Murder Made in Italy

Homicide, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture

Ellen Nerenberg

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253012425
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Violencia en la sociedad

A study of three high-profile Italian murder cases, how they were covered by the media, and what it all says about Italian culture. Looking at media coverage of three very prominent murder cases, Murder Made in Italy explores the cultural issues raised by the murders and how they reflect developments in Italian civil society over the past twenty years. Providing detailed descriptions of each murder, investigation, and court case, Ellen Nerenberg addresses the perception of lawlessness in Italy, the country's geography of crime, and the generalized fear for public safety among the Italian population. Nerenberg examines the fictional and nonfictional representations of these crimes through the lenses of moral panic, media spectacle, true crime writing, and the abject body. The worldwide publicity given the recent case of Amanda Knox, the American student tried for murder in a Perugia court, once more drew attention to crime and punishment in Italy and is the subject of the epilogue. "A fantastic array of literary, cinematic, and oral narratives." —Stefania Lucamante, Catholic University of America "Original, engaging, and thought-provoking... quite unlike any other existing book in Italian cultural and media studies." —Ruth Glynn, University of Bristol

PART ONE

Serial Killing

INTRODUCTION

Extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes:
Fama malum quo velocius ullum;
Mobilitate viget, virisque acquirit eundo;
Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras,
Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.

Monstrum, horrendum ingens;
cui quot sunt corpore plumae
Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu,
Tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures.

—VIRGIL, THE AENEID IV, LL. 219–230 (MY ITALICS)

Straightway Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities,
Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world
She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride,
Slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air
She treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds.

A monster, horrific, huge
and under every feather on her body—what a marvel—
an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes
and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news.
and for every plume a sharp eye, for every opinion a biting tongue.
Everywhere its voices sound, to everything
its ears are open.) (MY ITALICS)

With his description of rumor in The Aeneid, the classical Roman poet Virgil offers an image that emphasizes rumor’s rapid spread and at the same time calls attention to the underpinning element of monstrosity. With its feathers like so many monstrous eyes, rumor is able to spread its wings and take flight. Long before the swiftness afforded by air travel—not to mention the advent of telecommunications—Virgil’s image insists on rumor’s speedy transport and transmission. Although it clearly travels, rumor appears to be omnipresent: since its voice is “everywhere,” it appears somehow “already” at its destination before it arrives.

Pietro Pacciani, the first man to stand trial for the serial murders attributed to the “Monster,” was convicted of murder in 1952, and the ways in which the news of that crime revisited his 1994 trial also recalls Virgil’s spread of rumor, this time aided by the speed and capacities for saturation that characterize contemporary media.¹ In this way, the nearly forty-year span between Pacciani’s 1952 conviction and his 1994 trial provides the opportunity to discuss the seismic shifts in the terrain occupied by the media in contemporary Italy.² Thus, I will draw attention to the proliferation of privately owned television channels and to the explosion of global telecommunications enabled by the development of the Internet.

The “Monster” narratives mark a period of transition in contemporary Italian society on several counts. This transition is visible both in the management and circulation of information and in its registration with government agencies; in criminological methodologies; in the powers of the police and the judiciary; and, finally, in an understanding of cultural identity shaped by regional location within Italy. For the ways this transition depends upon and exploits the “looping of information” and the “radical entanglement between forms of eroticized violence and mass technologies of registration, identification, and repudiation,” serial murder offers a point of departure for examining murder’s relation to media.³

Returning in time and tenor to Virgil’s rapid and monstrous rumor, we note its multiform, protean character. Like the collage of monstrous characteristics, the construction of the public discourse of serial killers in Italy—where they are commonly referred to as “monsters”—bears a similarly constructed aspect.⁴ Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, these monsters are stitched together from anthropology, folkways, literature, cinema, and (as the narrative of the case of the “Monster” illustrates) legal narrative. This suturing indicates other blurred distinctions between what is “real” and what is “represented,” between fiction and nonfiction, between legal and illegal, professional and amateur, and a host of other oppositions.

Like the construction of monstrosity, the murders attributed to the “Monster” and the trials that followed feature a contamination of form, hovering somewhere in the transom between rumor and reality. Hearkening back to a spread of rumor, Manlio Cancogni notes that “like most Italians, what I know about the case of the Monster of Florence is based on hearsay.”⁵ The shifts between these varying registers reveal slippages between seemingly clear divisions of the real and the represented.

Examining the slippage between genres enacts the type of genealogical project that French philosopher of history Michel Foucault explored. As Foucault described it, adopting a genealogical approach means “operat(ing) on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.” ⁶ In this part of Murder Made in Italy, comprising chapters 1, 2, and 3, the “parchments” vary. The examination of the murders ascribed to the “Monster,” the subject of chapter 1, probes true-crime investigations of the murders, including television programs and broadcasts and accounts in print media. Yet nonfiction is not the only genre to illustrate the crimes and the sense of moral panic that unfolded from them: a ballad dating to the 1950s and performed by one of the region’s last cantastorie—the Tuscan version of the griot, the fabled storyteller of some African cultures—offers useful insight into the “Monster’s” crimes and Pietro Pacciani’s 1994 trial. Chapter 2 examines the representation of serial killers in contemporary Italian prose fiction, while chapter 3 focuses on serial killer, detection, and police incompetence in the films of the “master of horror,” Dario Argento.

The spectacle of these crimes underscores the dangers and pleasures of looking, the central matter that links the “Monster” narrative with its representation in assorted genres. Vision, sight, and looking constituted a chief concern in the investigation of the “Monster’s” murders, which relied in part on evidence supplied by some of the nocturnal voyeurs active in the countryside outside Florence. Sight and vision, for example, are emphasized in the announcement posted everywhere in and around Florence in the 1983–1984 biennial that cautioned young couples against seeking the privacy of wooded areas. The poster showed two eyes staring out with a caption that reads, “Occhio ragazzi: Non nascondetevi. C’è il Mostro.” (Watch out, kids. Don’t seek cover. The Monster is out there.)⁷ Looking and seeing, moreover, enjoy elevated attention in the detective novel, where they serve as the capital metaphor for understanding, a point Andrea Pinketts makes particularly clear in his novels.⁸ Vision holds obvious importance for cinema, never more so than in the repeated display of the dangers of “hurtable” sight thematic in Argento’s films of the horror/slasher genre: as Argento’s cinema works to underscore the vulnerability of sight, paradoxically, because of their perceived extreme violence, his films are subject to considerable censorship.⁹ This juridical response intends, quite literally, to protect the commonweal’s vision by keeping such violent displays out of public view.

ONE

The “Monster” of Florence

Serial Murders and Investigation

IN THE ELEVEN-YEAR PERIOD from September 1974 to September 1985, seven couples were killed in Florence and the surrounding countryside. Once the seriality of the murders was established, panic and hysteria ensued. The victims were Stefania Pettini and Pasquale Gentilcore, murdered the night of September 14, 1974, in a rural lane in Borgo San Lorenzo; Carmela De Nuccio and Giovanni Foggi, whose bodies were discovered on June 7, 1981, near Scandicci; Susanna Cambi and Stefano Baldi, found on October 23 of the same year, in a park near Calenzano; Antonella Migliorini and Paolo Mainardi, murdered the night of June 19, 1982, on a country road near Montespertoli; Horst Meyer and Uwe Rüsch, whose bodies were discovered on September 10, 1983, in Galluzzo; Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, killed the night of July 29, 1984, in the woods near Vicchio di Mugello; and Nadine Mauriot and Jean-Michel Kraveichili, found murdered on September 9, 1985, in the woods near San Casciano.

The “monster event” in Florence generates two stories that, although by now inextricably connected by historical circumstance, must be considered as discrete narratives. The first story unfolds from the series of seven double homicides.¹ The second concerns the investigation of the crimes, in particular the investigation of Pietro Pacciani, an agricultural worker who had been in and out of prison for violent crimes and who became the state’s prime “monstrous” suspect. Although very few people doubt that the fourteen grisly homicides constitute a series, dispute erupted surrounding the killer’s identity.

The “Monster’s” crimes have excited a great deal of speculation about the identity of the perpetrator (or perpetrators) and possible motivations for the murders. The controversy that emerged concerned whether the crimes could likely have been done by one individual and whether more than one actor was involved. While many unsolved aspects of the murders exist, to say, as Douglas Preston does at the outset of the 2008 exposé The Monster of Florence (written with journalist Mario Spezi), that “despite the longest manhunt in modern Italian history, the Monster of Florence has never been found” and that “in the year 2000 the case was still unsolved, the Monster presumably still on the loose” is an exaggeration.²

If one believes in the theory of a lone killer, then it is true that no such individual has been brought to justice for the homicides. Pietro Pacciani, a farmer from Mercatale, was convicted for the murders in 1994, but his conviction was overturned two years later on the basis of poor evidence. At that point, the handling of the case descended into chaos. It was widely believed that Pacciani was the killer, and the public outcry was so great that the Supreme Court quickly scheduled a second trial. Meanwhile, on the day before Pacciani was released in 1996, two of his compagni di merenda, or picnicking pals—Mario Vanni and Gianfranco Lotti—were arrested. The state’s new theory was that these two men were part of a rural gang of voyeurs that was responsible for the serial murders. Two years later, they were convicted of conspiracy in the serial murders. That same year, Pacciani died at home of cardiac arrest brought on by an overdose of heart medication. In 2001, it mounted a third theory that a doctor, who had died in 1985, was the center of a group of wealthy Satanists that killed at his bidding and brought him body parts as human fetishes. However, after an extensive investigation, no arrest was made. Although the last of the murders took place in 1984, the state has still not solved the mystery; many believe that Pacciani was the killer, but the state has not proved any of the three theories—lone serial killer, gang of voyeurs-turned-murderers, or Satanic group seeking fetishes—conclusively.

The bodies in the serial homicides outside Florence act as a colophon, or an indicator, of the abject. A frequent presence in horror films, among other cultural expressions, the abject pressures boundaries between discrete spheres of order and disorder, between inside and outside, between the imaginary and the symbolic.³ Used as coordinates for mapping the murders, the victims’ abject bodies trace an open circle around greater Florence. Those who subscribe to the more esoteric theory of the murders—the gang of Satanists as the perpetrators—point to the geographical locations of the murders as support for their theory. The seven murder sites form a rough sickle shape constellated around Florence and opening to the east. (See Map 1.) To the proponents of this theory, the open-jawed map inscribed around Florence appears “unfinished” or somehow incomplete, awaiting the final sacrifice to “close” the sacrilegious circle.⁴ The sexed and nationalized bodies of the murdered visitors threatened the city’s cachet as a destination, long celebrated by non-Italian participants on the Grand Tour.⁵ Further, the rough circle inscribed by the victims’ bodies reveals a city that can be breached. The city seems assailable, its abilities to defend itself (and its residents and visitors) from menaces threatening from outside the city impaired. The imperfect circle created by the linked murder sites marks the arrival of a criminal problem of the magnitude of serial killing, once associated with metropolitan centers in foreign lands, to Italian soil, setting upon Italian cities and outlying areas that had previously been considered secure, even bucolic.⁶

The murders shared significant traits that helped draw them together in a series and, consequently, shape the view that a serial killer had murdered “by numbers,” as serial killing is sometimes known.⁷ The victims died from gunshot wounds, they died out of doors in remote areas, they died in their cars, they died in a condition of partial undress, they died at either the beginning or the end of sexual activity, and they died in a state of complete surprise. In each case, the couple was killed with a .22 caliber Beretta handgun that fired a Winchester Long Rifle series H bullet, and in a significant number of cases, each victim was also stabbed. In a significant number of cases, the car’s glove compartment was left open and the female victim’s purse, which was left at the scene, had been searched. All the DNA evidence recovered at the scene from semen or blood belonged to one of the victims and thus could not be attributed to the killer. In a significant number of cases, the flesh of the female victim’s pubic area had been sheared off with what looked like a hunting knife or some kind of surgical instrument.⁸ As well, in a significant number of cases, the female victim’s left breast had been removed, using what was apparently a similar instrument.

The police did not immediately link the first two double murders, which took place in 1974 and 1981, respectively. In Spezi’s narrative, a young journalist on staff at the Florentine daily La Nazione was credited with recalling the Borgo San Lorenzo murders seven years earlier.⁹ Once ballistic analysis certified that...