Some criminal cases are so vast that even the number of victims is uncertain: in the case of the unsolved “Monster of Florence” crimes that have gripped Italy for half a century, it is known that seven couples were murdered. But some say it’s eight, and at least another 16 murders have been connected to the case. The number of suspects almost matches that of the victims. First there was the pista sarda, the Sardinian line of enquiry into the swinging, pimping Vinci brothers who probably had a hand in the “first” murder in 1968. In the 1990s, a rapist, Pietro Pacciani, was convicted and then cleared. In 2000, Pacciani’s co-accused, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti, were sentenced to life and 28 years respectively for the murders committed between 1981 and 1985.
Gianluca Monastra, author of Il Mostro di Firenze, writes that it’s a case in which “there’s a seductive and ever more abstract ballet of hypotheses … it’s a story in which everything can seem true, as can its contrary.” Filled with intrigue and sex (most of the victims were young couples making out in the countryside), it has spawned its fair share of obsessives, who have come to be known as monsterologists. The frequency with which evidence suddenly appeared or disappeared has persuaded some monsterologists to suspect that elements within law enforcement were involved.
Debate about the Monster’s identity will reignite this month with the release of Stefano Sollima’s four-part Netflix drama, The Monster of Florence, on 22 October. Son of the film director Sergio, Sollima has decided to concentrate only on the beginning of the story, on the pista sarda, a choice that means the series never moves beyond act one of the Monster tragedy – a sequel is presumably in the works.
The actual facts are grim. In 1974, a couple kissing in a car in Sagginale, north-east of Florence, were murdered. The woman’s breasts and pubic area were stabbed 97 times. Nothing further happened until a burst in the 1980s. The Monster struck twice in 1981, then again in 1982, 83, 84 and 85. The same H-series gun cartridges were used in every murder – the stabbings and surgical cuttings only occurred after the monster had shot and killed his victims.
There was a creepy ritualism to the murders. Each time the victims were in states of arousal in a car. The man was killed first. Usually the women were sexually mutilated. A part of one victim’s breast was posted to the only woman on the investigative team. All the murders happened in the countryside north-east and south-west of Florence, often in or very near a small town called San Casciano.
But 1974 may be the wrong place to start the story. In 1982, an anonymous tip persuaded investigators to link the gun used by the Monster, a Beretta .22 series 70, to an earlier crime: in 1968, Barbara Locci and her lover, Antonio Lo Bianco, had been murdered in the latter’s car as they made love with Locci’s son asleep on the back seat. They were the “first” or “eighth” couple.
Locci’s husband, Stefano Mele, was imprisoned for that 1968 murder and thus excluded as a Monster suspect. But Mele was thought to have had Sardinian accomplices. Three brothers, called Vinci, had all been Barbara Locci’s lovers. One of them, Salvatore Vinci, had often been Locci’s husband’s lover as well.
There was a fluidity and abusiveness to many of these relationships. It seems that Salvatore Vinci probably pimped out Locci. In 1985, after a trial in which he was cleared of killing his first wife Barbarina back in 1960, Salvatore Vinci disappeared.
Sollima is exactly the man you would want to tackle this start of the tortuous story. The kingpin of Italian crime series for the last two decades, he directed Romanzo Criminale (the series, not the film) and Suburra (the film, not the series). He directed the cops-and-ultras film ACAB, and produced the series. He has also been a co-director on famous Roberto Saviano adaptations, from ZeroZeroZero to Gomorrah.
His new series captures the weird giddiness of the Monster case because each of the four episodes is told from a separate point of view: those ofMele and his brother Giovanni who was imprisoned for eight months, but later released without charge, and the two Vinci brothers. The same scenes appear in subsequent episodes but now the viewer sees things differently and scoffs at their previous gullibility.
But in never leaving the pista sarda, the series feels slightly gullible as well. The Sardinian line of enquiry was abandoned, at least by investigators, in 1989. Michele Giuttari, the lead investigator on the case for almost seven years, believes it was a deliberate red herring and that the ballistics connections between the 1968 and 1974 murders remain unproven.
In the 2000s, in the aftermath of the convictions of Vanni and Lotti, Giuttari (who had become chief inspector for the Investigative Group for Serial Crimes) concentrated on who commissioned the murders. “There was a superior level, it’s useless to deny that,” Giuttari said recently. Pacciani was mysteriously wealthy and Giuttari hypothesised that the murderers were commissioned in order to cull body parts for satanic masses. He revealed connections between prostitution and participants in orgiastic parties organised by a Sicilian guru called Salvatore Indovino in San Casciano.
Giuliano Mignini, the public prosecutor in Perugia, also took the case in new directions. Many suspects had spoken about a doctor’s role in the killings, without naming him. Mignini investigated the unexplained death in 1985 of a 35-year-old gynaecologist and freemason, Francesco Narducci, who had been fished out of Lake Trasimeno, Umbria, one month after the last double murder. No autopsy was conducted. Mignini disinterred Narducci and claimed that he had been murdered.
The conspiracy theories, and tangential murders, mounted up. In 1982, Elisabetta Ciabani, a friend of one of the Monster’s 1981 victims, Susanna Cambi, was found disembowelled in her room in Scicli, Sicily. Francesco Vinci was killed – hog-tied and set on fire in his car – in 1993. A few days later, Milva Malatesta, a woman who had been in a relationship with Vinci, was murdered – also burned in a car – along with her three-year-old son.
There are so many connections, but it’s hard to know if they mean anything. Members of the Malatesta family worked in a factory owned by the doctor’s family. Malatesta’s brother maintains that one of those most closely involved in the official investigation had been present at parties where his sister was part of the carnal offering.
By now, it’s widely accepted that the “Monster” label covers an actual conspiracy – in the sense of “plotting together”. It’s almost impossible to conclude from the evidence that all the murders were committed by a single culprit. The crimes appear collective: the killings were probably watched, the body parts passed on. Most now believe not in a single monster but in monsters. In 2019, Paul Russell, an Italy-based producer, titled his documentary Monsters of Florence (Paramount+/Netflix). “The whole case is a source of fantasies,” he tells me.
The fantasies aren’t only sexual, but investigative. Public prosecutors became “monsterologists”, speculating about masonic lodges and satanism and often appearing borderline paranoid themselves. Mignini maintained that if Narducci’s body was present in his actual grave it must have been swapped twice. Giuttari thought a stone cairn implied satanism. The Perugia and Florence prosecutors started a turf war over who held ultimate responsibility for the case: Mignini opened an investigation into the chief prosecutor in Florence and arrested, and imprisoned, the journalist, Mario Spezi, on charges including libel which were later dropped (Spezi was the co-author of Douglas Preston’s book, The Monster of Florence, which made veiled accusations against the son of one of the original Sardinian suspects). Mignini was later accused, and cleared, of abuse of office.
That’s what the Monster story can do to people. Public prosecutors, journalists, film-makers and barflies become fixated. But as we pile up names, facts and distant connections, the story slips from the true crime genre into a fable about the evasiveness of truth.
