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Authors: Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi
Tags: HIS037080
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Identi-Kit. A group of boys began making fun of him by coming into the pizzeria with the portrait, putting on a show of comparing it to him, and then rushing out as if in terror. The next day, after lunch, the man cut his own throat.
The police received thirty-two phone calls identifying a certain taxi driver from the old San Frediano quarter of Florence as the Monster. A police inspector decided to check the person out; he called the taxi company and contrived for the driver to pick him up and take him to police headquarters, where his men surrounded the cab and ordered the driver out. When the taxi driver emerged, the men were astonished: the man matched the Identi-Kit portrait so perfectly that it could have been a photograph of him. The inspector had the cabbie brought to his office, and to his surprise the man heaved a great sigh of relief. “If you hadn’t brought me down here,” he said, “I’d have come myself just as soon as my shift was over. Ever since that picture was published it’s been total hell. I’ve had nothing but clients who suddenly want to get out of the cab in the middle of the ride.” An investigation quickly determined that the taxi driver could not have committed the crimes—the resemblance was a coincidence.
A huge crowd attended the funeral of Paolo and Antonella, the two victims. Cardinal Benelli, the archbishop of Florence, gave the homily, turning it into an indictment of the modern world. “Much has been said,” he intoned, “in these recent tragic days of monsters, of madness, of crimes of unimaginable viciousness; but we know well that madness does not arise out of nowhere; madness is the irrational and violent explosion of a world, a society, that has lost its values; that every day becomes more inimical to the human spirit. This afternoon,” the cardinal concluded, “we stand here, mute witnesses to one of the worst ever defeats of all that is good in mankind.”
The engaged couple were buried one next to the other, the only photograph ever taken of them together placed between their tombs.
Among the avalanche of accusations, letters, and telephone calls that arrived at carabinieri headquarters in Florence, one odd letter stood out. Inside an envelope was nothing more than a yellowed, tattered clipping from an old article published in
La Nazione
, which told of a long-forgotten murder of a couple who had been making love in a car parked in the Florentine countryside. They had been shot with a Beretta pistol firing Winchester series H rounds, the shells having been recovered at the scene. Someone had scrawled on the clipping, “Take another look at this crime.” The most chilling thing about the clipping was the date it had been published: August 23, 1968.
The crime had been committed fourteen years before.
CHAPTER 7
D ue to a serendipitous bureaucratic error, the shells collected from that old crime scene, which should have been tossed out, were still sitting in a nylon pouch in the dusty case files.
Each one bore on the rim the unique signature of the Monster’s gun.
Investigators reopened the old case with a vengeance. But they were immediately confounded: the 1968 double murder had been solved. It had been an open-and-shut case. A man had confessed and was convicted of the double homicide, and he could not be the Monster of Florence, as he had been in prison during the first killings and had lived since his release in a halfway house, under the watchful eye of nuns, so feeble he could barely walk. There was no possible way for him to have committed any of the Monster’s crimes. Nor was his confession false—it contained specific, accurate details of the double homicide that only a person present at the scene could have known.
On the surface, the facts of the 1968 killing seemed simple, squalid, even banal. A married woman, Barbara Locci, had been having an affair with a Sicilian bricklayer. One night after going to the movies, they had parked on a quiet lane
The police received thirty-two phone calls identifying a certain taxi driver from the old San Frediano quarter of Florence as the Monster. A police inspector decided to check the person out; he called the taxi company and contrived for the driver to pick him up and take him to police headquarters, where his men surrounded the cab and ordered the driver out. When the taxi driver emerged, the men were astonished: the man matched the Identi-Kit portrait so perfectly that it could have been a photograph of him. The inspector had the cabbie brought to his office, and to his surprise the man heaved a great sigh of relief. “If you hadn’t brought me down here,” he said, “I’d have come myself just as soon as my shift was over. Ever since that picture was published it’s been total hell. I’ve had nothing but clients who suddenly want to get out of the cab in the middle of the ride.” An investigation quickly determined that the taxi driver could not have committed the crimes—the resemblance was a coincidence.
A huge crowd attended the funeral of Paolo and Antonella, the two victims. Cardinal Benelli, the archbishop of Florence, gave the homily, turning it into an indictment of the modern world. “Much has been said,” he intoned, “in these recent tragic days of monsters, of madness, of crimes of unimaginable viciousness; but we know well that madness does not arise out of nowhere; madness is the irrational and violent explosion of a world, a society, that has lost its values; that every day becomes more inimical to the human spirit. This afternoon,” the cardinal concluded, “we stand here, mute witnesses to one of the worst ever defeats of all that is good in mankind.”
The engaged couple were buried one next to the other, the only photograph ever taken of them together placed between their tombs.
Among the avalanche of accusations, letters, and telephone calls that arrived at carabinieri headquarters in Florence, one odd letter stood out. Inside an envelope was nothing more than a yellowed, tattered clipping from an old article published in
La Nazione
, which told of a long-forgotten murder of a couple who had been making love in a car parked in the Florentine countryside. They had been shot with a Beretta pistol firing Winchester series H rounds, the shells having been recovered at the scene. Someone had scrawled on the clipping, “Take another look at this crime.” The most chilling thing about the clipping was the date it had been published: August 23, 1968.
The crime had been committed fourteen years before.
CHAPTER 7
D ue to a serendipitous bureaucratic error, the shells collected from that old crime scene, which should have been tossed out, were still sitting in a nylon pouch in the dusty case files.
Each one bore on the rim the unique signature of the Monster’s gun.
Investigators reopened the old case with a vengeance. But they were immediately confounded: the 1968 double murder had been solved. It had been an open-and-shut case. A man had confessed and was convicted of the double homicide, and he could not be the Monster of Florence, as he had been in prison during the first killings and had lived since his release in a halfway house, under the watchful eye of nuns, so feeble he could barely walk. There was no possible way for him to have committed any of the Monster’s crimes. Nor was his confession false—it contained specific, accurate details of the double homicide that only a person present at the scene could have known.
On the surface, the facts of the 1968 killing seemed simple, squalid, even banal. A married woman, Barbara Locci, had been having an affair with a Sicilian bricklayer. One night after going to the movies, they had parked on a quiet lane
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