Following, in chronological order, is a selection of records partially translated in English of the first investigation into Joe Bevilacqua for the Monster of Florence’s murders. They are attached to my defense briefs in the case file of my trial for the alleged defamation of Bevilacqua (case no. RGNR 8859/18 – Florence DA’s Office, Italy).
The police investigations into Bevilacqua concerning the Monster and Zodiac Killer’s murders started in 2018 from a denunciation and a journalistic investigation of mine, which initially gave rise in to a superficial and incomplete investigation by the Florence ROS Carabinieri (Italian gendarmerie/police) which the local DA’s Office have dismissed in violation of the Italian law, without the offended parties receiving the mandatory notifications in 2021.
On March 1, 2018, I had stated to the Carabinieri that Bevilacqua admitted to being responsible of the Zodiac and Monster’s murders in a phone conversation on September 12, 2017 (I backdated it to 11 due to an oversight). He would have turn himself in, but he changed idea.
As I told the police, I did not recorded the discussion for a ethical reason.
The admission of guilt followed a few interviews in person between me and Bevilacqua. Their existence wase then confirmed by a phone records analysis by the Florence ROS Carabinieri in 2018.
According to Carabinieri’s analysis, I went to Bevilacqua’s house seven times between May 26 and August 10, 2017. The meetings lasted 2, 3 hours circa.
It was also found that on 28 July, we moved to Falciani, as I tell in in an account handed over to the Carabinieri and on Il Giornale in 2018.
When I disclosed Bevilacqua’s admission, at the end of May 2018, he publicly denied it in a statement transmitted by his lawyer to the press and in a defamation suit, without refuting other facts I wrote in the newspapers, though, and confirming the 2017 interviews.
There also are other relevant documents up to the transmission I made of Bevilacqua’s genetic profile to the US law enforcement agencies that had jurisdiction on Zodiac’s homicides in November 2023. I obtained the profile for defensive purpose from prosecutor Nicola Marini, Siena DA’s office, who had Bevilacqua’s DNA collected in 2020. Although urged by my lawyers in March 2022, the Florence DA’s office chose not to sent Bevilacqua’s genetic profile to the US Authorities in charge of the Zodiac case.
Bevilacqua died on December 23, 2022.
All the Italian records of the first investigation (some of them, excerpts) are at this link.
To open the PDF files and download them, click on the orange titles.
Introduction
My first tips to the Italian and US law enforcement agencies, following the admission on 12 September 2017, were informal and via email.
Regarding the tips to the US agencies, I remained anonymous by using different accounts for a certain period.
In August 2017, I sent the cover of the book “Zodiac” by Robert Graysmith with Bevilacqua’s fingerprints in an anonymous envelope to an FBI agent. There was no note in the envelope. I thought it was FBI protocol for these types of communications to automatically take fingerprints. If there had been anything on Bevilacqua, something would have popped out, I thought.
I posted partial information in some comments on a forum about the Monster, sharing a stylized decrypition of Zodiac’s name (already sent to the police – next image) on the blog of a researcher, Martin Rush, in December 2017.
Initially, I took a cautious approach because I did not know if there were other people involved and I suspected that the “admission call” had been wiretapped. When it was clear that there was no surveillance activity or investigation, that Bevilacqua probably had no accomplices and would not turn himself in (although his wife Meri Torelli had heard the admission), seeing that my reports had no effect, I filed a formal denunciation.
Below, one of the detectives in charge of the Zodiac case responds to one of the detractors of my investigation, the user of the Facebook group “Il Mostro di Firenze” Max Bosco, who asked about Bevilacqua after the publication of my first article on his admission in June 2018.
The Vallejo police had already received word of my article.
Detective Terry Poyser states that Bevilacqua:
Index
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- Tips, emails, and DNA profile transmission (2020-2023)
- The “Khaki Mafia” files to the SFPD (2022)
- Main records from Italian Bevilacqua’s case file dismissed in 2021
- My indictment (2022)
Tips, emails, transmission of the DNA profile (2020 – 2023)
- 2023, November, emails with genetic profile
Below, emails with the attached Bevilacqua’s DNA profile transmitted to the US authorities in charge of the Zodiac case and other Zodiac’s possible crimes.
- 2020 – 2022, emails, tips and reports on Bevilacqua
Below, Bevilacqua to the San Francisco Police Department, Vallejo police and Napa County Sheriff’s Department
Below, an email from March 31, 2022, in which I put the Carabinieri lieutenant Liberato Ilardi, assistant to the prosecutor Turco, and a detective in charge of the Zodiac case in contact.
As part of my defamation pre-trial, my defenders asked prosecutor Turco to have Bevilacqua’s handprints taken for comparison. The SFPD in fact has a sample of latent bloody fingerprints that perhaps Zodiac left on Paul Stine‘s cab during his murder in ’69.
An unsuccessful attempt. Bevilacqua’s handprints were not taken.
“Khaki Mafia” files, excerpts with sworn translation in Italian
Accompanying the tip to the SFPD there were exercepts from a selection of the so called “mess and club” cases investigations conducted by the Army CID in the late ’60 and early ’70s.
In their 2017 meetings, Bevilacqua confided to me that he worked undercover as s CID investigator in California, also near Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, in ’69, and, a year later, in the Lake Tahoe area.
Bevilacqua told me that he had participated to a huge CID case which took place above all in Vietnam, Germany, and California between the late ’60s and the early ’70s.
The investigation concerned the “Khaki Mafia”, a group of NCOs who plundered Army messes and clubs.
Starting in ’69, the US Senate investigative panel, followed by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles in ’70, led parallel inquiries aided by the CID detectives.
Although Bevilacqua’s name is not present in the records collected here nor in the Senate hearings transcript, several investigative reports prove the concomitance between the CID investigations into the Khaki Mafia case in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Zodiac’s activity in the same territory.
The US authorities will perhaps be able to determine which investigations Bevilacqua was assigned to of those that took place in the area of the Zodiac murders in ’69 and ’70.
Italian criminal case file, records (2018 – 2021)
Below are the translations of the most important records of the Joe Bevilacqua case file on the Monster of Florence murders resulting from my denunciation of March 1, 2018. The investigation conducted by the ROS Carabinieri and Florence DA’s office was dismissed in 2021.
Notice that retired Army sergeant Bevilacqua became a witness in the Pacciani trial on the Monster’s homicides after having contacted the police. He lived in the main serial killer’s attack area in the same period of his crimes. Most of the killings were committed near the Florence American Cemetery where Bevilacqua was living and working. Besides, he told the Carabinieri, then a Court in 1994, he had seen the last victims the days before the attack close to the cemetery.
- 2018, February 22, accounts on the 2017-meetings with Joe Bevilacqua
It was submitted to the Monza Carabinieri and then to the Florence DA’s Office. This is the second version of April 16, 2018.
Translated
- 2018, March 1 – Denunciation against Bevilacqua regarding the Monster of Florence murders
My first statement on Bevilacqua’s admission of guilt contains a brief summary of the “admission call”. After I filed it I was interviewed by the Carabinieri (the PDF with the interview is below, after the denunciation). Differently from what I said to the LE officers in 2018, the phone call was made on September 12, 2017, not 11.
Translated
- 2018, March 1 and June 19 – My two interviews with the Carabinieri on the 2017 talks with Bevilacqua and his admission of guilt
Translated
- 2018, May 30 – Bevilacqua’s interview with the Carabinieri
Bevilacqua was heard in his home in the presence of three relatives. For this reason, a note of Carabinieri ROS says, it was impossible to take his DNA.
Translated
As proven by Bevilacqua’s bio records and his testimony at the Pacciani Trial, there are some mistakes and contradictions in his statements to the Carabinieri in 2018. He slightly changes the end date of his tour of service in Vietnam (“end of 1969” instead of “early 1969”), for example. He did a similar “mistake” with the Wolfhounds’ association (see here), to which he said he was in Vietnam between 1969 and 1970 (i.e. during the Zodiac’s higher period of activity).
The most notable contradiction in this interview, however, is what Bevilacqua says on the encounters with Pacciani in the 80s.
“Joe” tells the Carabinieri officers that Pacciani hung out around the American cemetery at the time he was living there. He would see him more times along the cemetery fence and at a bar in Via Scopeti, near the last crime scene of the Monster. However, in 1994 the retired Army sergeant told the court he had never seen Pacciani before the police showed him a picture of the defendant in the 90s.
The detectives overlook this contradiction and does not question Bevilacqua about his knowledge of Pacciani.
- 2018, September 28 – Report on the connection Zodiac-Monster by RacIS Carabinieri
Not translated
The Carabinieri’s forensic psychologists analyze the cases of the Monster of Florence and the Zodiac Killer on the basis of the available literature. The experts, in their conclusions, find “interesting” elements in Bevilacqua without excluding the possibility that he could be one or both serial killers. However, their suggestion to carry out new possible investigative activities remains unheeded by the Prosecutor’s Office and the ROS of Florence.
- 2021, April 6 – Dismissal of murder charges against Bevilacqua
Not translated
In 2021, the charges against Bevilacqua were dismissed by examining judge Gianluca Mancuso on request by Florence assistant District Attorney Luca Turco in violation of the Italian procedural law, since victims’ families were not advised of the request.
Prosecutor Turco’s motivation for dismissal says that there is “no fact with the dignity of a clue” in my investigation.
Bevilacqua’s DNA would not have been acquired if not for the Siena DA’S Office, Prosecutor Nicola Marini.
Between March 2018 and November 2023, Prosecutor Turco and the Carabinieri has not never made contact with the US authorities to ask for information on Bevilacqua’s past or send his DNA acquired by Siena DA’s Office. At that date, his home has never been searched for weapons or clues, regardless the existence of a probable cause for the Italian law.
My indictment (2022)
- 2022, November 3 – Indictment for defamation of Bevilacqua
Not translated
Both the request by Turco and the decree by Mancuso read that:
“…in the commission of the same criminal scheme, [Francesco Amicone] offended Joseph Bevilacqua’s reputation indicating him as the perpatrator of the homicides committed by the so called ‘Monster of Florence’ and of the murders (committed in the United States) by the so called ‘Zodiac’.”
Follows a list of 32 newspapers articles about the Zodiac-Monster connection written by me and other reporters.
Zodiac, il Mostro 
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