Murder on the New Moon Page 5
Elsewhere, maps seemed to have locations close to the murder scenes marked on them, and investigators found a postcard that had been sent from Calenzano, the closest town to the Susanna Cambi/Stefano Baldi murder scene.
Calenzano
Photo by Massimilangalardi
They also found weaponry, but only initially in the form of several knives, a hunting rifle and two World War II shell casings—nothing that matched the bullet shells or gun from the Monster murders. They also found some pornographic magazines and a photo of a young Pacciani posing with a machine pistol. Finally, they found another macabre-looking painting, this time a childlike work of Pacciani’s own, featuring skull-headed figures in fascistic-looking military uniforms surrounded by seven crosses. (One for each of the double murders? Why, of course!) This painting would later be cited as evidence of the old man’s sick imagination, but it turned out to be a copy of a painting by a Chilean artist depicting the horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship, which the amateur artist had imitated.
This random clutch of elements could be seen as nothing more than a peasant’s tatty objets d’art, or alternatively, as the macabre ornaments of a serial killer’s lair. Perugini evidently saw them as the latter, but undoubtedly, it would not be nearly enough to make a charge of seven double murders stick. (Pacciani was also suspected of the 1968 killings.)
Even bugging and secretly filming Pacciani’s home bore no fruit. Perugini went on national television to make a public appeal to the Monster, hoping that Pacciani’s reaction would confirm his guilt before secret cameras. Pacciani simply shouted his innocence at his own television set.
Finally, in 1992, Perugini ordered an exhaustive search of every last inch of Pacciani’s property, in the hope of unearthing some previously overlooked gem of evidence.
On April 29, the chief inspector found it.
In fact, he found it personally.
“I caught in the light of the late afternoon an almost imperceptible gleam in the earth,” Perugini recalled in his book about the case A Normal Enough Man. Bending down to inspect its origin, he found a Winchester series “H” bullet cartridge. It had not been fired, so it lacked the customary mark made by the Monster’s defective firing pin, but ballistics experts agreed that it could be the kind of bullet whose shells were found at all those murder scenes.
It was a dramatic scene straight out of a Hollywood movie—a scene, some would later claim, which was every bit as fictional, complete with script, props and the leading man positioned heroically at center stage.
Nonetheless, investigators could claim they finally had a priceless piece of evidence to finally prove that Pietro Pacciani was The Monster of Florence.
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Chapter 16—Trial and Error?
The trial of Pietro Pacciani took up much of 1994 and would divide the whole of Italy. It even provoked the surreal sight of people who believed the old peasant was innocent wearing “I (heart) Pacciani” T-shirts.
In truth, it would be difficult for even the most forgiving of Christian souls to muster much love for a man whose own daughters testified against him, weeping as they told of decades of physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of an alcoholic brute.
That didn’t stop Pacciani from regularly crying, ranting to the heavens, and waving religious icons as he protested his innocence.
Alongside the bullet, a German-made sketchpad was presented as further evidence linking Pacciani to one of the murder scenes. It had been found in Pacciani’s home and prosecution lawyers argued that it could only have come from the camper van of the murdered German men in 1983. It had been written on extensively, with contents that seemed to date back long before 1983, but prosecutors argued that Pacciani had merely written these entries later to fool detectives. Likewise, a soap dish found in the house was identified by the mother of one of the murdered students as being similar to one they had taken on holiday with them.
Pacciani’s friends and associates were called to the witness stand, but few could offer much in the way of coherent testimony, with the exception of Lorenzo Nesi, who claimed that Pacciani had told him of hunting at night with a pistol, contradicting Pacciani’s claims not to even own a pistol. Nesi also claimed that on the night of Sunday, November 9, 1985, the night believed to be that of the French couple’s murder, he saw Pacciani in his Ford Fiesta traveling with a passenger close to the crime scene.
Despite glaring flaws in his testimony, including getting the color of the defendant’s car wrong and claiming to be driving that way because of motorway road works (which weren’t actually taking place that weekend), the prosecution now had a witness who swore he had seen the defendant near the scene of the crime, along with items linking him to the murder weapon and the victims.
In November 1994, Pacciani was convicted of all but the 1968 murders, and received 14 life sentences.
Among a Florentine public just as keen as the authorities to reach a conclusion to the whole saga, there was relatively little doubt that justice had been done. Certainly, although Pacciani had gone to prison wailing that he was “as innocent as Christ on the cross,” few could summon up much pity for a man for whom “monster” didn’t seem too inappropriate a label, whether or not he was The Monster of Florence.
Under Italian law, however, any convicted murderer is allowed an appeal before a different judge and jury. Sure enough, early in 1996, the case came back to court. The new judge did not hold back in expressing his contempt for the original investigation. After looking over the original evidence presented in court in 1994, he claimed the case against Pacciani contained nothing more than “half-clues” and inconclusive evidence.
The whole judicial system was facing a serious humiliation.
Thankfully for Inspector Perugini, his “success” in nailing the Monster had since helped him win a lucrative posting in Washington D.C. to work with the FBI.
His replacement, Chief Inspector Michele Giuttari, wasn’t about to stand by and watch the whole case collapse around him.
He went back over the evidence once more, and came to the conclusion that not only was Pacciani guilty, but he had also not acted alone. Among those who had been called to the witness stand at the original trial was a fellow peasant farmer named Mario Vanni. He had been a memorable figure in court, not because of any great charisma, but because he seemed to refuse to answer the prosecution team’s questions, either through fear… or because he had something to hide.
Vanni had become a figure of some ridicule, because he seemed to answer every question with the defense that he had nothing to do with Pacciani’s more unsavory activities and that they were merely compagni di merende—roughly translated as “picnicking friends.”
Giuttari had come to the conclusion that this scruffy figure was not as innocent as he would have people believe, and had in fact been the man Nesi claimed to have seen in Pacciani’s car on the Sunday night when the murder was believed to have taken place. He was arrested on the morning of Feb. 13, 1996, the same day the appeal court’s judgment was due to be announced.
As the appeal court was making its final speeches that morning, a policeman arrived in the courtroom with a stunning announcement: No fewer than four other witnesses had been found to corroborate the prosecution’s original case against Pacciani and back up the chief inspector’s new theory that Vanni had been his accomplice. Two of them, Giuttari would later claim, were even present at the scene of the most recent murder.
The president of the appeal court, Francesco Ferri, asked the policeman to name these individuals and present this new evidence in full. However, the officer insisted on referring to them only as Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma, for “security reasons.” Ferri demanded he name them or his evidence would be ignored. The policeman refused and was duly dismissed from court and his new evidence disregarded.
A few hours later, Ferri announced the judgment of the court—Pacciani was to be unconditionally acquitted of all charges and released immediately.
Pietro Pacciani
There was just one problem. As the appeals court had angrily dismissed this new evidence, it could be argued to the Italian Supreme Court that the acquittal was not valid. They agreed, and the court ordered a new trial, this time with the mysterious new witnesses taking center stage.
These unnamed individuals didn’t just claim to have seen things relevant to the case. They claimed to have actually been present at the murder and, in one case, actively took part. As the court would learn, that was barely the half of it.
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Chapter 17—How Many Monsters?
Over the months that followed Pacciani’s acquittal, as a new case was prepared against Mario Vanni, news of the investigation continually leaked to the media, and they quickly worked out the identities of Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma.
Most significant among that quartet were the first two, a man named Fernando Pucci and his friend Giancarlo Lotti, both from Vanni’s hometown of San Casciano. At first, they claimed they had been driving to Florence when they stopped to urinate by the Scopeti clearing on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 8, 1985. There they saw Pacciani, armed with a pistol, and Vanni, with a knife in his hand; the pair got out of a light-colored car and threatened to kill them unless they left immediately.
San Casciano
Pucci concluded that they had stumbled across the murderous duo in the act of dismembering the French woman’s corpse.
Later, Lotti changed his statement to make an explosive claim: He had actually gone to the clearing deliberately, as he was enlisted to stand guard for the pair as they committed the crime. He saw Vanni make a cut in the tent and Pacciani enter through it, and he saw Pacciani subsequently chase and shoot the male victim.
That wasn’t all. Lotti claimed he had performed the same role at the 1984 killing of Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci. He had heard the girl scream as Pacciani dragged her out of the car, in fact.
If he was to be believed, three men had taken part in the Monster killings.
According to the two other witnesses, there was far more to it than that, as a stunned courtroom would find out in due course.
For now, the Italian public was happy to lap all of this up pretty much at face value. Many never believed Pacciani was innocent in the first place, and this revelation of a team operation only reinforced that view.
The media were highly critical of the appeal court for reversing Pacciani’s conviction, and Judge Ferri even wrote a book in 1996 defending his decision to acquit and vehemently dismissing the new evidence. He denounced Pucci and Lotti as “habitual liars,” and accused the police of keeping Lotti in relative luxury with an unlimited supply of alcohol while persuading him to come up with ever-more-lurid pieces of testimony, which he would keep changing so they lined up with the prosecution’s version of events. The book got little publicity, and in May 1997 the trial of Vanni and Lotti began in Florence.
The testimony of Pucci and Lotti clearly contradicted the conclusions of the medical experts. At the 1984 killing, for instance, the medical examiners concluded that Pia Rontini had been killed instantly by a bullet to the head while she sat in the car, so she couldn’t have been heard screaming as her body was dragged out. Likewise, the slash in the tent’s flysheet at the 1985 scene showed that Pacciani couldn’t have entered in the way Lotti claimed, and the male victim did not die from being shot by an assailant chasing him—there were no bullet shells that far from the tent, only knife wounds, and they alone would have proved fatal.
Witness Gamma, a prostitute named Gabriella Ghiribelli, and witness Delta, her pimp, Norberto Galli, testified that they had driven near the crime scene and seen Lotti’s car there on the night of Sunday, September 8. Ghiribelli also claimed that Pacciani, Vanni and Lotti were involved in black-magic rituals, which they practiced at the home of a self-styled wizard.
The man Ghiribelli claimed was a wizard had died in 1986, and there was little evidence for the existence of such a den of occult activity at his home, but the accusation helped fuel a long-held popular theory that the killer(s) had removed the body parts to use in some sort of Satanic rites.
Whatever twisted motives lay behind the murders, the new witnesses’ damning claims proved sufficient to convict Vanni and Lotti of involvement in 14 of the Monster’s murders. Vanni got a life sentence and Lotti was given a lighter sentence of 26 years in return for his guilty plea and cooperation with the investigation.
Once again, justice appeared to have been done. However, not even Chief Inspector Giuttari believed that this was the end of the story. It was merely the end of the beginning.
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Chapter 18—On the Devil’s Trail
The next step should have been to retry Pietro Pacciani, but that would not prove possible. In February 1998, at 72 years of age, he keeled over and died of a heart attack.
By that time, however, Giuttari had come to the conclusion that Pacciani, Vanni and Lotti were merely the henchmen for an even larger conspiracy. How else could you explain the removal of sexual organs from the female victims, no traces of which were found at the homes of the killers? They must have been stealing these body parts to order for some sort of occult ritual involving a Satanic sect.
Such talk might seem somewhat fanciful to outside observers, but in a deeply religious country like Italy, the notion of devil-worshipping cults was taken very seriously, and the idea that they might be conducting human sacrifices with the help of hired body snatchers was not just the stuff of horror fiction. The Tuscan hills were the place where the political philosopher Machiavelli wrote his seminal Renaissance-era novel The Prince, outlining the dark arts of skullduggery in the pursuit of power, and conspiracy theories are a favorite topic of a country long plagued by corruption in every corner of society, from the taxi stand to the presidential palace. In short, Italians tend to believe in conspiracy theories because there is a lot of conspiring going on in their society.
Suspicions that the plot was indeed thickening were raised when it was revealed that Pietro Pacciani had actually died a rich man, owning several houses and savings worth the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars. How had a peasant come by these untold riches? His bank records revealed little, and none of his “picnicking friends” seemed to know, although Lotti mentioned that Pacciani had been “asked to do a few jobs for a doctor.” Giuttari concluded that the only way a man like Pacciani could come by that kind of money was through serious criminal activity. Obviously, this “doctor” had paid him handsomely for his evil handiwork. Why Lotti and Vanni didn’t seem to have a lire note to rub together between them, despite having also been convicted of taking part, remained unexplained.
Backing up the Satanic coven theory was a mysterious pyramid-shaped stone found at the site of the October 1981 killing, and a scattering of stones found near the 1985 murder site, both of which Giuttari claimed were the kind of esoteric objects used in Satanic rites.
His theory was backed up by a number of “experts” on the occult, such as a blogger and conspiracy theorist named Gabriella Carlizzi. She claimed that a Satanic sect called the School of the Red Rose was behind the murders. She would later claim that the sect was also responsible for 9/11, but even that didn’t seem to diminish her credibility in the eyes of the chief inspector and his team.
This new line of investigation really came into its own when investigators discovered that Pacciani had been a gardener for a time at a retirement home called Villa Verde near San Casciano. It was claimed that the place would be closed to outsiders at 10 PM every night, suggesting strange goings-on there. Although the place had since been closed and later turned into a country hotel, investigators suspected that this was where these Satanic rituals had taken place. Although a search of the property revealed no evidence of such activity, the media immediately dubbed it “The Villa of Horrors.” The notion was not exactly a hard sell to a scandal-hungry public—a gang of wealthy, influential Satanists meeting
in the dead of night at a palatial country retreat to indulge in devil worship with the body parts of couples killed while making love. In a book he wrote on the case, Giuttari even added the lurid and utterly unfounded detail that the aim would have been to kill the couples at the point of orgasm.
Thankfully, for lovers of common sense everywhere, proving all this in a court of law would be a considerably tougher task.
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Chapter 19—The Drowned Doctor
By 2002, it had been nearly 17 years since The Monster of Florence last struck. The chances of him being anything but either dead or in prison seemed slim. Around that time, a promising new branch of the inquiry came to light, surrounding a man who had died shortly after those final murders in 1985. His name was Francesco Narducci and he was a handsome, wealthy doctor from the city of Perugia, in the neighboring region of Umbria. In October 1985, he had been found drowned in Lake Trasimeno, and even then, there were whispers that he had killed himself because he was the Monster. That theory had been investigated and dismissed at the time, but as luck would have it, an inmate at a Rome prison had told Gabriella Carlizzi that Narducci’s death had actually been murder. Furthermore, the young doctor had been a member of this mysterious School of the Red Rose, which murdered him. The public minister of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, found this story interesting, as he had heard of some gangsters he was investigating threatening an enemy, saying that he would end up “the same as that dead doctor at the lake.” Once the media picked up on it, constantly retelling it and at the same time changing the details like in the game of “telephone,” the quote evolved into the more specific “We’ll do to you the same as we did to Narducci and Pacciani.”