Nestling in the lush, rolling hills of Tuscany, with the Arno river and Ponte Vecchio at its centre, Florence is an idyllic city. Florentines gave us the Renaissance and the city is the very cradle of Western civilisation.
Yet within all this beauty, Florence has a violent past, from public executions to bloody wars. Forming part of this shocking violence is the story of the Monster of Florence.
Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples – fourteen people in all – were murdered while making love in parked cars in the beautiful hills surrounding Florence. The case became the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. Close to a hundred thousand men were investigated and more than a dozen arrested, many of whom had to be released when the Monster struck again. Scores of lives were ruined by rumour and false accusations. The generation of Florentines who came of age during the killings say that it changed the city and their lives. There have been suicides, exhumations, alleged poisonings, body parts sent by post, séances in graveyards, lawsuits, planting of false evidence, and vicious prosecutorial vendettas. The investigation has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing to different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined.
Despite the longest manhunt in modern Italian history, the Monster of Florence has never been found and, with the acquittal of the latest suspect in May 2008, the case is still unsolved.
In The Monster of Florence, Mario and I track down and interview a man we have strong reasons to believe may be the Monster himself. At the end of the interview, we asked him, “Are you the Monster of Florence?”
We’d be curious to hear from readers their thoughts on the following questions:
Do you think our suspect is the Monster? Why or why not?
If not, is there another person in the book you think may be the Monster?
And finally, do you think the case will ever be solved?
A Note from Douglas
The worst thing about the Monster of Florence case is that it has effectively exiled me from Italy, a country that I love. The chief prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, has publicly threatened to have me arrested, and yet he refuses to release any information about my legal status to the U.S. State Department. Am I still under indictment? Is there a warrant out for my arrest? Will I be harassed by the police if I return? Investigated? Interrogated? I do not know. Having seen the arbitrary exercise of judicial power in Italy first-hand, I’m not inclined to take the risk and go back.
What most shocked me most about the Monster case was that this could happen in a civilized, educated, economically advanced Western European country, the country that gave us the glory of ancient Rome and the magic of the Renaissance. Indeed, across the centuries Italy has blessed the world with incomparable music, art, architecture, science, literature and philosophy. My own country has been immeasurably enriched by immigration from Italy. Beginning in the 1960s, Italy transformed itself yet again, rising from the ruins of World War II to create a modern industrial state with a standard of living that eventually surpassed Great Britain. (The Italians celebrate that singular event with a word: il sorpasso, “the overtaking.”) It is an amazing country, and the Italians are a fascinating, clever and exceedingly complex people.
And yet, today, Italy’s great wealth and power seems to have brought with it a spiritual and ethical malaise. The ambition, careerism, fecklessness, and dishonesty exposed by the Monster case is a symptom of this malaise, in which the concern for saving face, cutting a good figure, and advancing one’s career trumps the plodding and unglamorous search for the truth. The Monster of Florence is not just a book about a serial killer or a bungled investigation; it is a book about modern Italy itself.
A Note from Mario
Douglas Preston and I live under a cloud of suspicion generated by certain Italian prosecutors and police. I—who coined the term the “Monster of Florence” as a journalist for La Nazione—was thrown into prison for almost a month and I remain accused of homicide even today. The judge who ordered my arrest, Giuliano Mignini, seems to believe that I am the Monster himself.
Douglas Preston is suspected because he knows me—indeed, we are friends—but above all because we wrote a book together about the case, Dolci Colline di Sangue, published in Italy on April 19, 2006 while I was locked up in prison.
In three hundred and twenty pages we reconstructed the entire Monster case, which I had followed as a journalist since 1981. We reviewed facts and documents, interviewed and reviewed the testimony of witnesses and others who were involved, including medical examiners, retired policemen, former prosecutors and judges. We carefully re-examined all the evidence, meticulously checked every fact, and sourced every assertion—an exercise many Italian investigators considered tiresome, useless, and above all optional.
We began the project under contract with the New Yorker magazine to write an article about the case. The article went through the New Yorker’s celebrated fact-checking process and was vetted by its lawyers. It was accepted for publication.
Then occurred the greatest frustration of my professional life. The article was slated for September 2001 publication; and then the unthinkable happened: 9/11, the Twin Towers. The story about a serial killer suddenly seemed like the last thing that would interest a reader. And so Doug and I turned it into a book.
The book took us far, far from the conclusions of Chief Inspector Michele Giuttari and the Public Minister of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini: in our book there were no extraordinary Satanic sects descended from mysterious Medieval orders who drew their membership from noble Florentine families; in our account there were no convoluted conspiracies between high officials and illiterate peasants, alcoholic prostitutes and village idiots. Only a serial killer. A lone killer who wasn’t nearly as valuable in building many splendid careers in law enforcement as all those other stories—careers that would be ruined by our counter investigation.
At the end of our journey, Doug and I found ourselves ringing the doorbell of someone who, we had discovered, fit all the characteristics of the Monster and may well have owned the infamous .22 Beretta used by the Monster in all his killings. The New Yorker had insisted on the interview, despite our misgivings. Sharon, our editor, sent us a sarcastic email: “I can imagine you’re a little nervous about having to interview a probable serial killer. But it’s our custom to keep our authors from being murdered. At least as long as we maintain a good relationship with them.”
We interviewed our man. What he said was so surprising, so shocking, that we ended our Italian book with that interview. But that wasn’t the end of the story by any means. After that interview, many more extraordinary things happened to us. The English edition of The Monster of Florence tells the entire story.
A most unusual and enjoyable book. I was reticent about reading a book bought for me about a serial killer as I find it almost unbearable to imagine the final moments of a murder victim, but The Monster of Florence does not pander to the lust for cruelty on which society seems to thrive (I was going to say ‘modern’, but has it ever been any different?). Instead it is a very thorough and well written investigation into an investigation. Atmosphere and people are recreated vividly in a style which draws you in.
I am as appalled at the Italian police and justice system and its incumbents as I am with the monster himself. I truly mean this. It seems that the country’s finest hour has passed and has now allowed itself to be governed by ruthless, vindictive, incompetent and egotistical children. The chilling and farcical behaviour of some of its officials will stay with me as long, if not longer, than the memory of the monster himself. Heaven only knows how many more lives in countless other cases they have destroyed than the monster is ultimately responsible for. It is perhaps significant that had they done their jobs properly all those years ago investigating the death of a certain wife, one particular serial killer may never have been made.
The monster of Florence è un bellissimo romanzo, sapientemente costruito nella sua trama fatta di suspance e colpi di scena. Uno dei migliori gialli degli ultimi anni. Purtroppo però, the monster of Florence è molto di piĂą. E’ la drammatica ricostruzione delle gesta del piĂą agghiacciante serial killer italiano di sempre. Romanzo e realtĂ , fiction e tragedia, si sovrappongono fino a perdere i propri confini, perchè il romanzo di Mario Spezi e Douglas Preston è una fedele e critica ricostruzione di tutti gli avvenimenti che hanno insanguinato le colline di Firenze dal 1968 al 1985. Un libro insomma che non può mancare nella biblioteca di un buon lettore. Anche perchè racconta un pezzo di storia a cui manca ancora, dopo sedici morti innocenti (ma forse sono molti di piĂą) la parola fine.
gst
(Warning to readers: storyline revealed.)
I have been a big fan of Doug Preston since first reading his Cities of Gold back in the very early 90s. I also enjoyed another great book of his called Talking to the Ground. So, I am very glad he has returned to his non-fiction writing roots with the release of The Monster of Florence. I am fortunate in being able to enjoy his most recent effort on many levels: I am of 100% Italian descent; I have visited Florence for an extended period when my daughter lived there as a student; and I have had Italian exchange students live with me and my family, making me quite familiar with their very unique culture, their quirks, their mannerisms, and their unforgettable characters. I am also a writer.
Preston has written a remarkable book. He has exquisitely captured the Italian propensity for practicing the art of quasifatti, or the self-promotion of half-truths. It’s a term I first had explained to me when I read Joe McGinnis’s excellent book, The Miracle of Castle di Sangro. McGinnis discovered how the use of quasifatti by Italians gives them a unique ability to take an event and extract only the most minimal of truths about that event, then embellish these “almost truths” and present them as if they were the entire or the whole truth.
Preston and Spezi go much deeper in experiencing this peculiarity of the Italian people when they uncover two more similar yet deftly more sinister Italian quirks–dietrologia and face. The former, Preston unfortunately discovered during his encounter with the darker side of Italy and its judicial system, is “the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth.” My family and I also experienced dietrologia firsthand when we once hosted a beautiful, young Italian exchange student. Her family and friends back in her home country could not understand why an American family would host a student for one year, make them an equal member of their family, and not expect anything (specifically: payment or “favors”) in return. We explained that by having her live with us, we gained merely by being able to experience a cultural exchange with her presence in our home that to us was priceless. Our open and obvious intentions could not be true, her family and friends back in Italy thought, she had told us one-day several months into her stay with us. “Friends and relatives of our family don’t understand this,” she had said. “They don’t understand how someone could do something so generous without expecting something in return or having some hidden motive.” I didn’t know it then but I was experiencing dietrologia at its finest.
As for the answering the questions above on this Web site, I have my theories but I think Preston’s conclusion in the last sentence in his book is the finest. As for me, it seems that the FBI profile analysis of the Monster of Florence is the key to determining who he really is. Although Antonio Vinci seemingly fits the profile best, why would he have stopped killing? Merely because his father was out of his life? It makes more sense to me that his father, Salvatore, was the killer even though he doesn’t fit the FBI’s profile to a tee. The most glaring evidence to me of this is that the killings stopped completely once Salvatore was found not guilty of the murder of his wife and ran off into the hills of Sardinia, never to be seen again.
I also don’t buy into the theory that the killer was impotent, hence his never having sex with any of his victims—pre- or post-mortem. Both father and son Vinci were notorious womanizers, possibly bordering on being sex addicts, the former even supposedly swinging the other way at times.
But as Spezi so correctly surmises, the gun is the key. Once it’s found, then the case will be solved. As for the incredulous theory that there are multiple Monsters, possibly this line of thinking isn’t so far-fetched. Could the Monsters be father and son Vinci? Could it be possible that the father was involved in the early killings but then when the gun was stolen (we presume a: from the elder Vinci, and b: by his estranged son) and used by Antonio in some tragic serial style mimicking of his father’s earlier crimes? This could be the ultimate action of payback by a vengeful son against a father whom he believed killed his mother, hoping (albeit incorrectly) that the authorities would link the crimes back to his father, whom they suspected all along.
It certainly does leave much to the imagination. Had I known this story and known the Monster was still on the loose when my daughter lived there for six months back in the late 90s, I may never have let her go.
For me, though, l’ignoranza è la felicitĂ , I guess. Did you ever hear that expression in Italy, Dottore Preston?
Further to my earlier post I would like to answer the questions put by Mr Preston:
Until part two I was convinced that Salvatore was the Monster. I don’t believe that now, or if I do he could only be half of the Monster together with his son Antonio. Perhaps they committed the first killings together as he wanted to recreate the high of the Barbara Mele killing. He perhaps involved his son in many of the bizarre sexual encounters as suggested by Spezi and went on to involve his 15 year old son in this also. But it either wasn’t to his taste or it got out of hand somehow forcing him to make a panicky police statement about a burglary committed by his son. It was about this time that Salvatore checked himself into an asylum after all! Antonio and Salvatore could be the “they” spoken of by Stephano Mele. Perhaps Stephano kept his silence until the day he died not because he was afraid of Salvatore releasing details that he was homosexual, but that he, Stephano, was a peadofile and had sexual relations with Antonio. Only the latter makes sense when you think of the fourteen year sentence he got for killing his wife as a result of this silence. Antonio’s loathing for his father could be an act. Take away the posturing and he certainly didn’t seem vengeful at his father’s trial.
I don’t believe Antonio could stop himself from killing. I think he learned his knife proficiency from his close relationship with his uncle Francesco and that there are many other victims aside from the lovers lane slayings. The prostitute killings where a link with Salvatore’s repair company was found could be proof that Antonio or Antonio and Salvatore are capable of other M.O.’s. Did he ever work for his father’s company? Were there unsolved murders in the area Antonio lived for the five years he was away from Florence? It could be that the reason Salvatore has disappeared so absolutely is either because Antonio finally murdered him to silence him , since the burglary report suggests Salvatore knew that his son was the Monster or capable of it, and as a result of all the years of abuse, or he fears that someday someone will make the connection that he and Antonio are the Monster together, if only for perhaps the first killings.
Why didn’t the police search the ‘retreat’ with the six boxes that Spezi had allegedly planted - not to catch Antonio because they supposedly believe him innocent, but to confirm that Spezi planted something at all? Two reasons occur to me why they did not search; A) they didn’t want to risk finding proof that Antonio is the Monster and show themselves either corrupt or fools, and B) they knew he had not planted anything as their entire case against him was concocted by themselves to discredit him and take revenge against him, so why bother looking?!
I believe that the Monster case will be solved when he dies. Whether it is Antonio or not I don’t believe that the Monster could not part with either his trophies or the gun, and these will be found upon his death. If it is indeed Antonio, then his current wife may find out somehow before this and if she has any sense will tell the world about it before she could be silenced.
Please add that this is all speculation of course and I don’t mean to accuse or defame without proof! Where I talk about Antonio being the killer, this is to be taken, ‘if it were Antonio’.
I believe that Antonio is the Monster, but I wonder why he has stopped killing. If indeed he is the highly disburted individual the authors portrayed so convincingly, why have the murders stopped? I would be interested to hear the opinions of others.
First: Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Richard Preston: you are all fantastic writers and I love all of your work.
Who do I think the Monster of Florence is? Antonio Vinci, for the same reasons that Preston and Spezi do.
The appaling, egregious, bumbling, unfair practices of the Italian police, prosecutors and judges go beyond the pale, no question about that. Especially Judge Mignini. But as I recall from reading other true accounts of American cases, the behavior of law officers and court officials is almost as bad. Take a look at the prosecutorial zeal (based on the flimsiest of evidence) of “An Innocent Man” (Grisham). Observe how bollixed up the Jon Benet Ramsey case was (what is it’s status now, anyway?) Read any of Ann Rule’s true accounts of various crimes replete with shoddy police practices and wrong-headed, bull-headed prosecutions. I could go on and on.
I’m not pointing this out to make Preston & Spezi feel better. No, I’m just wondering why the police & courts can’t do a better job, without getting so certain they have the right suspect, when it’s not the culprit at all. It seems like they often ignore obvious evidence, & rely too much on hunches. Thank goodness DNA evidence is now causing the release of many an innocent victim of a justice system too often run amok down the wrong track.
I was given The Monster of Florence as a gift and I literally couldn’t put it down. So much so that I went and bought Dolci colline di sangue as well. What drew me to this story and at the same time scared me the most was that although I was born and raised in Italy I didn’t know much about the whole thing (let alone what happened to Mario Spezi and Douglas Preston), except for vague memories about the Pacciani trial on TV when I was younger. It’s scary that my generation is sort of missing that part of our collective historical memory, including the appaling way the investigation was conducted and especially in consideration of the more recent Perugia trial involving Amanda Knox.
I did notice a few differences between the Italian and the English language versions, the most evident of which is that in the Italian book the name of the person Spezi and Preston believe to be the Monster is never explicitly mentioned. I was wondering what the reason for that might be considering that the English edition has probably made quite an impact on an international level anyway.
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