Households of victims of a serial killer who terrorized Florence within the Seventies and 80s are demanding a brand new probe into certainly one of Italy's darkest unsolved mysteries, a lawyer mentioned on Friday. Kinfolk of three victims have formally requested prosecutors within the Tuscan metropolis to look afresh at potential leads into the so-called "Monster of Florence," believed to have murdered 16 folks.
"We're on the lookout for the reality, with a brand new investigation, and we're satisfied that there are components within the previous case information that had been wrongly neglected," lawyer Valter Biscotti advised AFP.
Biscotti represents Estelle Lanciotti, the eldest daughter of French sufferer Nadine Mauriot, who was shot lifeless in 1985 with Jean Michel Kraveichvili throughout a tenting vacation in Italy.
The victims had been all couples, killed with the identical Beretta pistol. Most had been attacked in automobiles, throughout or simply after having intercourse. Mauriot, murdered in her tent, was certainly one of 4 ladies whose breasts or pubic areas had been mutilated.
"We would like a recent take a look at a lead regarding a suspect named in an previous police file who was by no means investigated correctly, in addition to DNA discovered on nameless letters," Biscotti mentioned.
Years of investigations into the murders, which came about in small cities round Florence between 1968 and 1985, lead police to suspect everybody from a poor farmer to Italy's secret service and a satanic cult.
5 males had been at one level or one other accused of the killings however in every case, whereas they had been in jail, one other homicide came about and so they had been freed. Certainly one of these males had confessed.
"Not one of the trials up to now have gotten to the entire reality"
The legal professionals for family members of Mauriot, Kraveichvili and Carmela De Nuccio, who was killed in 1981, have requested entry to the case file of one-time suspect Pietro Pacciani, a farmer.
Pacciani, a convicted assassin who was additionally discovered responsible of raping his two daughters, was given life in 1994 for killing six of the eight couples however was cleared by an enchantment court docket two years later.
That ruling was then overturned by Italy's highest appeals court docket however Pacciani died in 1998 from a coronary heart assault on the age of 73 earlier than he may very well be retried.
Prosecutors had portrayed Pacciani as a violent and sex-obsessed man who dedicated the murders with a number of pals with whom he used to frequent brothels.
Two of these pals — Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti — had been discovered responsible of 4 of the eight double murders after Lotti confessed. Each had been jailed and each have since died.
There have been "inconsistencies" in Lotti's confession, nevertheless, and among the murders stay unclaimed, suggesting "not one of the trials up to now have gotten to the entire reality," Biscotti mentioned.
Different suspects included one other pal of Pacciani's, Giampiero Vigilanti. A police search of his home within the Eighties discovered newspaper cuttings on the killings and bullets of the identical make used within the murders.
Biscotti mentioned he and the opposite legal professionals need the probe into Vigilanti, now 90, to be reopened.
Additionally they need male DNA discovered on nameless letters despatched to prosecutors in 1985 — which didn't match Pacciani's — to be in contrast towards the suspect they are saying police had been too fast to miss.
Final yr, Deadline reported that Antonio Banderas had been solid to play Italian crime reporter Mario Spezi in a sequence known as "The Monster of Florence," based mostly on the ebook by Spezi and American novelist Douglas Preston. Within the ebook, the authors uncovered a sequence of alleged errors made by police throughout their investigation of the murders.
Spezi was arrested in 2006 by authorities in a probe that additionally entangled Preston, the Related Press reported. Prosecutors accused the journalist of slander and of sidetracking their investigation into the "Monster of Florence" murders.
