The Monster of Florence (14 page)
T
he Squadra Anti-Mostro was taken over by a new chief inspector of police, a man named Ruggero Perugini. A few years later, Thomas Harris would create a fictional portrait of Perugini in his novel
Hannibal
, giving him the thinly disguised fictional name of Rinaldo Pazzi. While researching the book, Harris had been a guest in Chief Inspector Perugini’s home in Florence. (It was said that Perugini was not pleased with Harris’s return on his hospitality, by having his alter ego gutted and hung from the Palazzo Vecchio.) The real chief inspector was more dignified than his sweaty and troubled counterpart in the film version, played by Giancarlo Giannini. The real Perugini spoke with a Roman accent, but his movements and dress, and the way he handled his briar pipe, made him seem more English than Italian.
When Chief Inspector Perugini took over SAM, he and Vigna wiped the slate clean. Perugini started with the assumption that the gun and bullets had somehow passed out of the circle of Sardinians before the Monster killings began. The Sardinian Trail was a dead end and he had no more interest in it. He also viewed the evidence collected at the crime scenes with skepticism—and perhaps rightly so. The forensic examination of the crime scenes had been, in general, incompetent. Only the last was actually secured and sealed by the police. In the others, people came and went, picking up the shells, taking pictures, smoking and throwing their butts on the ground, trampling the grass, and shedding their own hair and fibers everywhere. Much of the forensic evidence that was collected—and there was precious little—was never properly analyzed, and some, like the rag, was lost or allowed to spoil. Investigators had not generally kept samples of the victims’ hair, clothing, or blood, to see if their presence might be associated with any suspects.
Instead of plodding once again through the evidence and rereading the thousands of pages of interrogations, Perugini was smitten by the idea of solving the crime in the modern way—with computers. He was in love with the scientific methods used by the FBI to hunt serial killers. He finally dusted off the IBM PC given to SAM by the Ministry of the Interior and booted it up.
He ran through it the names of every man between the ages of thirty and sixty in the province of Florence who had ever been picked up by the police, asking it to spit out all those persons convicted of sexual crimes. Then Perugini matched up their periods of incarceration with the dates of the Monster’s homicides, identifying those who were in prison when the Monster didn’t kill and out of prison when he did. He winnowed the list down from thousands to a few dozen people. And there, in the middle of this rarefied company, he found the name of Pietro Pacciani—the peasant farmer who had been denounced in an anonymous letter after the Monster’s final killings.
Perugini then did another computer screening to see how many of these suspects had lived in or around the areas where the Monster had struck. Once again Pacciani’s name surfaced, after Perugini generously expanded the definition of “in or around” to swallow most of Florence and its environs.
The appearance of Pacciani’s name in this second screening again reinforced the anonymous message that had arrived on September 11, 1985, inviting the police to “question our fellow citizen Pietro Pacciani born in Vicchio.” In this way, the most advanced system of criminal investigation, the computer, was married to the most ancient system, the anonymous letter—both of which fingered the same man: Pietro Pacciani.
Pietro Pacciani became Perugini’s preferred suspect. All that remained was to gather the evidence against him.
Inspector Perugini ordered a search of Pacciani’s house and came up with what he considered further incriminating evidence. Prime among this was a reproduction of Botticelli’s
Primavera
, the famous painting in the Uffizi Gallery, which depicts, in part, a pagan nymph with flowers spilling from her mouth. The picture reminded Perugini of the gold chain lying in the mouth of one of the Monster’s first victims. This clue so captivated him that it became the cover of the book he would later publish about the case, which showed Botticelli’s nymph vomiting blood instead of flowers. Reinforcing this interpretation, Perugini took note of a pornographic magazine centerfold pinned up in Pacciani’s kitchen, surrounded by pictures of the Blessed Virgin and saints, showing a topless woman with a flower clamped provocatively between her teeth.
Right after the Monster’s last double homicide, Pietro Pacciani had been sent to prison for raping his daughters. This, for Perugini, was another important clue. It explained why there had been no killings for the past three years.
Most of all, it was the 1951 murder that attracted Perugini’s attention. It had taken place near Vicchio, Pacciani’s birthplace, where the Monster had struck twice. On the surface it looked like a Monster crime: two young people making love in a car in the Tassinaia woods, ambushed by a killer hidden in the bushes nearby. She was just sixteen, the town beauty and Pacciani’s girlfriend. Her lover was a traveling salesman who went from village to village selling sewing machines.
But on a closer look, the crime was quite different—messy, furious, and spontaneous. Pacciani had beaten the man’s head in with a stone before knifing him. He then threw his girlfriend into the grass and raped her next to his rival’s dead body. Afterwards, he slung the salesman’s corpse over his shoulders to carry it to a nearby lake. After struggling for a while he gave up and dumped it in the middle of a field. Criminologists would have called it a “disorganized” homicide, as opposed to the organized ones of the Monster. So disorganized, in fact, that Pacciani was swiftly arrested and convicted.
The murder in the Tassinaia woods had an antique flavor to it, a crime of passion from another age. It may have been the last tale of love and murder to be immortalized in song in the traditional Tuscan manner. At the time, there was one man left in Tuscany who practiced the ancient profession of
cantastorie
, or “story singer,” a sort of wandering minstrel who set stories to song. Aldo Fezzi walked about Tuscany dressed in a bright red jacket, even in the heat of August, going from town to town, from country fair to country fair, singing stories in rhyme while showing drawings illustrating the action. Fezzi composed most of his own songs based on stories he collected in his travels; some were hilarious, racy, and off-color, while others were tragic tales of jealousy and murder, desperate love, and savage vendettas.
Fezzi composed a song about the murder in the Tassinaia woods that he sang across northern Tuscany:
I sing to you of a great and tragic tale,
In the town of Vicchio in the Mugello,
At the Iaccia farm of the Paterno estate,
There lived a young man, brutal and cruel.
Stay and hear, and your tears will flow,
His name was Pier Pacciani, twenty-six years old,
O, listen to the story I am about to tell,
To speak of it will freeze your blood . . .
Perugini considered it a crucial piece of evidence that Pacciani, spying on the two lovers from the bushes, told investigators he had gone into a frenzy of rage when he saw his girlfriend bare her left breast for her seducer; that was the moment when he had snapped. The story reminded Perugini of the left breast taken from the last two victims. The baring of the left breast, Perugini argued, was the event which first unleashed Pacciani’s homicidal fury; it had settled in his unconscious to reappear years later, every time the same circumstances arose—when he saw two young people making love in a car.
Others pointed out that the left breast would be the one most likely seized by a right-handed killer—as the Monster was known to be. But this was far too simple an explanation for Perugini’s taste.
Perugini discounted the earlier reconstructions of the Monster’s crimes, which seemed to argue very much against Pacciani as the killer. For example, it was difficult to place a fat, short, alcoholic, thickset old peasant, barely five feet three inches tall, at the scene of the crime in Giogoli, in which the killer took aim through a strip of window that was five feet ten inches off the ground. It was even more difficult to put this doddering peasant at the scene of the last crime, in the Scopeti clearing, in which the killer outran a twenty-five-year-old who was an amateur champion of the hundred-meter dash. At the time of the Scopeti crime, Pacciani was sixty years old, had suffered a heart attack, and had undergone a bypass operation. His health records showed he had scoliosis, a bad knee, angina pectoris, pulmonary emphysema, chronic ear infections, multiple slipped discs, spondiloarthrosis, hypertension, diabetes, and polyps in his throat and kidney, among other ailments.
The other incriminating “evidence” Perugini and his team recovered from Pacciani’s house included a round from a hunting rifle, two World War II shell casings (one of which was being used as a flower vase), a photograph of Pacciani as a young man posing with a machine pistol, five knives, a postcard sent from Calenzano, a register book that on its first page had a crude drawing of a road that could not be identified, and a package of pornographic magazines. He also interviewed a series of witnesses who described Pacciani as a violent man, a poacher, a man who at town festivals couldn’t keep his hands in his pockets and annoyed all the women.
But the crown jewel of evidence found in Pacciani’s house was a disturbing painting. It depicted a large, uncovered cube, inside of which was a centaur. The human half of the centaur showed a general with a skull in place of a head who brandished a saber in his right hand. The animal part was a bull whose horns became a lyre. This strange creature had both male and female sex organs and huge clown feet. There were mummies that looked like policemen, one of which was making a vulgar gesture. A hissing snake was coiled in the corner wearing a hat. And in front of all this, most significantly, were seven little crosses planted in the ground, surrounded by flowers.
Seven crosses. Seven crimes of the Monster.
The painting was signed “PaccianiPietro,” and he had given it a misspelled title: “A science-fition dream.” Chief Inspector Perugini submitted the painting to an expert for psychological examination. The conclusion: the painting was “compatible with the personality of the so-called Monster.”
By 1989, Perugini was closing in on Pacciani. But before he could hang the sign of “Monster” around Pacciani’s neck, the chief inspector had to explain how the gun used in the 1968 clan killing ended up in Pacciani’s hands. He dealt with the problem in the simplest way possible: he accused Pacciani of committing the 1968 murders too.
Judge Mario Rotella, as the examining magistrate, had watched Perugini’s investigation with dismay, viewing it as an effort to construct a monster out of thin air, using as a starting point the conveniently brutal person of Pietro Pacciani. But the attempt to accuse Pacciani of the 1968 double homicide, without a shred of evidence, was going too far. It was a direct challenge to the Sardinian Trail investigation. As examining magistrate, Rotella refused to sanction it.
Inspector Perugini was backed by two powerful supporters for his investigation of Pacciani: Vigna, the prosecutor, and the police. The carabinieri backed Rotella.
The struggle between Vigna and Rotella, the police and carabinieri, finally came to a head. Vigna led the charge. He argued that the Sardinian Trail investigation was nothing more than the sterile result of paying heed to the ravings of Stefano Mele. It was a red herring that had sidetracked the investigation for more than five years. Rotella and the carabinieri found themselves on the defensive, protecting the Sardinian Trail investigation, but they were on the losing side. They had allowed their primary suspect, Salvatore Vinci, to slip through their fingers after his acquittal in Sardinia. Rotella, with his condescending pontifications and lack of charisma, had become deeply unpopular with the press and the public. Vigna, on the other hand, was seen as a hero. And finally, there was Pacciani himself—brutal murderer, daughter rapist, wife-beater, alcoholic, a man who forced his family to eat dog food—a monstrous human being in every way. To many Florentines, if he wasn’t actually the Monster himself, he was close enough.
Vigna won. The carabinieri colonel in charge of the Monster investigation was transferred from Florence to another posting, and Rotella was ordered to close his files, prepare a final report, and remove himself from the case. The report, he was instructed, must clear all the Sardinians of any involvement in the Monster killings.
The carabinieri were furious at this turn of events. They officially withdrew from the Monster investigation. “If one day,” a colonel of the carabinieri told Spezi, “the real Monster came to our barracks with his pistol and perhaps even a slice of a victim, our response would be: ‘Go to the police station, we’ve got no interest in you or your story.’ ”
Rotella prepared the final report. It was a curious document. In more than a hundred pages of crisp, logical exposition, it laid out the case against the Sardinians. It detailed the clan killing of 1968, how it was executed, and who was involved. It traced the probable arc of the .22 Beretta from Holland to Sardinia to Tuscany, and placed it in Salvatore Vinci’s hands. It built a persuasive case that the Sardinians who participated in the 1968 killing knew who took the gun home and, therefore, knew the identity of the Monster of Florence. And that that person was Salvatore Vinci.
And then, abruptly, on the last page, he wrote, “P.Q.M. [
Per questi motivi
, For these reasons] this investigation shall proceed no further.” He dismissed all the charges and indictments against the Sardinians and officially absolved them of any involvement in the Monster of Florence killings and the 1968 clan killing. Mario Rotella then resigned from the case and was posted to Rome.
“I had no other way out except for this,” Rotella told Spezi in an interview. “This ending is a source of the greatest bitterness to me and many others.”
