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2008 Book Reviews

 

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi

Rating:

***

 

(Recommended)

 

 

 

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Scary

If you’ve ever doubted that true life is often more bizarre than fiction, read Douglas Preston’s new book, The Monster of Florence. After Preston moved his family to Florence to research his next book, Italian journalist Mario Spezi told Preston about the unsolved serial murders by a criminal Spezi called “the Monster of Florence.” Preston became hooked by the story. Seven pairs of lovers were killed between 1974 and 1985 while parked in their cars outside Florence. One of those murders took place in an olive grove on Preston’s property. Preston and Spezi began to investigate the case together. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 23, pp. 120-122:

The Scjuadra Anti-Mostro was taken over by a new chief inspector of police, a man named Ruggero Perugini. A few years later, Thomas Harris would create a fictional portrait of Perugini in his novel Han­nibal, giving him the thinly disguised fictional name of Rinaldo Pazzi. While researching the book, Harris had been a guest in Chief Inspec­tor Perugini's home in Florence. (It was said that Perugini was not pleased with Harris's return on his hospitality, by having his alter ego gutted and hung from the Palazzo Vecchio.) The real chief inspector was more dignified than his sweaty and troubled counterpart in the film version, played by Giancarlo Giannini. The real Perugini spoke with a Roman accent, but his movements and dress, and the way he handled his briar pipe, made him seem more English than Italian.

When Chief Inspector Perugini took over SAM, he and Vigna wiped the slate clean. Perugini started with the assumption that the gun and bullets had somehow passed out of the circle of Sardinians before the Monster killings began. The Sardinian Trail was a dead end and he had no more interest in it. He also viewed the evidence collected at the crime scenes with skepticism—and perhaps rightly so. The forensic ex­amination of the crime scenes had been, in general, incompetent. Only the last was actually secured and sealed by the police. In the others, peo­ple came and went, picking up the shells, taking pictures, smoking and throwing their butts on the ground, trampling the grass, and shedding their own hair and fibers everywhere. Much of the forensic evidence that was collected—and there was precious little—was never properly analyzed, and some, like the rag, was lost or allowed to spoil. Investiga­tors had not generally kept samples of the victims' hair, clothing, or blood, to see if their presence might be associated with any suspects.

Instead of plodding once again through the evidence and rereading the thousands of pages of interrogations, Perugini was smitten by the idea of solving the crime in the modern way—with computers. He was in love with the scientific methods used by the FBI to hunt serial killers. He finally dusted off the IBM PC given to SAM by the Ministry of the Interior and booted it up.

He ran through it the names of every man between the ages of thirty and sixty in the province of Florence who had ever been picked up by the police, asking it to spit out all those persons convicted of sex­ual crimes. Then Perugini matched up their periods of incarceration with the dates of the Monster's homicides, identifying those who were in prison when the Monster didn't kill and out of prison when he did. He winnowed the list down from thousands to a few dozen people. And there, in the middle of this rarefied company, he found the name of Pietro Pacciani—the peasant farmer who had been denounced in an anonymous letter after the Monster's final killings.

Perugini then did another computer screening to see how many of these suspects had lived in or around the areas where the Monster had struck. Once again Pacciani's name surfaced, after Perugini gener­ously expanded the definition of "in or around" to swallow most of Florence and its environs.

The appearance of Pacciani's name in this second screening again re­inforced the anonymous message that had arrived on September 11, 1985, inviting the police to "question our fellow citizen Pietro Pacciani born in Vicchio." In this way, the most advanced system of criminal investigation, the computer, was married to the most ancient system, the anonymous letter—both of which fingered the same man: Pietro Pacciani.

Pietro Pacciani became Perugini's preferred suspect. All that re­mained was to gather the evidence against him.

Inspector Perugini ordered a search of Pacciani's house and came up with what he considered further incriminating evidence. Prime among this was a reproduction of Botticelli's Primavera, the famous painting in the Uffizi Gallery, which depicts, in part, a pagan nymph with flowers spilling from her mouth. The picture reminded Perugini of the gold chain lying in the mouth of one of the Monster's first victims. This clue so captivated him that it became the cover of the book he would later publish about the case, which showed Botticelli's nymph vomiting blood instead of flowers. Reinforcing this interpre­tation, Perugini took note of a pornographic magazine centerfold pinned up in Pacciani's kitchen, surrounded by pictures of the Blessed Virgin and saints, showing a topless woman with a flower clamped provocatively between her teeth.

Right after the Monster's last double homicide, Pietro Pacciani had been sent to prison for raping his daughters. This, for Perugini, was another important clue. It explained why there had been no killings for the past three years.

Most of all, it was the 1951 murder that attracted Perugini's atten­tion. It had taken place near Vicchio, Pacciani's birthplace, where the Monster had struck twice. On the surface it looked like a Monster crime: two young people making love in a car in the Tassinaia woods, ambushed by a killer hidden in the bushes nearby. She was just sixteen, the town beauty and Pacciani's girlfriend. Her lover was a traveling salesman who went from village to village selling sewing machines.

But on a closer look, the crime was quite different—messy, furi­ous, and spontaneous. Pacciani had beaten the man's head in with a stone before knifing him. He then threw his girlfriend into the grass and raped her next to his rival's dead body. Afterwards, he slung the salesman's corpse over his shoulders to carry it to a nearby lake. After struggling for a while he gave up and dumped it in the middle of a field. Criminologists would have called it a "disorganized" homicide, as opposed to the organized ones of the Monster. So disorganized, in fact, that Pacciani was swiftly arrested and convicted.

 

Preston and Spezi’s investigation turned scary at two points: when they interviewed the individual they think is the most likely criminal, and when Spezi was arrested and Preston interrogated. Read The Monster of Florence for a gripping tale of true life and the scary turns that it can take.

 

Steve Hopkins, November 20, 2008

 

 

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The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the December 2008 issue of Executive Times

 

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