On April 12, 1998, a young woman traveling alone on the train from Genoa to Venice went to the lavatory. The man who had boarded because, as he later said, he wanted to kill a woman followed her, unlocked the door with a skeleton key, shot her in the head and took her ticket. Six days later, on a train to Sanremo, he did it again, using his victim's jacket to muffle the shot. The killing of two women on trains set off public outrage and the creation of a police task force. The man was Donato Bilancia, and by then he had killed fifteen people along the Italian Riviera in six months.
Bilancia was born in Potenza, in Basilicata, on July 10, 1951, and his family moved north when he was about five, first to Piedmont and then to Genoa. He wet the bed until ten or twelve, and his mother shamed him by hanging his mattress on the balcony for the neighbors to see; an aunt, undressing him for bed, pulled down his underwear in front of his cousins to show off his underdeveloped penis. At fourteen he began calling himself Walter. He dropped out of high school, worked as a mechanic, bartender, baker and delivery boy, and was arrested young for stealing a scooter and a truckload of Christmas sweets. He was jailed in 1974 for carrying an illegal gun, escaped from the psychiatric ward of Genoa General Hospital, and served terms in Italy and France for robbery and armed robbery. He had no record of violence until he was forty-seven.
He was a compulsive gambler who lived alone. In October 1997 he strangled a friend who had drawn him into a rigged card game in which he lost heavily; the death was first taken for a heart attack. He then shot the game's operator and the man's wife and emptied their safe, and he said later that those killings gave him a taste for it. That month he followed a jeweler home to rob him and shot him and his wife when she began to scream. He robbed and killed a money changer, then, two months later, a security guard on his rounds, because he did not like night watchmen. He killed an Albanian sex worker and a Russian worker, and a second money changer. In March 1998, holding a sex worker at gunpoint, he shot two night watchmen who interrupted and then shot her; she survived to help with a police sketch and to testify against him. He killed a Nigerian and a Ukrainian sex worker. After the train killings, on April 20, he shot a gas station attendant, Giuseppe Mileto, and took the day's takings.
His methods changed so much, and his victims had so little in common, that for months the police did not see one killer. What stayed constant was a .38 revolver loaded with wadcutter ammunition, and a black Mercedes one of the murdered sex workers had been seen getting into. Police tailed him for ten days and took his DNA from cigarette butts and a coffee cup; it matched the crime scenes. He was arrested at his home in Genoa on May 6, 1998, and his revolver was seized. After eight days in custody he confessed, talking for two days and drawing seventeen diagrams. The police had credited him with nine killings; he admitted eight more.
On April 12, 2000, after an eleven-month trial, he was sentenced to thirteen terms of life imprisonment plus twenty years for the attempted murder of the sex worker, and the judge ordered that he never be released. The Italian press called him the Monster of Liguria and the Killer on the Trains. He never expressed remorse, saying he had been possessed by a disease when he killed.
In prison he was considered a model inmate. In 2016 he earned a diploma in accounting and began university studies in tourism. In 2017 the Court of Cassation rejected his bid to have his life terms converted to thirty years, and that year he was allowed out under armed escort to visit his parents' grave at Nizza Monferrato. A second permit was refused in September 2019 by the surveillance court in Padua, which found him still dangerous. He died of COVID-19 in prison on December 17, 2020.