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 were prostitutes, strangled with their own clothing within days of one another in July: Thea Stroppa, fifty-one, known as Tiziana, found between the Via Flaminia Vecchia and Due Ponti on July 6, also struck in the face with a stone and shot; Luciana Lupi, forty-five, known as Silvana, strangled with her belt and disfigured with stones, found at Passo Corese on July 9; and Lucia Rosa, thirty-three, known as Margherita, from Catania, found at Tor de' Cenci on July 13 after five days. On August 5, Giulia Meschi, thirty-one, a former municipal clerk, was killed near a cornfield at Sabaudia, and a farmer saw the killer's face. On October 31 the painter Fernanda Renzetti Durante, fifty-three, wife of a Bank of Italy official, was found half-naked on a country road near Pratica di Mare with the knife beside her. On January 22, 1984, Catherine Skerl, seventeen, known as Katty, daughter of the film director Peter Skerl, was found strangled with wire and the strap of her bag in a vineyard at Grottaferrata. A witness had seen her get onto a stranger's Vespa the day before.
All six were first 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, the second of four children of cattle farmers, malnourished from birth and unable to speak until he was about four. In 1970 a carabinieri vehicle hit him, and from then on he became unstable and aggressive, attacking his father, his siblings and his classmates and killing animals on the farm. He was put in psychiatric hospitals several times and escaped each time. The family moved often and settled in Rome. In 1977 he was jailed briefly for robbery at the Casal del Marmo juvenile prison; in 1979 he was arrested for sexually assaulting an acquaintance, held at the Aversa judicial psychiatric hospital, sentenced to two years and sent to Pianosa. Released, he drifted around the outskirts of Rome in a caravan with his wife, Rosa Bussaglia, whom he had met as a teenager, and their daughter.
In February 1984, after a violent argument with his mother-in-law, he set fire to the Bussaglia family's apartment and was arrested for arson. After the sixth killing, Rocco Marazzita, the police commissioner of the Prenestino district, sent the head of the homicide squad, Nicola Cavaliere, a report pointing to Giugliano's record. The evidence was thin: a caravan like his had been seen near each scene, the cars used had been bought under false names as he habitually did, and he got around on a Vespa. His wife said that in their quarrels he had claimed the murders as his own, and his mother had gone to the authorities about his behavior as early as October 1983. The Sabaudia farmer picked him out of a lineup without hesitation. For the other killings no decisive evidence emerged, some newspapers questioned his guilt, and commentators noted that similar murders of women around Rome, before and after his arrest, remain unsolved.
He was sent to trial for three of the six. In the Stroppa case the court found him totally lacking in mental capacity and acquitted him on grounds of insanity, declaring him socially dangerous. He confessed to Lucia Rosa's murder and then retracted it at trial, and because witnesses could not identify him as the man seen walking away with her, he was acquitted. In 1986 the Corte d'assise of Latina convicted him of Giulia Meschi's murder, largely on the farmer's evidence, and sentenced him to seventeen years and eight months. The three trials produced three different psychiatric verdicts. He was never charged with the murders of Lupi, Renzetti Durante or Skerl, which, with Rosa's, remain unsolved.
At Rebibbia prison he shared a cell with Agostino Panetta, leader of the so-called Clockwork Orange gang, who said Giugliano had confided two more killings: Lucia Rosa's and that of Maria Negri, strangled with an electric wire in her home at Cavallino, near Jesolo, on August 3, 1983, while he was supposedly on a summer holiday in the Veneto with his wife and brother-in-law. Giugliano denied ever saying it, Panetta's account did not match how the body was found, and he was acquitted of that murder for insufficient evidence.
In custody he was violent. On October 27, 1988, on trial for a 1982 theft and robbery, he threw his handcuffs at the court, and in November 1989, at the Rosa trial, he hurled a chair at the judges and threatened to kill them. In 1990 he was admitted to the judicial psychiatric hospital at Montelupo Fiorentino, where after three years he smothered a fellow patient with a pillow for refusing him a cigarette. He was transferred to Reggio Emilia and died there of a heart attack the following year, 1994.