At about six in the morning of August 6, 1992, his twenty-sixth birthday, two police officers stopped a car leaving Bolzano, the capital of Italy's German-speaking province of Alto Adige. The driver, Marco Bergamo, said he was coming from Volta. The passenger seat was stained with blood and missing its padding, a document belonging to a young woman was in the trunk, and the rear-view mirror was gone. It was later found beside the body of Marika Zorzi, twenty, from Laives, stabbed twenty-eight times at the second bend of the road up Monte Pozza.
Bergamo was born on August 6, 1966. From early childhood he struggled: he stuttered at four, and later he was obese and suffered from a skin disease, which made him shy and withdrawn. He collected things, knives among them, and always carried one. He worked as a welder and carpenter, and in May 1992 he had surgery to remove a testicle.
His first victim was Marcella Casagrande, fifteen, a first-year student at the local teacher-training institute, found dead in her home on January 3, 1985, stabbed many times by someone who knew how to use a knife; one blow reached her spine. Six months later, on June 26, Anna Maria Cipolletti, forty-one, a junior high school teacher who also worked as a prostitute, was found stabbed nineteen times near a studio at 149 Brennero Street, her underwear taken. Then seven years passed. On January 7, 1992, Renate Rauch, twenty-four, was found in a deserted parking lot off Renon Street. Days later flowers appeared on her grave with a note: I'm sorry but what I did, it had to be done and you knew it: bye Renate! Signed MM. On March 21, Renate Troger, nineteen, from Millan near Bressanone, accepted a lift in Piazza Verdi at night; she was found near Renon, mutilated, with fourteen stab wounds. Zorzi was the last. Rauch, Troger and Zorzi were working as prostitutes.
He admitted three of the killings and then denied Cipolletti's and Troger's. The Bolzano Court of Assizes consulted four experts who disagreed: one found him not responsible by reason of mental illness and proposed a judicial psychiatric hospital, and the defense psychiatrist agreed, but a panel of three professors concluded that he had reached the most extreme perversion, killing for pleasure, and was fully aware of what he did. On March 8, 1994, International Women's Day, the court convicted him of all five murders on the strength of how alike they were, and sentenced him to life. He wrote to a local journalist, Paolo Cagnan, that he had committed only three and that whoever killed Troger and Cipolletti was more dangerous than he was. On April 18, 1994, the day the state broadcaster announced a program on his trial, his father, Renato, seventy-two, hanged himself in his attic. Two other killings of women in the region, of Anne Maria Ropele in Trento in January 1992 and of a Florentine tourist, Adele Barsi, near Bruneck in July 1984, were never connected to him and remain unsolved.
He spent twenty-four years in a succession of maximum-security institutions. In 2005 he was granted a reward leave from prison, which shocked Italy, and in 2008 he was refused parole. He was moved to the Bollate prison near Milan, which runs on a rehabilitative model. There, at fifty-one, he asked to be taken urgently to hospital and was found to have a serious lung infection. Ten days later he fell into a coma, and he died on October 17, 2017, without waking.