In February 1996 Merano, a spa town in the Italian province of South Tyrol, lived for three weeks with a gunman nobody could name. Two people were shot dead in the town center on February 8. A farmhand was found dead on the edge of town six days later, and an accountant was shot on February 27 while out walking with his fiancée. On the morning of March 1 a farmer and a carabinieri marshal were killed at Rifiano, a village in the hills above the town, and the man investigators blamed for all six deaths, Ferdinand Gamper, died by his own hand as carabinieri surrounded the building where he was hiding.
Gamper was never charged, so no court weighed the evidence against him. The case against him, as investigators described it in March 1996, rested on the gun found with him, which they said had fired the shots in Merano, on the description given by the fiancée who survived, and on notes in which he appeared to claim the killings. For about three weeks before that, a young local man had been held in jail as the suspect. He was released the night Gamper died.
Ferdinand Gamper was born in 1957, according to tirol.ORF.at, the Tyrol service of Austria's public broadcaster, and grew up in Kuens, known in Italian as Caines, a small village at the entrance to the Passeier valley just north of Merano. L'Unità, the Rome daily, gave his age as 39 when he died. He was German-speaking, as most people in the villages around Merano are, and he never married.
He earned his living mostly away from South Tyrol. ORF reported that he worked as a shepherd in Switzerland and, at times, sold bed linen. L'Unità's correspondents, writing in the days after his death, said he spent the winter months in the Merano area and went to Switzerland in spring to herd cattle and goats, earning two to three million lire a month. In winter he lodged at Rifiano, on land he rented from the farmer Tullio Melchiorri.
Neighbors knew little about him. "He was a lone wolf," Melchiorri's son told L'Unità, adding that Gamper did not even talk to the family. A friend later told ORF that Gamper had suffered from persecution mania all his life, and ORF described him in 2021 as a psychologically unstable loner. The barber who would identify him said he had few friends, and that a Swiss girlfriend had left him about two years before.
He had come to police notice before, though not for violence against anyone. L'Unità reported that the carabinieri had filed reports on him in 1981 and 1987, both times for incidents when he was drunk, including resisting and assaulting a public official. His family had known hardship. A brother had died some years before 1996, and the death had been treated as a suicide; accounts in L'Unità differed on when it happened, and one said investigators were considering an exhumation. In 2016 ORF wrote that Gamper's hatred of everything Italian probably had roots in his family's history: under the Fascist regime, it said, his grandparents' farm at Sinich, on the edge of Merano, had been expropriated.
On the evening of February 8, 1996, Hans Otto Detmering and Clorinda Cecchetti were shot dead while walking together in the center of Merano. It was the night the Sanremo song festival was on television, as L'Adige of Trento later recalled.
Detmering was 61, a senior official of the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, and was in Merano on holiday, according to ORF. Cecchetti was 50, unmarried, and came from Penna San Giovanni in the Marche region of central Italy; she worked at a middle school in Merano, L'Unità reported. The paper described the couple as lovers, and wrote that he had left his family for her. She died where she fell; he died later in hospital in Bolzano.
The first theories had nothing to do with a random gunman. Investigators believed, L'Unità reported two days later, that the killing looked like the work of a professional, and they favored a crime of passion connected with the couple's relationship over any motive linked to Detmering's job, though a lead involving the bank was also followed. Detmering's wife was traced in Germany and placed under investigation; the same report said she had a solid alibi, and nothing came of the suspicion. L'Adige wrote in 2021 that the police at first treated the case as a crime of passion.
A young man who had been near the scene told carabinieri he had seen the gunman, and described him as tall with short black hair, L'Unità reported. That account would later be judged false, and it became one of the reasons he was arrested.
Umberto Marchioro was 58, a farmhand who was partly disabled and lived modestly in Sinigo (Sinich), a district on the southern edge of Merano. He worked on one of the few Italian-owned farms in the area, L'Unità reported, and friends called him Berto. A relative found him dead on the evening of February 14.
His death was first put down to natural causes, and only later did anyone realize he had been shot. L'Adige wrote in 2021 that this cost the investigation about 16 hours, and that the prosecutor on duty, Cuno Tarfusser, had been told the death looked accidental and involved no one else. The autopsy found a bullet of the same caliber used on February 8, L'Unità reported on February 16; ballistic tests were still to confirm whether the same weapon had fired both. ORF wrote in 2021 that the ballistics experts concluded it had.
By then the word "serial" was in the headlines. The carabinieri, the prosecutor's office in Bolzano and the state police forensic service were working the case together, L'Unità reported. Investigators told L'Unità they could not rule out a gunman killing with no motive at all, though they also considered whether Marchioro had been killed because he had seen something.
The young man who had described the gunman after February 8 lived close to where Marchioro died. L'Unità reported that investigators found he had been driven home by police minutes before Marchioro was killed and could not explain why he had been in the area. A former girlfriend said he had once talked of owning a pistol, and a bloodstain on his clothes, which he said came from a fight, added to the suspicion. He was arrested and held as the suspect.
The case against him was presented publicly as close to certain. The prosecutor, L'Unità reported, said he would be ready to argue the charge before the Court of Assizes "even tomorrow morning", and the judge for preliminary investigations refused to release him. His mother insisted he was innocent. Francesco Zonno, the head of the special team the Interior Ministry had sent to Merano, did not attend the press conference that announced the arrest, the paper noted afterward.
He was held for 22 days, by L'Unità's count, and released on the night of March 1, after the last killings, once investigators accepted that he was not the man. His family and his lawyer were bitter. At the funeral of Paolo Vecchiolini on March 2 a priest told mourners, "They crucified an innocent man." The former Green member of parliament Marco Boato told L'Unità that the magistrates had been wrong to present the young man as the almost certain culprit, and he spoke of serious professional failings by the security forces. L'Unità reported on March 3 that his position was still under review, including whether he had known Gamper. How that review ended has not been reported.
On the evening of February 27 Paolo Vecchiolini, an accountant, was shot dead in the old center of Merano while walking with his fiancée. She survived. Her description of the gunman was turned into a composite sketch, ORF reported, and after Gamper's death L'Unità reported that she had identified him as the man she saw that evening. About a thousand people attended Vecchiolini's funeral in Merano on March 2, with his fiancée among them, L'Unità reported.
The fourth death brought panic. The mayor advised residents not to go out, and tourists left the town, ORF recalled in 2016. "In hindsight everything is easier to understand," Tarfusser told L'Adige in 2016, "but in those days the pressure on the investigators was truly enormous." He called it "an extreme situation, rarely experienced in South Tyrol, before or since."
Carabinieri took the sketch from shop to shop. A barber in Merano who had known Gamper since their school days recognized him at once. "When the carabinieri came into my shop with the composite picture, I recognized Ferdinand," he told ORF years later; he said the two had gone skiing together the day before. He told L'Unità he had been shown the black-and-white sketch on the Thursday, the day before the last killings. Carabinieri said they had received about a hundred tips and checked about ten people before then, none of them Gamper.
On the morning of March 1 Tullio Melchiorri, 58, the farmer who rented Gamper his lodgings at Rifiano, was shot dead at Rifiano, L'Unità reported. Carabinieri were already on their way to the area after a tip, and a woman then reported a body at Rifiano.
Marshal Guerrino Botte was among the carabinieri who went to Rifiano. He was shot, carabinieri said by Gamper, and died that afternoon in hospital in Bolzano despite surgery. Botte was 54 and came from Ormea, in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont. He was deputy commander of the operations unit of the provincial carabinieri command in Bolzano, had earlier commanded the station at San Genesio (Jenesien), and served as a delegate on the carabinieri's representative council. L'Unità reported that he was close to retirement and had three children, one of them at the officers' school in Turin; his wife was a German-speaking South Tyrolean. Prime Minister Lamberto Dini sent condolences to the commander of the carabinieri, General Luigi Federici, who went to Bolzano.
Carabinieri surrounded the building where Gamper was. By late morning he was dead by his own hand, L'Unità reported. Two carabinieri colonels told the paper no procedural errors had been made, and said relatives of the victims had told them the gunman had fled, so officers did not expect an armed confrontation.
The day added a second injustice. Melchiorri's son was in the Ultental at the time and heard on the radio that he himself was being named as the killer, after a woman claimed he had quarreled with his father; the claim was repeated by news agencies and afternoon television before it was withdrawn. "They said I'm the murderer, do you understand?" he told L'Unità. He also told the paper that Gamper had never quarreled with his father, and that he did not hunt.
No court ever ruled on the six deaths, and the attribution to Gamper rests on what investigators said in the days after March 1. According to L'Unità, the carabinieri said the gun found with him had fired the shots in Merano, and it was sent to Rome for analysis. A front-page report on March 2 linked it to all the killings. The fiancée who survived the February 27 shooting identified him. ORF wrote that ballistics had already tied the second killing to the first.
There were also his notes. L'Unità reported that he left several before he died. One read, as L'Unità printed it in Italian, "This time too you arrived late. You will not be able to stop me." Another praised a united Tyrol, a "Pan-Tyrol" and a "greater Germany," and in one, as the paper described it, he took for himself the name "il mostro," which the Italian press had been using for the gunman. Documents, notes and paintings were seized from the places he used and handed to investigators for study; L'Unità reported that a portrait of Andreas Hofer, the hero of the Tyrolean rising of 1809, was among his belongings, and that his car carried a Tyrolean eagle sticker and leaflets of the Schützen, the traditional Tyrolean marksmen's companies.
The motive, ORF wrote in 2021, "has still not been fully explained." Five of the six dead were Italian speakers, and much of the Italian press concluded at once that the killings were driven by ethnic hatred. ORF noted that Italian media suspected racist or German-nationalist motives. L'Adige wrote in 2016 that the killings grew from severe mental and social distress and an intense hatred of Italians. L'Unità reported that Gamper had claimed Italians hated him because he spoke Italian poorly, and its headline on March 2 called him a "racist madman."
The provincial authorities pushed back against the political reading. The prosecutor Paul Ranzi, the first magistrate to investigate, rejected a terrorist motive, L'Unità reported, and investigators said they had found no contact between Gamper and extremist groups. Ranzi did note that carabinieri had once searched Gamper's farm during an earlier investigation into a separatist group, which L'Unità identified as Ein Tirol. In a background piece the same week, the paper recalled that Ein Tirol had carried out a campaign of bomb attacks in and around Merano in the 1980s, and that its suspects had never been extradited to Italy. Investigators reported no link between Gamper and those attacks. Investigators told the paper on March 3 that they had set aside the political-terrorism theory and were studying the documents instead. No local Schützen company admitted to having seen him at its gatherings.
Politicians on both sides of the language divide condemned the killings and argued over their meaning. Silvius Magnago, the veteran leader of the South Tyrolean People's Party, called Gamper an unknown madman and said he would change his view only if some larger organization were shown to be behind him, L'Unità reported. The party's leader, Siegfried Brugger, condemned attempts to use the tragedy for political gain. Gianfranco Fini of the National Alliance also called the killings madness and said political exploitation was out of place, while a National Alliance councillor from Merano blamed ethnic hatred toward Italians. Franco Tretter, president of the regional council of Trentino-Alto Adige, criticized La Repubblica and Il Messaggero for linking the killings to anti-Italian racial hatred and warned against casting suspicion on the local population. The sociologist Norbert Dall'O described Gamper to L'Unità as a man with serious family and personal problems.
The end of the case brought more criticism than relief. L'Unità's headline on March 3 called it "the day of poisons" in Merano, as residents asked why Gamper had not been stopped sooner, since he had been named the evening before the last two deaths. The paper wrote that only three carabinieri went to confront him the next morning. The carabinieri colonels denied any procedural error. The Dolomiten, the German-language daily of Bolzano, reported a further note by Gamper; L'Unità wrote that police said they had never seen it and that the carabinieri denied it existed.
Looking back in 2021, Tarfusser, by then a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague after serving as chief prosecutor in Bolzano, told L'Adige it was hard to say whether today's forensic and investigative tools would have led to an earlier arrest. The victims had no links to one another, he said, which made the case extremely difficult, though modern cameras and phone tracking might now help. He also recalled the heavy media and public pressure of those weeks.
At a funeral in Merano in early March, the priest Paolo Michelini criticized the community for failing to care for people like Gamper, L'Unità reported. Twenty years later Paolo Valente, director of Caritas in the diocese, wrote in the diocesan weekly Il Segno that people and movements stoking division, prejudice and hatred still existed, though they were a minority, and called them a weed to be uprooted, L'Adige reported.
The six killings: none was tried. Investigators attributed all six to Gamper through the gun found with him, the surviving witness's identification and his notes. The carabinieri said he shot Marshal Botte. These attributions were never tested in court.
Political links: Italian accounts at the time connected him with the separatist milieu of the 1980s. Investigators said they found no contact between him and extremist groups, and the prosecutor rejected a terrorist motive.
An earlier stabbing: L'Unità reported in March 1996 that investigators were reexamining a fatal stabbing in Merano in July 1994, because a composite sketch from that case resembled Gamper. No result was ever reported.
Mental illness: he was widely described as mentally unstable, and a friend spoke of lifelong persecution mania. No diagnosis was reported. One of his brothers told L'Unità that he was not mad.
His age: ORF gives his birth year as 1957; L'Unità gave his age as 39 in March 1996.
The Dolomiten note: reported by the Dolomiten, denied by the carabinieri.
1957: Ferdinand Gamper is born; he grows up in Kuens (Caines), near Merano.
1981 and 1987: carabinieri report him for incidents while drunk, including resisting and assaulting a public official.
February 8, 1996: Hans Otto Detmering, 61, and Clorinda Cecchetti, 50, are shot dead in central Merano.
February 14, 1996: Umberto Marchioro, 58, is found dead at Sinigo; his death is first taken as natural, then found to be a shooting.
February 1996: a young local man who claimed to have seen the gunman is arrested and held as the suspect.
February 27, 1996: Paolo Vecchiolini is shot dead in Merano; his fiancée survives and helps produce a composite sketch.
The Thursday before March 1, 1996: a Merano barber recognizes Gamper from the sketch.
March 1, 1996: Tullio Melchiorri, 58, is shot dead at Rifiano; Marshal Guerrino Botte, 54, is shot and dies that afternoon in Bolzano; Gamper dies by suicide as carabinieri surround him. The jailed suspect is released that night.
March 2, 1996: Paolo Vecchiolini's funeral in Merano.
February 2016 and February 2021: anniversary reports in L'Adige and on tirol.ORF.at revisit the case.