her that he had read the story in the newspaper—though the papers didn’t report the murders until the following day. Spalletti was arrested and jailed pending trial.
Four months later Spalletti had to be freed when another couple were murdered in exactly the same way. As he was behind bars, this was plainly a crime he could not have committed.
On 23 October 1981, 26-year-old Stefano Baldi and his 24-year-old girlfriend Susanna Cambi decided to spend the evening parked in their Volkswagen at a beauty spot near Calenzano, five miles north of Florence. Later that evening, another courting couple found their bodies.
Stefano Baldi was found next to the car. Half-naked, he appeared to have been shot and stabbed many times. Susanna Cambi was lying on the other side of the car. Her wounds were similar to Baldi’s—only her genitals had been excised like those of Carmela de Nuccio.
The medical examiner concluded that both victims had been shot through the front windscreen of the car, but were both still alive when they were stabbed. The same .22 Beretta as before had been used. The knife used to stab the victims had a single-edged blade, between 5 and 7 cm long and approximately 3 cm wide.
The instrument used on Susanna Cambi’s genitals appeared to be the same as the one used on Carmela De Nuccio, but the murderer seemed to have been rushed. The killer had performed the operation with less precision and a larger area was excised. He had cut through the abdominal wall and punctured the intestine.
The press now dubbed the killer the “Monster of Florence” and two separate couples came forward and reported that they had seen a lone male driver speeding from the crime scene in a red Alfa GT. However, despite the growing press coverage no further leads were forthcoming.
The following summer another couple were targeted. On 19 June 1982, 20-year-old Antonella Migliorini and her boyfriend, 22-year-old mechanic, Paolo Mainardi, were making love in a parking spot off the Via Nuova Virgilio, near Montespertoli, 12 miles south west of Florence. They were just putting their clothes back on when the killer appeared out of the bushes and started shooting.
Antonella Migliorini died instantly but Paolo Mainardi survived the initial burst of gunfire. Although badly injured, he started the Seat, switched on the headlights and slammed the car into reverse. But he ended up in a ditch. The killer walked over, shot out the headlights and emptied the pistol into the wounded driver. Then he pulled out the ignition keys and threw them into the undergrowth.
When he left, Paolo Mainardi was still alive. Unfortunately he was not found until the next morning and died a few hours later, without regaining consciousness and before he was able to give the police any vital clues. However, Silvia della Monica, the prosecutor assigned to the case, persuaded the newspapers to report that Paolo Mainardi was alive when he reached hospital and that he had given a description of the killer before he died. All of the reporters agreed, and the information appeared in the afternoon paper.
The idea was to rattle the killer. It worked. After the afternoon paper hit the streets, one of the paramedics who had accompanied Paolo Mainardi to the hospital received two telephone calls from a person who first claimed to be with the prosecutor’s office. The second time he identified himself as the killer and he wanted to know what Mainardi had said before he died.
A few days later, police Sergeant Francesco Fiore made the connection to the 1968 murder of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco, when he had been seconded to Montespertoli from Signa, ten miles away. Francesco began to wonder if there was a connection with the crimes of the Monster. At his insistence, the bullets were compared. They matched. Not only had all the bullets been fired by the same .22 Beretta and were the same distinctive