Between January 1985 and August 1992, five girls and women were stabbed to death in and around Bolzano, the capital of the mostly German-speaking province of South Tyrol in northern Italy. The killings stopped on the morning of August 6, 1992, when police at a checkpoint pulled over a red car driven by a 26-year-old local man, Marco Bergamo. It was his birthday, the Italian news agency ANSA later noted. Hours earlier Marika Zorzi, a young woman from Laives, had been killed.
Bergamo admitted that killing at once, and in the following months he admitted two more. He denied two others. In March 1994 the Bolzano Court of Assizes found him sane and convicted him of all five murders, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Italian press called him "il mostro di Bolzano," a name that followed him to his death in custody in October 2017.
Bergamo grew up in Bolzano. Il Fatto Quotidiano described him in 2023 as the only child of a comfortable family, polite and introverted, with a steady job, who still lived with his parents at the time of his arrest. The Czech daily Deník, in a 2021 retrospective, wrote that he stammered from the age of four, was overweight as a schoolboy, had a skin disease and was an outsider at school. Il Fatto said the skin condition was psoriasis.
According to both Il Fatto and Deník, his interest in knives began when he was 13. He collected them, Il Fatto reported, and usually carried one. The communist daily L'Unità, whose correspondent Michele Sartori covered the case from Bolzano, described him in August 1992 as a loner since childhood, without friends or girlfriends. His parents were retired; his father had worked for the city. L'Unità called him a carpenter and welder employed at a workshop, and at his trial in 1994 the same paper described him as a mechanical fitter. Deník also gave his trades as carpenter and welder.
Psychiatrists who examined him after his arrest described sadistic tendencies, Deník reported, and said that killing gave him a feeling of possessing women.
The first of the five killings took place on January 3, 1985. Marcella Casagrande was a student in Bolzano. L'Unità gave her age as 15 in August 1992 and as 16 in its 1994 report on the verdict; Deník also gave 15 and described her as a first-year secondary-school student. She was stabbed to death, and it was her mother who found her.
Bergamo lived a short walk from the Casagrande family, L'Unità reported after his arrest. Her death went unsolved for more than seven years. In August 1992, after his arrest, police found what L'Unità described as more than one item in his room that tied him to her killing, and prosecutor Guido Rispoli questioned him at length about it.
Deník wrote that he was 19 when she died.
Anna Maria Cipolletti, a 41-year-old former teacher, was stabbed to death in Bolzano later in 1985. Deník dated her death to June 26, 1985, and reported that a note in her diary read "Marco left." L'Unità's 1994 report placed her death in 1985; its 1992 report, written days after the arrest, said she was killed a year after Marcella Casagrande.
Bergamo never admitted this killing. He was convicted of it at trial.
After 1985 there was a long pause. L'Unità reported at the time of the verdict that his father had taken away his large collection of knives after the 1985 killing, and that the next killing came only in 1992. The paper did not say how the father came to do so or what he knew.
Renate Rauch, 24, was killed in Bolzano on the night of January 7, 1992, according to L'Unità's 1994 report, Il Fatto and Deník; L'Unità's report of August 1992 gave the date as January 8. She was stabbed to death. Il Fatto reported that the next day Bergamo went skiing.
Some time after her funeral, flowers appeared on her grave with a note of apology. L'Unità and Il Fatto both reported that Bergamo left the note, and Deník wrote that it was signed "M. M." Deník also reported that he later said he had killed her only so as not to be bored.
Renate Troger, 19, came from Bressanone, a town north of Bolzano, according to L'Unità. She was killed in March 1992; Deník dated the killing to the night of March 20 to 21. L'Unità described her in 1994 as a teenager whom Bergamo knew. She was stabbed to death.
By then the police were treating the deaths of Renate Rauch and Renate Troger as linked. Bolzano was frightened, and the carabinieri had set up a telephone line for tips, anonymous ones included, L'Unità reported.
Bergamo never admitted this killing either. He was convicted of it at trial.
Marika Zorzi came from Laives, a town just south of Bolzano. L'Unità gave her age as 19; Deník gave 20. She was stabbed to death on the night of August 5 to 6, 1992. Her body was found near Bolzano on August 6.
Witnesses saw a red car, possibly a Seat Ibiza, leaving the area at speed, and one of them remembered the first characters of its license plate, L'Unità reported. Police also found a part from a car near the body.
Alessandro Arervo was a 29-year-old police officer in Bolzano that summer. In an interview reported by the Trento daily L'Adige in 2014, he recalled that he and his colleagues were at the end of their night shift, looking for an open bar for a coffee, when they saw a red Seat Ibiza. A witness had reported a similar car speeding away from the scene of the killing, so they stopped it.
L'Unità put the stop at about 6 a.m., at a police roadblock. The driver was a young man with a small mustache. Arervo told L'Adige that the windshield was damaged and the driver had scratches on his arms. Bergamo said he had fallen off his scooter, and that strangers had broken the windshield. Arervo did not believe him, in part because the damage seemed to have come from inside the car. The passenger seat was missing. In the trunk, the officers found blood-soaked seat covers, the missing seat and Marika Zorzi's identity card. L'Unità reported that before the stop Bergamo had gone home, washed, changed and gone out again.
Arervo later described the arrest as a piece of luck that also rested on years of work by the police, the carabinieri and the prosecutor's office, L'Adige reported.
Bergamo admitted killing Marika Zorzi straight away, L'Unità reported on August 7, 1992, but at first he denied any link to the other deaths. He told prosecutors that she had provoked and attacked him, and that she had mocked him over a recent operation. The investigating judge did not appear to believe him, the paper wrote.
Prosecutor Mario Martin called the investigation very delicate and said links to the earlier cases were not ruled out. Within two days the inquiry had reached back to Marcella Casagrande's death in 1985. Investigators from Trento, Treviso and Udine came to Bolzano to compare their own unsolved killings of women with the Bolzano cases, L'Unità reported, and the paper noted that each of the Bolzano victims had been stabbed in a similar way, though with different blades.
In the end Bergamo admitted three of the killings. He denied two, those of Anna Maria Cipolletti and Renate Troger.
The trial was held before the Court of Assizes in Bolzano, presided over by Judge Felix Martinolli. Five of the six lay jurors were women, L'Unità reported.
The central question was his state of mind. The prosecution's expert, Enzo Conciatore, found him fully responsible for his actions. Francesco Introna, a consultant to the investigating judge, called him beyond recovery, but L'Unità reported that his report was discredited. A panel of three court-appointed experts, Ugo Fornari, Franco Bruno and Giancarlo Ponti, concluded that he was able to understand and to will his actions. That finding of sanity, the paper wrote, decided the verdict.
In court Bergamo wore a sweater and jacket and a long beard, in place of the large mustache he had worn at the time of the killings. He appeared sedated and said nothing. His parents told the court they had not noticed anything, L'Unità reported. At one point Renate Rauch's mother shouted that he was like Dracula, that he wanted blood.
On the evening of March 8, 1994, the court sentenced Bergamo, then 28, to life imprisonment for all five murders. He was convicted of the two killings he denied, L'Unità reported, because the method was the same as in the three he admitted. Il Fatto Quotidiano wrote in 2023 that the court had described his conduct as the extreme perversion of murder for pleasure.
L'Unità also reported that in prison he had taken up the history of South Tyrol's castles.
No appeal has been reported. ANSA reported in 2017 that he had been serving a life sentence when he died.
Paolo Cagnan, then a reporter for the Bolzano daily Alto Adige, wrote to Bergamo after the verdict, and Bergamo wrote back. In his letters he admitted three of the murders and blamed someone else for the deaths of Renate Troger and Anna Maria Cipolletti, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. Deník reported that he described that other killer as more dangerous than himself.
Cagnan went on to write a book on the case, Anatomia di un serial killer, published by Athesia, and later became co-editor of Il Mattino di Padova, Il Fatto reported.
Bergamo's father testified at the trial, Deník reported. He later took his own life, after learning that the Italian state broadcaster RAI was making a documentary about his son.
Marco Bergamo died on October 17, 2017, at the age of 51. ANSA reported that day that he had died while serving a life sentence in a Milan prison; Deník named the prison as Bollate, on the edge of Milan, and gave the cause of death as a serious lung infection. Il Fatto Quotidiano, in 2023, gave the date as October 16.
Two of the five convictions rest on the court's finding that the killings were alike, not on any admission. Bergamo denied killing Anna Maria Cipolletti and Renate Troger at trial and in his letters to Cagnan. The court convicted him of both.
Other killings of women in the region were looked at after his arrest. Deník reported that police tried to link a killing in Bruneck in July 1984 to the Casagrande case, and that a killing in Trento in January 1992 was also examined; neither was attributed to him, and both remained unsolved.
In 2023, a new edition of Cagnan's book set out his own theory that Bergamo might also have been responsible for an unsolved 1990 killing of a young woman in Rome. Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that Cagnan pointed to similarities between the crimes, to the victim's resemblance to the Bolzano victims and to a reexamined alibi, and that he had sent his hypothesis to Rome prosecutors, who had an open file against persons unknown, suggesting that traces of DNA from that case be compared with Bergamo's genetic profile. The paper presented it as Cagnan's hypothesis. No court has linked Bergamo to that killing.
The case left its mark on South Tyrol. In 2014, more than two decades on, L'Adige marked the anniversary of the arrest with its interview with Alessandro Arervo, who said the capture had brought relief to a city that had lived for years in fear of a killer of young women. Cagnan's work on the case continued for three decades, and the 2023 debate over his Rome theory brought the case back into national newspapers.
January 3, 1985: Marcella Casagrande, 15 or 16, a student, is stabbed to death in Bolzano.
1985 (June 26, per Deník): Anna Maria Cipolletti, 41, a former teacher, is stabbed to death in Bolzano.
After 1985: his father takes away his knife collection, L'Unità later reports.
January 7, 1992 (January 8 in one report): Renate Rauch, 24, is killed in Bolzano; a note of apology later appears on her grave.
March 20 to 21, 1992: Renate Troger, 19, of Bressanone, is killed.
August 5 to 6, 1992: Marika Zorzi, of Laives, is killed.
August 6, 1992, about 6 a.m.: police stop Bergamo's red car at a Bolzano checkpoint on his 26th birthday; he admits killing Marika Zorzi.
August 7 to 8, 1992: prosecutors question him about the death of Marcella Casagrande; investigators from other cities compare unsolved cases.
March 8, 1994: the Bolzano Court of Assizes, finding him sane, convicts him of all five murders and sentences him to life.
After the verdict: he writes to the reporter Paolo Cagnan, admitting three killings and denying two.
After the trial: his father takes his own life.
August 6, 2014: L'Adige publishes the arresting officer's account.
October 17, 2017: Bergamo dies in custody, aged 51.
September 2023: Cagnan's theory of a link to a 1990 Rome killing is reported nationally.