Mario Vanni was a postman from San Casciano in Val di Pesa, a hill town in the wine country south of Florence. In the 1990s he became one of only two men ever finally convicted for a series of eight double murders of couples that took place in the countryside around Florence between 1968 and 1985. The courts found him guilty of complicity in the last four of them, committed between June 1982 and September 1985, in which eight young people died. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
He was tried alongside Giancarlo Lotti, a man from the same town who confessed to taking part and became the prosecution's central witness. The courts also found that Pietro Pacciani, a farmer from Mercatale Val di Pesa and Vanni's long-standing friend, had taken part in the same crimes, though Pacciani died in February 1998 before his own case could be settled. Vanni's conviction was upheld through three levels of judgment and became final in the Court of Cassation. His sentence was suspended in 2004 because of his health, and he died in April 2009.
The case did not end with his death. In January 2025 his nephew asked the courts to revise the conviction, arguing that new expert evidence undermined Lotti's account of the last double murder. The Court of Appeal of Genoa declared the request inadmissible in July 2025, and in February 2026 the Court of Cassation rejected the appeal against that decision. The verdict against Mario Vanni stands.
Vanni was born in San Casciano in Val di Pesa and spent his working life there as a postman. He lived in the Val di Pesa all his life, among the villages and farmhouses of the Chianti hills between Florence and Siena. His family has described him as a mild and easygoing man. In 2025 his nephew, Paolo Vanni, then 81, called him docile, calm and fearful, and said he could not imagine his uncle doing the things he was convicted of.
His friendship with Pietro Pacciani, a farmer born in Vicchio in 1925 who lived in Mercatale Val di Pesa, a village a few miles from San Casciano, is the thread that ran through his case. Pacciani was a former partisan who had served a long prison term for a killing in 1951, and in 1987 he had been sentenced to four years and three months for violence against his daughters. The two men belonged to a small circle of friends from the Val di Pesa. The circle included Giancarlo Lotti, who was born in San Casciano and was orphaned young, and Fernando Pucci, a man from the village of Montefiridolfi. In the investigation that followed, each of them would be called upon to account for the others.
Between August 1968 and September 1985, sixteen people died in eight double murders in the countryside of the province of Florence. In each case the victims were a couple, killed together in the countryside. The first came at Castelletti di Signa in August 1968; the others followed at Borgo San Lorenzo in September 1974, Scandicci in June 1981, Travalle di Calenzano in October 1981, Baccaiano di Montespertoli in June 1982, Giogoli in September 1983, Vicchio in July 1984 and Scopeti, near San Casciano, in September 1985. Investigators came to believe that one series ran through all of them.
For the 1968 killing a different man, Stefano Mele, the husband of one of the two victims, was convicted. He had been in prison since 1974 and could not have committed the later crimes. For years the investigation followed a line of inquiry centered on a group of men from Sardinia who lived in the area. Several of them were jailed, but the killings went on while they were in custody, and in December 1989 the investigating judge, Mario Rotella, closed that line of inquiry.
Mario Vanni was never charged with any of the first four double murders. The final judgments against him and Lotti place their involvement in the series from 1982 onward, and the double murders of 1974 and of June and October 1981 have no convicted culprit. The four cases for which Vanni was convicted are the last four in the series.
Paolo Mainardi, 22, and Antonella Migliorini were a young couple from the area around Montespertoli, a farming town in the hills southwest of Florence. They died together near the village of Baccaiano, in the comune of Montespertoli, on the night of June 19, 1982. Antonella was in her late teens or early twenties. Theirs was the first double murder for which Vanni and Lotti were later convicted.
Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rüsch were two young men, both 24, who were traveling together in Tuscany in the late summer of 1983. They died on September 9, 1983, at Giogoli, on the hills above Scandicci, just southwest of Florence.
Pia Rontini was 18 and Claudio Stefanacci had just turned 21 when they died together in the countryside near Vicchio, in the Mugello valley north of Florence, on the night of July 29, 1984. Pia had been a majorette, and she kept diaries. Her father was helped through the hardest years of his life by a friend, and years later that friend's relatives found a trunk of her belongings that held both her diaries and her majorette costume.
The trial courts accepted Lotti's account of the Vicchio murders, and Lotti and Vanni were both convicted for them. In 2025 Vanni's defense lawyers pointed to two police reports, never filed with the trial record, that they said bore on the timing of events at Vicchio that night.
Nadine Mauriot, 36, and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili, 25, were visiting Tuscany in September 1985 and died in the Scopeti area of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, a few miles from Vanni's home. Her daughter, who was four years old that September, later described her mother as sweet and cheerful. Jean-Michel had grown up with a close friend with whom he played in a band. The couple were the last victims in the series. The courts placed their deaths on the night of Sunday, September 8, 1985, the date given in Lotti's account.
Nadine's daughter has spoken of the case as an adult. In 2023, opposing the closure of a later inquiry, she said she was not seeking compensation, which the family had never received, but wanted to understand why there had been so many errors and conflicting rulings, and that justice had not been satisfying for her family.
The special police unit created to work exclusively on the double murders reviewed the case data by computer in the spring of 1991, and the results pointed to Pietro Pacciani, who was then in prison for the offenses against his daughters. Investigators found that the dates of the killings fitted the course of his life and that the series had stopped while he was in prison. They regarded these as indications, not proof. An anonymous letter had named him as early as 1985.
Pacciani was arrested in January 1993. On the evening of November 1, 1994, the Corte d'assise di Firenze convicted him of seven of the eight double murders, excluding the 1968 killing, for which Mele had already been convicted, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The court's reasoning held that Pacciani could not have acted alone.
Mario Vanni was called to testify as a witness at Pacciani's trial in 1994. He was evasive on the stand, and the presiding judge, Enrico Ognibene, warned him that he risked a charge of perjury. To almost every question he gave the same answer: that he and Pacciani had only gone out together to eat and drink in the countryside. The phrase he used would follow him and his friends for the rest of their lives.
The court's finding that Pacciani had not acted alone opened a new line of inquiry. The chief prosecutor of Florence, Piero Luigi Vigna, assigned it to Michele Giuttari, the head of the Florence flying squad. Its subject was the circle of men around Pacciani.
Giancarlo Lotti had first appeared in the special unit's records on July 19, 1990. In the new inquiry he went much further. He confessed that he had taken part in the last murders of the series and named the people he said had been there with him. He was admitted to witness protection as a cooperating witness, and the prosecution's case against Vanni would rest on his account.
Lotti also named Fernando Pucci, who testified in 1997 that he had been with Lotti on the evening of the last double murder, and his evidence implicated Pacciani and Vanni. His statements were often evasive and contradictory, and at times he risked a charge of false testimony. He was nonetheless an important witness against Pacciani and Vanni for the Vicchio and Scopeti killings, and decades later the courts still cited him as confirming Lotti's account of the day of the last murder.
In January 1996 Mario Vanni was formally accused of complicity in the double murders, and on February 12, 1996, he was arrested. The timing coincided with a turn in Pacciani's case. His appeal was then under way, and the appeal prosecutor, Piero Tony, asked for and obtained his acquittal. The appeal court, presided over by Francesco Ferri, refused to hear four witnesses whose identities had been protected with code names: Fernando Pucci, Giancarlo Lotti, G. G. and N. G.. Pacciani was acquitted of all charges.
The acquittal did not hold. Later in 1996 the Court of Cassation annulled it because of that procedural flaw and ordered a new appeal trial. Pacciani died at Mercatale on February 22, 1998, on the eve of the new trial. He died with no final verdict.
Vanni and Lotti went on trial before the Corte d'assise di Firenze, the court that had convicted Pacciani in 1994. A third man, G. F., a friend of Pacciani from Calenzano, was tried with them. The charges against Vanni and Lotti covered the four double murders from Baccaiano in 1982 to Scopeti in 1985. Vanni was defended in the assize trials by, among others, the Florence lawyer Antonio Mazzeo.
In December 1997, while the trial was still under way, the Corte d'assise granted Vanni house arrest, and he returned to San Casciano. Pacciani's death in February 1998 removed the man the prosecution saw as the third participant from any further proceedings. About a month later the court gave its verdict. It convicted Mario Vanni of complicity in all four double murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Lotti was convicted for the same four crimes. G. F. was acquitted.
The prosecution's account, as the courts accepted it, was that Pacciani, Vanni and Lotti had acted together in the four crimes, and that in some of them Vanni and Lotti were among those who carried them out. It was Lotti's statements that led to Vanni's conviction, and Pucci's testimony supported them.
The case went through the full Italian appeal system. At the appeal stage the prosecutor general again asked for acquittal, as Piero Tony had done in Pacciani's case, but the appeal court upheld the convictions. Lotti's final sentence was 26 years' imprisonment. G. F. was acquitted at every level. The proceedings against the men from the Val di Pesa, which had begun in 1996, ended in 2000 with the judgment of the Court of Cassation, and Vanni's life sentence became final. Three courts in turn, up to the Cassation, judged Lotti's account credible.
The final judgments fixed the legal record that still stands. Vanni and Lotti were convicted of the four double murders from 1982 to 1985. Pacciani, whom the prosecution placed with them, died legally unconvicted, with a first-instance conviction, an annulled acquittal and a new appeal that never took place.
Lotti's statements carried the investigation beyond the three men. He spoke of a man he called the doctor, whom he described as having paid Pacciani, and this led to a further inquiry into what investigators saw as a possible second level of responsibility. A man from San Casciano, F. C., was identified as the man Lotti meant. He was tried and acquitted at first instance in 2008, and the prosecution did not appeal. A separate inquiry in Umbria, into the death of a Perugia doctor in 1985, ended with the Perugia prosecutors seeking its closure for lack of evidence.
Later suspects were investigated and cleared. G. V., a former soldier of the French Foreign Legion who lived in Prato, was entered in the register of suspects after a complaint filed in 2014 by a lawyer for the family of Nadine Mauriot; his position was archived in 2020, and he died in 2024. None of these inquiries changed the judgments against Vanni and Lotti.
Giancarlo Lotti died in 2002. Vanni remained under his life sentence until 2004, when it was suspended because of his health. He spent his last years in a care home in the province of Florence. An earlier attempt to have his conviction revised was brought in Genoa in 2004 and failed.
He died in Florence in April 2009; his death was reported on April 14, 2009. He was 82. He was the last survivor of the circle of friends around Pacciani who had stood trial. Fernando Pucci, the witness who had confirmed Lotti's account, died in a hospice in San Casciano in February 2017, aged 86.
Vanni's family did not accept the verdict. In January 2025 his nephew, Paolo Vanni, represented by the lawyers Valter Biscotti and Antonio Mazzeo, filed a request for revision of the conviction with the Court of Appeal of Genoa, which has jurisdiction to review judgments of the Florence courts. The filing ran to some 350 to 400 pages. The lawyers called the verdict unjust and said it had to be reviewed.
The request centered on the last double murder. A new expert report, signed by Fabiola Giusti and Stefano Vanin, argued that the two victims at Scopeti had died about two days earlier than the night of Sunday, September 8, 1985, that Lotti had described, on the night of September 6 to 7. If that was right, the lawyers argued, Lotti could not have seen what he said he saw, and the evidence on which all four convictions rested would be undermined. The request also cited two police reports on events at Vicchio in July 1984 that had never been filed with the trial record, testimony from witnesses who said Lotti had not been at Scopeti that Sunday, and evidence the lawyers said had been tampered with. They argued that the series fitted a single offender working alone, not a group of men from the Val di Pesa.
The request passed the first screening for manifest groundlessness, and in March 2025 the 34 folders of the case file were sent from Florence to Genoa. The hearing before the court, presided over by Vincenzo Papillo, was postponed from May 9 to June 13, 2025, because the prosecutor general, Alessandro Bogliolo, had not finished studying the file.
In July 2025 the Court of Appeal of Genoa declared the request inadmissible. Its reasoning ran to three pages and dealt only with the new expert evidence, which it found did not apply to the case. The judges also disputed some of the data in the report. Biscotti said an appeal to the Court of Cassation was ready and would be filed within hours; the lawyers argued that the Genoa court had gone into the merits of the case, which they said the law did not allow at that stage.
The Fifth Section of the Court of Cassation rejected the appeal in February 2026. In its reasons, published in March 2026, it held that the Genoa court had in fact dealt with the defense arguments, and that the new report could not be certain proof of a different date and time of death. The court ruled out moving the deaths back two or three days before the official Sunday evening. It found that the report had not applied the same analysis to both victims although they died at the same time, and that existing evidence contradicted it, above all the testimony of Fernando Pucci, who had confirmed Lotti's account of the day of the murders.
The ruling closed the attempt to revise the conviction. Under the code of criminal procedure a new request remains possible only on different grounds.
The court that tried Vanni, the Corte d'assise, is the Italian court for the gravest crimes. It is a mixed court: two professional judges, one of whom presides, sit with six lay judges as a single panel, and the appeal court, the Corte d'assise d'appello, is formed in the same way, with a presiding judge, a second professional judge of the court of appeal and six lay judges. Both are governed by Law No. 287 of April 10, 1951. Lay judges must be Italian citizens between 30 and 65 years of age with at least a lower secondary school diploma (an upper secondary diploma for the appeal court), and they are drawn by lot in public from lists compiled in each comune. The arrangement reflects Article 102 of the Constitution, which provides for the direct participation of the people in the administration of justice.
Under Article 5 of the code of criminal procedure, the Corte d'assise hears crimes punishable by life imprisonment or by a maximum of not less than 24 years, together with intentional crimes that cause the death of one or more people, with some exceptions. Murder falls within its jurisdiction, and its judgments are appealed to the Corte d'assise d'appello.
Revision of a final conviction is governed by Articles 629 to 647 of the code of criminal procedure. It may be sought at any time in favor of the convicted person, even after the sentence has been served or extinguished. When the convicted person has died, an heir or close relative may bring the request, which is how Vanni's nephew could act sixteen years after his uncle's death. The grounds are set out in Article 630; the one invoked in Vanni's case allows revision when new evidence has emerged that, alone or with the evidence already assessed, shows that the convicted person should be acquitted. The request goes to the court of appeal chosen under Article 11, which assigns cases from one district to the courts of another, so that Florence judgments are reviewed in Genoa. Under Article 634 the court of appeal declares a request inadmissible if it falls outside these grounds or is manifestly unfounded, and that order can be challenged in the Court of Cassation. Under Article 641 an inadmissibility order does not bar a new request based on different evidence.
Vanni's family and lawyers have contested the verdict for years. The central dispute is over Lotti, whose confession was the core of the prosecution case. His credibility was challenged during his lifetime and has been questioned since. Prosecutors at the appeal stage of both trials asked for acquittal. The 2025 revision request was built to attack his account of the last night of the series, and the courts rejected it.
Other questions remain open. The double murders of 1974 and 1981 have no convicted culprit. The courts found that Vanni and Lotti came into the series only in 1982, and no final judgment names the person or people responsible for the earlier killings. The inquiry into a possible instigator ended in acquittal. Relatives of victims outside Vanni's convictions, among them the sister of one of the two victims of June 1981 at Scandicci, have said they do not find the official account convincing, and the family of that victim did not join the civil proceedings against Pacciani and his companions in the 1990s.
In October 2025 Netflix released a four-part Italian limited series on the case, directed by Stefano Sollima and filmed in Florence and the surrounding countryside, which drew on court records, testimony and journalistic investigations and did not claim to solve the case.
Date unknown: Mario Vanni is born in San Casciano in Val di Pesa; he works there as a postman.
1968 to 1981: four double murders in the province of Florence; Vanni is never charged with any of them.
June 19, 1982: Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini die at Baccaiano, Montespertoli.
September 9, 1983: Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rüsch die at Giogoli, Scandicci.
July 29, 1984: Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci die near Vicchio.
September 1985: Nadine Mauriot and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili die at Scopeti, San Casciano in Val di Pesa; the courts later place their deaths on the night of Sunday, September 8.
December 1989: the investigating judge closes the earlier line of inquiry.
July 19, 1990: Giancarlo Lotti first appears in the special unit's records.
Spring 1991: the special unit's computer review points to Pietro Pacciani.
January 1993: Pacciani is arrested.
November 1, 1994: the Corte d'assise di Firenze convicts Pacciani of seven double murders and sentences him to life; Vanni testifies as a witness at that trial and is warned about perjury.
January 1996: Vanni is accused of complicity in the double murders.
February 12, 1996: Vanni is arrested; in the same weeks Pacciani is acquitted on appeal.
1996: the Court of Cassation annuls Pacciani's acquittal and orders a new appeal.
1997: Fernando Pucci testifies.
December 1997: the Corte d'assise grants Vanni house arrest.
February 22, 1998: Pacciani dies at Mercatale on the eve of his new appeal.
About March 1998: the Corte d'assise di Firenze convicts Vanni of complicity in four double murders and sentences him to life; Lotti is convicted; G. F. is acquitted.
2000: the Court of Cassation makes the convictions final; Lotti's final sentence is 26 years.
2002: Lotti dies.
2004: Vanni's sentence is suspended for health reasons; a first revision attempt in Genoa fails.
2008: F. C. is acquitted at first instance in the inquiry into a possible instigator.
April 2009: Vanni dies in Florence, aged 82; his death is reported on April 14.
February 2017: Fernando Pucci dies, aged 86.
2020: the inquiry into G. V. is archived.
January 2025: Vanni's nephew files a revision request with the Court of Appeal of Genoa.
March 2025: 34 folders of the case file are sent to Genoa.
June 13, 2025: the postponed hearing in Genoa.
July 2025: the Court of Appeal of Genoa declares the request inadmissible.
October 2025: a Netflix limited series on the case is released.
February 2026: the Court of Cassation, Fifth Section, rejects the appeal; its reasons follow in March.