Minghella was born in Genoa on July 16, 1958. In 1978, aged twenty, he killed four young women in the city, all of them strangled, and was arrested the same year. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982.
He was released in 1995 under the Italian system of progressive benefits for good conduct, having served seventeen years. Between 1996 and 2001, living in Turin, he killed at least four more women, most of them working as prostitutes and several of them foreign nationals, strangling them or striking them with a rock. He was arrested again in March 2001 and sentenced to life on June 8, 2005, with terms totalling 131 years across the counts. The Italian press called him the Valpolcevera Strangler, after the valley.
The women named in the record are Anna Pagano, twenty; Giuseppina Jerardi, twenty-three; Maria Catena Alba, fourteen; Maria Strambelli, twenty-one; Wanda Scerra, nineteen; Loredana Maccario, fifty-three; Fatima H'Didou, twenty-seven; Cosima Guido, sixty-three; and Tina Motoc, twenty-seven.
The range of four to nine reflects the two periods: four convictions in Genoa, four established in Turin, and further cases attributed and not proved. His birth year is given here as 1954 in the roster and as 1958 in Italian records.
The case is cited in Italy in every argument about early release, because the second series began within months of his coming out and because the same method identified them. It also produced a long and unresolved dispute about whether the Turin killings had been correctly attributed, his defence maintaining throughout that the second series was not his.
One point about the sentence, since the case is argued in Italy as an early-release case. Italian life imprisonment is not ordinarily whole-life: conditional release can be considered after twenty-six years, and less with work credits. That is the mechanism under which he came out the first time, and it is why the second series is held up as the cost of it.