Maurizio Minghella was sentenced to life imprisonment in Genoa in 1981 for killing young women in the hills and valleys north of the city in 1978. He was 20 when he was arrested. In 1995, after years as a model prisoner, he was allowed out of prison each evening to work as a carpenter in Turin. During those years women who worked the streets of Turin and its suburbs were found dead, one after another. He was arrested in March 2001, and Italian courts later convicted him of four of those killings: Fatima H'Didou in 1997, Floreta Islami in 1998, Cosima Guido in 1999 and Tina Motoc in 2001.
His case has often been cited in Italian debate over releasing men serving life sentences. Il Giornale used it in 2022 to ask whether rehabilitation is always possible. The prosecutor who handled his later cases, Roberto Sparagna, told a Turin court in 2017 that Minghella was not mentally ill but a person who knew right from wrong, and that the opposite conclusion would have been more comforting.
Minghella was born in Genoa on July 16, 1958, according to Il Giornale and the Turin news site Mole24. He grew up in public housing in Bolzaneto, an industrial suburb in the Val Polcevera, the valley that runs north from Genoa toward the Apennines. Il Giornale reported that he suffered asphyxia at birth, which delayed his speaking and walking.
His parents separated when he was about six; Fanpage put his father's departure at five. His mother raised five children. The man she then lived with was violent toward her and the children, and Il Giornale described him as an alcoholic. Mole24 reported that Minghella later said he had often dreamed of strangling him.
School went badly. Il Giornale reported in 2022 that he was held back in first grade and sent to a special school; Mole24 wrote that he was still in first grade at 12 and never got past second grade. He was declared unfit for military service on psychiatric grounds. He worked on and off, as a tile setter's assistant and in local workshops, and stole cars and motorbikes, especially small Fiats. Mole24 gave his measured IQ as 70.
He boxed as an amateur and spent his evenings in dance halls and discos. That earned him the nickname "Travoltino della Valpolcevera," after John Travolta, the star of Saturday Night Fever. His brother Carlo died in a road accident, and several accounts, including Il Giornale's in 2023, link that loss to a later fascination with death. As a teenager he married. Il Giornale reported that the marriage ended quickly and that their baby died at nine months; Mole24 and GenovaQuotidiana wrote instead that his young wife died of an overdose of psychiatric drugs.
Over roughly eight months in 1978, five young women were killed in and around Genoa. Their deaths were later laid at Minghella's door by investigators and, for at least four of them, by the Corte d'Assise of Genoa.
Anna Pagano was 20. Her body was found on April 18, 1978, according to GenovaQuotidiana; Il Giornale gave the date of her death as April 9. She had been beaten to death. Found with her was a handwritten message that misspelled the name of the Red Brigades, the armed group that had kidnapped the former prime minister Aldo Moro a month earlier. Il Giornale described it as an attempt to send investigators after terrorists. It did not work, and a handwriting comparison later tied the message to Minghella.
Giuseppina Jerardi, whose surname some reports spell Ierardi, was 23 according to GenovaQuotidiana and 24 according to Il Giornale. She was found dead in Genoa on July 8, 1978. Il Giornale wrote in 2023 that her death was attributed to him but that the case could not be reconstructed with objective evidence.
Maria Catena Alba, known as Tina, was 14 and the youngest of the five. She was killed on July 18, 1978, in the Valbrevenna, near Genoa. A pair of glasses recovered in her case was later identified as his. Police first held her former boyfriend, who was cleared within days.
Maria Strambelli was 21, according to Il Giornale and Mole24, or 23, according to GenovaQuotidiana. She had come to Genoa from Bari. She was killed on August 22, 1978, after a night out, and was found three days after she went missing. She was strangled.
Wanda Scerra, whose first name is also spelled Vanda, was 19 and a friend of Maria Strambelli. Mole24 gave the date of her death as November 28, 1978; Il Giornale and Fanpage gave December 3. She was found in Genoa. She was strangled.
GenovaQuotidiana wrote that police had stepped up patrols in the Val Polcevera during the year. The series stopped with his arrest.
Minghella was arrested on the night of December 5 to 6, 1978. Fanpage reported that a witness remembered seeing him approach a woman. After many hours of questioning he confessed to killing Maria Strambelli and Wanda Scerra and led investigators to the places where they died. He denied the other three deaths. Within days he withdrew the confession and said it had been forced out of him, according to Il Giornale.
The case against him on the other killings rested on physical and documentary evidence. The handwriting on the message found with Anna Pagano was compared with his. A pen recovered in that case and the glasses recovered in Tina Alba's case were tied to him. A first psychiatric examination, Fanpage reported, found no mental illness that would reduce his responsibility.
On April 3, 1981, the Corte d'Assise of Genoa sentenced Minghella to life imprisonment. The reports disagree on how many killings the verdict covered. Il Giornale, in 2005 and again in 2023, wrote that the life sentence was for four murders. ANSA in 2017 described him as serving life for four murders in Liguria at the time of the 1998 killing in Rivoli, and Il Fatto Quotidiano wrote the same year that he had been convicted of four murders in Genoa in the late 1970s. Mole24, Fanpage and Nuova Società wrote that the court convicted him of five. GenovaQuotidiana wrote that he received 131 years for five murders, a figure other outlets attach to his later total.
Il Giornale's statement that the Jerardi case could not be reconstructed with objective evidence is consistent with the lower figure.
He was sent to the maximum-security prison at Porto Azzurro, on the island of Elba. There he began to insist that he was innocent, and he went on insisting for decades.
Inside Porto Azzurro Minghella learned carpentry and behaved well, Il Giornale reported. The Genoese priest Don Andrea Gallo, known for his work with people on the margins, came to believe that he was innocent. Mole24 reported that in the 1980s Gallo asked for the Genoa case to be reviewed. Fanpage wrote that Minghella persuaded Gallo of his innocence. Gallo supported his application for semi-liberty, according to Il Giornale.
In 1995, when he was 37, Minghella was granted semi-liberty and moved to the Le Vallette prison in Turin, according to Mole24 and ANSA. Il Giornale's 2005 account dates the decision to 1996. Semi-liberty, as Il Fatto Quotidiano explained it, allowed him to work outside the prison by day and return at night.
He was given a job as a carpenter with a cooperative linked to the Gruppo Abele, the Turin charity founded by the priest Don Luigi Ciotti; Il Giornale wrote that the firm built wooden play equipment, and ANSA described it as a church-sponsored cooperative. On weekdays he stayed inside until five in the afternoon, then had five hours outside, and was back in his cell by ten at night. On holidays he was free from seven in the morning.
The criminologist Ludovica Mancini told Il Giornale in 2022 that the decision to release him rested on objective criteria, since he had been a model prisoner. Outside, he formed relationships. ANSA reported that he had a child with a woman he met during those years, and Il Giornale wrote that he became the father of a boy in 1998. By 2001 he had left that partner and was living with another woman.
From the mid-1990s women who worked the streets of Turin and its outskirts began to be attacked and killed. Il Giornale wrote in 2005 that the series had frightened the city since 1996 and that by 2001 fifteen women had been attacked and ten killed. Fanpage reported that many of the women who survived attacks did not go to the police, out of fear and because many lacked residence permits. The killings fell on weekends or in the evening hours, the hours his semi-liberty allowed him outside.
Minghella was convicted of four of those deaths.
Fatima H'Didou was 27 and came from Morocco; Il Giornale gave her year of birth as 1970. She was killed on May 24, 1997, according to Fanpage, and found at Caselette, west of Turin. She was strangled. DNA evidence from that case was among the material that later connected him to the series.
Floreta Islami was 29 and Albanian. She was killed on February 14, 1998, Valentine's Day, near Rivoli, west of Turin. She was strangled. Her case went unsolved for 18 years.
Cosima Guido, known as Gina, was 67 and came originally from Taranto, in Puglia. She was killed in Turin on January 30, 1999. She was strangled. Il Giornale wrote in 2005 that Minghella had met her while doing cooperative work, and Il Giornale in 2022 reported that biological traces on kitchen paper at the scene linked him to her death.
Florentina Motoc, known as Tina, was born in 1980 in Dorohoi, in the Moldavia region of Romania, according to Libera, the anti-mafia association that later took up her memory. Her father and brothers had worked at a glass factory that closed, leaving the family without income. As a young woman she accepted a job offer in Turkey and was deceived and forced into prostitution by traffickers. She became pregnant, went home to Romania and gave birth to a daughter, who was left in the care of her grandparents; the traffickers then sent her to Turin. She was last seen on the night of February 9, 2001. Her body was found about eight days later between Pianezza and Collegno, on the edge of Turin. Mole24 and Fanpage reported that she died during the night of February 16 to 17. She had been beaten and strangled. Her age is given as 20 (Il Giornale in 2022 and 2023, Mole24, Fanpage) or 21 (Libera and Il Giornale in 2005).
Minghella was arrested on March 7, 2001. The immediate charge had nothing to do with murder. A woman who had been attacked and robbed the previous September had reported the attack late, and she was due to testify, according to Il Giornale. Libera wrote that he was arrested for assaulting and robbing a woman near the place where Tina Motoc was found.
Searches of his home produced the evidence that turned a robbery case into a murder inquiry. Police found mobile phones that had belonged to the victims, with the serial numbers erased, according to Il Giornale and Mole24. One of them was Tina Motoc's, and he had given it to his partner as a Valentine's Day present. Libera reported that police also found her boots at his home. Il Giornale wrote in 2023 that investigators matched traces of a rock called peridotite, found in quantity where she died, to the soles of his shoes.
Investigators also relied on DNA traces from the scenes, the similarity of the killings and their timing. He had no alibi. On several of the days in question, Il Giornale reported, he had missed work or reported sick and had returned to prison only at the last minute. Mole24 wrote that all the crimes took place after five in the afternoon.
He denied everything. He used his right to remain silent and went on a hunger strike, Il Giornale reported. ANSA wrote that he refused to defend himself in court because he believed he was the victim of a plot.
The attack on the woman who reported him brought its own conviction and a four-year sentence, according to Il Giornale. A surviving woman later identified him and told investigators that he had said he had already killed two other women, one at Rivoli and one at Caselette, Quotidiano Piemontese reported. The Caselette case was soon identified as Fatima H'Didou's. The Rivoli case would take much longer.
In the spring of 2001, while held at Le Vallette, Minghella tried to escape from the prison laundry and got as far as the first perimeter wall, according to Il Giornale and Mole24.
On January 2, 2003, he complained of pain in his chest and arm and was taken for treatment. He slipped away, caught a train and was arrested the same evening in Biella, Mole24 reported. Il Giornale wrote in 2023 that he later admitted he had planned to kill the prosecutor, Roberto Sparagna. Il Fatto Quotidiano reported in 2017 that he had two convictions for escape.
The Turin trial resumed in late 2002. A psychiatric assessment filed on February 15, 2002, by Enzo Bosco, Franco Freilone and Salvatore Ruberto found intellectual functioning at the borderline, with no hallucinations, no delusions and no significant substance dependence, Fanpage reported. It noted that he kept fit in prison.
On April 4, 2003, the Corte d'Assise of Turin sentenced Minghella to life imprisonment for the murder of Tina Motoc and to 30 years each for the murders of Cosima Guido and Fatima H'Didou, according to Il Giornale, Mole24, Fanpage and Libera. Il Giornale wrote in 2005 that he had been formally charged with four of the ten killings attributed to the man the press called the "mostro di Torino". Mole24 summed up the result as four Turin convictions out of ten suspected killings; other outlets count three. Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that the Court of Cassation upheld in 2005 the life sentence for the Turin murders of the late 1990s and 2001.
ANSA reported in 2016 and 2017 that his terms totaled 131 years. Fanpage put the total at 200 years in 2023.
In 2015 the Questura of Turin reopened its unsolved killings. Using biomolecular techniques that had not existed in 1998, forensic police working with colleagues in Rome found a mixed genetic profile that matched Minghella's in the wool fibers of the scarf used to strangle Floreta Islami, according to Nuova Società and Il Fatto Quotidiano. Il Fatto reported that he had also been seen watching women in that area at the time.
On March 8, 2016, a preliminary investigations judge, Cristiano Trevisan, issued a new arrest order, and the Turin flying squad served it on Minghella in the prison at Pavia, ANSA reported. In February 2017 he was sent to trial.
At the Corte d'Assise in Turin on November 30, 2017, Sparagna asked for a sentence of 30 years and called the DNA test on the scarf decisive. Minghella did not come to court. Through his lawyer, Lucia Franzese, he rejected all the charges and said, "Vorrei essere dimenticato," "I would like to be forgotten," Il Fatto Quotidiano reported.
On December 7, 2017, at about noon, the court sentenced him to 30 years for the murder of Floreta Islami. He was 59. ANSA, Il Fatto Quotidiano and Quotidiano Piemontese reported the verdict.
In March 2020 the Court of Cassation confirmed the sentence, Quotidiano Piemontese reported. The judges wrote that he had an uncommon capacity to commit crime, one that long detention and attempts at rehabilitation had not curbed, and they cited his record of reoffending, an escape and a failed escape attempt. Sparagna described him as legally capable of understanding and intending his acts, driven by compulsive and irrepressible urges.
In 2017 the Turin flying squad, then led by Marco Martino, was examining five more unsolved killings of women, with the working hypothesis that Minghella was responsible, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. ANSA reported that two of the five were elderly women found dead in their homes and that his involvement had not been ruled out.
Il Giornale wrote in 2023 that he may have killed about ten women or more, and Quotidiano Piemontese described him in 2020 as convicted of killing at least ten. His convictions are those set by the courts in Genoa in 1981 and in Turin in 2003 and 2017; the other deaths have not been tried against him.
Minghella has never explained himself. In court he said little or nothing, and his denials have been consistent since he withdrew his 1978 confession. Il Giornale's 2023 headline quoted him: "Io non ho fatto nulla," "I did nothing."
Ludovica Mancini, a criminologist who has studied his case, told Il Giornale that he fits the FBI category of a disorganized sexual serial offender. She said his apparent calm during the long years at Porto Azzurro was forced on him by his circumstances rather than chosen. She described him as semi-literate: his letters from prison were written in capital letters and full of spelling mistakes. She said he chose women who worked on the street because they were available at once and harder for investigators to trace.
Mancini's view of rehabilitation was cautious rather than absolute. She told Il Giornale that it is not always possible but is very hard to judge in advance, and that on the record available in 1995 the decision to release him was defensible.
Tina Motoc's body lay unidentified for a long time in the municipal morgue at Mirafiori. Turin's Orthodox community, the Gruppo Abele and the association Acmos worked to establish who she was and to find her family, Libera reported. A month after her death a march called "Un Fiore Per Tina," a flower for Tina, brought associations, officials and hundreds of students to the Murazzi on the Po, where they threw flowers into the river.
On March 9, 2002, Libera obtained permission from the prosecutor's office to take her body home to Dorohoi, after an interfaith and civil ceremony in Turin. The Casa Acmos in Turin and a local Libera group are named after her, and she is remembered among the victims Libera honors.
ANSA placed Minghella in the prison at Pavia in 2016 and 2017. Mole24 in 2012 and GenovaQuotidiana in 2015 had reported him held at Poggioreale in Naples. Il Giornale in 2022 and Fanpage in April 2023 again reported him at Pavia, and Il Giornale wrote in March 2023 that he was serving his sentence in a maximum-security prison.
The number of Genoa convictions. Il Giornale, ANSA and Il Fatto Quotidiano say the 1981 life sentence was for four murders; Mole24, Fanpage, Nuova Società and GenovaQuotidiana say five. The death of Giuseppina Jerardi is the one Il Giornale describes as attributed to him without objective evidence.
Wanda Scerra's date of death is given as November 28, 1978, by Mole24 and as December 3 by Il Giornale and Fanpage.
Tina Motoc's age is given as 20 or 21, and the date of her death as February 9, the night she was last seen, by Il Giornale in 2005, or the night of February 16 to 17 by Mole24 and Fanpage.
The semi-liberty decision is dated 1995 by most reports and 1996 by Il Giornale in 2005.
The total of his sentences is reported as 131 years (ANSA, 2016 and 2017) and as 200 years (Fanpage, 2023).
The Turin count. Police and press have connected Minghella with about ten deaths of women in the Turin area between 1996 and 2001. He was convicted of four. The rest remain unsolved in law, and he has denied all of them.
July 16, 1958: Born in Genoa; grows up in Bolzaneto, in the Val Polcevera.
April 1978: Anna Pagano, 20, is killed; her body is found on April 18.
July 8, 1978: Giuseppina Jerardi is found dead in Genoa.
July 18, 1978: Maria Catena "Tina" Alba, 14, is killed in the Valbrevenna.
August 22, 1978: Maria Strambelli is killed.
November 28 or December 3, 1978: Wanda Scerra, 19, is killed.
Night of December 5 to 6, 1978: Minghella is arrested; he confesses to two killings, then withdraws the confession.
April 3, 1981: The Corte d'Assise of Genoa sentences him to life imprisonment.
1980s: Held at Porto Azzurro; Don Andrea Gallo asks for a review of the case.
1995: Granted semi-liberty and moved to Le Vallette prison in Turin; works evenings as a carpenter for a Gruppo Abele cooperative.
May 24, 1997: Fatima H'Didou, 27, is killed at Caselette.
February 14, 1998: Floreta Islami, 29, is killed near Rivoli.
January 30, 1999: Cosima "Gina" Guido, 67, is killed in Turin.
February 2001: Tina Motoc, 20 or 21, is killed; her body is found near Collegno.
March 7, 2001: Arrested in Turin; victims' phones are found in his home.
Spring 2001: Tries to escape from the Le Vallette laundry.
February 15, 2002: Psychiatric assessment filed in the Turin case.
January 2, 2003: Escapes during medical treatment; recaptured that evening in Biella.
April 4, 2003: Turin Corte d'Assise sentences him to life for Motoc's murder and 30 years each for the murders of Guido and H'Didou.
2005: The Court of Cassation upholds the 2003 life sentence.
2015: Turin police reopen unsolved killings; his DNA is found on the scarf in the Islami case.
March 8, 2016: New arrest order served on him in Pavia prison.
February 2017: Sent to trial for the murder of Floreta Islami.
December 7, 2017: Turin Corte d'Assise sentences him to 30 years for the Islami murder.
March 2020: The Court of Cassation confirms the 30-year sentence.
April 2023: Reported held in the prison at Pavia.