Murder on lovers lane

Here, in the rolling hills outside Florence, the fabled Tuscan countryside, lurked a vicious killer.

Here were two double murders, seven years apart.  Four young lovers dead.  One of the women sexually mutilated. 

Mario Spezi, then a young newspaper reporter, wrote story after story about the case.  He had heard of other famous serial killers dubbed "monsters" -- and he began to use that term as well. “We call him the Monster of Florence,” says Spezi.

Police desperately hunted the monster.  In the process, they exposed some aspects of Italian life you don't read about in the tourist brochures. 

Doug Preston: Most people live with their parents until they're married, and so making love in parked cars is a national pastime.  The beautiful hills surrounding Florence on Friday and Saturday night were full of cars parked where kids were making out and making love. 

All the love-making was an open secret among Florentines. But what police found next was not.

Investigating the terrible murders along lovers' lanes like this one in the beautiful Tuscan countryside, police uncovered a subculture that many Florentines found disturbing: these hills were not only being stalked by a killer, they were also swarming with peeping toms.

Police quickly zeroed in on one of these voyeurs.

Doug Preston: He lied to them at first. He lied about his movements that night. So they thought, "We've got our man."  They arrested him.

But then, in October of 1981, with the suspect in jail, the monster  struck.

Once again, the victims were young lovers in their 20's, shot to death on a lovers’ lane in the countryside.  These were murders five and six.

The same Beretta .22 was the murder weapon.  The young woman suffered the same post-mortem mutilation, performed with a notched knife.

This murder set up a pattern that would repeat itself. Police arrested a suspect, and the killer, almost as if taunting them, killed again.

Preston: And the police were humiliated and had to release him.

The monster struck again eight months later, in June 1982, about 10 miles south of Florence.  A young couple had parked just off a busy road.  This time, the young man apparently spotted the killer. 

Stone Phillips: He saw the murderer coming?
Mario Spezi: Yes, because he tried to -- to start with the car.  And -- the murderer to stop him, shoot the boy.

The young man managed to back the car across the road.  But his rear wheels got stuck in a ditch.  The car wouldn't move.

Doug Preston: The monster shot the two headlights out.  And then he fired a shot that struck the boy in the middle of the forehead.  And then when he went across the street and got into the car, he shot the boy a second time. 
Stone Phillips: And he shot the girl?
Doug Preston: And he shot the girl when he got in the car. 

But with the car stuck beside a busy road, the monster apparently did not feel he had enough time to perform his ritual mutilation of the woman.  He fled, once again leaving no clues to his identity.  These were murders seven and eight.

As the killings continued, the terror and paranoia ratcheted up.  Florentines changed their daily routines.  They never traveled alone, and they eyed each other suspiciously because the monster could be any one of them.

At one point a witness thought he had seen the killer.  Police released a sketch.

The result was chaos.

Preston: There was a man who owned a pizzeria outside of Florence who looked just like him and was so harassed by his neighbors that he cut his throat, he committed suicide.  There was a butcher who looked just like this fellow … a mob formed in front of his butcher shop and the police had to come and disperse the mob.  There was a taxi driver who looked like this fellow … the people would scream and jump out of the taxi.

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What the sketch did not provide was any solid leads.  Then one day, police got an anonymous letter, containing a newspaper clipping.

Doug Preston: About a double killing that took place in 1968.
Stone Phillips: All the way back to '68?
Doug Preston: All the way back to '68.  And scrawled on this clipping was a sentence, you know, "take another look at this crime." 

The spent shells from the '68 murder were still in the evidence room.  Police tested them and were astonished to find that they matched the monster's gun.

Stone Phillips: So the gun -- so the same gun, the same bullets were used in this 1968 killing.
Doug Preston: Yes.  And it was also the same m.o. -- a woman and a man who had been making love in a car who were killed in the act of making love.
Stone Phillips: So was it the monster?
Doug Preston: This is what they immediately thought.  It must be the monster.  But the strangest thing was that this crime had been solved.  The killer had been found.

Or had he?

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