The Monster of Florence (8 page)
E
ven at the time of the 1968 double homicide, the investigation uncovered many clues that a group of men had committed the killings, clues that were ignored or dismissed.
The police back then had questioned the six-year-old Natalino closely, the only witness to the crime. His story was confused. His father had been there. At one point during his questioning, he said, “I saw Salvatore in the cane.” He quickly reversed that, saying it wasn’t Salvatore but Francesco, and then he admitted it was his father who told him to say it was Francesco. He described the “shadow” of another man at the crime scene and spoke vaguely about an “Uncle Piero” as also being present, a man who “parted his hair on the right and worked at night”—which must have been his uncle, Piero Mucciarini, who worked as a baker. Then he said he couldn’t remember anything.
One of the carabinieri officers, frustrated by the child’s incessant contradictions, threatened him: “If you don’t tell the truth, I’ll take you back to your dead mother.”
The only solid piece of information the investigators felt they had gotten from the boy was that he had seen his father at the crime scene with a gun in hand. As the wronged husband, he was the perfect suspect. They took Stefano Mele in that very night and quickly demolished a pathetic alibi that he had been home sick. The paraffin-glove test revealed traces of nitrate powder between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, the classic pattern of someone who had recently fired a handgun. Even a simpleton like Mele realized that after the test, there was no point in further denial, and he confessed to being present at the scene of the crime. Perhaps it even dawned on him that he had been framed.
Cautiously, fearfully, Mele told the carabinieri interrogators that Salvatore Vinci was the actual killer. “One day,” he said, “he told me that he had a pistol . . . It was him, he was the jealous lover of my wife. It was him, who, after she left him, threatened to kill her, he said it more than once. One day when I asked him to give me back some money, do you know what he said? ‘I’ll kill your wife for you,’ that’s what he said, ‘and that’ll even up the debt.’ He really said that!”
But then, abruptly, Mele retracted his accusations against Salvatore Vinci and took full responsibility for the murder. As to what had happened to the gun, he never gave a satisfactory answer. “I threw it in the irrigation ditch,” he claimed—but a careful search that night of the ditch and the surrounding area revealed nothing.
The carabinieri did not like his story. It seemed improbable that this man who had difficulty finding his way around a room would, by himself, have been able to find the scene of the crime, without a car, many kilometers from his house, ambush the lovers, and place seven shots into them. When they pressed him, Stefano once again turned the accusation against Salvatore. “He was the only one who had a car,” he said.
The carabinieri decided to bring the two together to see what might happen. They picked up Salvatore and brought him down to the carabinieri barracks. Those present have said they never will forget that meeting.
Salvatore entered the room, suddenly the
balente
himself, full of swaggering self-assurance. He stopped and subjected Mele to a hard, wordless stare. Bursting into tears, Mele threw himself on the ground at Salvatore’s feet, groveling and sobbing. “Forgive me! Please forgive me!” he cried. Vinci turned around and left, never having spoken a word. He possessed an inexplicable hold over Stefano Mele, the ability to enforce an
omertà
so powerful that Mele would risk life in prison rather than challenge it. Mele immediately retracted his accusations of Salvatore being the shooter and once again accused Salvatore’s brother Francesco. But when pressed, Mele finally went back to insisting he had committed the double murder all by himself.
At this point the police and the examining magistrate (the judge who oversees the investigation) felt satisfied. Regardless of the particulars, the crime was solved in the main: they had the confession of the wronged husband, backed up by forensic evidence and the statements of his son. Mele was the only one charged with murder.
During the trial in the Court of Assizes, when Salvatore Vinci was brought in to testify, an odd scene occurred. As he was gesturing and speaking, his hand caught the attention of the judge. On one finger he wore a woman’s engagement ring.
“What is that ring?” the judge asked.
“It’s Barbara’s engagement ring,” he said, looking not at the judge but giving Mele another hard stare. “She gave it to me.”
Mele was convicted as the sole perpetrator of the double homicide and sentenced to fourteen years.
In 1982, investigators began to compile a list of possible accomplices to the 1968 killing. On the list were the two Vinci brothers, Salvatore and Francesco, as well as Piero Mucciarini and the “shadow” mentioned by Natalino.
Investigators felt sure that the gun had not been thrown in the ditch, as Stefano insisted. A gun used in a homicide is almost never casually sold, given away, or tossed. One of Mele’s accomplices, they felt, must have taken it home and carefully hidden it. Six years later, that gun had emerged from its hiding place, along with the same box of bullets, to become the Monster of Florence’s gun.
Tracing the gun, they realized, was the key to solving the case of the Monster of Florence.
The Sardinian Trail investigation zeroed in on Francesco Vinci first, because he was the
balente
, the cocky one, the guy with a rap sheet. He was violent, he had beaten up his girlfriends, and he hung around with gangsters. Salvatore, on the other hand, seemed quieter, a man who had always worked hard and stayed out of trouble. He had a spotless record. To the Tuscan police, who had no experience with serial killers, Francesco Vinci seemed the obvious choice.
Investigators dug up bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence against Francesco. They established that he had not been far from the scenes of each crime on the dates they were committed. Between robberies, thefts of livestock, and escapades with women, he moved around a great deal. At the time of the 1974 double homicide in Borgo San Lorenzo, for example, they placed him near the scene, due to an argument between him and a jealous husband, in which his favorite nephew, Antonio, the son of Salvatore Vinci, also took part. At the time of the Montespertoli killing, Francesco had also been nearby, again visiting Antonio, who happened to live at that time in a little town six kilometers from the scene.
A prime piece of evidence against Francesco, however, took a while to surface. In the middle of July, the carabinieri in a town on the southern Tuscan coast reported to investigators in Florence that on June 21 they had discovered a car hidden in the woods, covered with branches. They had finally gotten around to running the license plate and found it belonged to Francesco Vinci.
This seemed highly significant: June 21 happened to be the day that Spezi and other journalists had published the (false) reports that one of the victims of the Montespertoli killings may have survived long enough to talk. Perhaps the news had spooked the Monster after all, prompting him to hide his car.
The carabinieri took Vinci in and asked him for an explanation. He launched into a story about a woman and a jealous husband, but it didn’t make much sense and, furthermore, it didn’t seem to explain why he had hidden the car.
Francesco Vinci was arrested in August of 1982, two months after the Montespertoli killings. At the time, the examining magistrate said to the press, “The danger now is that a new killing might happen, even more spectacular than before. The Monster, in fact, might be tempted to reassert his paternity claim to the killings by moving yet again into action.” It was a strange thing for a judge to say on the arrest of a suspect, but it showed a high level of uncertainty among the investigators that they had the right man.
Fall and winter came, and there were no new killings. Francesco Vinci remained in custody. Florentines, however, did not rest easy: Francesco did not look like the intelligent and aristocratic Monster they had imagined; he was too much the image of a cheap hustler, ladies’ man, and macho charmer.
All of Florence awaited with trepidation the arrival of the warm weather of summer, the time favored by the Monster.
D
uring that fall and winter of 1982–83, Mario Spezi wrote a book on the Monster of Florence case. Entitled
Il Mostro di Firenze
, it was published in May. It told the story of the case from the 1968 killings to the Montespertoli double homicide. The book was devoured by a public terrified of what the coming season might bring. But as the balmy nights of summer settled on the green hills of Florence, no new killings occurred. Florentines began to hope that perhaps the police had gotten the right man after all.
In addition to writing a book and publishing articles on the Monster case, that summer Spezi wrote a puff piece about a young filmmaker named Cinzia Torrini, who had produced a charming little documentary about the life of Berto, the last ferryman across the Arno River—an ancient, wizened man who regaled his passengers with stories, legends, and old Tuscan sayings. Torrini was pleased by Spezi’s article, and she read his Monster book with interest. She called him to propose the idea of making a film on the Monster of Florence, and Spezi invited her to dinner at his apartment. It would be a late dinner, even by Italian standards, because Spezi kept journalistic hours.
And so it was that on the evening of September 10, 1983, Torrini found herself driving up the steep hill that led to Spezi’s apartment. As might be expected from a cinematographer, Torrini had a vivid imagination. The trees on either side of the road, she said later, looked like the hands of skeletons twisting and clawing in the wind. She could not stop herself from questioning her wisdom at going out in the heart of the Florentine hills on a moonless Saturday night to talk to someone about hideous crimes committed in the Florentine hills on moonless Saturday nights. Around one curve of the winding road, the headlights of her old Fiat 127 spotlighted a whitish thing in the middle of the narrow road. The “thing” spread itself, becoming enormous. It detached itself from the asphalt and rose, noiselessly, like a dirty sheet carried off by the wind, revealing itself to be a great white owl. Torrini felt a tightening of her stomach, because Italians believe, as the Romans did before them, that it is an ugly omen to encounter an owl in the nighttime. She almost turned around.
She parked her car in the small parking area outside the huge iron gates of the old villa turned into an apartment building and rang the bell. As soon as Spezi opened the green door to his apartment, her sense of disquiet vanished. The place was welcoming, warm, and eccentric, with an old seventeenth-century gambling table, called a scagliola, used as a coffee table, old photographs and drawings on the walls, a fireplace in one corner. The dining table had already been set on the terrace, under a white awning, overlooking the twinkling lights sprinkling the hills. Torrini laughed at herself for the absurd uneasiness she had felt on the drive up and put it out of her mind.
They spent much of the evening talking about the possibility of making a film on the case of the Monster of Florence.
“It seems to me it would be difficult,” Spezi said. “The story lacks a central character—the killer. I have my doubts the police have the right man, the man they have in prison awaiting trial, Francesco Vinci. It would be a murder mystery without an ending.”
Not a problem, Torrini explained. “The main character isn’t the killer: it’s the city of Florence itself—the city that discovers it harbors a monster within.”
Spezi explained why he thought Francesco Vinci was not the Monster. “All they have against him is that he was a lover of the first woman killed, that he beats up his girlfriends, and that he’s a crook. In my view, these are elements in his favor.”
“Why do you say that?” Torrini asked.
“He likes women. He’s a big success with women, and that’s enough to convince me he isn’t the Monster. He hits them but he doesn’t kill them. The Monster
destroys
women. He hates them because he wants them and can’t have them. That’s his frustration, the thing that damns him, and so he possesses them physically in the only way he can, which is to steal the part most indicative of their femininity.”
“If you believe that,” Torrini said, “then it must mean the Monster is impotent. Is that what you think?”
“More or less.”
“What do you make of the ritual aspects of the killings, the careful placement of the body? The stick from a grapevine inserted in the vagina, for example, which recalls the words of Saint John that the ‘vines which beareth not fruit He taketh away’? A killer who is punishing couples for having sex outside of marriage?”
Spezi blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling and laughed. “That’s a bunch of twaddle. You know why he used an old piece of grapevine? If you look at the crime scene photos, you see that they were parked right next to a vineyard! He simply grabbed the closest stick he could find. To me, his use of a stick to violate a woman seems to confirm that he is not exactly Superman. He didn’t and probably can’t rape his victims.”
Toward the end of the evening, Spezi opened his book and read the last page out loud. “Many investigators feel the case of the Monster of Florence is solved. But if, at the end of a dinner passed in pleasant company, you were to ask me what I thought, I would tell you the truth: that it is with a strong sense of unease that I answer the first ringing of the telephone on a Sunday morning. Especially if the previous Saturday evening was the night of the new moon.”
After Mario set down his book, a silence fell on the terrace that overlooked the Florentine hills.
And then the telephone rang.
It was a lieutenant of the local carabinieri, one of Spezi’s contacts. “Mario, they’ve just found two people killed in a VW camper in Giogoli, above Galluzzo. The Monster? I don’t know. The dead are two men. But if I were you, I’d head over there for a look.”
