It was clear then—as it is today—that Rotella and the carabinieri, despite all their missteps, were in fact on the right trail. The Monster of Florence was very likely a member of that Sardinian clan.
The official closing of the Sardinian Trail meant that the Monster investigation could now proceed in any direction but the right one.
T
he carabinieri pulled their men out of SAM, and the special anti-Monster unit was reorganized under Chief Inspector Perugini as an all-police force. Pacciani was now the only suspect, and they pursued him hammer and tongs. The chief inspector was convinced that the endgame was near, and he was determined to force it to a conclusion.
The year was 1989, and the Monster had not killed for four years. Florentines began to think that maybe, finally, the police had gotten their hands on the right man.
Perugini went on a popular television show and became an instant celebrity when, at the end, he fixed his tinted Ray-Bans on the camera and spoke directly to the Monster in firm but not unsympathetic tones: “You’re not as crazy as people say. Your fantasies, your impulses, have taken your hand and govern your actions. I know that even in this moment you are trying to fight against them. We want you to know that we will help you overcome them. I know that the past taught you suspicion and silence, but in this moment I am not lying to you and never will, if you decide to free yourself from this Monster who tyrannizes you.” He paused. “You know how, when, and where to find me. I will be waiting for you.”
The speech, which seemed wonderfully spontaneous to millions of listeners, had actually been written in advance by a team of psychologists. Perugini had memorized it. It was specifically directed at Pacciani himself, who they knew would be at home watching the program. In the days preceding the show, the police had bugged his house in hopes of getting some incriminating reaction from him when Perugini made his carefully crafted speech.
The tape recording from the bug was collected from Pacciani’s house after the program and listened to with great interest. There had been, in fact, a reaction. When Perugini concluded his statement on television, Pacciani erupted in a torrent of profanity in a Tuscan dialect so antique, so forgotten, that it would have brought joy to a linguist. He then wailed, still in dialect, “They better not name names, because I’m just a poor, innocent, unfortunate man!”
Three years passed. Between 1989 and 1992, Perugini’s investigation against Pacciani made little headway. He could not find a smoking gun. The loot from the searches of his property and house had yielded just enough to satisfy the fantasies of the investigators, but not enough to actually arrest the man for murder.
When Pacciani was interrogated, he responded very differently from the cool and collected Vinci brothers. He loudly denied everything, told lies even about things of no importance, contradicted himself continually, broke down sobbing, and wailed that he was a poor innocent, unjustly persecuted.
The more Pacciani lied and bawled, the more Perugini became convinced of his guilt.
One morning in the early nineties, Mario Spezi, now a freelance writer, dropped by police headquarters and looked up an old friend from his days on the crime beat, hoping to rustle up a story. He had heard rumors that Perugini and SAM, years before, had asked the American FBI for help. The result had been a secret profile of the Monster prepared by the famed Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. But no one had ever seen the report—if there even was one.
Spezi’s contact disappeared and returned a half an hour later with a sheaf of papers. “I’m not giving you anything,” he said, handing them to Spezi. “We haven’t even seen each other.”
Spezi took the file to a café in the loggia of Piazza Cavour. He ordered a beer and began to read. (The report had been helpfully translated into Italian; I have translated it back into English, being unable to get the original report.)
FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia, 22135. Request for collaboration by the Polizia di Stato Italiana regarding the investigation of THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, FPC-GCM FBIHQ 00; FBIHQ. The following investigative analysis was prepared by Special Agents John T. Dunn, Jr., John Galindo, Mary Eileen O’Toole, Fernando M. Rivera, Richard Robley and Frans B. Wagner under the direction of Special Agent in Charge Ronald Walker and other members of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).
It carried a date of August 2, 1989: “THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE/Our file 163A-3915.
“Please be informed,” began the cautionary preface of the American experts, “that the attached analysis is based on an examination of materials furnished by your office and is not to be considered a substitute for a complete and well-conceived investigation and it should not be considered conclusive or comprehensive.”
The report stated that the Monster of Florence was not unique. He was a serial killer of a type known to the FBI, on which they had a database: a lone, sexually impotent male with a pathological hatred of women, who satisfied his libidinous cravings through killing. In the dry language favored by law enforcement, the FBI report catalogued the Monster’s likely characteristics, explained his probable motive, and speculated as to how and why he killed, how he chose his targets, what he did with the body parts, and even included such details as where he lived and whether or not he owned a car.
Spezi read with growing fascination. It became clear to him why the report had been suppressed: it painted a portrait of a killer very different from Pietro Pacciani.
The report stated that the Monster chose the places, not the victims, and he would kill only in places he knew well.
The aggressor in all likelihood effectuated a surveillance of the victims until they engaged in some form of sexual activity. It is at this point that the aggressor chose to strike, with the advantage of surprise, speed, and the use of a weapon able to incapacitate immediately. This particular method of approach is generally indicative of an aggressor who has doubts about his own ability to control his victims, who feels himself insufficiently prepared to interact with his victims “alive” or who feels himself incapable of confronting them directly.
The aggressor, using a sudden approach, discharged his weapon at close range, concentrating his fire first on the male victim, neutralizing in this way the greater danger to himself. Once the male victim is neutralized, the aggressor feels himself sufficiently secure to perpetrate his attack on the female victim. The use of many rounds indicates that the aggressor wanted to assure himself that both victims were deceased before initiating the mutilation post mortem on the female victim. This is the real objective of the aggressor; the man represents only an obstacle that must be removed.
According to the FBI report, the Monster acted alone. It said the killer may have a record, but only for such things as arson or petty theft. He was not a habitually violent person who would have committed serious crimes of aggression. Nor was he a rapist. “The aggressor is a person who is inadequate and immature in sexual matters, who has had little sexual contact with women in his own peer group.” It said that the reason for the mysterious gap in the killings from 1974 to 1981 was probably because the killer was away from Florence during that time. “The aggressor is best described as a person of average intelligence. He would have completed his secondary studies or the equivalent in the Italian educational system. He would be experienced in work that required use of the hands.”
Farther on it read, “The aggressor would have lived alone in a working-class area during the years in which the crimes occurred.” And he would own his own car.
But the most interesting part, even today, is the manner in which the crimes were committed, which the FBI called his “signature.” “The possession and the ritual are very important for this kind of aggressor. This would explain why the female victims were generally moved some meters from the vehicle containing their companion. The necessity of
possession
, as a ritual enacted by the aggressor, betrayed rage toward women in general. The mutilation of the sexual organs of the victims represented either the inadequateness of the aggressor or his resentment of women.”
The FBI report noted that this type of serial killer often tried to control the investigation through direct or informal contact with the police, presenting himself as an informant, sending anonymous letters, or contacting the press.
One chapter of the FBI analysis discussed the so-called “souvenirs”—the body parts and perhaps trinkets and jewelry—the Monster took from the victims. “These pieces were taken as souvenirs and helped the aggressor relive the event in his fantasies for a certain period of time. These pieces are kept for a long period of time, and once they are no longer needed by the aggressor they are often left back at the scene of the crime or on the tomb of the victim. Occasionally,” the report noted dryly, “the killer may, for libidinous reasons, consume the body parts of the victim to complete the act of possession.”
A paragraph was dedicated to the letter that contained the piece of a victim’s breast, mailed to the magistrate Silvia Della Monica. “The letter may indicate that the aggressor was attempting to mock the police, suggesting that the publicity and attention of this case were important to him, and indicating a growing sense of security on his part.”
And about the pistol used by the Monster, the FBI wrote that “for him, perhaps, the pistol was a fetish.” The use of the same firearm and boxes of bullets was all part of the ritualized nature of the killing, and probably included specific clothing and other accessories used only for killing, and kept well hidden at other times. “The overall behavior of the aggressor at the scene, including his use of certain accessories and instruments specific to the crime, suggests that the ritual inherent in this series of aggressions is so important to him that he must repeat the offense in the identical manner until he reaches satisfaction.”
None of it sounded like Pacciani, so the FBI report was ignored and suppressed.
In the three years from 1989 to 1992, Perugini and his investigators became increasingly frustrated that they could not gather enough evidence to charge Pacciani. They finally decided to organize a massive twelve-day search of the peasant’s miserable house and property.
In April of 1992 Perugini and his men launched what would become the longest and most technologically advanced property search in Italian history. From 9:50 a.m. on April 27 to noon on May 8, 1992, a well-armed squad of elite investigators searched Pacciani’s hovel and garden: they examined the walls inch by inch, sounded under the paving stones, searched in every possible gap and cavity, looked in every drawer, turned over furniture, beds, chairs, sofas, closets, and bureaus, lifted the roof tiles one by one, excavated with backhoes almost three feet deep in the soil of the garden, and penetrated with ultrasound every square millimeter of the land surrounding the house.
Firemen went over the place with their special knowledge. Representatives of private firms wielded metal detectors and heat-sensing equipment. There were technicians who filmed with precision the places that were being searched. There was a doctor on hand to check on the health of Pacciani, as they feared the excitable peasant might have a heart attack during the search. They brought in an expert in “diagnostic architecture,” able to pinpoint the location in a seemingly solid, load-bearing wall where, for example, one might hide a niche or cavity.
At 5:56 p.m. on April 29, when the exhausted police had already decided to abandon the search “under a sky that promised rain,” a discovery was made. Ruggero Perugini would later write about this triumphant moment in his book
A Normal Enough Man
(the book that depicted the Botticelli nymph on the cover, vomiting blood). “I caught in the light of the late afternoon an almost imperceptible gleam in the earth,” the chief inspector wrote.
It was a Winchester series H cartridge, completely covered with oxidation. It had not been fired, and so the base did not bear the Monster’s signature firing-pin mark. It did, however, bear marks that indicated it had been inserted into a firearm. It was analyzed by ballistics experts who concluded that it was “not incompatible” with having been inserted into the Monster’s gun. “Not incompatible” was as far as they would go despite (as one expert complained later) having been relentlessly pressured.
But it was enough. Pacciani was arrested on January 16, 1993, and charged with being the Monster of Florence.
T
he trial of Pietro Pacciani began on April 14, 1994. The courtroom bunker was overflowing with a public divided between those who thought him guilty and those who maintained his innocence. Girls paraded around in T-shirts that read in English, “I Pacciani.” There was a veritable caravansary of photographers, filmmakers, and journalists, in the middle of which, protected and led by Chief Inspector Ruggero Perugini, was the writer Thomas Harris.
A trial is perfect theater: a restricted time period, a shut room, recitations by subject, fixed roles—the prosecutor, the lawyers, the judges, the accused. There was no trial that was purer theater than Pacciani’s. It was melodrama worthy of Puccini.
The peasant farmer rocked and sobbed during the proceedings, sometimes crying out in his antique Tuscan dialect, “I am a sweet little lamb! . . . I am here like Christ on the cross!” At times he would rise to his full diminutive height, pull forth from a hidden pocket a little icon of the Sacred Heart, and wave it in the judges’ faces while the president of the court banged his gavel and told him to sit down. At other times he erupted in anger, face on fire, spittle flying from his lips, cursing a witness or condemning the Monster himself, invoking God with his hands joined and eyes rolled to heaven, hollering, “Burn him in hell forever!”
After only four days of the trial, Spezi broke the first big story. A central piece of evidence against Pacciani was his bizarre painting—the one with the centaur and the seven crosses—which psychologists said was “compatible” with the psychopathic personality of the Monster. The actual image had been kept under wraps, but Spezi had finally managed to extract a photograph of it from the prosecutor’s office. It took him only a few days to find the actual painter—a fifty-year-old Chilean artist named Christian Olivares, exiled to Europe during the Pinochet era. Olivares was outraged when he heard that his painting was being used as evidence against a serial killer. “In this painting,” he told Spezi, “I wanted to present the grotesque horror of a dictatorship. To say it is the work of a psychopath is ridiculous. It would be like saying the
Disasters of War
by Goya indicated he was a madman, a monster who needed to be locked up.”
Spezi called up Perugini. “Tomorrow,” he told the chief inspector, “my paper will publish an article saying that the painting that you attributed to Pacciani was not painted by him, but by a Chilean artist. Would you care to comment?”
The article was a major embarrassment. Vigna, the chief prosecutor, tried to play down the painting. “It was the mass media that exaggerated its importance,” he said. Another prosecutor, Paolo Canessa, tried to minimize the damage by explaining that “Pacciani did sign the painting and told some of his friends that it was his own dream.”
The trial marched on for six more months. In a corner of the courtroom, cameras with zoom lenses focused in on Pacciani and the witnesses arrayed against him. The images were projected on a screen on the left-hand side of the court, so that even those in poor seats could follow the drama. Every night the highlights of the trial were replayed on television, attracting huge audience numbers. Everyone gathered around the television at dinnertime, watching a drama in installments better than any soap opera.
The high point came when it was time for Pacciani’s daughters to speak from the witness stand. All of Tuscany was glued to the television for their testimony.
Florentines have never forgotten the sight of the two daughters (one of whom had joined a convent) weeping as they told, in excruciating detail, how they had been raped by their father. In front of everyone passed a picture of Tuscan country life very different from
Under the Tuscan Sun
. Their testimony portrayed a family in which the women endured insults, drunken abuse, beatings with a stick, and sexual violence.
“He didn’t want daughters,” said one daughter, weeping. “Once Mamma had a miscarriage and he knew that it was a boy. He said to us, ‘You both should have died and he live.’ Once he gave us the meat of a groundhog to eat that he had taken for its skin. He beat us when we didn’t want to go to bed with him.”
None of this had anything to do with the Monster of Florence. When the questioning did turn in that direction, the two daughters weren’t able to recall a single damning fact—a glimpse of the gun, a spot of blood, an incautious word dropped during his nightly drinking bouts—that could connect their father with the double homicides of the Monster of Florence.
The prosecutors lined up their meager scraps of evidence. The bullet and a rag were presented. A plastic soapdish found at Pacciani’s house was put forward. (The mother of one of the victims said that she thought it looked like one belonging to her son.) A photograph of Botticelli’s nymph was propped up in the courtroom, next to a blow-up of the victim with the gold chain in her mouth. A German-made block of sketching paper, also found in Pacciani’s house, was advanced as evidence, with relatives saying they thought the German couple might have had one like it. Pacciani claimed he had found it in a Dumpster years before the killing, and notes Pacciani had jotted in it did clearly date to well before the murder. Prosecutors maintained that the wily peasant had added the notes later to divert suspicion. (Spezi pointed out in an article that it would have been far simpler for Pacciani to have thrown the incriminating sketchbook in the fireplace.)
Among the witnesses were Pacciani’s old pals from the Casa del Popolo, the communist-built social club and meeting hall for working-class people in San Casciano. His friends were mostly country bumpkins, uneducated, ruined by bad wine and whoring. Among them was a man named Mario Vanni, a dimwitted ex-postman of San Casciano, who had been nicknamed Torsolo, “Apple Core,” by his fellow citizens—in other words, the part of the apple that is no good and is thrown away.
In the courtroom Vanni was confused and terrified. In answer to the first question (“What is your current occupation?”) instead of answering, he immediately launched into a quavering explanation that, yes, he knew Pacciani, but they were only “picnicking friends” and nothing more. In order to avoid making mistakes the postman had obviously memorized that phrase with which he answered almost every question, whether relevant or not. “
Eravamo compagni di merende
,” he kept repeating, “We were picnicking friends.”
We were picnicking friends.
With those words, the unfortunate postman invented a phrase that would enter the very lexicon of the Italian language.
Compagni di merende
, “picnicking friends” is now a colloquial expression in Italian referring to friends who pretend to be doing something innocent when in fact they are bent on dark, murderous misdeeds. The phrase became so popular that it even has its own Italian Wikipedia entry.
“We were picnicking friends,” Vanni continued to repeat after every question, his chin dipping, his eyes squinting about the vast courtroom.
The prosecutor became more and more irritated with Vanni and that phrase. Vanni went on to retract everything that he had said in his earlier interrogations. He denied hunting with Pacciani, denied various statements he had made, and ended up denying everything, swearing he knew nothing, protesting loudly that he and Pacciani were picnicking friends and nothing more. The president of the court finally lost his temper. “Signor Vanni, you are what we call reticent, and if you continue this way you risk being charged with false testimony.”
Vanni continued to whine, “But we were just picnicking friends,” while the courtroom audience laughed and the judge banged his gavel.
His behavior on the witness stand aroused the suspicions of a police officer named Michele Giuttari, who would later take over the Monster investigation from Chief Inspector Perugini. Perugini had been rewarded for capturing the Monster (i.e., Pacciani) by being given the plummiest of postings: he had been sent to Washington, D.C., to became the liaison officer between the Italian police and the American FBI.
Giuttari would take the Monster investigation to a new, spectacular, level. But for now he was waiting in the wings, watching and listening, and developing his own theories of the crimes.
The day arrived in the trial that the Italians call the “twist”—that Perry Mason moment when a key witness mounts the stand and seals the fate of the accused. This witness in the Pacciani trial was a man named Lorenzo Nesi, thin and smarmy, with slicked-back hair and Ray-Bans, shirt unbuttoned, gold chains dangling among his chest hair, a smooth talker and small-time ladies’ man. Whether it was for the love of attention or the desire to be on the front page, Nesi would become a veritable serial witness, popping up when most needed and suddenly recalling events buried for years. This was his debut appearance; there would be many more.
In his first deposition, spontaneously given, Nesi said that Pacciani had boasted to him of having gone hunting at night with a pistol to shoot pheasants resting in the trees. This was taken as another damning piece of evidence against Pacciani, because it showed the peasant, who denied having a pistol, owned one after all—no doubt “that” pistol.
Twenty days later, Nesi suddenly remembered something else.
On Sunday evening, September 8, 1985, the alleged night of the murder of the two French tourists, Nesi was returning from a trip and was forced to take a detour past the Scopeti clearing because the Florence-Siena superstrada, his usual route, was blocked by construction. (It was later determined, however, that the work interrupting the superstrada occurred on the following weekend.) Between approximately nine-thirty and ten-thirty in the evening, Nesi said, he was about a kilometer from the Scopeti clearing when he stopped at an intersection to let a Ford Fiesta pass. The car was of a rosy or reddish color, and he was ninety percent certain it was driven by Pacciani. There was on board a second individual he didn’t know.
Why hadn’t he reported this ten years ago?
Nesi replied that at the time he was only seventy to eighty percent certain, and that you should only report things you are certain of. Now, however, he had become ninety percent certain of his identification, and that, he figured, made it certain enough to be reported. The judge praised him later for his scrupulosity.
One wouldn’t normally think that Nesi, being a small dealer in sweaters, would mistake a color. But he had gotten wrong the color of Pacciani’s car—it was not “rosy or reddish,” it was dead white. (Perhaps Nesi was thinking back to the red Alfa Romeo reported by witnesses that led to the infamous Identi-Kit portrait.)
Nevertheless, Nesi’s testimony put Pacciani within a kilometer of the Scopeti clearing on Sunday night, and that was enough to seal the peasant’s fate. The judges convicted Pacciani of murder and condemned him to fourteen life sentences. In their opinion, the judges explained Nesi’s mistake by the fact that the reflection of the taillights at night made the white car look red. They acquitted Pacciani of the 1968 murders, as prosecutors had presented no evidence linking him with that crime, beyond the fact that it was committed with the same gun. The judges never addressed the question of how, if Pacciani had nothing to do with that killing, he had come into possession of the gun.
At 7:02 p.m. on November 1, 1994, the president of the court began to read the verdict. All the national networks in Italy interrupted their programming to bring the news. “Guilty of the murder of Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini,” the president of the court intoned, “guilty of the murder of Giovanni Foggi and Carmela De Nuccio, guilty of the murder of Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi, guilty of the murder of Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini, guilty of the murder of Fredrich Wilhelm Horst Meyer and Uwe Jens Rüsch, guilty of the murder of Pia Gilda Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, guilty of the murder of Jean-Michel Kraveichvili and Nadine Mauriot.”
As the judge’s stentorian voice boomed out the final “guilty,” Pacciani placed his hand upon his heart, closed his eyes, and murmured, “An innocent dies.”