|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2008 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
The
Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
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 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Monster of Florence.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
