On the morning of March 1, 1988, a day after the Carabinieri took him in Mestre, a twenty-five-year-old prisoner climbed out onto the roofs of the prison and tried to get away along the electrical cables. Television crews filmed him up there before he fell, breaking three ribs and dislocating a shoulder. By then police in three countries knew who he was: Roberto Succo, who had killed his mother and father seven years earlier, had been declared too ill to stand trial for it, and had spent the previous twenty months moving through eastern France under false names, leaving behind two dead police officers, a dead doctor, a raped and murdered woman and a young teacher who has never been found.
He was born on April 3, 1962, in Mestre, the mainland town across the lagoon from Venice, the only son of Nazario Succo, a police officer in Venice, and Marisa Lamon, fourteen years younger than her husband, who did knitting work at home. French accounts drawn from the case file describe a strong, athletic schoolboy, doted on and closely controlled by his mother, who wanted the use of his father's Alfa Romeo. On April 9, 1981, after an argument over school classes he had skipped, he held a knife to his own chest and threatened suicide, then stabbed his mother with a butcher's knife and put her face down in the bathtub with the water running. When his father came home from the police station he killed him with a hatchet and laid him in the tub on top of her. Some accounts date the killings April 12. He was nineteen.
He took the Alfa Romeo and his father's service pistol and drove northeast. Investigators linked him to the deaths almost at once, and he was arrested days later outside a pizzeria at San Pietro al Natisone in Friuli, near the Yugoslav border. Psychiatrists found him schizophrenic and, in the words of the Italian penal code, incapable of understanding and willing. He could not be tried, and he was committed to a judicial psychiatric hospital for ten years; most accounts place him at Reggio Emilia. By 1986 he was on a semi-liberty regime, sleeping at the hospital and attending geology classes at the University of Parma by day. On May 15, 1986, he did not come back.
He crossed into France within weeks, stole cars, and drifted through the Drôme before settling in Toulon in December 1986, on rue Nicolas Laugier. The crimes that followed were robberies, burglaries, abductions and rapes, most of them never tied to any name while they were happening. At about six on the morning of April 3, 1987, at Tresserve on the Lac du Bourget, near Chambéry, a police brigadier named André Castillo, thirty-eight, married with two daughters, saw a man sleeping in a car fifty meters from his own home and went over alone to check him. He was shot in the throat with a .22 long rifle round. His killer took his service weapon, a 9mm Manurhin.
France Vu-Dinh, thirty, a former English teacher, was abducted in the Annecy area on April 27, 1987. The same day a driver attacked in the Drôme noticed a woman in his attacker's car, whom police later believed to be her. She has never been found. After his arrest Succo is reported to have told investigators that she lived with him for several weeks and that he killed her when she tried to get away and put her body in the sea near Nice; no evidence of that has been found. That same evening Michel Astoul, a twenty-six-year-old doctor, disappeared from Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. His badly decomposed body turned up on October 18, 1987, in an isolated barn at Épersy in Savoie, shot in the head with Castillo's pistol.
On June 27, 1987, a woman and her fifteen-year-old son, Nicole and Damien Veillet, were taken at gunpoint from their holiday house at Pugny-Chatenod in Savoie, driven up Mont Revard, and made to strip. They were released naked but unhurt near the Chambéry municipal dump, about twenty kilometers from home. A stolen Renault 21 left near the house held papers and objects from Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, the first physical thread between the cases. On October 24, 1987, Claudine Duchosal, forty, was raped and shot in the head with a 9mm bullet in her own home at Menthon-Saint-Bernard, on Lake Annecy.
On January 28, 1988, two Toulon police inspectors, Michel Morandin, thirty-five, and Claude Aiazzi, were looking into a shooting in a bar at La Seyne-sur-Mer that had left a man named Jacques Volpé paralyzed. At the door of the Hôtel Prémar in Toulon they found the man they were after. He fired a .357 Magnum three times into Morandin, in the leg, the left arm and behind the ear, killing him, and badly wounded Aiazzi. By now he was the most wanted man in France, Italy and Switzerland. In Savoie a young woman he had been seeing, who knew him as Kurt, gave detectives the rest of the story, and he had told her, weeping, that he was Italian and that he had killed his parents. After a student recognized him at Aix-les-Bains he went back to Italy.
Italian television broadcast his composite sketch, and the parents of Francesca, a schoolgirl he had been seeing in the Veneto, recognized him. The Carabinieri arrested him in Mestre on February 28, 1988. The rooftop escape attempt came the next day. Interviewed in custody, he was reported in La Repubblica saying that he liked killing. Italy refused to hand him over to France, and on May 9, 1988, psychiatrists again found him not responsible, diagnosing paranoid schizophrenia, which would have sent him back to an asylum.
On May 23, 1988, in his cell in the prison at Vicenza, he pulled a plastic bag over his head and opened into it the butane cartridge from the small stove he was allowed to use. He was twenty-six. He was never tried in Italy, France or Switzerland for any of the killings attributed to him, and the account of the French crimes rests on the police investigations, the weapons and the statements attributed to him after his arrest. The playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès wrote Roberto Zucco about him in 1988, Pascale Froment published a study of the case in 2001, and the director Cédric Kahn made the film Roberto Succo the same year.