Bartolomeo Gagliano was born at Nicosia in Sicily in 1958, one of two sons, and the family moved to Savona in Liguria while he was small. Accounts describe a modest and stable household and a boy who began, as he grew, to behave in ways that suggested mental illness.
On the night of January 16, 1981, close to his own wedding, he killed Paolina Fedi, thirty-two, a prostitute who used heroin and who had threatened to tell his fiancee that he had been unfaithful with her. He smashed her skull with a stone. He was twenty-two. The court found him incapable of understanding or willing and committed him for ten years to the criminal asylum at Aversa.
In 1983, out on a licence, he took two families and a taxi driver hostage. The sequence, as the Italian reporting has it, began at Massa Carrara, where he seized a married couple and made them drive him to La Spezia; he abandoned them, took their van to Savona, threatened a dock worker with a pistol, seized a taxi, fired at the officers chasing him, and wounded a traffic policeman and a girl who was trying to shelter from the shots. He then gave himself up. He was committed to the psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, near Florence.
There he became friendly with another patient, Francesco Sedda, who had also been found insane. On January 11, 1989 the two of them escaped.
Within a month Gagliano had killed twice. On February 8 he shot Nahir Fernandez Rodriguez, thirty-two, a Uruguayan trans woman, on the road between Milan and Genoa. On February 14, in the Carignano district of Genoa, he shot Francesco Panizzi, thirty-four, a transvestite known as Vanessa, in the face while Panizzi was with a client; the client survived. The day after that the same 7.65 pistol was used to wound another woman, Laura Baldi, who also lived. Investigators found that it was Gagliano who fired on each occasion, and a shot to the face was his signature. The Italian press called him il mostro di San Valentino, the Valentine's Day Monster.
On February 20, 1989 he was stopped at a roadblock and officers found two spent 7.65 cartridges on the dashboard of his car. He and Sedda were declared totally insane and committed again, this time in Emilia Romagna.
While he was on the run in 1989 he wrote to the newspaper La Stampa saying he was ready to give himself up on one condition only: that he be given a psychiatric examination.
In April 1990 at Florence he shot and wounded his girlfriend and fled, then presented himself at the hospital in Reggio Emilia and said the gun had gone off by accident. She defended him, saying it had been an erotic game that went wrong. He was given leave for New Year in 1991 and never came back; nobody in Savona saw him. Writing in January 1991, a correspondent for La Repubblica said the real mystery was why the supervising judges went on trusting a killer who had always betrayed that trust. He disappeared from a psychiatric hospital again in 1994.
There were five escapes altogether, and between them three robberies, a sexual assault, an assault and an attempted extortion; he was found at various points with weapons, with explosives and with drugs.
In December 2013, aged fifty-five, he left the prison at Genoa on a day-release privilege and did not return, driving off in a pale Fiat Panda. He was recaptured that month.
He hanged himself at the prison in Sanremo on January 22, 2015.
Four corrections to this entry as it stood. It said he was sentenced to eight years; it was ten. It gave Paolina Fedi's age as twenty-two, which was his age, not hers; she was thirty-two. It described the 1989 escape as being from a psychiatric hospital, which is right, but omitted that he escaped with another patient, that he escaped five times in all, and that he walked out of a prison again in 2013. And it closed by saying that nothing accessible recorded where he was; he had been dead for eight years when that was written.
The point the entry made about institutional failure stands, and the record is worse than it had. He was never convicted of any of the three killings. Each time he was found not responsible and detained, and each time he got out.