On the night of February 16 to 17, 2001, in Turin, a woman of twenty-seven named Tina Motoc, the mother of a two-year-old, was killed and her body left savagely beaten. Three weeks later, on March 7, police arrested Maurizio Minghella. He had been serving a life sentence for murdering five young women in Genoa in 1978, and for six years he had been out of prison every day on semi-liberty, working evenings as a carpenter in a cooperative of the Gruppo Abele community in Turin, where everyone who knew him spoke well of him.
He was born in Genoa on July 16, 1958, and grew up in public housing in Bolzaneto, in the Val Polcevera. When he was six his mother separated from his father and raised her five children alone; the man she later lived with beat the whole family, and Minghella told investigators he had dreamed of strangling him. His brother Carlo's death in a car accident marked him deeply. As a young man he boxed as an amateur and loved dance halls, which earned him the nickname Travoltino. In 1978 a psychiatric clinic at the University of Genoa measured his IQ at seventy.
That year he killed five women in about seven months. Anna Pagano, twenty, a sex worker and drug user, was found in April in the hills of Sant'Olcese with her head smashed; on her body he had written "Bricato Rose," a misspelled attempt to blame the Red Brigades that the police saw through at once. Giuseppina Jerardi, twenty-three, was killed on July 8 and left in a stolen car. On July 18 he killed Maria Catena "Tina" Alba, fourteen, whose naked body was found the next day at Valbrevenna, tied to a tree. Maria Strambelli was killed on August 22 after a night at a disco, and her friend Wanda Scerra disappeared on November 28 and was found raped and strangled beside the Genoa to Milan railway.
He was arrested on the night of December 5 to 6, 1978. He confessed to killing Strambelli and Scerra and denied the others, but handwriting experts matched the note on Pagano's body to him, and a pair of his glasses was found where Tina Alba died. On April 3, 1981, the Corte d'Assise of Genoa sentenced him to life for all five murders, and he was sent to the maximum-security prison at Porto Azzurro. He always said he was innocent, and in the 1980s the priest Don Andrea Gallo asked for his case to be reviewed.
In 1995, at thirty-seven, he was granted semi-liberty and moved to the Vallette prison in Turin. From 1997 women in sex work began to be found dead in the city. He was suspected in ten of those killings, among them Loredana Maccario, fifty-three; Fatima H'Didou, twenty-seven; and Cosima Guido, sixty-three, as well as Tina Motoc. In 2003 the Turin Corte d'Assise convicted him of four of them, by one account, while other accounts credit him with all ten; he was sentenced to life, with prison terms reported to total 131 years. He was also convicted of robbery, kidnapping and escape. The case became the example Italians reach for in every argument about releasing men serving life.