Antonio Mantovani was born in 1957 and was working as a warehouseman for a Milan transport firm in 1983, when he was twenty-six and living at Sesto San Giovanni.
Carla Zacchi was the wife of one of his friends. She was twenty-six and worked for a fashion magazine in Milan. On the evening of the murder he was expected at a dinner with a group of friends that included her husband, and did not appear; instead, knowing the husband was out, he called at the house and drew her outside on a pretext. She refused him, and he beat her about the head until she lost consciousness, strangled her, and put her body in the Villoresi canal, where a passer-by found her, naked, with a red jumper wound round her neck. She was identified from her wedding ring, which carried a name and the date of the marriage. Her husband was the first to name Mantovani to the police. The Italian press called him the Monster of Milan.
On December 5, 1985 he was sentenced to twenty-nine years and two months.
In 1996, after thirteen years, he was granted semi-liberty. This is the fact the case turns on, and this entry previously described it simply as release: he was let out during the day to work and returned to the prison at night, and remained a serving prisoner throughout.
Within months Dora Vendola, thirty-eight, was strangled with the belt of her raincoat in a Fiat Panda in Milan. She was herself a prisoner on semi-liberty. He knew her, and suspicion fell on him at once. There was no firm evidence, he was never formally charged, and his semi-liberty was not withdrawn.
In 1997, using the permits he had, he killed twice more. Simona Carnevale, a hairdresser of twenty-six, left her shop in Milan on the evening of March 7, telephoned her sister to say she would be home late, and was not heard from again; her disappearance was taken up by the television programme Chi l'ha visto?, and two years later an anonymous letter reached the programme describing an attack on her in the underground. In June he killed Cesarina De Donato, the woman who had rented him his flat. She was found half burned in her own bed, with plastic bags about her face, the scene arranged to look like a suicide.
What convicted him was his own cellmate. Carlo Fermi saw Simona Carnevale's photograph on television and remembered having seen her with Mantovani. He told investigators that on the evening of March 7 Mantovani had come back to the cell in a state of agitation and had said he had killed a girl, and that the next day he had shown him her body, wrapped in a sheet, in the boot of his yellow Y10. Mantovani's telephone number was then found among Carnevale's papers.
He absconded and was arrested at Clusone on January 28, 1998. He said he had been framed over Dora Vendola, and that Albanian dealers had tortured him over a debt.
On November 12, 2001 the assize court at Milan sentenced him to life for Simona Carnevale and to twenty-nine years for Cesarina De Donato. He protested his innocence throughout, wept in court more than once, and said he was sorry for the victims' families. He attempted to escape during the proceedings and was retaken. The convictions were confirmed on appeal and by the Court of Cassation on June 13, 2002.
He hanged himself in the prison at Saluzzo on March 28, 2003. He never confessed to any of the killings.
The release is what the case is remembered for in Italy, and it belongs with Maurizio Minghella in this archive: a man convicted of murder, let out partway through a long sentence under a conduct-based scheme, and killing again within months.
Four corrections to this entry as it stood. It gave the count as four; three killings produced convictions and the fourth, Dora Vendola, was never charged. It dated the first sentence to 1983, which is the year of the murder rather than the sentence. It gave the arrest as June 1999, where the Italian record gives January 28, 1998. And it did not record that he died: he had been dead for more than twenty years. The date of the Vendola killing is given as 1993 in some accounts and 1996 in others, and her forename appears once as Carolina rather than Cesarina for the fourth victim.