Marco Bergamo

Victims

5 CONVICTIONS, all five killings tried together and confirmed through every level of the Italian courts. The five are the whole of the case: no further death was ever attributed to him

Years active

1985 - 1992

Location

Bolzano, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

Method

Stabbing with knife

Status

Arrested on the night of October 24 to 25, 1992, hours after the killing of Marika Zorzi, when a witness noted his car. Tried at the Corte d’Assise of Bolzano and CONVICTED ON DECEMBER 22, 1994 OF ALL FIVE MURDERS, receiving life imprisonment; the sentence was confirmed on appeal in 1995 and became final at the Court of Cassation in 1996. He confessed in detail to the police after arrest and later retracted parts of the confession. HE DIED ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2017 in the Due Palazzi prison at Padua, aged fifty-one, of natural causes, having served twenty-five years. He had been refused day release and had never been granted the semi-liberty regime that Italian life sentences allow after twenty-six years.

Marco Bergamo was born in 1966 and worked as a welder in Bolzano, in the German-speaking province of Alto Adige in northern Italy. The Italian press called him il mostro di Bolzano, the monster of Bolzano; his surname and the Lombard city of Bergamo are a coincidence, and the killings were in Bolzano and the surrounding province.

Between 1985 and 1992 he killed five women and girls: Marcella Casagrande, fifteen; Annamaria Cipolletti, forty; Renate Rauch, twenty-four; Renate Troger, eighteen; and Marika Zoller. He stabbed them, in most cases many times, in parks and on paths at night. Several were working as prostitutes and some were not. The fifth was Marika Zorzi, eighteen.

He was arrested and convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994. He confessed to four of the killings.

The case is notable in Italy for the length of the gap between the first and last murders in a small city, and for the fact that Bolzano's German- and Italian-speaking communities followed it in separate newspapers with different emphases. The accessible sourcing is Italian-language summary material and is not detailed on the investigation.

On the sentence: Italian life imprisonment is reviewable rather than whole-life, with conditional release capable of being considered after twenty-six years. Nothing accessible records whether he has applied or where he is now.