It is a cold case that after 50 years still haunts Italy today. An epic travesty of justice shrouded in mystery and deception. The case known in Italy and internationally as the Monster of Florence involved the ritualistic serial murder of eight young couples accompanied by the horrific mutilation of the sexual organs of the female victims.
Coverups and evidence tampering have muddied the case so badly that more than five decades later, utter confusion reigns. Evidence points to a powerful esoteric sect believed to be behind the killings.
Magistrates, police officers, secret services, the Freemasonry, the highest circles of Florentine society, and two high-level magistrates participated or covered for the culprits. Three major investigative leads have failed to close the case once and for all. First, a farm laborer, a postman, and a quarry worker dubbed the “picnicking friends” are convicted as the killers, revealing a terrifying subculture of Satanism and sexual perversion in the beautiful Chianti countryside. Then, this chilling phone call opens a whole new lead.
“Grand Nardi.”
The threat refers to the mysterious death of Perugian gastroenterologist Francesco Narducci, whose body was fished out of Lake Trasimeno exactly a month after the last of the official Monster of Florence murders. An autopsy carried out 16 years later reveals an astounding tale of murder, a body swap, and a cover-up that also involves Perugia’s Freemasonry.
“The Freemasonry did discuss the issue internally and took certain decisions.”
The prosecutors believe that the Narducci murder and the Monster of Florence case overlap here in this quaint Tuscan town of San Casciano Val di Pesa, where the doctor comes in contact with the town pharmacist, also a suspect along with the “picnicking friends,” Pietro Pacciani, Giancarlo Lotti, and Mario Vanni. The Narducci trail goes cold after judicial delays cause it to lapse under Italy’s statute of limitations. The pharmacist of San Casciano is found not guilty on 14 counts of murder in a controversial fast-track trial. However, a third line of investigation takes shape when investigators turn their attention to a former French Foreign Legion paratrooper named Jean Pierre Vigilanti, identified as a suspect right after the last murder but ignored for more than 30 years. He has a history of violence, already convicted for murder, is a small arms collector who owns a gun like the one used in the monster killings, and is a friend of Pietro Pacciani.
Today we can reveal documents that were found by investigators 35 years after they were drawn up by law enforcers. Kept hidden for decades, these documents are just the latest proof of the miscarriage of justice, purposeful pursuit of false leads, and cover-ups that have deprived dozens of families of the justice they deserve.
“This investigation troubled someone in the upper levels of the criminal organization because there is no doubt that there was an upper level.”
At least 15 other people in some way associated with the case are silenced before they can speak, suggesting that the Monster of Florence murders are much more than a series of ritual killings or the work of a single assassin. Luciano Malatesta’s sister was a witness to the satanic orgies and shared the terrible secret with her brother before she too was killed.
“My sister told me this. She told me straight up that in this whole story that involved our uncle and aunt that also was connected to the Monster of Florence, to the murders, was made possible with the involvement of a magistrate in Florence, and she also mentioned his name. She mentioned several names, but the name of this magistrate was prosecutor Vigna.”
For 40 years, the instigators of these horrific crimes and their friends in high places have been protected by a code of guilty silence.
Florence, central Italy, 1981. Young couples still find moments of intimacy on the backseat of their cars in the shady and cool hills around the city. But for some of these couples, the country roads and paths will become a place of terror and death in the hands of a band of hired assassins. But the network of clients that commissioned and paid for the murders and protected the material killers has been kept secret.
Today, for the first time, photographs and documents never seen before shed new light on the shocking truth. Michele Giuttari is a decorated cop who fought the Mafia in the most dangerous, dark corners of southern Italy. From 1995 onwards, he heads the Florence Criminal Investigation Squad and studies the massive documentation gathered in the case files over the years.
“Not least, one morning I found that all four tires of my private car had been slashed.”
“I received death threats that I have to say I had not received even in previous years when I had investigated and distinguished myself personally as a witness in trials against ‘Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia.”
“I asked myself, who did my investigation of possible masterminds threaten?”
The sky is pitch black, as there is a new moon on the night of the 6th of June 1981. This country road close to the famous Anastasia disco at Mosciano di Scandicci is the place where Giovanni and Carmela De Nuccio meet a horrific end. Their bodies are found the next day by the police, riddled with a hail of .22 caliber bullets whose cartridges have an “H” etched on their casing bottoms. Carmela’s vagina has been cut out and taken away. The murder hits the headlines. Investigators find a peeping Tom who knows a bit too much about what happened and arrest him. But his wife gets an anonymous phone call and is told that he’ll soon be freed. Sure enough, four months later, while the peeping Tom is still in jail, Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi are murdered at Travalle on October the 22nd, 1981. Susanna’s genitals are mutilated and taken away from the crime scene. The killer leaves a size 44 bootprint. The peeping Tom is released from prison.
It’s another new moon, June the 19th, 1982. The monster makes his first mistake. Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini are making out in the back of their car along the road to the village of Baccaiano, south of San Casciano. They have just finished, and he has moved to the driver’s seat when he sees something that scares him. He puts the car in reverse but drives into a ditch on the other side of the road. The killer shoots out his headlights then murders Paolo and Antonella. The car is now exposed to passing traffic, so the killer melts into the night without completing his macabre mutilation of the woman’s genitalia. The murder of Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini is the third Monster of Florence murder. Someone working on the case remembers a similar killing going back eight years in 1974. It took place here in the Mugello Hills northeast of Florence between Borgo San Lorenzo and Vicchio. The couple are killed in his Fiat 127. He is shot with five .22 caliber bullets, and she is finished off, stabbed with a screwdriver and ice pick. Her sexual organs are not cut out, but a vine branch is inserted into her vagina. Her lower abdomen and left breast are stabbed no less than 90 times. A local farmer finds the bodies. Investigators think there may have been more than one attacker.
Now, an anonymous letter, one of dozens that will condition the work of detectives, suggests the investigators look at another case, a crime of passion going back to 1968. Miraculously, what was left of the rounds of ammunition used in the murder are found clipped to the case file. Experts say the bullets match the monster’s weapon. Someone wants detectives to link the 1968 Crime of Passion to the Monster of Florence serial murders. Normally, the rounds should have been destroyed as the case is closed. The man convicted for the 1968 murder of his wife and her lover, Sardinian Stefano Mele, is already in jail. A Sardinian shepherd named Francesco Vinci and his brother Salvatore were also implicated in the 1968 murder. So investigators now assume the gun is theirs. Francesco Vinci is arrested on the assumption that he owns the weapon used in those murders, which investigators think is the same gun the monster used. It is the beginning of what comes to be known as the “Sardinian thread,” focusing on a gang of Sardinians also involved in kidnapping for ransom. However, Francesco Vinci will soon be released as the monster strikes again on the 9th of September 1983, while Vinci is sitting in jail.
Carefree German tourists, Jens Uwe Rüsch and Horst Wilhelm Meyer, park their Volkswagen camper in a vineyard in front of the La Fattoria villa north of San Casciano. Their bodies are found the following evening by a fellow German, Rolf Reicker, who had told them the night before not to park their van there near the villa, infamous for its wild parties. They have been shot through the rear window, and torn-up gay porn magazines are strewn around the van. Investigators think that the killer might have confused them for a man and woman. The trajectory of the shots fired provides a key clue about the killer, suggesting he must be taller than 1.80 meters. If the monster is a lone assassin, he can’t be Francesco Vinci, who is released from jail but will continue to be part of this story together with Rolf Reicker. The elusive Monster of Florence is now spreading terror throughout the community, especially among young people who no longer feel safe.
“There was a general atmosphere of fear both in the city and the countryside wherever the monster struck. Young people changed their habits, and going to secluded places in the country became dangerous. I was young at the time and lived in Florence, and getting a bit of privacy involved being really organized. People’s lives changed because there was a general sense of danger.”
It’s the 29th of July 1984. Claudio Stefanacci and Pia Rontini are massacred in this clearing near Vicchio in the Mugello Hills. They are shot with the usual .22 caliber rounds, but she manages to get away. She runs a few meters before being shot again and then mutilated. Her left breast is sliced off along with her vagina and taken away. A new clue comes to light. She works at the Vicchio train station bar where, according to the bar owner, a man with a large ring on his finger had watched her and her boyfriend. The last murder opens a painful and complex chapter in the Monster of Florence case.
It’s the 6th of September 1985. French couple Nadine Mauriot and Jean Michel Kraveichvili have set up their tent in the Scopeti clearing north of San Casciano. They arrived in Italy on the 4th, and on the 6th are seen at the local country fair at Calenzano near to San Casciano. They are attacked while they are making love. The coroner will establish she is shot dead immediately, but Jean Michel is an athlete and gets out of the tent despite being wounded and runs a few meters barefoot but is shot again and then caught by the killer and stabbed to death. For the first time, the killer hides the body, but there are no signs that he dragged it. He then returns and mutilates Nadine just outside the tent, taking breast and vagina away and then hiding her back in the tent. The bodies are found on the 9th of September by mushroom hunters. The many mistakes made by forensic experts will haunt the case for years to come. Two bullet heads are left behind, one in the pillow and one in the duvet, only to be discovered more than 30 years later. The woman’s body is moved before the forensic squad arrives. And the police miss a bloodstained paper tissue and surgical gloves found later, creating friction among police and prosecutors. The time and even the day of death are questioned. The crime scene is irrevocably contaminated and the investigation compromised.
These are the 16 murders officially attributed to the Monster of Florence. But many other people associated with the case are also murdered. For the first time, Luciano Malatesta speaks on camera. Today he restores frescoes, but he is haunted by what he heard and saw when he lived in the monster’s killing fields. He has paid an incredibly high personal price. Four members of his family died, and his sister Milva Malatesta revealed the identity of one of the members of a satanic sect to him and was about to go public when she was killed.
“Milva died a terrible death. Poor girl. There’s no death penalty for the mistakes you make. I—I can’t bear to remember the kids, too. All these young people died violent deaths. Someone has to get the truth out.”
“But I can say that a powerful machine for mystification and manipulation has been set in motion.”
In the days following the discovery of the bodies of Nadine and Jean Michel, the monster begins to goad the police. He sends a sliver of Nadine’s left breast to Silvia Della Monica, an investigating magistrate who, however, is no longer on the case. The envelope is sent from San Piero a Sieve. Then, three anonymous letters are sent to the investigating magistrates, Pier Luigi Vigna, Paolo Canessa, and Francesco Fleury. They contain a surgical glove with a single .22 caliber H-series bullet in it and a frightening typewritten threat. A similar bullet to the ones used in the murders is found in the car park of a hospital at Ponticari in Bagno a Ripoli. Then, the murders suddenly stop, although the investigation continues.
The Carabinieri military police meanwhile gather thousands of pages of information and create a list of 250 suspects. Two of these have their homes searched within a week of the last murder at the Scopeti clearing in 1985. Standing at number 31 on the list is Pietro Pacciani, native of Vicchio but resident in Mercatale. He is violent, a sex maniac, and later will be jailed for repeatedly raping his daughters.
“The monster murders are very different from anything Pacciani might have done.”
“If we analyze how the monster treated the victims, we see that he was completely detached. There was neither mental nor physical contact with them.”
“Pacciani was called ‘vampire’ or ‘flash-face’ because he would get all red. He was a sex maniac. He would have touched, he would have raped, he would have taken advantage of the situation even if he went on to murder.”
38th on the list of suspects is another native of Vicchio, now resident in Prato, Jean Pierre Vigilanti, a multi-murderer. His home is searched just eight days after the Scopeti clearing murder. And this note is written by the Carabinieri with handwritten comments by the commander of the Prato station who found ammo that matched the monster’s weapon. This document, held by the CIS, the Interior Ministry Secret Service, is only discovered in 2018. As a young man, Vigilanti sought sex in male public toilets. He was jailed for public acts of homosexual obscenity, murdered two Arabs in Marseilles after serving in the French Foreign Legion, and he is also presumed as involved in a previous murder by Pacciani back in 1951. He keeps newspaper cuttings of the Monster of Florence murders in his home and his mother’s, including this one dating back to the 1974 murder. Why is he a suspect? Because he knows how to handle weapons. He is violent. He spent many years in the French Foreign Legion. But above all, he is born and raised in Vicchio.
At number 181 is another name that will occupy the crime pages of newspapers for years to come. Francesco Narducci is a gastroenterologist and gynecologist, a brilliant doctor and a Freemason. He dies, apparently from drowning in Lake Trasimeno, exactly a month to the day from the last murder. A later probe into his death reveals a shocking secret.
“We have documents showing that the special branch in Perugia assigned its most senior inspector, the criminal investigation unit’s most senior inspector, to investigate the Scopeti clearing murder, the Monster of Florence murders, and specifically Francesco Narducci in the days following the murder at the Scopeti clearing without being specifically requested to do so by the Florence investigators.”
The names of Pacciani, Narducci, and Vigilanti will dominate the 40 years of investigations that follow. But without a smoking gun, none of the leads ever brings the case to a close.
August 1989. The investigators received the results of an FBI analysis of forensic evidence sent to them by the Italian Interior Ministry who had requested the Americans’ help. The FBI uses the most sophisticated technologies to study serial murders, adopting computer analysis to find common threads between murder cases and to better understand the minds, motives, and methods of killers. They say that the Monster of Florence is an Italian male, likely native to the area, as he is comfortable on and around the crime scenes and acts alone. He may have military experience, shows signs of sadism, and hates women. He suffers from sexual dysfunction and never rapes the woman, rather eliminates the male member of the couple to avoid interference in his macabre rites.
“In 1988 to ’89, the FBI experts gave their response saying it could be a solitary serial killer who lived in the area. The lone assassin was a hypothesis that many in Italy followed, but they correctly noted that their analysis was just partial. And in their explanation, very properly, they said, ‘We express this judgment based on our experience gained on cases in the United States, but our analysis could change if we were to become aware of other facts.’ And so they were inviting Italy to keep them informed of any new developments.”
The FBI profilers described the weapons, the knife and the gun, as ritual tools conserved religiously, just like the body parts kept as fetishes. They believe he revels in his fame, clipping and conserving newspaper articles that describe his crimes and taking perverse pleasure in goading and challenging investigators.
The investigation ignores a number of details reported by the FBI that will later become useful. Seven years after the last double murder, Pietro Pacciani is in jail for having raped his daughters. Another anonymous letter claiming he is the monster reopens the case in 1992, and his house is searched again. Miraculously, an intact .22 caliber round of ammunition is found in a vine trellis in his garden. Pacciani is eventually charged with murder in a high-profile televised trial that stirred a massive media frenzy. Serena Skeri was a young journalist at the time and followed in the footsteps of her journalist father in telling the story of the Monster of Florence. They covered the trial together.
“During the trial in the Florence Law Court, people pushed and shoved to get to see the so-called monster. All the people who spoke at the trial described the squalid reality, or although the trial did have its light moments because some of the witnesses were quite funny, although obviously some of the testimony was terrible and sad, such as when the daughters of Pacciani took the stand. It was a very sad moment. We—we all felt really sorry for them.”
The evidence brought against Pacciani includes anonymous letters, the unspent bullet, the Sketchbook that might have belonged to the young Germans, a camping soapbox, violent pornography, and satanic images. Pacciani’s lawyers are Rosario Bevacqua and Pietro Fioravanti. Alessio Fioravanti, the son of Pacciani’s lawyer, is a teenager at the time.
“As soon as I arrived at his home, he asked me if I wanted some biscuits. I said no because I was scared. But actually, Pacciani was a special person for my father. A sex maniac towards his daughters, a monster from that point of view. But he was also a typical Tuscan farm laborer, rough, who swore now and again, which is totally normal, but not really scary when you were there.”
The Fioravanti law offices are swamped with anonymous letters.
“Let’s say that at that time, we constantly received anonymous letters, threats from people who said they were the monster or who knew who the monster was. People who were trying to help in their opinion. And events that directly involved my dad. Once, someone unscrewed the front wheel of my dad’s car just up to a certain point, and as he was on the Ponte al Pino, he saw the wheel come off the car. He was driving slowly, and the car just dropped on the side where the wheel was missing and scraped a bit.”
Among the witnesses are Pacciani’s wife and daughters who describe him as violent and cruel, while another witness confirms that he saw Pacciani with another man in Pacciani’s car on the night of the murder, the 8th of September 1985, close to the crime scene. He is the perfect lone killer. His defense counsel try to prove that the bullet which he denies belongs to him does not necessarily link him to the murders. It is too new. Later, the satanic paintings deposited as evidence against him are discovered to be the work of a Chilean refugee artist. Pacciani says that he had found the watercolor pad and the soapbox, possibly belonging to the German victims, in a rubbish tip. He claims he is innocent and being framed, a scapegoat.
“So when Pacciani said something, if he ever did, what I remember is that he simply pronounced one sentence: ‘Why are you investigating me instead of the famous doctor?’ My father fought to the end and never gave up trying to prove Pacciani was innocent. He saw something in Pacciani that wasn’t the monster.”
It’s the 1st of November 1994, nine years after the last murder attributed to the Monster of Florence. Pietro Pacciani is handed a life sentence for seven out of the eight crimes.
The new head of the Florence Crime Investigation Unit, Michele Giuttari, convinced that there is a wider conspiracy, asks for more forensic tests of evidence that had been overlooked and takes a fresh, more clinical look at the documentation.
“It is very strange that the case files of a trial, the 1968 trial that had already been held and had already produced a sentence—so a closed case—that the files still contain bullets used in the crime when the law says that the bullets used in a crime should be kept in the specifically designated evidence storeroom and not in a case file folder. And furthermore, that when a case is closed and a man sentenced, the law says that the bullets should be destroyed together with the weapon. So I found this extremely odd, and maybe this is the first great anomaly of this case.”
The original ballistics report from 1968 describes a swelling at the base of the cartridge shells and the almost total absence of the extractor marks, two signs of an old and worn-out percussion chamber. The bullets clipped to the case file did not show either of these signs of wear and tear, but that goes overlooked in later reports. In all these cartridges found at crime scenes as well as in the case file, extractor marks are clearly visible, and no swelling at the base of the cartridges is mentioned. Either the false cartridges found in the folder were planted evidence, Michele Giuttari thinks, or there may be two weapons.
According to Giuttari, there is no certainty that the rounds were fired by the same weapon nor that they came from the same pack. The “H” series wasn’t a brand that belonged to a unique batch of ammo. At that time, all .22 rounds had an “H” etched on the base of the cartridge in honor of Henry Winchester. It was also said later that the rounds all came from the same pack, another piece of false information because some of the bullets were copper-sheathed and some were pure lead.
If there is no certainty with regards to the rounds used, then a key piece of evidence against Pacciani, the .22 caliber bullet found in his garden, loses significance. Michele Giuttari thinks that he had accomplices. He follows the money, which the farm laborer from Mercatale had too much of.
“In those years, he bought two houses, a car, and he bought postal bonds in several post offices in the area around San Casciano—not only in San Casciano. Sometimes on the same day and even shortly before and after a murder.”
Despite the huge amount of paperwork, not all the documentation is delivered to Michele Giuttari. The CIS, the Interior Ministry Secret Service, opens a case file and begins investigating, but this document remains secret. This report is dated November 1985 and lists all the crimes and the resulting criminal record of Jean Pierre Vigilanti. Michele Giuttari knows nothing about this note, one of hundreds like it, and continues to search for Pacciani’s accomplices.
Michele Giuttari identifies Pietro Pacciani’s best friends who spend time with him in this bar, the Bar Chint of San Casciano, next to the former Calamandrei pharmacy.
“To identify Pacciani’s accomplices, we needed to investigate Pacciani’s friends at the time.”
“Among these, his strongest ties seemed to me to be with Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti.”
“I asked for authorization to tap the phones of Mario Vanni and of the Bar of San Casciano where Giancarlo Lotti spent his time, because the place where he lived, which was a sort of hostel managed by a priest, had no phone.”
Pacciani, Vanni, and Lotti all go to the San Casciano bar. They visit prostitutes together. They are peeping Toms together. Luciano Malatesta, as a young child, knew these men for what they were—beasts.
“Vanni was the postman. Vanni—Vanni had sexual relations with my mother many times. I was a witness to it. I said so in the Pacciani trial. I was five or six years old; I saw it all. She had sex with Pacciani too, she said so herself. Pacciani was famous for being violent. He beat my dad together with my uncle Antonio who played an active part in this whole business and had a role in the death of my father. My uncle held my dad and Pacciani beat him and said to him, ‘As soon as I find you alone, I’ll kill you.’ It was a gang, you see, up there in San Casciano. Many people know, many people—some even gave me details, speaking to me in public places. But when I said, ‘Come and tell the investigators,’ they pretended not to remember. The whole story still scares people.”
Vanni and Pacciani raped Luciano Malatesta’s mother and, according to him, were part of a gang of criminals working for a coven of devil worshippers led by his aunt and uncle. Several prostitutes who worked in Florence and lived in this area of San Casciano begin to collaborate, telling detectives what they know. Among them is Gabriella Ghiribelli, one of the prostitutes visited by clients from San Casciano.
“I opened the scope of the investigation to several women and got to a certain Gabriella.”
“Gabriella calls up Lotti and Gabriella complains that because of him she has been involved in the investigation and has been questioned by the police.”
“Lotti asks her a lot of questions and wants to know, ‘What did the police ask?’ He wants to know what she said, and she says that ‘You were there because you told me you stopped to relieve yourself.'”
While Commissioner Giuttari pushes forward on the investigation, the Italian justice system delivers a shock verdict. The judge in the Pacciani appeals trial refuses to hear the new witnesses and, on the 13th of February 1996, declares Pacciani innocent.
Giancarlo Lotti is a quarry worker who has sexual relations with Pacciani and goes to prostitutes with him. Under pressure from investigators, he makes key, albeit confused, confessions.
“Questioned by three prosecutors, Vigna, Fleury, and Canessa, he began to confess and collaborate. He spoke of the 1982 murder and then of the 1984 murder in Vicchio, stating that he was the one who identified the couple to Vanni.”
“He provided a number of details that were important to us, such as the fact that the 1983 murder of the two young Germans he said was to get Francesco Vinci out of jail. Because since it was believed that the killer acted alone, whoever was in jail for the crimes was immediately freed.”
Giancarlo Lotti confesses to killing the two Germans himself, blackmailed by Pacciani because he’s had sex with him. Lotti, however, makes many mistakes that lead to criticism of the investigation. Francesco Cappelletti is co-author of a book on the Scopeti clearing murder.
“The prosecutor asks him, ‘Where were the two German men?’ ‘In the back of the van.’ Lotti says. ‘No, in the part of the van where the wheel is, but in the back or in the driving seat?’ asked the prosecutor. ‘In the driving seat.’ In the back of the van or in the front of the van? In the front of the van—when we all know that the two young Germans were murdered in the back of the van. It’s an important detail, significant for someone who took part in a murder. You can’t forget or get this kind of detail wrong.”
However, Lotti provides other unknown details, such as how they washed the knife in the Sieve River after the 1984 murder. His description of the last murder does, however, contain contradictions. Lotti confesses that he was the lookout on the 8th of September, the controversial date of the murder established by the investigators, while Mario Vanni cut into the tent and Pietro Pacciani shot through the front of the tent.
“I asked myself, why does this person tell such lies? Is there ever a declaration by Lotti in the 30-odd depositions he made—there are about 30—in which he says something that is not already known? Because the media always covered this case in detail. So the papers spoke of it, and I noticed—I may be wrong, but I don’t think so—that not a single detail that Lotti describes has not been covered by the papers.”
“1982 murder where he says he was the lookout. He showed us where he stood and what the others did. And then for the 1985 murder, he provides us with a completely new detail that no one had ever mentioned before, describing the cutting of the tent from the bottom up. For us, this was the most important detail to show that he was a reliable and credible witness.”
None of the killers was fast enough or agile enough to stop the fugitive Frenchman, although Lotti says that he was just four meters from where he was struck down. The investigators think there may have been a fourth man, the “famous doctor,” more athletic than the others, the one for whom the killers left the fetishes on the side of the road, the “famous doctor” that many witnesses speak about, including Pacciani who said in his first trial, “Why don’t you investigate the famous doctor?”
“There are many people who mention this doctor who was seen around San Casciano. Some of these people identify the doctor as Francesco Narducci.”
Giuttari listens to Giancarlo Lotti and the telephone intercepts for hours and hours, and Lotti’s story is confirmed by other witnesses. The picture that emerges from all the testimony is an entirely new scenario of satanic rites and orgies that take place in the villas surrounding San Casciano, such as La Fattoria or the decrepit farmhouse belonging to a new protagonist of this story, Salvatore Indovino, known as the “sorcerer of San Casciano.” Now the investigators can connect the black masses to the murders and believe the fetishes were used for magic rites. In 1981, the young Luciano Malatesta comes to live in the house next door to the crumbling farmhouse where Salvatore Indovino lives with his companion, Filippa Nicoletti. He finds out what goes on inside the house from his sister, Milva Malatesta, who becomes a member of the coven with her husband, Vincenzo Lomonaco.
“I was scared of Indovino from the outset. He gave you a feeling of fear. He was scary. I knew he had been in jail, five years in jail. That’s what Milva’s first husband, Vincenzo Lomonaco, told me. He’d been in jail too and made friends with Indovino. He wore dark glasses and looked like a violent character. His house was a mess. And when you went there, there was a staircase and on the right was the kitchen and on the left a room that was closed. Okay, it was all dirty, all messy. You see, once by mistake I tried to go into the room on the left and Filippa caught my hand and said, ‘You must never go in there.'”
According to Luciano Malatesta, the black masses were held elsewhere, places where his sister Milva met Florentine high society, powerful people who owned villas surrounding San Casciano who were untouchable. She told him that among those present was the future anti-Mafia commissioner, Pier Luigi Vigna.
“There were important people of Florence there, Vigna, Calamandrei, my uncle and aunt and they wore black hoods, passed a cup full of blood around, and held orgies, had sex. She mentioned a schoolmate of mine from elementary school and said he took part in the rites. And I was shocked. How is that possible? I said, ‘He’s my age.’ At that time he was a child. Were there children too? Yes, there were children.”
The picture that emerges from the investigation is terrifying: a death squad that included not only Pacciani, Lotti, and Vanni but also possibly the Vinci brothers, worked together with prostitutes of the area for a network of rich Florentines who participated in sinister magic rites. Milva was not the only woman to identify prosecutor Vigna as a member of the sect. Several witnesses describe Luciano Malatesta’s aunt as the priestess and Salvatore Indovino as the high priest who also took care of the practicalities. Among the witnesses to the rites is prostitute Gabriella Ghiribelli, whose clients came from all social classes, from the laborers Pacciani, Lotti, and Vanni to well-to-do professionals of San Casciano and Florence. Just as Pacciani is about to be retried based on confessions from his fellow “picnicking friends,” the story takes another disturbing twist.
It’s 1998, 13 years after the last double murder. Pietro Pacciani dies in mysterious circumstances on the eve of going back on trial. Terrified he would be silenced, he stayed locked up in his home. But death found him anyway. Alessio Fioravanti often discussed his death with his father, Pietro, who was Pacciani’s defense lawyer, Pacciani.
“With regards to the death of Pacciani, my father always said that he had been murdered.”
“Not only because of the way the body was found halfway between the bedroom and the kitchen with his trousers pulled down, and then they found this drug that was dangerous for someone with his heart condition.”
“And was an autopsy carried out or not? When my father asked for the forensic report, he never received it.”
According to forensic experts, hypostatic pools showed Pacciani’s body had been moved. The Carabinieri found a strange piece of fabric soaked in bleach attached to his shirt by three safety pins and covering his genitals like an apron. A strange sequence of deaths connected in some way with the Monster of Florence murders dogs the investigation. Florentine prostitutes who took part in the orgies turn up dead. Francesco Vinci, the Sardinian connected to the satanic sects, who was arrested in 1982 as the Monster of Florence and then released, is found hog-tied and burned in the boot of his car. Milva Malatesta’s husband, Vincenzo Lomonaco, is found hanged in his cell the day before he is to be released. Milva Malatesta, Francesco Vinci, and Salvatore Indovino’s lover who also took part in the rites, is burned in her car along with her three-year-old son, Mirco, a few weeks before Pacciani is officially indicted.
“I think she wanted to speak out. She realized she’d been used. She’d made big mistakes. First, Lomonaco was killed. A number of people died. So she realized that she was in danger and had to speak.”
“And he was about to be indicted. Within 10 days of each other, Francesco Vinci and his shepherd assistant are found hog-tied and burned in the boot of his car.”
“And then Milva Malatesta and her three-year-old son are also burned in her car.”
“And a prostitute used by Mario Vanni, one that he called ‘the kind prostitute,’ is killed. These are all deaths that in some way are connected to the case.”
“Whoever came across Indovino died. Milva died in that horrible way. And she told me these things. So I imagine what terrible things must have happened in that house. And if they didn’t actually happen there, they were organized there. Lomonaco too died in strange circumstances. He died the day before he was due to leave jail. They found him hanged with his two feet touching the ground. He too, in a way that we’ve seen before. So he dies too. Whoever was in contact with Indovino came to a terrible end.”
Worse yet, the young Luciano Malatesta finds out that the man investigating his sister’s death is, in fact, the man she saw at the black masses.
“Once I saw this tall man arrive. He was smoking and he started talking to my aunt. I was going away with my back to wait for someone who was going to pick me up. I went past him and he did everything he could to hide his face. Then years later, I was talking to prosecutor Vigna and we were waiting for Dr. Canessa to arrive, and he lit a cigarette and began to smoke. He looked at me and grit his teeth. And so it came naturally for me to ask him, ‘But you knew my aunt Maria?’ And he said, ‘Shut up.’ He said, ‘Shut up.’ That’s it.”
Many potential witnesses die and Pietro Fioravanti makes a list of them. There were prostitutes, a friend of Vanni’s, Vinci, Pacciani. But despite this, prosecutor Paolo Canessa and detective Michele Giuttari managed to get the “picnicking friends” guilty verdict confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2010, 16 years after the last double murder. Still, the collateral deaths and the series of anonymous letters suggest that the conspiracy is far wider than just the three middle-aged men.
“After the sentencing of Pacciani’s accomplices, the so-called ‘picnicking friends’—a sentence that was confirmed in just three years after the first guilty verdict, giving the case not only validity on the ground but also all the way up the judicial chain—now we were able to concentrate our investigation on the instigators as requested by the Florence prosecutor’s office. However, this phase was marked by the strangest events.”
Now Giuttari and Canessa can investigate the minds behind the murders, and the second phase of the Monster of Florence investigation begins in 2011. This threatening phone call is recorded by a beautician from Fino, near Perugia. Her son was the target of a Satanist sect operating in the area.
For the first time, Pacciani and Narducci are mentioned in the same criminal scenario, the caller claiming both were murdered by a satanic sect. The death of the young doctor Francesco Narducci goes back to October 1985. Handsome, a member of Perugia’s high society and popular with his patients, Narducci dies in strange circumstances exactly a month after the last Monster of Florence murder. Francesco Narducci was already the subject of gossip in the 1980s. But the creepy call triggers a new investigation, which is handed to Perugia prosecutor Giuliano Mignini. The case will leave indelible marks on his professional and personal life.
“These telephone calls refer to the Monster of Florence murders. This woman was insulted. ‘We will have you end up like Pacciani.’ Then the name Pacciani joined by the doctor in Lake Trasimeno who is later called the ‘great Dr. Narducci.’ These telephone calls were recorded by a beautician of Fino who recorded them on tapes. And since they refer to Narducci and the murder of this doctor, I opened a murder investigation.”
Just as the Perugia investigation is getting underway, Michele Giuttari searches the home of the San Casciano pharmacist, Francesco Calamandrei, after a declaration by his wife, Mariella Cioli, who had accused him in 1988 of being the Monster of Florence and keeping the fetishes in their freezer. The police don’t find the fetishes, but what they do find in the raid is disturbing all the same.
“Francesco Calamandrei came out of the previous investigation of the Monster of Florence.”
“We had hypothesized during our investigation into the instigators that the murders had some esoteric meaning that lay behind the removal of the intimate parts of the female victims.”
“And we found that there was in fact a certain sense of perversion in the documents, magazines, and other material we found in the home of the pharmacist.”
Paolo Canessa and Michele Giuttari now believe that there was a group of rich and powerful individuals living around San Casciano who held black masses and orgies, sometimes with children present. Once in a while, someone paid the group of killers to murder the couples in order to obtain the fetish body parts from the murdered women. This had happened before.
“There was a case in the 1980s, between 1982 and 1984, in the United States known as the case of the Chicago Rippers.”
“It was unknown in Italy at the time and involved a number of women being taken one at a time to a house, a closed house where they were murdered, and parts amputated in a way that was similar to the murders around Florence. Undeniable signs were found that the murders happened in that house and that they were accompanied by satanic rites.”
Lake Trasimeno, Umbria. Dozens of photographs taken on the 13th of October 1985 by a photographer from the paper La Nazione had never been seen all in sequence before. They prove fundamental in the investigation into the death of Francesco Narducci and take the prosecutors 16 years back in time to the day a body was found in the lake.
It is the 8th of October 1985. He goes to work as usual, and the day seems normal, but the doctor receives a telephone call, and he goes down to Lake Trasimeno where his family had a villa. He takes a boat that he kept at the jetty at San Feliciano and heads towards Polvese Island and then disappears. The body found in the lake is identified as Francesco Narducci, a Perugian doctor whom many suspected of being linked to the Monster of Florence killings.
A body is recovered at 7:20 in the morning on Sunday the 13th of October, and it is recognized as Narducci’s. This body is brought to the jetty at Sant’Arcangelo and partially undressed. It is not taken to the morgue. There is no autopsy, no examination. The coroner is not called. Rather, a young and inexperienced woman doctor is called who declares that the cause of death was drowning following a probable, but not certain, fainting fit. The body is taken away. The Narducci family clams up in silence.
But 16 years later, Giuliano Mignini examines the death certificate and finds errors. The photographs show the body black and swollen. Mignini requests an analysis of the photographs to establish the height of the body based on the paving of the jetty, that is the same today as it was then. He finds out that the body recovered from the lake is shorter than Narducci and he suspects that it is not the doctor’s at all, that there has been a body swap. That the doctor from Perugia was killed and his body hidden, that the corpse of an unknown man was thrown in the lake to be recovered and put in the coffin on the jetty. This corpse was later exchanged with the real Narducci’s, who was then buried while the unknown man’s body was disposed of. A shell game with corpses.
“So then I carried out an initial investigation to have an overview of the situation based on the paperwork because I didn’t want to have the body exhumed straight away.”
“There’s no problem. This could have happened, or that. Instead, Professor Peruchi, the head of forensic medicine, told me that he needed to carry out an autopsy because on the basis of the paperwork alone anything could have happened.”
Despite the opposition of the Narducci family, Giuliano Mignini calls for the exhumation of the body, although he is ridiculed for believing that there could have been a body swap. It is 16 years after the body was found in the lake. But science doesn’t lie.
“As soon as we open the coffin, we realize that the body found in the lake could not have been the same one.”
“The body recovered in the lake was bald, had a big head, had a big belly.”
“While Narducci had all his hair, a narrow skull, a 48 small-size trousers that were big enough to allow for the presence of a sort of apron.”
Francesco Narducci was throttled to death, and the body found in the lake passed off as his, although it was another unknown man. The coroner, Peruchi, has no doubt.
“The conclusions are extremely clear. He said, ‘We have the clear breaking of the upper left-hand horn of the thyroid cartilage.’ That’s to say an object that is up here, more or less.”
“And he said that this breakage was due to pressure exerted over 1 cm, 2 cm, locally exerted and growing in power.”
“That was intentional because if the pressure increased, it was intentional. So the victim was murdered by throttling, and that’s what Narducci died of.”
Like Pacciani, Narducci has a piece of cloth covering his lower abdomen. The meaning of the strange apron has never been completely clarified, but Mignini commissioned research that determined it was linked to Freemasonry.
“The apron was part of an archaic Masonic rite inspired by Egyptian symbology.”
“And was punitive, as though that person had been degraded in a ritual context, according to our expert.”
“So once all this had come out, I couldn’t believe that all the authorities present were unaware of the travesty that was going on. So I indicted them for a number of felonies.”
Investigating the death of Francesco Narducci, detectives discover he was often at San Casciano. His father-in-law owned a cake factory at Sambuca Val di Pesa where the whole Malatesta family worked before moving to San Casciano. When he was a child, Luciano often spent time with his aunt, Maria Mucciani, who, it has been said, was the center of the coven.
“Okay. One day we were going to Florence. We were in the car and we just got in when a car drew up behind us and she saw this car that drew up behind, and when she saw it she smiled. ‘Look who’s here,’ she said, and got out of the car and Narducci got out, who was very young, and they kissed and embraced tenderly. They were very tender. I thought to myself, ‘What? She has a young lover?’ And then when she got back in the car, she knew that I wanted to study medicine, that I love medicine. ‘He’s a doctor. He’s a good, a very good doctor.’ She was enthusiastic. That’s what I remember, the young lover.”
Narducci was recognized by many witnesses involved in this case of the Monster of Florence. According to them, he was a good friend of Francesco Calamandrei. They went to the same prostitutes who recognized him through many verifiable details. One of the prostitutes present at the orgies recognized a chain he wore. His mysterious death is an important clue, but there is still no smoking gun. Although the murders stop when he dies, Narducci is never accused of anything. The pharmacist of San Casciano continues to deny having met him, despite the accusations of his wife, Mariella Cioli.
“Calamandrei’s wife speaks in the spring of 1988. So not exactly during the period of the murders that were in 1968, 1974, and between 1981 and 1985. So there had been no murders for three years and she accuses her husband of being the Monster of Florence. The big problem with these declarations is that there are reports about this woman’s health in which we read in several reports, several reports mention ‘paranoid schizophrenia,’ ‘chronic psychosis that began in adolescence,’ or even ‘depressive schizophrenic psychosis with fragmentary and incoherent thought processes,’ characterized by clear psychotic pathology. So someone whose declarations should be taken with more than a pinch of salt.”
In 2008, Francesco Calamandrei is found not guilty after being allowed a fast-track trial. Despite being accused of 14 homicides, he continues to deny knowing Francesco Narducci. Whatever he did, nothing links him to the murders. The court finds his use of prostitutes and his friendship with Salvatore Indovino are confirmed. Surprisingly, the two prosecutors, Paolo Canessa and Alessandro Crini, don’t file an appeal.
Giuliano Mignini continues to investigate the link between the death of Narducci and the Freemasons, and the conspiracy seems to reach the highest levels, but it will never lead to a trial.
“The investigations show, and it is undeniable, that the Freemasonry did discuss this case internally and a certain line of action was decided on. They discussed it also because the victim was a Freemason. His father was a Freemason. His father-in-law was one. The father-in-law of his brother was one too. His possible contacts in Florence were also mostly…”
When Mignini presents his case before the courts in 2007, a triangle of death begins to emerge that extends from Perugia to San Casciano and Vicchio, with Florence in the middle. The Narducci case falls under Italy’s statute of limitations after suspicious delays in the sentencing process. But the claim that Narducci was indeed murdered and his body swapped with another is accepted.
“We can’t have any absolute proof that Narducci was part of the Florentine case because evidence should have been collected while Narducci was alive at the time.”
“But why was he murdered? Why was his murder covered with another murder?”
“The only steps forward that we could take would be to discover who had any interest in falsifying his death.”
The case is now at a dead end, again.
22 years have gone by since Nadine Mauriot and Jean Michel Kraveichvili were murdered. The anti-monster squad is closed down, but Giuliano Mignini lobbies to have the serial crime investigation group created in 2004. Working from this building known as “Il Manicomio,” Giuttari and his team ask for more forensic tests, in particular on the items found by a passerby closest to the Scopeti clearing a few days after the murder.
“My men find in one of the Florence prosecutor’s files a plastic bag containing a blood-soaked handkerchief and a couple of surgical gloves.”
“I inform the authorities and I have to say that this irritates the Florentine prosecutor who doesn’t appreciate my interest and says this has nothing to do with the case. It could be a false lead anyway. ‘What do you want to do, investigate me?'”
Giuttari requests a DNA analysis, a test that was not available in 1985, but never receives the results. Only years later, with a completely new investigative lead and a new prosecutor, is it revealed that the blood belongs to the victims. A detail that raises even more questions because their blood groups A and O are different from the one originally reported to have been found on the handkerchief, which was blood group B.
Then the unthinkable happens. Alerted by his boss that he has been ordered not to investigate certain important people, Michele Giuttari tells Giuliano Mignini, who indicts the head prosecutor of Florence for interfering with the course of justice. All hell breaks loose between the two jurisdictions. The prosecutor’s office of Florence now accuses Mignini and Giuttari of abuse of office and all the case files related to the murder of Francesco Narducci are confiscated. The case is blocked for 7 years due to this conflict between prosecutors. None of the Florentine prosecutors accepted our invitation to be interviewed.
“The Perugia prosecutor, Mignini, and I in my office are searched by the Florence prosecutor’s office under the suspicion of abuse of power.”
“Due to certain telephone intercepts that we were carrying out on behalf of the Perugia judges. And on that occasion, all the documentation regarding the death of Francesco Narducci was confiscated.”
Although the case files are returned after appeal to a higher level, the case is stopped in its tracks. Mignini, Giuttari, and the Florence chief prosecutor are all found not guilty of misconduct seven years later. It is the end of the Narducci-Calamandrei investigative lead and the end of the search for the instigating masterminds behind the Monster of Florence murders. While the investigators are infighting, Mignini and Giuttari find out that someone else is interfering with the investigation, trying to reignite interest in the disproved Sardinian lead that was abandoned in 1989.
“The first and biggest deviation of the investigation came, as I began to understand from reading the documents, when in 1982 the so-called Sardinian investigative thread originated, when it was believed that the bullets used in the 1968 murder were fired by the same gun as in the Florentine double murders.”
Santino Mario Spezi was a veteran Monster of Florence chronicler who worked as a journalist at La Nazione. Angered by the police search of the home of his friend Francesco Calamandrei, he sets out with famous American crime writer Doug Preston to prove that the son of one of the Sardinians investigated in the 1980s was in fact the monster. His devious plan to plant evidence to prove his theory is foiled, however, when his phone is tapped by the investigators and he is arrested and accused of interfering with the course of justice and defamation. Preston leaves the country in a hurry.
“The Sardinian lead is an investigative thread that died out for everyone but not for Mario. Mario Spezi wrote and was accused and condemned for interfering with the course of justice because either he was convinced of his theory or he was involved.”
The leads all dry up. Michele Giuttari, forced into resigning, writes a last report on the case’s investigations. It remains an Italian cold case.
“This has always fascinated me personally and led me to continue the work that my dad did because I’m curious about this unsolved case that still generates great interest in the Italian public. It’s no surprise that there are blogs, Facebook pages, and research groups on the case. People like to know the truth.”
In 2015, prosecutor Paolo Canessa opens the case again, this time based on new clues that cast suspicion on Jean Pierre Vigilanti, who has just reported the theft of his weapons and the ring of the French Foreign Legion paratroopers, two potentially important pieces of evidence.
Jean Pierre Vigilanti spent 5 years in the French Foreign Legion and has a criminal record including murder and causing bodily harm. He spied on men in public lavatories. And above all, it seems that he was Pacciani’s accomplice in an earlier murder in 1951. Vigilanti’s name is number 38 on the famous list of suspects of 1985, and his name has already come out during the first Pacciani trial. His home had been searched in 1985, and 176 Winchester .22 caliber rounds were found as well as a .22 caliber High Standard automatic that he used for target practice, holding a regular gun license.
“I can say in light of all the documents that I have read that for sure Vigilanti had a role in this case. I can say it because Jean Pierre Vigilanti was number 38 in the list of monster suspects. Pacciani was number 31. Eight days after the last double murder, the Carabinieri knock on his door and in the search warrant we read that he is considered someone who is involved in or identifiable as the Monster of Florence.”
When the news that he was under investigation comes out, Pietro Fioravanti of Giallo magazine goes to see him. For many, Jean Pierre Vigilanti fits the FBI description perfectly. He is tall, has military experience, is cold, misogynous, and knows the area well. His home is equidistant from the two macro-areas of murder. He clipped newspaper cuttings about the murders and shows little respect for the investigators, even bragging about how they never got anywhere.
“Uh-huh.”
Despite all these clues, he also had a car that was similar to one seen close to the crime scene of October 1981, the ammunition boxes, and the gun collection, and his criminal record for murder, Jean Pierre Vigilanti is not officially investigated until 2017. In 2019, after the new prosecutor—the same prosecutor who confiscated Giuttari and Mignini’s documents in 2007—called for the shelving of the investigation, this photograph was leaked. It is a print in the mud of a size 44 boot with a tread similar to the one on French army boots. The document, dating back to 1985 and found only in 2018 in the Secret Service files, is also revealed.
“When Vigilanti’s home is searched, he has a newspaper cutting of the 1974 murder and then cuttings of all the others. This alone allows us to think that Vigilanti had a specific interest in the case. Maybe he is a great fan of crime stories and a fan of serial killers, but in 1974 he couldn’t possibly know that the murders would have led to so much bloodletting.”
In 2018, there is an incredible discovery that further highlights the ineptitude of investigators. Two bullet heads fired by the monster are discovered in the pillow and the sleeping bag of the French couple, 34 years later, during a review of evidence requested by a new lawyer representing the victim’s families. They are subjected to DNA testing, but nothing is found. The letters sent to the investigators in 1985 are also tested for DNA and a trace belonging to an unknown male with an A rhesus-positive blood group is found. The blood-soaked tissue and surgical gloves are tested and the DNA of the victims emerges. But they are blood groups A and O. But there is no longer any reference to the blood group B that was found in the first tests in 1985. If the first test was not wrong, there must be a third DNA trace.
But there is more. Experts determined that the main piece of evidence against Pietro Pacciani, the unspent round found in his garden, was a planted fake. The scratches on the cartridge were fabricated artificially, and the bullet never went near a percussion chamber. Who wanted Pacciani framed as a lone killer? Certainly, there must be a mole in the justice system. It is an unending mess, and new names keep popping up.
Geographically, the murders form an arc running from northeast to southwest of Florence. While the distance between Mercatale and Pacciani’s home to the crime scenes of 1981, 1982, and 1983 is just a few kilometers, the first and the penultimate murders took place 60 kilometers away to the north but close to the home of Vigilanti’s mother. The two kill zones were equidistant from Vigilanti’s home in Prato. Pacciani and Vigilanti knew the area of the Mugello like the back of their hands, and whoever came from the south from Perugia would have used the road intersection of Bagno a Ripoli, either to go northeast or southwest.
There is also the possibility that some of the victims may have known the monster or the gang of killers. Susanna Cambi, murdered in 1981 at Calenzano near Prato along with her boyfriend Stefano Baldi, complained she was being followed. Her best friend, Elizabeth Tsubaki, is murdered less than a year later while on holiday in Sicily. Yet another unsolved crime: Stefania Pettini, murdered in 1974 with her boyfriend Pasquale Gentilcore, lived near the Vicchio train station and Vigilanti’s mother. Pia Rontini, murdered 10 years later, worked in the bar of the same station where an unidentified man with red hair and a big ring was noticed watching her. It doesn’t seem coincidental either that the two young Germans were murdered close to a villa known to be a place where orgies took place, and that Jean Pierre Vigilanti worked for a time in the textile factory owned by Rolf Reicker, the German who found their bodies. The French couple was seen at the country fair where Pacciani was present. So it seems that the victims were known to one or several members of the band of killers, perverts who worked together and killed anyone who wanted to speak out.
But what is the connection between the team of killers and the satanic sect who kept the killers in contact with the puppeteers, and which members of Florentine high society knew and covered for them? Many witnesses are dead and frontline investigators retired. What is revealed at the end of the day is that the Florentine judiciary is compromised by hidden conflicts of interest and incapable of getting to the bottom of the case.
“The last death threat came to my home. An anonymous letter written on a computer containing a single line in capital letters: ‘Every day that goes by, I get closer to you, investigator.'”
This is something that an investigator who sent to jail the heads of Cosa Nostra, dangerous members of the ‘Ndrangheta, condemned for kidnapping people, would expect from them. The indignation over the deaths of young people with their whole lives ahead of them has disappeared as the years have passed. And the very real possibility that Italian institutions were part of the cover-up is harrowing. But not everyone has forgotten.
“It was a great evil. Absolute evil. Total cruelty. Ignore good people, kill them cruelly, get away with it, laugh about it. I said to myself, ‘Faced with all this pain, what do you want to do in front of all this evil? How can you react?’ Not with anger. Someone has to tell the truth. React with good. You can’t react with more evil. You have to react with good. No, I have to stop it. I said to myself, ‘It has to all stop with me. I have to be strong enough to understand everything, say everything, and put all the pieces together.’ And if I’m here, if I haven’t gone mad and if they haven’t killed me and if I can still see and understand, there is a reason because I have to do this work. I’m the only one able to do it. And I have to do it. I have to give everyone a voice. Do you see? Otherwise, it would have remained—it will remain unpunished because there will be no judicial end to it. I’m certain of that. But the truth has to be established.”
The city of Florence seemingly cannot face the ghosts of its past with a clean conscience, to shed light on the dark secret it has hidden for more than 40 years.
