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CRIME

Italian families want ‘Monster of Florence’ serial killer case reopened

The 'Monster of Florence' was thought to have murdered 16 people in Italy and remains on the loose.

The families of victims of an Italian serial killer known as the 'Monster of Florence' have asked prosecutors to look into new leads
The families of victims of an Italian serial killer known as the 'Monster of Florence' have asked prosecutors to look into new leads. (Photo by MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP)

Families of victims of a serial killer who terrorised Florence in the 1970s and 80s are demanding a new probe into one of Italy’s darkest unsolved mysteries, a lawyer said on Friday.

Relatives of three victims have formally asked prosecutors in the Tuscan city to look afresh at potential leads into the so-called “Monster of Florence”, believed to have murdered 16 people.

“We are looking for the truth, with a new investigation, and we’re convinced that there are elements in the old case files that were wrongly overlooked,” lawyer Valter Biscotti told AFP.

Biscotti represents Estelle Lanciotti, the eldest daughter of French victim Nadine Mauriot, who was shot dead in 1985 with Jean Michel Kraveichvili during a camping holiday in Italy.

The victims were all couples, killed with the same Beretta pistol. Most were attacked in cars, during or just after having sex. Mauriot, murdered in her tent, was one of four women whose breasts or pubic areas were mutilated.

We want a fresh look at a lead concerning a suspect named in an old police file who was never investigated properly, as well as DNA found on anonymous letters,” Biscotti said.

Years of investigations into the murders, which took place in small towns around Florence between 1968 and 1985, lead police to suspect everyone from a poor farmer to Italy’s secret service and a satanic cult.

Five men were at one point or another accused of the killings but in each case, while they were in jail, another murder took place and they were freed.

One of these men had confessed. 

‘Inconsistencies’

The lawyers for relatives of Mauriot, Kraveichvili and Carmela De Nuccio, who was killed in 1981, have requested access to the case file of one-time suspect Pietro Pacciani, a farmer.

Pacciani, a convicted murderer who was also found guilty of raping his two daughters, was given life in 1994 for killing six of the eight couples but was cleared by an appeal court two years later.

That ruling was then overturned by Italy’s highest appeals court but Pacciani died in 1998 from a heart attack at the age of 73 before he could be retried.

Prosecutors had portrayed Pacciani as a violent and sex-obsessed man who committed the murders with several friends with whom he used to frequent brothels.

Two of those friends — Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti — were found guilty of four of the eight double murders after Lotti confessed. Both were jailed and both have since died.

There were “inconsistencies” in Lotti’s confession, however, and some of the murders remain unclaimed, suggesting “none of the trials so far have got to the whole truth”, Biscotti said.

Other suspects included another friend of Pacciani’s, Giampiero Vigilanti. A police search of his house in the 1980s found newspaper cuttings on the killings and bullets of the same make used in the murders.

Biscotti said he and the other lawyers want the probe into Vigilanti, now 90, to be reopened.

They also want male DNA found on anonymous letters sent to prosecutors in 1985 — which did not match Pacciani’s — to be compared against the suspect they say police were too quick to overlook.

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CRIME

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

Amanda Knox was again found guilty of slander on Wednesday, in a retrial in Italy related to her infamous jailing and later acquittal for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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