Simona Carnevale, a hairdresser of twenty-six, closed up her shop at 56 Via Palmanova in Milan on the evening of March 7, 1997, telephoned her sister to say she would be home late, and was never seen again. Her body has never been found. For two years the only trace of her was on Chi l'ha visto?, the Italian television program about missing people, until on March 1, 1999, an anonymous letter arrived at the program describing an attack on Simona in the subway.
The man who was finally charged with her murder was, on the night she disappeared, a serving prisoner. Antonio Mantovani had been convicted fourteen years earlier of killing a friend's wife, and since 1996 he had been on semi-liberty, out by day to work and back in his cell at Milan's Opera prison each night. His cellmate, Carlo Fermi, saw Simona's photograph on television and remembered having seen her with him. On the evening of March 7, Fermi told investigators, Mantovani had come back to the cell badly agitated and said he had killed a girl, and the next day he had shown Fermi her body, wrapped in a sheet, in the trunk of his yellow Y10. Mantovani's telephone number turned up among Simona's papers. On June 1, 1999, a Milan judge ordered him held.
He was born in 1957 at Trevenzuolo, in the province of Verona, and was known as il Morin. In 1983, when he was twenty-six, he was living at Sesto San Giovanni and working as a warehouseman for a Milan transport firm. Carla Zacchi, twenty-six, worked for a fashion magazine in Milan and was married to one of his friends. On the evening he killed her he was expected at a dinner with a group of friends that included her husband, and did not come. Instead, knowing the husband was out, he called at the house and drew her outside on a pretext. When she fought off his assault he beat her until she lost consciousness, strangled her, and put her in the Villoresi canal near Monza, where her body surfaced two days later, naked, a red sweater wound around her neck. She was identified by her wedding ring, engraved with a name and the date of the marriage. Her husband was the first to give Mantovani's name to the police. He protested his innocence at trial, and on December 5, 1985, was sentenced to twenty-nine years and two months, a little short of the thirty the prosecution had asked. The press called him the Monster of Milan.
In 1996, after about thirteen years, he was granted semi-liberty. Within months Dora Vendola, thirty-eight, herself a prisoner on semi-liberty, was found strangled with a cord in a red Fiat Panda in Milan. Accounts date her death to October 31, 1996, the evening his work computer was shut off for three hours, and the discovery of her body to November 6. He knew her, and suspicion fell on him at once. Questioned, he admitted she had rejected a sexual advance and denied killing her. The investigators found his account credible. He was never charged, and his semi-liberty stayed in place.
Three months after Simona Carnevale vanished, on June 2, 1997, the half-burned body of Cesarina De Donato, sixty, the woman who had rented him an apartment, was found on her bed with two plastic bags over her head and some twenty dolls and several bottles of perfume arranged around her, a scene set to look like a suicide. She had been strangled before the fire was set. Her niece, Monica Marceddu, said years later that Mantovani had seemed like the classic good boy, as mild as a priest, that he always turned down invitations to go out for pizza because he said he had to look after his mother, and that he had made a pass at her before he killed her aunt. "We never saw him work," she said. "He was always looking for women." Accounts differ on the details of the scene, and one puts the killing on June 3.
He ran. He was arrested at Clusone, in the mountains above Bergamo, on January 28, 1998, carrying a forged passport and identity card. He said he had been framed for Dora Vendola's death and that Albanian drug dealers had tortured him over a debt.
The trial opened before the Milan assize court on April 19, 2000, on charges of the double murder of Simona Carnevale and Cesarina De Donato, destruction of one body and concealment of another, receiving stolen goods, and forgery of the documents he had used while on the run. The victims' families attended throughout. Mantovani insisted he was innocent, wept in court more than once, said he was sorry for the families, and at one point tried to escape and was recaptured. On November 12, 2001, he was sentenced to life for Simona Carnevale and to twenty-nine years for Cesarina De Donato. The convictions were upheld on appeal and by the Court of Cassation on June 13, 2002.
He hanged himself in the prison at Saluzzo on March 28, 2003, having never admitted any of the killings. In Italy the case is remembered less for the man than for the decision that let him out: a prisoner already convicted of murder, released by day under a conduct-based scheme, kept on it after he was suspected of a second killing, and free to commit two more.