On the night of February 14, 1989, in the Carignano district of Genoa, a man walked up to a car in which Francesco Panizzi, thirty-four, a transvestite sex worker known as Vanessa, was with a client, and shot Panizzi in the face with a 7.65 pistol. The client survived. Six days earlier, on February 8, Nahir Fernandez Rodriguez, thirty-two, a Uruguayan trans woman, had been shot in the face on the road between Milan and Genoa. The day after the Genoa killing the same pistol wounded another woman, Laura Baldi, who lived. The Italian press called the gunman il mostro di San Valentino, the Valentine's Day Monster. He was Bartolomeo Gagliano, and he had escaped from a criminal psychiatric hospital a month earlier.
Gagliano was born in 1958 at Nicosia, in Sicily, one of the two sons of Antonio Gagliano and Giuseppina Di Grazia, and the family moved to Savona, in Liguria, when he was small. Accounts describe a modest, stable household and a boy who, as he grew, began to behave in ways that suggested mental illness.
On the night of January 16, 1981, shortly before his wedding, he killed Paolina Fedi, thirty-two, a sex worker who used heroin and with whom he had been having a secret affair, after she threatened to tell his fiancée. He smashed her skull with a stone. He was twenty-two; some later accounts wrongly give that age as hers. 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 leave, he took two families and a taxi driver hostage. According to the Italian reporting, he seized a married couple at Massa Carrara and made them drive him to La Spezia, took their van to Savona, threatened a dock worker with a pistol, commandeered a taxi, and fired on the officers chasing him, wounding a traffic policeman and a girl sheltering from the shots, before giving himself up. He was sent to the judicial psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, near Florence. There he became close to another patient, Francesco Sedda, an HIV-positive drug addict held for robberies who had also been found insane and who was likewise violent toward sex workers. On January 11, 1989, the two escaped together.
While on the run he wrote to the newspaper La Stampa offering to give himself up on one condition: that he be given a psychiatric examination. Investigators later concluded that he had fired the shots in all three February attacks, and that a shot to the face was his signature. 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. Neither killing produced a conviction.
The escapes went on. In April 1990, in Florence, he shot and wounded his girlfriend and fled, then turned up at the hospital in Reggio Emilia saying the gun had gone off by accident; she defended him, calling it an erotic game gone wrong. He was given leave for New Year's in 1991 and did not come back. A La Repubblica correspondent wrote that January that the real mystery was why the supervising judges kept trusting a killer who had always betrayed that trust. He vanished from a psychiatric hospital again in 1994. Over five escapes he committed three robberies, a sexual assault, an assault and an attempted extortion, and he was found at various times with weapons, explosives and drugs.
By 2013 he was held at Marassi prison in Genoa. On December 17 of that year, at fifty-five, he was let out on a day-release privilege to visit his mother and did not return, driving off in a pale Fiat Panda. During four days on the run he took a baker hostage, and on December 20 he was caught at Menton, across the French border. France extradited him on April 23, 2014, and on January 14, 2015, a court sentenced him to six years and six months for escape, kidnapping, aggravated robbery and illegal possession of a weapon.
Eight days later, on January 22, 2015, he hanged himself from the window bars of the infirmary at Sanremo prison, where he had been admitted the night before after cutting himself. He was fifty-six. The prison guards' union said staff had not been able to stop him in time. 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.