Gianfranco Stevanin was a farmer from Terrazzo, a small municipality on the plain south of Verona near the Adige river. In 1993 and 1994 he picked up women, most of them young, several of them foreign sex workers and one a local drug user, and took them to his family's farmhouse. At least five of them never left. He hid their bodies on his land and in the waters nearby, and their disappearances drew little attention at the time.
He was caught by chance. In November 1994 a woman he was holding got out of his car at a motorway toll booth and went to police officers. He was jailed for that attack, and searches of his home turned up thousands of photographs and the papers of two missing women. The killings came to light in July 1995, when a farmer's mower struck a sack in a ditch. Stevanin admitted hiding bodies but denied killing anyone, and for seven years Italian courts argued over whether a head injury he suffered at 16 meant he could not be held responsible. He was sentenced to life in 1998, declared not punishable on appeal in 1999, and sentenced to life again in 2001. The Court of Cassation made that sentence final in 2002. In September 2026, at 65, he was refused semi-liberty and remains in prison.
Stevanin was born on October 2, 1960, in Montagnana, a town in the province of Padua close to the border with the province of Verona. He grew up in Terrazzo, the only son of a well-off farming family, l'Unità reported in 1996. According to il Giornale, after an accident when he was seven his parents sent him to a boarding school to keep him away from danger.
The event his defense would later put at the center of the case happened in 1976, when he was 16. A motorcycle crash left him with a serious head injury, a long scar across his scalp, and epileptic seizures that stayed with him for life. Il Post, describing the defense case in 2025, said the injury was to the frontal lobe; the Venice appeal court's experts in 1999 described a right frontal lesion and epilepsy. In court in 1997 he shaved his head so that the scar, running from his right ear toward the top of his skull, could be seen.
At about 20, il Giornale reported, he fell in love with a young woman and stayed with her for about five years, until she became ill and his parents made him end the relationship. After that he looked for partners in casual encounters, and later through paid sex. L'Unità described a troubled family life that included psychiatric consultations and a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and reported that his father was dying of cancer in the period when the killings took place. Stevanin worked the family's land. He also kept a second property, an old farmhouse on via Brazzetto in the hamlet of Torrano, close to the Adige embankment.
Roswita Adlassnig was 23 and came from Austria. She worked as a sex worker in Italy. She disappeared on May 8, 1993, and her body has never been found. She appeared in Stevanin's photographs and in his card index of partners, and she was last seen getting into his car. In his 1996 interrogations he said he could not clearly remember whether he had killed her, and in 1998 he still insisted she was alive. The prosecution charged him with her murder, and Il Post's 2025 account of the case describes her as a woman certainly killed whose body has never been recovered.
Claudia Pulejo was 29 and lived in Legnago, a town in the lower Verona plain not far from Terrazzo. She was known as Chicca. She was a heroin user, and she knew Stevanin; later reports say they had a romantic relationship. She was last seen on January 15, 1994.
Her mother, Sandra Giulietti, did not let the disappearance pass. She told l'Unità in 1996 that she had confronted Stevanin, who claimed her daughter had stood him up, and that she had gone to his mother to ask about Claudia and been turned away. When Stevanin later said that Claudia had died of an overdose, her mother called the story convenient for him. Months after the body was found, she said, her daughter had still not been buried, and the uncertainty was "a continuous torment."
Blazenka Smoljo was 24, from Croatia, and worked as a sex worker. Stevanin later admitted that she died in his arms during a sexual encounter in early July 1994. On July 31, 1994, a woman's body was pulled from the Adige at Piacenza d'Adige, in the province of Padua. Nobody could say who she was. The body was identified as Blazenka Smoljo only on July 23, 1997, three years later. Relatives from Croatia and Serbia, mothers and sisters among them, came to the courtroom in Verona when the trial opened in October 1997.
Biljana Pavlovic was 25, Serbian, and lived in Arzignano, in the province of Vicenza, where she worked as a waitress. She had come to Italy to earn money. Stevanin said he met her at the beach at Rosolina. The Verona court record, as reported in 1998, placed her death in September 1994; other accounts say she went missing in August. Like Claudia Pulejo, she was listed in his card index, and her belongings were in his house when police searched it. Later reports describe her, too, as a woman with whom he had a relationship.
Two more women were part of the charges at the first trial, and neither has ever been identified.
The first is known from her remains: the torso found in a sack in July 1995 and a thigh recovered from a canal at Merlara, in the province of Padua, on June 12, 1997, which tests matched to the same body. She was small and slight, very young, possibly a minor, and possibly of Asian origin. Stevanin said he remembered her dying during sex. Her remains are still held at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Verona.
The second is known only from photographs. Among the negatives found in Stevanin's house were pictures of a woman whom the prosecution's experts judged to have been photographed after her death. Her body has never been found. Of one unidentified victim, Stevanin said only that she was a student he had met three or four times, whose name and face he could not recall.
On November 16, 1994, Stevanin offered a young Austrian woman, a sex worker, money for sex and photographs, and she got into his car. At his house she was threatened with what looked like a pistol and held for hours. He was later convicted of sexual violence against her. She tried to escape through a bathroom window and could not. In the end she offered him her savings, about 25 million lire, in return for her freedom, and he set off with her by car to get the money.
At the Vicenza Ovest toll booth on the motorway, while he stopped to pay, she jumped out and went to police officers on duty there. Stevanin was arrested on the spot for sexual violence, attempted extortion and possession of a toy pistol without the red cap the law requires. He was later sentenced to between two and a half and three years in prison for that attack; accounts differ on the exact term. The woman survived and is not named here.
The next day, November 17, 1994, investigators searched Stevanin's home and the farmhouse on via Brazzetto. They seized pornographic material, anatomy books and more than 7,000 photographs of women he had been with. They found a card index with information on his sexual partners, and envelopes and boxes holding hair from the women he photographed. They also found the identity documents and belongings of two women who were missing: Claudia Pulejo and Biljana Pavlovic. Both were in his index. Stevanin said the items were gifts.
The documents raised suspicion, but there were no bodies, and he was held for the attack at the toll booth. By the summer of 1995, according to Il Post, he was about to be moved to house arrest.
On July 3, 1995, a farmer mowing a field near the Stevanin land struck a sack in an irrigation ditch about 800 meters from the farmhouse. Inside was the torso of a woman, without head or limbs. It could not be identified, and the cause of death could not be determined. Stevanin was placed under investigation for concealing a corpse, and the prosecutors in Verona sent excavators to the family's fields.
The digging went on for months. On November 12, 1995, the body of Biljana Pavlovic was dug up in the fields of the Stevanin farm, wrapped in a tarpaulin about 80 centimeters below the surface. On December 1, 1995, Claudia Pulejo's body was recovered from a pit near the farm's storehouse, wrapped in plastic. DNA tests confirmed both identities. After the discoveries of 1995, Stevanin was moved to the maximum-security prison of Montorio in Verona.
His mother was later placed under investigation, with a cousin, on suspicion of helping to hide a body and other evidence. The sources consulted do not record any charge against either of them.
The investigation was led by the Verona prosecutor Maria Grazia Omboni. Stevanin first denied everything. Then, from the summer of 1996, he began to release pieces of memory, which he described as dreams, visions and sensations, and which changed from one session to the next. On July 19, 1996, he made a partial confession. In a statement reported in l'Unità two days later, he described remembering himself cutting up a woman's body, while his lawyer, Cesare Dal Maso, called his statements "self-cooperation" rather than confessions and said Stevanin was still convinced he had killed no one.
On August 24, 1996, he was questioned for about ten hours. Using photographs seized from his home to prompt his memory, he said that at least four women had died with him: one by accident, one suffocated, and two strangled. He said one of them, Claudia Pulejo, had died of an overdose before they had sex. He admitted dismembering the bodies of four women and hiding them. Investigators were skeptical; they noted that his admissions mostly covered what the inquiry had already established. Another of his lawyers, Daniele Accebbi, said that for the first time Stevanin had shown emotion.
He kept to one line for years afterward: he hid the bodies, but he did not kill the women; they died. "Yes, the women died at my house, but I am not to blame," he said in court in 1997.
On September 20, 1996, he led investigators along the ditches between the provinces of Padua and Verona, pointing to places where he said he remembered throwing body parts. The thigh found at Merlara in June 1997 came from that search area. Some remains were found from his directions and others by chance, and some have never been found.
Before the August 1996 interrogation, psychiatric experts appointed for the prosecution had already reported that Stevanin was fit to stand trial and able to understand and will his actions. In October 1996 he was formally declared fit. One consultant in the case, the psychiatrist Ugo Fornari, was described by l'Unità as cautious about insanity claims in cases of this kind. Il Giornale later summarized the expert findings as describing a man fully capable and highly intelligent.
On September 15, 1997, the preliminary investigations judge, Paola Vacca, joined all the charges against him and sent him to trial.
The trial opened before the Verona Court of Assize on October 6, 1997, with Mario Sannite presiding over a panel that included lay judges. Stevanin had turned 37 four days earlier. He was charged with six murders: Claudia Pulejo, Biljana Pavlovic, Blazenka Smoljo, the unidentified woman whose torso had been found, Roswita Adlassnig, and the second unidentified woman in the photographs. The charges also covered the dismemberment and concealment of the bodies.
The prosecution said he chose women whose disappearance would go unnoticed, drug users and undocumented foreign sex workers, lured them with offers of paid photography, and then restrained or drugged them. Omboni called him "a lucid killer," not a madman. The defense said he was ill. Dal Maso told the court Stevanin was "only a sick man," and the defense asked the court to find him wholly insane, which would have meant a judicial psychiatric hospital, or at least partly insane, which would have meant a fixed term. His mother told reporters he did not realize what he was doing. Stevanin, put in the defendants' cage, said he felt like an animal.
On January 28, 1998, after about six hours of deliberation, the court found Stevanin guilty of all six murders, with aggravating circumstances that included premeditation and cruelty, and of dismembering and burying the bodies. It found him able to understand and will his actions. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with three years of daytime isolation, and ordered to pay about 1.5 billion lire in damages to the victims' parents, brothers and sisters, and children.
Asked by the judge how he saw himself, Stevanin said for the first time that he was probably ill. Leaving the court, he complained that he had not been understood. The defense announced an appeal. Its own inquiries, l'Unità reported, suggested there could have been as many as 14 victims; nothing in the record supports that figure.
The next evening Stevanin gave an interview to the journalist Enzo Biagi for the RAI program Il Fatto. He said he apologized "with my heart" to the families, that he had never felt resentment toward the women who died, and that he remembered them smiling. He again said he had hidden the bodies but had not killed anyone, and that the key moments were missing from his memory. In January 1999 he sold the house and land to compensate the victims' families in part.
The appeal came before the Venice Court of Assize of Appeal, with Silvio Giorgio presiding. The court appointed new experts: the neurologist Giuliano Avanzini of the Istituto Besta in Milan, Gianfranco Benes, head of neurology in Venice, and Mario Tantalo, a forensic psychopathologist from Padua. They concluded that the brain lesion and epilepsy left by the motorcycle accident had overwhelmed his will at the moments when he killed, and that his control had returned when he hid the bodies. The prosecutor general, Augusto Nepi, accepted that report and asked the court to find him not responsible for the killings.
On July 7, 1999, the court did so. It declared Stevanin not punishable for the six murders because he had been unable to understand and will his actions, convicted him only of concealing and desecrating corpses, and sentenced him to 10 years and 6 months. Because it judged him socially dangerous, it ordered him held in a judicial psychiatric hospital for at least 10 years. Nepi had asked for 13 years plus the same hospital term. Omboni, who had brought the case at first instance, said she was "certainly surprised."
This was a finding that he was not punishable, not a conviction for murder, and it did not stand.
On May 24, 2000, the First Section of the Court of Cassation annulled the appeal verdict on the ground that its reasoning was illogical, and sent the case back to Venice for a new appeal trial.
While the case was pending, Stevanin was held in the judicial psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, near Florence. On December 12, 2000, another patient cut his throat with a razor blade. The wound needed 19 stitches and narrowly missed the jugular vein. His attacker, a foreign national, was reported to have acted in order to be convicted in Italy and so avoid deportation.
The new appeal trial took place before the Venice Court of Assize of Appeal, presided over by Luigi Lanza with Gianmaria Pietrogrande as associate judge. On March 23, 2001, it found Stevanin able to understand and will his actions and sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murders of five women, not six. The sources consulted do not say which of the six counts fell away. Il Post's account of the case refers to five women: the four whose bodies were recovered, one of them never identified, and one, presumably Roswita Adlassnig, whose body was never found.
In its written reasons, filed on May 22, 2001, the court accepted that Stevanin had a mental disorder, but found it was not serious enough to stop him understanding the risks of what he did. It held that the killings were driven "exclusively" by the satisfaction of his own sexual desires, and that he had the intellectual and cultural means to avoid such crimes and, at the least, not to repeat them after the first. Neither the head injury, nor the epilepsy, nor his relationship with his mother, the court said, had played a causal role. It treated as aggravating his lucid and careful conduct after each death and his conduct at trial, which it said never showed a glimmer of remorse but adapted itself to each new piece of evidence.
On February 7, 2002, the Court of Cassation rejected his appeal and confirmed the life sentence. The conviction for the murders of five women became final.
In December 2002 Stevanin was held in Abruzzo, under the jurisdiction of the Supervisory Court of L'Aquila. That month Dal Maso applied for early release credit for good conduct, and the court granted 720 days, 45 days for each six-month period he had served, which brought forward the point at which he could ask for benefits such as prison leave. He was later held at Sulmona and at Opera, near Milan, and then at Bollate, also near Milan, where he was held by 2020 and remains.
In prison he earned an accounting diploma and took courses in computing and gardening. He volunteered in the library and was chosen as a floor representative, a go-between for other inmates. He is reported to have saved a cellmate who was trying to kill himself. He has had two disciplinary sanctions since 2017, according to a 2023 report: one for touching a young woman, whom he called his girlfriend, during a visit, and one for hidden items found in his cell.
In September 2010, as he turned 50, he said he wanted to become a lay Franciscan. He told Libero that the best news he had received in sixteen years was that the Church did not close its door to him. Asked about guilt, he said that since he did not remember, he had nothing to forgive himself for. The spiritual adviser who had visited him for five years warned that faith should not be confused with an effort to improve his legal position. He said again that he remembered nothing of the killings.
In October 2020 his lawyer, Francesco D'Andria, said he was seeking a new psychiatric assessment and would apply for prison leave. Stevanin, he said, was a model prisoner who felt he had served many years and deserved to "see the light"; the lawyer had asked the priest Don Mazzi to take him into a community, but the plan had stalled, because nobody wanted to take responsibility for releasing him.
In 2021 the treatment team at Bollate assessed whether he could be given leave and concluded that he remained dangerous and could reoffend. They wrote that he had not made the progress needed for even short periods outside, and described the pleasure he had deliberately sought after each crime. In May 2023 he applied for leave again, telling the press he had changed and wanted to get out. D'Andria commissioned a new psychiatric assessment from the psychiatrist Alessandro Meluzzi and insisted that his client was a human being and should be judged as one.
In 2026 the defense asked the Milan Supervisory Court for semi-liberty, which would have let him spend part of each day outside prison, possibly in a community. D'Andria argued that his circumstances had changed: Stevanin had been treated for a serious cancer which, the lawyer said, had ended his sexual drive, and he had undergone a religious conversion. The court also refused a request for a new psychiatric assessment.
The refusal was reported on September 20 and 21, 2026. Relying on the specialists who had followed him over the years, the judges found no significant change in his personality. They found that he still lacked real awareness of the seriousness of his crimes, that his remorse was formal, and that he remained emotionally distant from what he had done. They noted that he says he cannot remember the moment of the killings, although he recalls what came before and after. His long record of good conduct was not enough. The headline in the Trentino daily l'Adige summed up the reasoning: he has no awareness of the harm he did. D'Andria said he was considering an appeal and argued that if a man could not be returned to society after more than 30 years, the failure was also the State's.
As of October 18, 2026, Gianfranco Stevanin is serving his life sentence at Bollate prison, near Milan, where reports of October 5, 2026, said he had spent his 66th birthday. He has been in custody since November 16, 1994. His request for semi-liberty was refused in September 2026; no ruling on any appeal against that refusal was found.
The woman whose torso was found in July 1995 has never been named. In 2026 Carabinieri asked prosecutors to order new DNA tests to check whether the remains could belong to Stanislava Chlebcová, a Slovak girl from Nitra who disappeared in 1994 at the age of 17. She had run away from a youth center in Zlaté Moravce, and her family believes she was trafficked to Italy. Using the name Diana, she kept in touch by telephone and by letters sent from Verona, the last dated October 1, 1994, in which she wrote that she was being forced to work. Her family has not heard from her since. Her case has been covered by the RAI program Chi l'ha visto? and by Slovak authorities.
The tests were authorized, but reports in October 2026 said the remains were too degraded after three decades to give a definitive answer. In 2021, Diego Gasparrini, the Verona police inspector who had led the Stevanin investigation, told Slovak television that he did not believe Chlebcová was one of Stevanin's victims, saying the photographs of the unidentified woman dated from 1992. Nothing links her to Stevanin beyond the period and the place.
Proven and final: Stevanin's conviction for the murders of five women, made final by the Court of Cassation on February 7, 2002, and his earlier conviction for the November 1994 attack on the woman who escaped.
The number of victims. The Verona court convicted him of six murders in 1998; the retrial court in 2001 convicted him of five, and the Court of Cassation confirmed the five. Many reports, including those on the 2026 semi-liberty refusal, still speak of six women. The sources opened do not say which count was dropped in 2001. His defense spoke in 1998 of as many as 14 possible victims, and Il Post noted in 2025 that the question of whether everything was uncovered remains open; no further killing has ever been charged.
His account of the deaths. Stevanin has always said the women died during sex or from drugs and that he only hid them. The courts rejected that and found him responsible for killing them. He says he cannot remember the moments of their deaths.
His mental state. Three courts reached different conclusions. The Verona court found him fully responsible; the first Venice appeal court found him not punishable because of the effects of his head injury; the second Venice appeal court, upheld by the Court of Cassation, found that he had a disorder that did not remove his responsibility.
Details that vary between sources: the year of the motorcycle crash (1976, at 16, in the accounts opened; no source opened gives 1979); the date Blazenka Smoljo's body was found (July 31, 1994, in the Adige at Piacenza d'Adige, identified in July 1997, against September 24, 1996, in some later summaries); whether Biljana Pavlovic went missing in August or September 1994; the sentence for the November 1994 attack (two years and six months, or three years); the spelling of several names (Roswita or Roswitha Adlassnig; Blazenka Smoljo or Blazenca Smolijo); and the make of the car he was driving at the toll booth.
October 2, 1960: Gianfranco Stevanin is born in Montagnana, province of Padua.
1976: at 16, he suffers a serious head injury in a motorcycle crash.
May 8, 1993: Roswita Adlassnig, 23, Austrian, disappears.
January 15, 1994: Claudia Pulejo, 29, of Legnago, is last seen.
Early July 1994: Blazenka Smoljo, 24, Croatian, dies with him; he later admits she died in his arms.
July 31, 1994: a woman's body, later identified as Blazenka Smoljo, is recovered from the Adige at Piacenza d'Adige.
August to September 1994: Biljana Pavlovic, 25, Serbian, of Arzignano, disappears.
November 16, 1994: a woman he is holding escapes at the Vicenza Ovest toll booth; he is arrested.
November 17, 1994: searches find more than 7,000 photographs, a card index and the documents of two missing women.
July 3, 1995: a farmer finds a woman's torso in a sack in a ditch near the farm.
November 12, 1995: Biljana Pavlovic's body is dug up on his land.
December 1, 1995: Claudia Pulejo's body is recovered near the farmhouse.
July 19, 1996: partial confession.
August 24, 1996: after ten hours of questioning he admits dismembering four women but denies killing them.
September 20, 1996: he leads investigators along ditches between Padua and Verona.
October 1996: declared fit to stand trial.
June 12, 1997: a thigh found in a canal at Merlara is matched to the 1995 torso.
July 23, 1997: Blazenka Smoljo is identified.
September 15, 1997: sent to trial.
October 6, 1997: trial opens before the Verona Court of Assize.
January 28, 1998: convicted of six murders; life imprisonment.
January 29, 1998: apologizes to the families in a RAI interview with Enzo Biagi.
January 1999: sells house and land to compensate the families.
July 7, 1999: Venice appeal court declares him not punishable for the murders; 10 years and 6 months for concealing corpses, plus psychiatric hospital.
May 24, 2000: Court of Cassation annuls the appeal verdict.
December 12, 2000: wounded in the throat by another patient at Montelupo Fiorentino.
March 23, 2001: Venice retrial court sentences him to life for five murders.
May 22, 2001: written reasons filed.
February 7, 2002: Court of Cassation makes the life sentence final.
December 2002: L'Aquila Supervisory Court grants 720 days of early release credit.
September 2010: says he wants to become a lay Franciscan.
October 2020: lawyer seeks a new psychiatric assessment and prison leave.
2021: Bollate treatment team finds him still dangerous.
May 2023: new request for prison leave.
June 1, 2025: Il Post publishes a two-part investigation of the case.
September 2026: Milan Supervisory Court refuses semi-liberty.
October 2026: DNA tests on the 1995 torso give no definitive answer; Stevanin remains at Bollate.