On the evening of February 8, 1996, while much of Italy was watching the Sanremo song festival on television, Hans-Otto Detmering, sixty-one, an official of the German Bundesbank, and Clorinda Cecchetti, fifty, a clerk from the Marche who was his companion, were walking along the promenade beside the Passirio stream in the center of Merano, the spa town of South Tyrol. Each was shot once in the back of the head with a .22. Investigators looked first for a private motive: money connected to the banker's affairs, or a crime of passion, with Detmering's wife briefly suspected. Neither held up.
Six days later, on February 14, Umberto Marchioro, a fifty-eight-year-old farmer, was found shot in the head in the yard of his small farm at Sinigo, on the edge of the town. The ballistics matched. The mayor, Franz Alber, advised people not to go out unless they had to, and after dark the streets emptied. Within days police arrested Luca Nobile, a young house painter with a drug problem who had witnessed the first killing and given an inconsistent account and a composite sketch that later proved false.
On February 27, at about eight in the evening, Paolo Vecchiolini, thirty-six, an accountant, was shot in the head in the cathedral square while walking with his fiancée, Ivonne Sanzio. The killer's gun jammed and she survived. Her description of the gunman, a tall, fair-haired man in a tracksuit with a backpack, cleared Nobile of the series, though he was not released for days. A Merano barber, Karl "Charly" Daprà, recognized the man in the sketch as one of his customers: Ferdinand Gamper, a shepherd from Rifiano, just above the town.
Gamper was thirty-eight, born in Merano on September 12, 1957, into a family of herders, and had grown up poor and working in the fields. He was withdrawn, spoke no Italian, and had a record for drunkenness, insulting public officials and resisting arrest; his brother had killed himself a few years earlier. Some described him as shy and solitary, others as mentally ill, and later accounts speak of schizophrenia that was never formally diagnosed. His victims were Italian speakers, apart from Detmering, whom investigators thought he may have taken for an Italian because he had been speaking Italian with Cecchetti.
On the morning of March 1, before the arrest could be organized, he shot his neighbor at Rifiano, Tullio Melchiori, a fifty-eight-year-old bricklayer, in the forehead. Beside the body, as at earlier scenes, were rambling notes, one of them reading in part, "Italian pig, you have settled in South Tyrol." Carabinieri surrounded his farmhouse. Marshal Guerrino Botte, of San Genesio, approached the hayloft where Gamper was hiding and was shot in the face; he died hours later in the hospital at Bolzano. Police and carabinieri exchanged fire with the farmhouse, and then a single shot was heard inside. Gamper had shot himself in the head; one account says he first set fire to the farmhouse. The weapon, a Weihrauch .22 Magnum pistol, was recovered, and it had fired the shots in all six killings. Nobile was freed the same day.
There was no trial. The prosecutor, Cuno Tarfusser, who later served as a judge at the International Criminal Court, had announced before the last killings that the killer had a name and a face, and he was criticized inside the Bolzano prosecutor's office for being away on his honeymoon when the case ended. Whether Gamper belonged to any political group is disputed. One Italian account says he was a member of Ein Tirol, a separatist group behind bombings in the province, while South Tyrolean politicians of every party disowned him and no organization was ever shown to have been involved. His notes are the only statement of his motive, and they were never tested in court.