Between July 1983 and January 1984 six women were found dead in the countryside around Rome and on the Pontine plain to the south. Three of them worked as prostitutes on the city's outskirts and were killed within days of one another in July. Thea Stroppa, fifty-one, known as Tiziana, who supported her family that way, was last seen on the Via Due Ponti at about 9:30 in the evening and found on the morning of July 6 by two workmen at a building site where the Via Flaminia Vecchia meets the Via Due Ponti; she had been strangled with her own blouse, struck in the face with stones and shot in the temple. Luciana Lupi, forty-five, known as Silvana, who lived in the Pigneto district, was found in open country at Passo Corese, near Fara Sabina, on the evening of July 9, strangled with her own belt during the night of July 4 to 5, her face battered with stones and her body partly hidden under a sheet of metal. Lucia Rosa, thirty-three, known as Margherita, was found on July 13 beside the old Via Pontina at Tor de' Cenci, half-naked, her T-shirt pulled tight around her neck. Accounts give her home town as Siracusa and as Catania; she had lived in Rome for years.
On August 5, Giuliana Meschi, thirty-one, a former municipal clerk who had recently moved to the Pontine coast, was found half-naked in a cornfield just inland from Sabaudia, strangled with her own trousers. She had been to Rome that day to collect a payment of 300,000 lire, which was not among her belongings. A farmer in the fields had watched a man seize her by the neck and heard her cry out that she did not want to, and he had seen the man's face. On October 31 the painter Fernanda Renzetti Durante, fifty-three, wife of a Bank of Italy official, was found in a ditch beside a country lane near Pratica di Mare, wearing only a bra and a pullover, stabbed more than thirty times, with a knife beside her. She had left an exhibition in Via Margutta an hour early the evening before, telling the porter of her building that she had an appointment, and her red Fiat 500 turned up the next day near the station at Campoleone. On the morning of January 22, 1984, Catherine Skerl, a high school student given as sixteen in some accounts and seventeen in others, daughter of the director and screenwriter Peter Skerl, was found in a vineyard near Grottaferrata, strangled first with wire and then with the strap of her bag. She had vanished at about 6:30 the evening before on her way to meet a friend.
All six were attributed to Maurizio Giugliano, and the press named him the Wolf of the Agro Romano. He was born on June 7, 1962, at Acciarella near Latina, one of four children of farmers, delivered with forceps, slow to develop and unable to speak until he was about four. In 1970, when he was eight, a car driven by a carabiniere hit him, and his brother told L'Unità in 1984 that he had not been right in the head since. Newspapers of the 1980s reported that he attacked his brothers and sisters and his father, killed animals on the farm, set fire to his father's barns and truck, and injured classmates. His parents had him admitted to psychiatric hospitals several times, and he escaped each time. The family moved to the country around Anguillara Sabazia, then to San Vittorino, and finally to Rome. In 1977, at fifteen, he was held briefly at the Casal del Marmo juvenile prison for robbery. In 1979 he was arrested for raping a bar owner in her forties at Osteria Nuova, near Anguillara, who had been the one person able to calm him; he tried to hang himself in custody, spent some months at the Aversa judicial psychiatric hospital, and in 1980 was sentenced to less than two years for the rape and for thefts and receiving, serving part of it on Pianosa. Released, he drifted around the outskirts of Rome in a caravan, living on petty crime, with Rosa Bussaglia, whom he had met while she was still a minor. They married and had a daughter.
In February 1984, after a violent argument with his mother-in-law, he set fire to the Bussaglia family's apartment in Via Gogol, in the Laurentino 38 district, and was arrested for arson. According to the Corriere della Sera, Rocco Marazzita, the police commissioner of the Prenestino district, remembered him after the six killings and sent the head of the homicide squad, Nicola Cavaliere, a report on his record. The evidence was thin: a caravan like his had been seen near each scene, the cars used, later found burned, had been bought under false names as he habitually did, and he got around the countryside on a Vespa and carried a knife. His wife, his mother-in-law and his mother told police that in his rages he had pointed at newspaper reports of the murders and shouted that he had killed those women, and his mother had gone to the police about him in December 1983. In April 1984, while he was held at Regina Coeli, an arrest warrant and five judicial notices reached him from the courts of Rieti, Latina and Rome, and the Rome police let it be known that he was suspected of all six killings. L'Unità objected at once that he was only perhaps the killer. The Sabaudia farmer, whose description had not at first suggested him, picked him out of a lineup without hesitation.
Only three of the six cases came to trial. No witness had seen Stroppa or Lupi with him, and in the Stroppa case the court found him totally lacking in mental capacity, declared him socially dangerous and acquitted him. In June 1986 the Corte d'assise of Latina convicted him of Giuliana Meschi's murder on the farmer's evidence, though he never confessed to it, and sentenced him to seventeen years and eight months; the appeal court refused a new psychiatric examination and confirmed the sentence. The three trials produced three different psychiatric verdicts: total incapacity in the Stroppa case, partial incapacity in the Meschi case, and full capacity in the Rosa case. The link to Renzetti Durante and Skerl rested on anonymous tips, his wife's statement that he had come home on his Vespa late on the night of January 21 with mud up to his waist, and an unconfirmed sighting of the girl climbing onto a Vespa with a young man. He was never tried for those two killings or for Lupi's, and they remain unsolved. Press reports at the time listed other women murdered around Rome in 1983 and 1984, before and after his arrest, whose killings were never solved.
In 1987 he shared a cell at Rebibbia with Agostino Panetta, a former policeman described as the leader of the so-called Clockwork Orange gang, and in December 1987 Panetta told magistrates that Giugliano had confided two killings. One was Lucia Rosa's. The other was that of Maria Negri, fifty-one, found strangled with the cord of her vacuum cleaner in her holiday home at Punta Sabbioni, near Jesolo, on the morning of August 3, 1983, a case investigators had put down to a burglar she surprised. In the version later published in the book Malaroma, he had stopped there to buy cigarettes while traveling with his wife and brother-in-law. He retracted everything, and at the end of 1989, in the bunker courtroom at Mestre, he was acquitted of the Negri murder for insufficient evidence. He had confessed to Rosa's murder during the investigation and again to magistrates in 1988, then denied it at trial; his account did not match the medical examiner's findings on the time of death, her clothing or her wounds, and in 1989 he was acquitted on the ground that he had not committed the act. Witnesses had seen her walk away with a man about half an hour before she was killed, and none of them recognized Giugliano.
In court he was violent. On October 27, 1988, on trial with his brother-in-law Pietro Bussaglia for thefts and robberies of 1982 and 1983, he threw his handcuffs at the bench and lunged at the prosecutor, and in November 1989, at the Rosa trial, he tore up the statement he had signed, hurled a chair at the court and threatened the people in the courtroom from inside the cage until the presiding judge talked him down. In 1990 he was sent to the judicial psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, where in 1993 he smothered a fellow inmate with a pillow for refusing him a cigarette. He was transferred to Reggio Emilia and died there of a heart attack in 1994.
June 7, 1962: born at Acciarella near Latina.
1970: he is hit by a car driven by a carabiniere.
1977: held briefly at the Casal del Marmo juvenile prison for robbery.
1979: arrested for raping a bar owner at Osteria Nuova.
1980: sentenced to less than two years for the rape and for thefts and receiving.
July 6, 1983: Thea Stroppa is found strangled and shot at a building site in Rome.
July 9, 1983: Luciana Lupi is found at Passo Corese, strangled during the night of July 4 to 5.
July 13, 1983: Lucia Rosa is found beside the old Via Pontina at Tor de' Cenci.
August 3, 1983: Maria Negri is found strangled in her holiday home at Punta Sabbioni.
August 5, 1983: Giuliana Meschi is found strangled in a cornfield near Sabaudia.
October 31, 1983: the painter Fernanda Renzetti Durante is found stabbed near Pratica di Mare.
December 1983: his mother goes to the police about him.
January 22, 1984: Catherine Skerl is found strangled in a vineyard near Grottaferrata.
February 1984: arrested for arson after setting fire to the Bussaglia family's apartment.
April 1984: held at Regina Coeli, he receives an arrest warrant and five judicial notices, and police say he is suspected of all six killings.
June 1986: the Corte d'assise of Latina convicts him of Giuliana Meschi's murder and sentences him to seventeen years and eight months.
December 1987: his former cellmate Agostino Panetta tells magistrates he confided the killings of Lucia Rosa and Maria Negri.
October 27, 1988: he throws his handcuffs at the bench and lunges at the prosecutor during a theft and robbery trial.
1989: acquitted of Lucia Rosa's murder, and at the end of the year acquitted at Mestre of the Negri murder for insufficient evidence.
1990: sent to the judicial psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino.
1993: he smothers a fellow inmate with a pillow.
1994: dies of a heart attack at Reggio Emilia.