Cesare Serviatti was convicted in July 1933 of killing three women he had met through newspaper marriage advertisements. The killings took place over four years, in La Spezia in 1928, in Rome in 1930 and in La Spezia again in November 1932. Each of the women brought him her savings, and each disappeared. The Corte d'Assise of La Spezia sentenced him to death for the last killing, that of Paolina Gorietti, and to life imprisonment for the other two. He was shot by firing squad at Sarzana on October 13, 1933.
The Italian press of the time compared him with the French killer of women Henri Desire Landru, and he went into the papers as the Landru of the Tiber, the Italian Landru and Bluebeard, and in Rome as the butcher of Rome. Writers since have retold the case many times, and they disagree on many details: his birth date, the names and origins of the women, the date of his arrest, which officer solved the case and how many killings he claimed. The core of the case is not in dispute. Three women were dead, he was tried for all three, and the court found that he had killed them for money and knew what he was doing.
Serviatti's early life is reported only in outline, and the accounts conflict. La Voce del Patriota, in a 2019 history of the case, gave his birth as November 24, 1880, in Subiaco, the town in the hills east of Rome, and said his parents were unknown. Il Giornale, in a 2005 account by Paolo Bertuccio, said he was born in Rome in 1875. The online periodical InLiberta, in 2023, gave both years and both places. Il Giornale's 2011 account, written by the regional criminology study center of Emilia-Romagna, described him as 52 at the time of his arrest, born and living in Rome, and said he had a criminal record before the killings. The nature of that record is not known.
He worked with his hands. Several accounts say he was a butcher for a time and worked as a nurse at the Policlinico, Rome's large teaching hospital, until he was dismissed for mistreating patients. Il Giornale in 2005 described him at the time of the crimes as short and stocky, with a large mustache and thinning hair. Witnesses at the trial, according to il Giornale's 2011 account, described him as a normal man, and the press portrayed him as intelligent, cold and composed under questioning.
He was married. His wife, according to il Giornale in 2005, had herself been found through a marriage advertisement, and that writer said she helped him with the advertisements while knowing nothing of the killings. She was later investigated as a possible accomplice and acquitted. At the time of his arrest he was living in Rome with his wife, and Eurocomunicazione, in a 2020 account, said that a woman described as his lover was also in the home that evening. Both women were cleared.
In the second half of the 1920s Serviatti ran a boarding house in La Spezia, the naval port on the Ligurian coast, according to il Giornale's 2011 account. La Spezia is where two of the three killings took place, where the 1932 case was traced and where he was tried.
The first of the three women was a widow named Pasqua Bartolini. Il Giornale in 2011 described her as the widow of a railway pensioner and said she disappeared around the middle of July 1928, after Serviatti persuaded her to sell what she owned, leave Chiavari, on the Ligurian coast, and move to La Spezia. Other accounts give her surname as Bartolini Tiraboschi, and il Giornale in 2005 printed it as Bartolini Faraboschi. La Voce del Patriota described her as a 42-year-old widow from Genoa who had been left an inheritance; Eurocomunicazione called her a widow from Livorno. Little else is known of her life.
Her death went unnoticed at the time. No relative reported her missing, according to InLiberta, and the case surfaced only after Serviatti's arrest more than four years later. According to il Giornale in 2011, he admitted bringing her to La Spezia but always denied killing her, and the prosecution relied on evidence found in La Spezia after his arrest. Other accounts say he confessed to her death as well. The court convicted him of her murder.
The second woman was Beatrice Margarucci, known as Bice, a woman from Rome. Serviatti met her in the summer of 1930 through a marriage advertisement he had placed in Il Messaggero, according to il Giornale in 2011. She brought her savings and went to live with him in Rome. She was last heard from in October 1930. La Voce del Patriota said she had recently returned to Italy from the United States. Her age is not known.
She was found dead near Rome in November 1930; La Voce del Patriota gave the date as November 3, 1930. No one was charged at the time. Città della Spezia, in 2010, said the same commissioner who later worked the 1932 case had handled her death without finding the person responsible. After his arrest in 1932, Serviatti confessed to killing her in Rome, according to il Giornale in 2011, and the court convicted him of her murder.
The third woman, Paolina Gorietti, was about 40. Il Giornale in 2005 said she was born in Assisi and that her parents lived in Umbria; La Voce del Patriota described her as Neapolitan. For years she had lived and worked in Rome, where she had a close friend, a young woman from Umbria who would later bring the case to the police.
In 1932 Gorietti answered a marriage advertisement, whose text il Giornale printed: "Pensionato, 450 lire mensili, conoscerebbe signorina con mezzi, preferibilmente cameriera, scopo matrimonio," a pensioner with 450 lire a month who wished to meet a young woman of means, for marriage. On November 4, 1932, according to Eurocomunicazione, she left Rome for La Spezia, where she expected to marry him and, by the accounts in il Giornale, to open a shop with about 12,000 lire she took with her. Her friend received a letter from her dated November 11. After that the letters stopped.
In mid-November 1932 an unidentified woman was found dead, according to il Giornale's 2011 account, and police in Naples, Rome and La Spezia began working the case together.
Eurocomunicazione, in its 2020 account of the investigation, said witnesses at the La Spezia station remembered a heavyset man of about fifty, with an upturned black mustache, and that police checked missing-person reports in all three cities and questioned about a hundred people without result.
Accounts differ on who led the inquiry. Città della Spezia and InLiberta both credit a deputy commissioner named Musco; InLiberta gave his full name as Mario Stefano Silverio Musco. Eurocomunicazione credited Giuseppe Dosi, then head of the mobile investigative squad in La Spezia.
Dosi, born in Rome in 1891, the son of a carabinieri noncommissioned officer, had been an actor before joining the police in 1912, and had made his name in Rome in the 1920s on difficult investigations, according to Eurocomunicazione. His quarrels with his superiors had brought a series of transfers, to Cortina d'Ampezzo, to Assisi and then to La Spezia. In the 1932 case, Eurocomunicazione said, he coordinated the La Spezia inquiry, and the breakthrough came when he learned that an officer of the Rome squad was already watching one of the town's apartments, having solved the case from the Rome end. Dosi received a fee of 1,000 lire for his work, and a New York newspaper paid him 350 dollars for a detailed report on the case. He was moved to Florence in 1933. A memoir he wrote was later seized; he was arrested in 1939 and dismissed from the police, and was freed in January 1941.
The name came from Rome. In early December 1932 Gorietti's friend read newspaper descriptions of the unidentified woman and went to the police, according to Eurocomunicazione, fearing the dead woman was Gorietti. She told them Gorietti had left for La Spezia on November 4 to marry a man she had met through a marriage advertisement, Cesare Serviatti, and that the letters had stopped after November 11. Il Giornale in 2011 said the testimony of Gorietti's relatives and of her friend led to the arrest. Il Giornale in 2005 placed the identification around December 12, after a tip from a young woman in Perugia. Within days investigators were sure the woman was Paolina Gorietti.
Police arrested Serviatti at his home in Rome while he was eating dinner with his wife. Il Giornale's 2011 account gave the date as December 9, 1932; Bertuccio's 2005 account gave December 13. He did not resist, according to La Voce del Patriota.
His first account, according to il Giornale in 2005, was that he had acted in self-defense. The medical report found that she had died of strangulation. For several days he admitted only to bringing her to La Spezia. Il Giornale in 2011 recorded that before he confessed he ate a plate of pasta in front of the officers and praised the cooking. Then he confessed to killing her in La Spezia.
He went further. According to il Giornale in 2011, he confessed to killing Beatrice Margarucci in Rome in 1930. Eurocomunicazione said he also confessed to the death of a widow, the 1928 case. Città della Spezia and InLiberta said he spoke of five killings in all, and La Voce del Patriota of at least four others besides those that came to trial, without giving names or details. Police identified three. No other case was charged against him.
Il Giornale's 2011 account said that, as the trial approached, he tried to avoid a death sentence by changing his account of the motive.
He was charged with three murders. Prosecutors argued premeditation and robbery as the motive, according to il Giornale in 2011: in each case he had taken the money the woman brought with her. In the Gorietti case the charges included theft and robbery, which La Voce del Patriota put at 2,000 lire in cash, and, according to Città della Spezia, the offenses of desecration and concealment of a corpse. His wife was investigated for complicity and acquitted.
The trial opened before the Corte d'Assise of La Spezia on June 14, 1933, according to La Voce del Patriota, and was held under the summary procedure, per direttissima, according to il Giornale and Città della Spezia. Under the Rocco penal code then in force, Eurocomunicazione noted, death was the most severe penalty for crimes of this kind, and public opinion, it said, demanded an exemplary sentence.
Serviatti was defended by two lawyers, Cassinelli of Rome and Bellincioni of La Spezia, according to il Giornale in 2011. The defense argued that his mental capacity was impaired. Serviatti said he had killed in his sleep, driven by a mysterious force, according to il Giornale in 2005 and InLiberta. The defense asked several times for a psychiatric examination, and the court refused each request. Witnesses who knew him described him as normal. The court found him capable of understanding and intending what he did.
On July 8, 1933, according to La Voce del Patriota, the court convicted him of the three murders and of the theft and robbery in the Gorietti case. It sentenced him to death for the murder of Paolina Gorietti and to life imprisonment for the murders of Beatrice Margarucci and Pasqua Bartolini. La Voce del Patriota said all stages of the case were settled quickly. A request for clemency went to King Victor Emmanuel III, who refused it, according to La Voce del Patriota and InLiberta.
Serviatti was executed by firing squad at the Chiara Vecchia military range at Sarzana, near La Spezia, on the morning of October 13, 1933. Eurocomunicazione and Città della Spezia gave the time as 6:24 a.m.; La Voce del Patriota gave 6:25.
In 2011 the regional criminology study center of Emilia-Romagna, writing in il Giornale, assessed him as a criminal with personality disorders but not insane, and as a multiple killer driven by profit rather than a serial killer in the usual sense. It compared his case with that of Leonarda Cianciulli, who killed in Correggio in 1939 and 1940: both had criminal records from youth, both chose lonely women and both were convicted after evidence built up against them.
The case has stayed alive in La Spezia. In 2010 the local band Funkafe recorded a song about it, "Er troncadone," sung in the La Spezia dialect and built around events at the town's central station, as Città della Spezia reported.
Number of killings. Serviatti was convicted of three murders. After his arrest he spoke of more, reported as five in all or as at least four besides those tried. He gave no names, no further case has been linked to him and no further charge was brought. The further killings are claims only.
The 1928 case. Il Giornale's 2011 account says he always denied killing Pasqua Bartolini; other accounts say he confessed to it. He was convicted of her murder.
Names and places. Her surname appears as Bartolini, Bartolini Tiraboschi and Bartolini Faraboschi, and her home as Chiavari, Genoa or Livorno. Gorietti's name appears in one account as Goretti and Margarucci's as Maragucci. Gorietti is described as born in Assisi in one account and as Neapolitan in another.
Birth. His birth is given as November 24, 1880, in Subiaco, or as 1875 in Rome.
Arrest. The arrest date is given as December 9 or December 13, 1932.
The investigators. Accounts credit either Deputy Commissioner Musco or Giuseppe Dosi, head of the La Spezia mobile squad, and Eurocomunicazione credits an unnamed Rome squad officer with solving the case.
Motive. Some later accounts attribute other motives to him. The criminology center writing in il Giornale in 2011 rejected those claims as unproven and held that the motive was money, as the prosecution argued at trial.
1875 or November 24, 1880: Cesare Serviatti born, in Rome or in Subiaco (accounts differ).
Late 1920s: he runs a boarding house in La Spezia.
Mid-July 1928: Pasqua Bartolini, a widow, disappears after moving to La Spezia.
Summer 1930: he meets Beatrice Margarucci through a marriage advertisement in Il Messaggero.
October 1930: Margarucci is last heard from.
November 3, 1930: she is found dead near Rome.
November 4, 1932: Paolina Gorietti leaves Rome for La Spezia.
November 11, 1932: date of her last letter to her friend.
November 1932: an unidentified woman is found dead; police in three cities investigate.
Early December 1932: Gorietti's friend goes to the Rome police.
December 9 or 13, 1932: Serviatti is arrested in Rome.
June 14, 1933: trial opens before the Corte d'Assise of La Spezia.
July 8, 1933: convicted of three murders; sentenced to death for the Gorietti murder and to life imprisonment for the other two.
1933: King Victor Emmanuel III refuses clemency.
October 13, 1933: executed by firing squad at Sarzana.
2010: the La Spezia band Funkafe records "Er troncadone."