This is a response to the attempted “debunking” of my journalistic investigation on the Monster of Florence-Zodiac connection by Max Bosco, user of the Facebook group “Il Mostro di Firenze”.
There is something to clarify first.
If Bosco wanted to do a real fact check, he should have cited the texts of my articles word for word, with links to the source.
He never does.
He simply paraphrases me, putting sentences in my mouth in his own words.
In this way, most of the time he distorts their meaning.
Related articles (2018, 2020)
Zodiac-Monster of Florence connection
Bevilacqua’s admission
The magazine used by the Monster
Premise of May 3, 2024
1. “What is actually true”
Bosco’s verification begins with a peremptory consideration.
"The journalist claims J.B. confessed being the Zodiac and the Monster of Florence. What is actually true is that mr. J.B. denied to have made that confession."
From a logical point of view, there is at least a second “certain fact” of equal value.
Journalist Francesco Amicone states that Bevilacqua admitted his responsibility for the murders of Zodiac and the Monster during a phone call and that he should have turned himself in.
In the absence of a record of the admission, which of the two versions would be true?
I open a brief parenthesis. I did not record Bevilacqua’s admission out of respect for professional ethics.
I had given my word to Bevilacqua that I would not disclose information received from him without his consent.
Before expressing an opinion, a check should normally be carried out.
Already two days after the publication of my article on the admission Bosco wrote me an email that began like this:
"Excellent hoax."
What thorough check would he have done?
It is the same approach adopted from the beginning by the Florence DA’s Office, which I gave notice of the publication of the article more than a month in advance.
For the most part, it is precisely on this attitude of hostility towards me that the failure of the investigation into Bevilacqua between 2018 and 2021 depended.
Although due to an oversight I backdated the “admission phone call” by one day, saying September 11 instead of September 12, 2017, the phone records confirm my version of events, not that of Bevilacqua and his wife Meri Torelli (she also listened to the admission and denied).
Both spouses gave a false version of events, omitting any reference to the contacts with the criminal lawyer I suggested to Bevilacqua, Francesco Moramarco, contacted immediately after the admission (image below).
Due to an error by the Carabinieri, the “admission phone call” between my home phone number and that of the American immediately before the Bevilacqua – lawyer contacts was not seen.
Maybe it was a problem with the software used for the automatic analysis.
In any case, it is easily identifiable in the phone records in PDF format in the documents.
In addition to the phone records, which confirm my reliability and call into question that of Bevilacqua, there are his own contradictory statements.
I do not examine his false statements. Further details here.
I limit myself to what Bevilacqua states about Pietro Pacciani, the main suspect of the DA’s Office for the Monster crimes. Although he died before a final conviction, to date, the official version has him as one of the three responsible for the murders.
In his deposition at the Pacciani trial in ’94, Bevilacqua declared that he did not know the defendant, reiterating this several times.
"I didn't know who he was."
On 16 April 2018, I gave the Florence Prosecutor’s Office a brief account of the conversations I had with the American in 2017. A five-page summary that I had already provided to the Monza Carabinieri on 22 February (in the first version the date of the “admission call” was correct).
I cited this document in the article on the admission in il Giornale.
"Bevilacqua told me that he knew Pietro Pacciani well, and that he had met him several times in the woods behind the Falciani cemetery."
This fact was not public knowledge and contradicted his previous version from 23 years earlier.
Bevilacqua himself confirmed what I anticipated:
"During my stay in Falciani I got to know Pietro Pacciani as he used to come along the fence to hunt animals and I lived inside the American Cemetery in Falciani; other times I happened to meet him at the bar of Scopeti."
The most recent version was confirmed by Bevilacqua’s wife in 2023.
"...he had seen him [Pacciani ed.] many times..."
When the DA’s Office leaked its considerations on my statements, they were already aware of Bevilacqua’s unreliability.
Who to believe then?
To the freelance journalist with no criminal record whose reliability is already established the day after the investigation began or to the Italian-American witness who lied at the Pacciani trial about knowing the defendant?
2. “The only reliable information”
"The journalist claims several times in his articles that there is an investigation going on in Italy. Actually the only reliable information about this aspect comes from another newspaper (La Nazione, 1-2 June 2018)..."
From “what is actually true” we move on to the “only reliable information”.
As it happens, once again, it is not what I write but what my detractors write.
Here is the entire piece in Italian linked by the debunker in which the DA’s office source says that the lead started by my denunciation is “already dead”.
The information from La Nazione seems to draw inspiration from a report that mistakenly attributed to me a false statement by Bevilacqua (Italian) by the person who heard me in the DA’s Office on April 16, 2018.
Thanks to this “communication” from the Prosecutor’s Office cited by Bosco (which in Italian is called “violation of official secrecy”), Bevilacqua was able to easily deduce that there was no record of the admission.
Beyond this “trivial matter”, I knew personally that there was an ongoing investigation, given that I had been called by the ROS Carabinieri to be interviewed as a person informed of the facts. And so it was, on June 19, 2018 (next image).
My complete statements to the ROS Carabinieri are available at this link.
Finally, I would like to point out that “the only reliable information” comes from a newspaper, La Nazione, which went on newsstands on January 27, 1984, with posters claiming:
"ARRESTED, the monsters are two"
The real Monster killed at least 4 more people after that proclamation.
Continuation
3. Misleading information
I have just never written that «the Vallejo Police Department is working on the case». Indeed, there are no links to prove it.
4. Certainties with CAPS LOCK
Ulysses is an American accused by postman Mario Vanni of being the real serial killer. In a conversation intercepted by the police in 2003, Vanni states that Pacciani (it is not very clear) met a man in the woods, an “American”, a “black” (later Vanni says “negro”) who was called “Ulisse” and who would have confessed to him to being the Monster of Florence. “Why black?”, Joe will ask me when I show him the transcript of the interview, immediately snapping angrily: “They’re going to kill Vanni.”
Perhaps “il Vampa” had seen Ulysses wearing a black hood with a Celtic cross, identical to that of Zodiac in the attack on Lake Berryessa some 15 years earlier. Having mistaken Ulysses for a neo-fascist due to the Celtic cross (considered by the neo-fascists their most representative symbol), Pacciani called him “black”, that is a word commonly used to refer to neofascists in Italy.
As I wrote in article on the admission in Il Giornale, to reassure Bevilacqua I told him that a witness (of dubious reliability) had identified an Italian-African American Mario Robert Parker as Ulysses.
In 1983, Parker was domiciled at Villa La Sfacciata, in front of the crime scene on Via di Giogoli.
The reality is that this identification has always been uncertain. It is known, however, that the only American present in the Monster investigation that Pacciani met near woods is Joe himself (“Pacciani was in the woods” by Franca Selvatici, La Repubblica, June 7, 1994).
5. The water theory
The “water theory” is composed of a series of observations made first by Dr. Leonti Thompson in 1969, then by Gareth Penn, and by Robert Graysmith in “Zodiac” in 1986, regarding the fact that Zodiac made many references to water. In particular, all the crime scenes and the location of the phone booths from which Zodiac called the police had a connection with a form of water in their names.
6. The birthday call
I have reconstructed the story of the “birthday phone call” in this post.
7. Red Phantom letter
Zodiac was probably not the author of the letter signed Red Phantom, according to FBI experts who examined it in 1974 (source), who stated that the postmark on the envelope was not legible. The date is a guess of the San Francisco Chronicle based on the fact that the letter was received on July 9. This is not much proof, because the previous two letters arrived 11 days and even 25 days after be mailed.
8. Joe’s real name
Joe’s real name is Giuseppe, according to the Italian Registry Office. It might be his baptismal name, a variant of the American Joseph which appears on his American documents.
9. Misunderstandings
I never said that Joe fought “in the Cambodian campaign” and he did not. I mentioned that he fought in Vietnam along the Cambodian border and that he and his fellow soldiers would sometimes go past it.
I stated that he told me that he also worked for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in Vietnam. At the time it was not yet a command and was composed of several detachments, not just the 5th.
The suit wore by Joe in that picture is not «navy» but the uniform of the cemetery superintendent of the American Battle Monuments Commission for which he worked from 1974 to 2010, as you can see below.
10. Lack of knowledge or forgetfulness and allusions?
Joe saw the last official victims of the Monster a few hours before they were killed near Florence between September 6 – 8, 1985. On June 6, 1994, he told the court at Pacciani’s trial that he saw the girl wearing a swimsuit. She was not on a beach but about 80 km away from the sea. However, swimsuit among her personal effects had been found by the police after the murder. Joe’s big error was saying that he knew about the crime before it was found out by the police (here’s the translation of his whole testimony). That could just be a murderer’s mistake.
I think that Joe gave the name “Raggianti” (radiant) to Vigilanti to allude the solution of his name cipher based on the song “Aquarius-Let the sunshine in” by the Fifth Dimension.
Maybe “J.B.” was not informed of Vanni’s death because the closest relatives, according to him and for reasons I do not know, did not let him read any other newspaper than “Famiglia Cristiana”. Or maybe because he had not inquired about Vanni’s fate, after his final conviction.
11. The woods
It is not known whether Pacciani saw Ulysses’s true face or whether he had his face covered, as is probable. But even if he had recognized Ulysses in Bevilacqua after the trial, why tell it to those who wanted him condemned? Mine is mere speculation, but perhaps he preferred to blackmail him to get himself exonerated.
12. Riddles
14. I furnished the solution to Zodiac’s , the and Zodiac’s name ciphers (supplemented with this video), for example.
For Bosco my solutions to the Zodiac puzzles/ciphers would be illogical and “unreal”.
This could be a limitation of my explanations. The logic of the solution to the Halloween riddle seems clear enough to me, however. In this blog, it is also possible to read the decryption of the Mt. Diablo code and the solution of Zodiac’s name cipher.
13. Donna Lass
Bevilacqua said the best way to hide a body in the Lake Tahoe area would be to drop it from a helicopter onto a mountain peak, because it was nearly impossible to find. It was simply what he would have done if he was the killer and had a helicopter.
Bevilacqua told me that another good place to hide a body would have been Emerald Bay. According to him, the problems were the presence of campsites and Rangers.
He ultimately circled Heavenly Valley because “Heaven means paradise.”
It is known that Zodiac was obsessed with the word “paradice” and claimed that his victims would become his slaves in the afterlife.
14. A big mistery
Bosco affirms that the connection between the gun used by the Monster in the murders of the couples in Florence and the previous crime of ’68 is a great mystery.
I explain here why I think it is a mislead.
Regarding the Zodiac murder of December 20, 1968, for now I simply point out in this post that, based on the flights offered by Pan Am in that month, taking advantage of a leave, Bevilacqua could have gone to San Francisco on leave for a few days and returned after the Lake Herman Road murder.
Conclusion
The main evidence of the Zodiac-Monster of Florence connection, for now, is my “real” testimony put in writing in a denunciation and in two interviews with me by the judicial police. The task of verifying the contents of a testimony through scientific examinations, such as comparisons of fingerprints, DNA, etc., or invasions of private property, such as a search, certainly is not up to journalists, but to law enforcement agencies.
The fact that this “concrete” investigation has not yet been carried out does not mean that there is no “physical evidence”, but that it has not yet been sought.
Zodiac, il Mostro 
You must be logged in to post a comment.