Giancarlo Lotti was the confessing defendant at the center of the second great trial over the double murders that ran through the hills around Florence between 1968 and 1985. Eight couples died in that series. Lotti, a man from San Casciano in Val di Pesa with no settled work, told investigators in 1996 that he had been present at the last four of those killings, and that Pietro Pacciani and Mario Vanni had carried them out. He was tried with Vanni before the Florence Court of Assizes, convicted of complicity in four double murders, and given a final sentence of 26 years. Vanni received a life sentence. Lotti died in 2002, about two weeks after he was released on health grounds.
His is the one confession on record in the series that ended in a conviction. Three levels of court, from the Court of Assizes to the Court of Cassation, accepted his account as credible. Others never did. More than two decades after his death, lawyers acting for Vanni's nephew asked a court in Genoa to reopen the case, arguing that Lotti's story could not be true. That request was declared inadmissible in July 2025, and the dispute over what Lotti saw, and whether he saw anything at all, has not gone away.
San Casciano in Val di Pesa is a hill town south of Florence, in the wine country between the city and Siena. Lotti was from there. He was orphaned young, and by the 1990s he was unemployed. He belonged to a small circle of men from the town and its villages that included Mario Vanni, the San Casciano postman, Fernando Pucci, and Pietro Pacciani, a farmer from nearby Mercatale. Lotti and Pucci spent much of their free time together.
Little else about his early life is known: his date of birth, his schooling, his family and his work before the 1990s have never been reported.
The killings that would later bring Lotti to court were part of a series that began, by most counts, on August 21, 1968, at Signa, west of Florence, where Antonio Lo Bianco and Barbara Locci died. Barbara Locci's husband, Stefano Mele, was convicted by the court in Perugia in 1970 and sentenced to 14 years. Only years later did investigators connect that case to the deaths that followed.
On September 14, 1974, Pasquale Gentilcore, 19, and Stefania Pettini, 18, died near Borgo San Lorenzo in the Mugello. On the night of June 6 to 7, 1981, Giovanni Foggi, 30, and his fiancée Carmela De Nuccio, 21, died near Scandicci. In October 1981 Stefano Baldi, 26, and Susanna Cambi, 24, died at Calenzano. The four double murders for which Lotti would be convicted came after those: at Baccaiano, in the commune of Montespertoli, in June 1982; at Giogoli, near Scandicci, in September 1983; near Vicchio, in the Mugello, in July 1984; and at Scopeti, near San Casciano in Val di Pesa, in September 1985.
The series ran from 1968 to 1985, and sixteen people died in it. Apart from the 1970 conviction in the Signa case, no one was finally convicted of the killings of 1974 and 1981. The prosecution in Lotti's trial did not charge him or his co-defendant with the 1974 or June 1981 killings, and the judgments that convicted them found that they had not been present at Calenzano in October 1981.
Paolo Mainardi was 22 and Antonella Migliorini was 19 when they died together at Baccaiano di Montespertoli on June 19, 1982.
Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rüsch were two young men from Germany, both 24, who were visiting Tuscany when they died at Giogoli, in the commune of Scandicci, on September 9, 1983.
Pia Rontini was 18 and Claudio Stefanacci was 21 when they died in the countryside near Vicchio on the night of July 29, 1984.
Nadine Mauriot, 36, and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili, 25, were French visitors to Tuscany. The courts fixed their deaths at Scopeti, in the commune of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, on the evening of Sunday, September 8, 1985. That date, and the account on which it rests, would become the main point of attack in every later challenge to Lotti's evidence.
In recent years the lawyer Vieri Adriani has represented the French couple's families, and with the lawyers Valter Biscotti and Antonio Mazzeo he has also acted for the family of Carmela De Nuccio.
For most of the 1980s the investigation looked elsewhere. A line of inquiry known in Florence as the Sardinian track grew out of the 1968 Signa case and the men around it. One man, F.V., was arrested in August 1982 and accused of the killings; he was released after another double murder took place while he was in custody. The investigating judge Mario Rotella closed the Sardinian line with a formal ruling in December 1989.
Two days after the Scopeti deaths in September 1985, the carabinieri in San Casciano received an anonymous letter that pointed to Pietro Pacciani. In the spring of 1991 the officers of the special investigative squad created for the case, cross-checking their data, settled on Pacciani, who was by then in prison for other offenses. He was arrested for the double murders on January 17, 1993.
On the evening of November 1, 1994, the Florence Court of Assizes convicted Pacciani of seven of the eight double murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment; it acquitted him of the 1968 killings. During that first trial Mario Vanni, called as a witness for his friend, told the court that he and Pacciani met only to share afternoon snacks.
In 1996 the Court of Assizes of Appeal acquitted Pacciani. The prosecutor general at that hearing, Piero Tony, had asked for the acquittal. The appeal court, presided over by Francesco Ferri, refused to admit four new witnesses whom the prosecution had brought forward under cover names. One of them, the witness designated "Beta," was Giancarlo Lotti. The Court of Cassation later in 1996 annulled the acquittal and ordered a new appeal trial; that procedural anomaly, the refusal to hear the new witnesses, was the ground on which it did so. Pacciani was released after about 1,100 days in prison. He died on February 22, 1998, before the new appeal could begin, and so died with no final judgment in the case.
Lotti's name first appears in the files of the special squad on July 19, 1990. At that point he was a minor figure, one of many men from the Val di Pesa who knew Pacciani. Nothing then suggested that he would confess to any part of the killings.
The man who first placed him near one of the scenes was his friend Fernando Pucci. Pucci told investigators that he had seen Lotti at Scopeti at the time of the last double murder, in September 1985. Pucci was later known in the case as witness "Alpha." His statements in court were often evasive and contradictory, yet the trial court treated his testimony as credible. He was the only one of the circle who was never convicted. He died in a care home in San Casciano in February 2017, at 86.
Under questioning by the investigators led by Michele Giuttari, Lotti moved from witness to self-accuser. He told investigators that he had been at Scopeti on the evening of Sunday, September 8, 1985, and that he had seen Pacciani and Vanni carry out the killing of the French couple. Further questioning brought him to describe his involvement in the three double murders before that one. His statements, in 1995 and 1996, gave the investigation the theory on which the second trial was built: that the later killings were the work not of one man but of a group.
Lotti confessed to taking part in the last killings of the series and became a "pentito," the Italian term for a defendant who confesses and gives evidence against others. He was placed under police protection. He said that on one occasion he had acted himself at Pacciani's request. His account placed Pacciani and Vanni as the men who carried them out, and himself as a companion who went with them and took part.
His evidence also reached past the men in the dock. In 1996 he told investigators that a doctor had paid money in connection with the killings, a statement that opened a third strand of the inquiry, into whether others had commissioned the killings. That strand led years later to the trial of a San Casciano pharmacist, F.C., who was acquitted in an abbreviated trial; the prosecution did not appeal, and the last ruling in that line came in 2008. Michele Giuttari, in a 2020 interview, said that Lotti knew more about such a group than he was willing to say. In a telephone conversation with a priest who looked after him, Giuttari said, Lotti remarked that he was not the only one, that there were many.
On the strength of Lotti's statements, Mario Vanni was accused of complicity in the double murders in January 1996 and arrested on February 12, 1996. A fourth man from the same circle, G.F., was tried with them.
The trial of Vanni, Lotti and G.F. before the Florence Court of Assizes, the proceeding known in the courthouse as the second inquiry into the series, opened in 1996 and ran, with its appeals, until 2000. It differed from the Pacciani trial in one decisive respect: the case rested on a defendant who said he had been there.
Pucci, called on Lotti's side, took the stand in 1997 and confirmed Lotti's account of the Scopeti killings. Lotti was examined as both defendant and witness. His account of Scopeti fixed the killing on the evening of Sunday, September 8, 1985.
Pacciani was not a defendant. He died while the trial was under way, still awaiting his second appeal. The prosecution itself was divided: in the companions' case, as in the Pacciani appeal, the prosecutor general asked for acquittal. The courts did not follow.
The Florence Court of Assizes delivered its judgment about a month after Pacciani's death on February 22, 1998. It convicted Lotti and Vanni of complicity in four double murders: Baccaiano di Montespertoli in 1982, Giogoli in 1983, Vicchio in 1984 and Scopeti in 1985. Vanni was sentenced to life imprisonment. G.F. was acquitted.
The convictions reached Pacciani indirectly. He had never been finally convicted of anything in the series, but the judgment against his companions found that the last four double murders had been carried out by him with Vanni and with Lotti's participation. The courts also found that someone had ordered the killings, a finding that kept the inquiry into others alive for years afterward.
The convictions of Lotti and Vanni were upheld on appeal and made final by the Court of Cassation; the proceedings, which had opened in 1996, closed in 2000. G.F. was acquitted at all three levels of judgment of every charge related to the killings. Lotti's final sentence was 26 years. Vanni's life sentence stood.
At each level the judges accepted that Lotti's account was credible. The Court of Assizes, the appeal court and the Court of Cassation all reached that view, and the convictions of both men rested largely on his confession and on Pucci's support for it.
In 2002 Lotti was released on health grounds. He died about 15 days later, in 2002. Mario Vanni's own sentence was suspended for health reasons in 2004. Vanni spent his last years in a care home in the province of Florence and died in Florence on April 13, 2009, at 82.
Michele Giuttari, who led the investigation that turned Lotti from witness to defendant, has defended him since. In 2020 he said that Lotti had told the truth, as the judges had established, and that he deserved credit for it. He pointed to two details from Lotti's account of the Vicchio killings that, in his view, only someone who had been present could have known.
Lotti's name came up in one more case. On January 16, 2026, it became public for the first time that he had been investigated by the Florence prosecutor Paolo Canessa as a suspect in the killing of Clelia Cuscito, a woman who died in December 1983. He was questioned about that death. He was never charged. The file against him was closed ("archiviato") seven years after he died. The matter surfaced because a lawyer, Mattia Alfano, filed a complaint naming a different suspect, a man still living who has never been investigated.
The courts' account of the last four killings did not end the inquiry. In July 2017 the Florence prosecutors Paolo Canessa and Luca Turco were pursuing a renewed investigation into who had commissioned the crimes and into possible misdirection of the original investigation. A former soldier of the French Foreign Legion, G.V., was investigated; his file was later closed. A doctor named in his statements was also part of the inquiry.
Later genetic analyses of exhibits from the case produced profiles that match no one convicted in it; whether they are significant has never been settled.
In March 2022 lawyers acting for the families of Carmela De Nuccio, Nadine Mauriot and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili asked the Florence Court of Assizes for access to the trial files and asked for the investigation to be reopened, pointing to a suspect named in a 1984 carabinieri report who had never been pursued.
In 2022 Vanni's nephew engaged the lawyers Valter Biscotti and Antonio Mazzeo to seek a revision of his uncle's conviction. The purpose, as the lawyers presented it, was to show that Lotti was innocent, and that the account on which both men were convicted was false. If Lotti had not been present, they argued, the whole version of the case accepted by the courts would have to be rewritten. Vanni, his nephew said, had been a gentle man who could not have done what he was convicted of. In December 2024 the nephew said he had lost contact with the lawyers and doubted the basis of the request, and that the real culprit should be found first.
The core of the request was timing. Two forensic entomologists, Stefano Vanin, who holds the chair in the subject at the University of Genoa, and Fabiola Giusti, concluded that the French couple had died on the night of Friday, September 6, to Saturday, September 7, 1985, about two days before the evening on which Lotti placed the killing. The request also offered two statements never assessed at trial that, the lawyers said, contradicted Lotti's presence at Scopeti and at one of the earlier killings. Lotti's own former lawyer, Nino Filastò, had tried for a revision some twenty years earlier and failed, the lawyers said, because forensic entomology was not then accepted in court.
The request, about 350 pages long, was filed on Saturday, January 11, 2025, with the Court of Appeal in Genoa, which hears revision requests against judgments from the Florence district. In March 2025 the 34 folders of the trial file were sent from Florence to Genoa. The request passed an initial screening for manifest groundlessness, and the Third Criminal Section, presided over by Judge Vincenzo Papillo, set a hearing in chambers for May 9, 2025. On that day the hearing was postponed to June 13, 2025.
On July 28, 2025, the Genoa Court of Appeal declared the request inadmissible. The lawyers appealed to the Court of Cassation, and in February 2026 its Fifth Section rejected the appeal. Vanni's conviction, and with it the account on which Lotti's own conviction rested, stands.
Lotti was tried before the Court of Assizes, the Italian court for the gravest crimes, among them homicide and massacre. Its panels sit at first instance and on appeal, and each is made up of two career magistrates and six lay judges, citizens drawn by lot from municipal lists. A law of 1951 governs their participation and makes the magistrates and lay judges a single panel in every respect, unlike the separate juries of common-law countries. Lay judges must be Italian citizens of good conduct between the ages of 30 and 65, with at least a middle-school diploma for first instance and a high-school diploma for the appeal courts. They serve for a session of three months.
At the close of the evidence the panel withdraws to deliberate in chambers. The career judges set out the legal framework, including the sentencing ranges and the aggravating and mitigating factors, and every question, from guilt to sentence, is put to a vote, one vote for each judge, beginning with the youngest lay judge and ending with the senior career judge. Where there is no unanimity, the outcome more favorable to the defendant prevails. The court then reads the operative part of its judgment, and one of the career judges writes the reasoning.
It was the Court of Cassation that annulled Pacciani's acquittal in 1996, on the ground that the appeal court had wrongly refused to hear the new witnesses, Lotti among them, and it was the same court that made the convictions of Lotti and Vanni final.
The Italian Code of Criminal Procedure allows the revision of a final conviction at any time in favor of the convicted person, in the cases the law sets out, even when the sentence has already been served or extinguished. Revision does not apply to acquittals. Among the grounds is the appearance or discovery of new evidence after the conviction which, alone or together with the evidence already assessed, shows that the convicted person must be acquitted. Case law requires that such evidence be decisive, and the revision court may not simply reweigh evidence already assessed. Revision requests against judgments from the Florence district fall under the territorial jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal in Genoa, which is why the Vanni request was heard there.
The 2025 request concerned Vanni's conviction. Because the convictions of the two men rested on the same account, a successful request would, as the lawyers argued it, have undone the case against Lotti as well.
Lotti's credibility has been doubted from the start, and critics of the verdicts still call it doubtful at best. The prosecutor general asked for acquittal at the appeal stages of both the Pacciani and the companions' trials. The courts at three levels found his account credible.
The date of the Scopeti killings, fixed by the courts at the evening of Sunday, September 8, 1985, on the strength of Lotti's account and other evidence, is contested by the 2025 entomology report, which would place the deaths about two days earlier. Two other witnesses say Lotti was not at Scopeti that Sunday. The Genoa court declared the request inadmissible, and none of these points has been accepted by a court.
Later genetic evidence matches no one convicted in the case, and its meaning has not been settled.
Lotti's statements about a higher group that commissioned the killings led to a trial in which the only defendant was acquitted. No court has found who, if anyone, ordered the crimes.
Lotti was never charged in the death of Clelia Cuscito, and the file was closed after his death.
August 21, 1968: Antonio Lo Bianco and Barbara Locci die at Signa; Stefano Mele is later convicted (Perugia, 1970, 14 years).
September 14, 1974: Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini die near Borgo San Lorenzo.
June 6 to 7, 1981: Giovanni Foggi and Carmela De Nuccio die near Scandicci.
October 1981: Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi die at Calenzano.
June 19, 1982: Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini die at Baccaiano di Montespertoli.
August 1982: F.V. is arrested; he is later released.
September 9, 1983: Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rüsch die at Giogoli, Scandicci.
December 1983: Clelia Cuscito dies; Lotti is later investigated in the case, never charged.
July 29, 1984: Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci die near Vicchio.
September 8, 1985: Nadine Mauriot and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili die at Scopeti, San Casciano in Val di Pesa (date fixed by the courts).
December 1989: Judge Mario Rotella closes the Sardinian line of inquiry.
July 19, 1990: Lotti's name first appears in the special squad's files.
Spring 1991: the squad settles on Pietro Pacciani.
January 17, 1993: Pacciani is arrested.
November 1, 1994: Florence Court of Assizes convicts Pacciani of seven double murders; life imprisonment.
1995 to 1996: Lotti's statements; he confesses and comes under police protection.
January 1996: Mario Vanni is accused; arrested February 12, 1996.
1996: Pacciani acquitted on appeal; witness "Beta" (Lotti) not admitted; the Court of Cassation annuls the acquittal.
1997: Fernando Pucci testifies.
February 22, 1998: Pacciani dies.
About a month later: Florence Court of Assizes convicts Lotti and Vanni of complicity in four double murders; Vanni sentenced to life; G.F. acquitted.
By 2000: convictions upheld on appeal and made final by the Court of Cassation; Lotti's final sentence 26 years.
2002: Lotti is released on health grounds and dies about 15 days later.
2004: Vanni's sentence suspended for health reasons.
2008: acquittal of F.C. in the inquiry into those who might have commissioned the killings.
April 13, 2009: Vanni dies in Florence.
March 2022: families ask for the investigation to be reopened.
January 11, 2025: revision request for Vanni filed in Genoa.
May 9, 2025: hearing postponed to June 13, 2025.
July 28, 2025: Genoa Court of Appeal declares the request inadmissible; the lawyers announce an appeal to the Court of Cassation.
January 16, 2026: it becomes public that Lotti had been investigated in the Cuscito case.
February 2026: the Court of Cassation, Fifth Section, rejects the appeal in the Vanni revision case.