The Monster of Florence by Douglas J. Preston & Mario Spezi

Author:Douglas J. Preston & Mario Spezi [Preston, Douglas J. & Spezi, Mario]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905264674
Google: 9d2VNwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1455573825
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 2009-01-01T08:01:02+00:00

CHAPTER 29

Pacciani remained free and technically innocent while Giuttari mustered up a new case against him. But the excitement was too much for the Tuscan peasant, and on February 22, 1998, the “sweet little lamb” dropped dead of a heart attack.

It took no time at all for the rumor mill to declare that Pacciani had not died of a heart attack, but had in fact been murdered. Giuttari sprang into action and directed an exhumation of the peasant’s body. The remains were tested for poisoning. The results? His death was “compatible” with having been poisoned—by an excess of his own heart medicine. Doctors pointed out that patients, in the throes of a heart attack, often overconsume their heart medicine. But that was far too prosaic an explanation for Chief Inspector Giuttari, who theorized that Pacciani may have been murdered by a person or persons unknown, to keep him from telling what he knew.

The trial of Pacciani’s picnicking friends, Vanni and Lotti, began in June of 1997. The evidence against them consisted of Lotti’s word, backed up by the feeble-minded Pucci, against Vanni’s ineffective and disorganized protestations of innocence. It was a sad spectacle. Vanni and Lotti were convicted of all fourteen Monster killings; Vanni was sentenced to life in prison and Lotti to twenty-six years. Neither the press nor Italian public opinion seemed skeptical of the idea that three quasi-illiterate inebriates of marginal intelligence could have successfully killed fourteen people over a period of eleven years with the goal of stealing the women’s sex organs.

The trial, furthermore, never addressed the central motive: why had Pacciani and his picnicking friends stolen those sex organs? Chief Inspector Giuttari, however, had already embarked on an investigation of this very question. And he had an answer: behind the Monster killings lay a satanic cult. This shadowy cabal of wealthy and powerful people, seemingly beyond reproach, who occupied the highest positions in society, business, law, and medicine, had hired Pacciani, Vanni, and Lotti to kill couples in order to obtain the sex organs of girls for use as the obscene, blasphemous “wafer” in their Black Masses.

To investigate this new theory, Chief Inspector Giuttari formed an elite police unit, which he called the Gruppo Investigativo Delitti Seriali, the Serial Killings Investigative Group, or GIDES. They set up shop on the top floor of a monstrous, modern cement structure called Il Magnifico, after Lorenzo il Magnifico, erected near the Florence airport. He assembled a crack team of detectives. Their sole mission: to identify and arrest the mandanti, the “masterminds” or instigators behind the killings of the so-called Monster of Florence.

Out of the Everest of evidence in the Monster case, Giuttari had pried out a few pebbles that he felt supported his new theory. First, Lotti had made an offhand statement, ignored at the time, that “a doctor asked Pacciani to do a few little jobs for him.” For Giuttari, this revived the old suspicion that a doctor was responsible for the killings—this time not as the killer himself, but as a mastermind.

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