The magazine used by the Monster of Florence

May 10, 2020 – Originally hosted on tempi.it
By Francesco Amicone

September 1985. An envelope addressed to Deputy DA Silvia Della Monica  arrives at the Florence DA’s Office. Inside there is a fragment of the breast of the last woman killed by  the Monster of Florence, a serial killer who is attributed with seven murders of couples in the province of Florence between ’74 and ’85.
The address on the envelope is made up of clippings from a newspaper that has not been identified. Until this year. The discovery is thanks to a researcher of the Monster case, Valeria Vecchione.

The magazine is number 51 of Gente in circulation on newsstands between 14 and 20 December 1984. Valeria was able to identify her thanks to a clipping provided to her by a well-known name in the community of scholars of the Monster case, Paolo Cochi.
The cover of the weekly depicts Gloria Guida and little Guendalina Dorelli, wife and daughter of Johnny Dorelli, the famous “Dorellik” who in 1967 parodied the protagonist of the comic “Diabolik”.

THE DISCOVERY
«We worked hard to find the magazine used by the Monster, in the end here it is» explains Cochi.
With the help of his collaborator Martino Rossi, Cochi provided Valeria Vecchione with a copy of the back of the newspaper clippings applied by the Monster on the envelope sent to Della Monica after the last crime. It was essential for the identification.
Gente #51 is a «key element in view of investigations» said Cochi. It is also one of the most important clues in a case in which there are still six murders officially unsolved.
Cochi disclose the discovery in February in his column in Ok Mugello. He is keen to distance himself from my investigation into the connection between the Monster and the Zodiac Killer, which I first spoke about two years ago.
It is Cochi’s opinion that the culprit of the Monster’s crimes was «an individual who had to do with Mugello» Cochi said. «He was from the area and had maintained a relevance near San Piero a Sieve,» the village where the Monster mailed the letter to Della Monica. «He was a person close to a certain type of “apparatus” and tied to a certain people.» [NDR il sospettato di Cochi sarà scagionato completamente nel 2025]
«Apart from my convictions,» explained Cochi, «in my work, I stick only to documented researches and disclosures of factual data taken from records. Criminal investigations are responsibility of investigators. I only try to provide a documental contribution. I hope it will be useful to them.»

How did Valeria understand she was in front of the right magazine?
«That font type was used by a few weeklies» replied Cochi. «Having a copy of the expertise on the envelope carried out by the scientific police with the part behind and every single letter annexed, [Valeria] was able to unequivocally identify the magazine, comparing the front part of every single clipping with the back part.»
Although the weekly in 1984 recorded an average circulation of 667,553 copies sold (Ads data), it was very difficult to find the number 51: «We bought entire collections of various weeklies. A search that lasted a couple of years» admitted Cochi. An enormous effort that will hopefully bear fruit.

DEAR SWEET WATERS…
Valeria identified the magazine thanks to the only word pasted in full on the envelope, a “DELLA”, perhaps to facilitate its identification through that clipping. And that word led Valeria to this sentence:

«Dear sweet waters , I don't recognize you anymore: here is the end of my childhood dream»

This is the title of an article by writer Piero Chiara, an eight-page long article dedicated to “his” Lake Maggiore.

The title reads: «Dear sweet waters, I do not know you anymore: my childhood dream is ended here.» – Z and E of “acque” are the last letters on the envelope mailed by the Monster. They were taken together with the only entire word pasted on the envelope from the same pages of the magazine Gente (picture above)

Chiara’s article, cited in Pietro Montorfani’s essay “I thought about it all my life” Piero Chiara and Manzoni, was published in the collection If not here, where? Il paesaggio di Varese di Chiara (Nicolini, 1997) curated by Federico Roncoroni.
Contacted by phone, Bambi Lazzati, director of the “Amici di Piero Chiara” association, inform me that they are examining the literary works of aspiring writers sent from all over Italy. This year, the stories of the Chiara prize junior have “water” as theme.
«We have a lot of work to do» says Lazzati. «These days, we are receiving the stories of young people… and then this mask…» She puts me in contact with Roncoroni.
«I read the article “Dear sweet waters …” directly in the magazine Gente» the heir of Chiara’s opera recalled. «Later I found a copy of Chiara’s article among the clippings kept in his Archive.»
Stumbled upon that essay, now lost among papers in the Lombard writer’s archive, he inserted it in “If not here, where? The landscape of Varese,” a collection of pieces «conceived to testify the great affection that bound the writer to Varese and its surroundings.»
Chiara’s text expresses a deep attachment to “his” lake. «Chiara was very close to Lago Maggiore and to the places where he spent the youth to which he always returned after each trip» Roncoroni recalled. «It is no coincidence that many of his novels and short stories have those places as a backdrop, and it is needless to specify that those places are places of the heart.»

TWO OCCURRENCES
The essay of Gente dates back to nine months before the letter to Della Monica was sent, so it is reasonable to assume the magazine was carefully kept for future use. Even the choice of titles for the clippings (one of which is an offensive allusion directed to Della Monica) would seem wisely considered and substantially confirms the investigation into the common identity of the Monster and the American serial killer Zodiac.
The number 51 of Gente in 1984 was on newsstands in the week of the year which included December 20, a date that, as reported in my first article on the Zodiac-Monster connection in May 2018, should be symbolic for Zodiac.
On December 20, 1968, the «cipher killer» committed his first double murder in Vallejo. The same day of the following year, he sent a letter to attorney Melvin Belli asking for help. «I’m drowning» he wrote.
The second occurrence concerns water, present in the sentence: “Dear sweet waters…”. From the title of Chiara’s story, the Monster extracted the last letter pasted on the envelope, the E of “waters” at the end of the word “Florence”.
In California, at the turn of the 60s and 70s, there is a maniac who “attacks couples” and “kills on weekends, near the water” writes Robert Graysmith in the 1986-book “Zodiac” of 1986 (St. Martin’s Press).
The self-proclaimed “Zodiac” is responsible for at least five murders in the San Francisco area. He sent the press about twenty letters containing riddles and ciphers. Probably its nickname derives from a watch brand whose advertising at the time focused on its items for divers, especially the Zodiac Sea Wolf.
The serial killer disappeared from the United States in 1974 claiming 37 murders and signing his farewell with a verse on suicide by drowning taken from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Mikado”. Thus concluded a dense correspondence in which the references to the water are numerous.
The signatures left by Zodiac and the Monster (also in crimes) present a series of affinities and analogies that do not end in the occurrences above, even if these are the most obvious. Both attacked couples at lover’s lanes, preferably before midnight and on weekends, trying to keep media attention high on themselves. Furthermore, the letter mailed to Della Monica has two other peculiarities in common with Zodiac’s “literary style”: the missing of a double consonant and use of the hyphen.

REQUESTS TO THE INTERPOL
At the beginning of the 1980s, the hypothesis that the Monster of Florence had emigrated to Italy was not considered by investigators science fiction.
In 1982, Prosecutor Silvia Della Monica, the recipient of the Monster’s letter, asked the Carabinieri and the police to consult the Interpol to verify the existence abroad of crimes «analogous for modus operandi» to the attacks of the “Tuscan” serial killer.
A similar request had been made the year before by examining judge Vincenzo Tricomi.
The results of the investigations were not made public, but the range of research set by the prosecutor investigating the crimes excluded Zodiac, limiting itself to the crimes that occurred after 1970. Indeed, the last crime officially attributed to the “enigmatic killer” dates back to 11 October 1969, although his parting letter after a three-year interval was sent on January 29, 1974.
The investigations that could have led abroad were abandoned.
Concomitantly with Della Monica’s request to consult Interpol, the crimes of the Monster were linked to a double murder of 1968 that occurred in Lastra a Signa and for which the husband of one of the victims, Sardinian bricklayer Stefano Mele, had been convicted. On July 20, 1982, the investigators found five bullets and five shell casings belonged to the Monster among the records of the trial against Mele. They were stored in the archives at the Clerk’s office in the Florence Court’s building, where they would have been since April 1, 1974. This was not the place where they should have been, but the evidence room.

INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIALS
The Monster had no fear of the “Sardinian” lead. He sanctioned his indifference with the blood of the other six victims in the Florentine summer nights of 1983, 1984, and 1985, making the police release the suspects of 1968 one after the other, before concluding his grim sequence of murders with the letter mailed to Della Monica. The investigating judge Mario Rotella accepted the reality. Defendants Piero Mucciarini, Giovanni Mele, and brothers Francesco and Salvatore Vinci were acquitted on December 13, 1989.
The last real prosecuted “Monster” was Pietro Pacciani, a farmer from Mercatale in Val di Pesa. Pacciani died on February 22, 1998, before the second appeal. After being sentenced at first instance, he had been acquitted of all charges in 1996 and then remanded for further judgment by the Cassation. The two alleged accomplices, Giancarlo Lotti and Mario Vanni, were definitively sentenced in 2000.
Last summer, a piece of news leaked from the Prosecutor’s Office saying Paride Minervini, ballistic expert of attorney Luca Turco, the prosecutor in charge of investigations on the Monster, had found traces of falsification in one of the decisive evidence against Pacciani, a .22 caliber cartridge, brand Winchester “H series,” found in a stake in his kitchen garden.

ZODIAC
According to reports drawn up by the police, at the time of his disappearance Zodiac must have been a stout, stocky built forty years old man possibly with a prominent stomach, about 5.8’ in height. Contrasting comments on hair color. One of the surviving victims saw it light brown, one other, dark brown, for other witnesses it was reddish-brown. Contradictions suggested the killer had disguised himself in all the attacks, as he stated in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle mailed on November 9, 1969.
Two Department of Justice’s reports in 1970 and 1971 by the agent Mel Nicolai accused Zodiac of six homicides committed in California between 1966 and 1969. For detective Dave Toschi and other American investigators he had slaughtered a girl in Riverside, killed a taxi driver in San Francisco, and attacked three couples at lover’s lanes in Vallejo and Lake Berryessa.
On September 14, 1974, two teenagers were killed at the Fontanine di Rabatta, in Mugello, Italy, a few months after the last official Zodiac’s written communication. It is the first ascertained crime of the “couples maniac” of Florence, one of his three attacks officially unsolved.