Donato Bilancia was born in 1951 in Potenza and grew up in Liguria. He was a small-time criminal and a compulsive gambler who lived alone in Genoa, and he was forty-six when he started. He went by Walter, and the Italian press called him the Monster of Liguria.
Between October 1997 and April 1998 he killed seventeen people across Liguria and Piedmont. He began with people connected to the illegal gambling circles he moved in, killing a club owner and then a jeweller and his wife and a money-changer, and then moved outward: prostitutes shot in their cars and flats along the Ligurian coast, a night watchman, a petrol station attendant, and two women shot on trains, one of them a nurse in a lavatory on the Genoa to Venice line, which caused a national alarm.
The dead named in the record are Giorgio Centanaro, fifty-eight; Maurizio Parenti and his wife Carla Scotto; Bruno Solari and his wife Maria Luigia Pitto; Luciano Marro; Giangiorgio Canu, fifty-two; Bodejana Almerina; Ljudmila Zubskova; Enzo Gorni; and Massimo Gualillo.
There was no single victim type, which is why the Italian police worked several separate investigations for months. What connected them was the .38 revolver and, eventually, DNA.
He was arrested on May 6, 1998. He confessed at length and gave an account of a childhood humiliation and of his gambling debts as the origin of it, which the court did not find explanatory.
He was convicted on April 12, 2000 and given thirteen life sentences with no possibility of release, among the most severe dispositions in Italian law. He died of COVID-19 at Padua prison on December 17, 2020.