Roberto Succo was 19 and in his final year at a science high school in Mestre when, in April 1981, he confessed to killing his mother and father in the family apartment. The investigating office of the Venice tribunal ruled that he could not be punished because of total mental infirmity, and he was sent to the judicial asylum at Reggio Emilia for at least ten years. In 1986, while on leave to attend university classes, he left and did not come back.
In the months that followed, investigators and the press came to attribute five deaths in France to him: a gendarmerie brigadier at Tresserve in Savoie, a young woman who disappeared at Annecy, a doctor killed at Sisteron, a woman killed at Menthon-Saint-Bernard and a police inspector in Toulon. He was arrested again in Italy on February 28, 1988, near Conegliano. An Italian investigating judge declared him incapable of understanding and willing, France pressed for him to be handed over, and on the night of May 23, 1988, he died by suicide in his cell in Vicenza. He was 26. No court in Italy or France ever tried him for any of the deaths.
Succo was born in 1962. Il Post's excerpt places his birth in Venice; il Giornale, in a 2023 profile by Massimo Balsamo, gives his birth as April 13, 1962, in Mestre, the mainland district of the city of Venice. He was the son of a police officer and a homemaker, and he grew up in a family apartment in Mestre.
His father, Nazario Succo, held the rank of appuntato. Il Giornale places him at the San Marco police station in Venice. His mother, Maria Lamon, was a homemaker.
Roberto attended the Morin scientific high school (liceo scientifico) in the Gazzera neighborhood of Mestre, in class 5D. Nazzi's account, drawing on what classmates said after the killings, describes a shy, good-looking student of average results who got along with everyone but had no close friends and left as soon as lessons ended. He sang in the parish choir. He was keen on martial arts and bodybuilding, though classmates said not to the point of obsession. He boasted of having dissected small animals. He could be irritable and aggressive, fought for room on crowded buses, and once, when classmates crowded around him, threatened to jump out of a window if they did not leave. Il Giornale's profile describes him in similar terms: introverted, solitary, irritable and obsessed with bodybuilding, and preparing for his final school examinations.
At home, neighbors heard furious arguments, according to Nazzi, and once saw him with scratches on his cheeks. His mother told neighbors that her son was becoming more and more violent. She was advised to take him to a psychologist and refused, saying the family already had enough problems.
The arguments at home turned on the family car, an Alfa Romeo Alfasud, which he wanted to use and his parents would not let him take. By the account of his confession that Nazzi gives, on the evening of Thursday, April 9, 1981, he argued with his mother when she refused him the car. He killed her, and when his father came home from work he killed him too.
On April 11, the San Marco police in Venice sent two officers to the apartment because Nazario Succo had not come to work for two days. They got in through a neighbor's balcony and found the bodies of husband and wife. Their son was gone, and so were the Alfasud and his father's Beretta service pistol. Police issued a warrant for his arrest.
Other accounts give other dates. Il Giornale dates the killings April 12, 1981, and says the father came home around midnight. Fanpage.it, in a 2017 article, also gives April 12. The discovery on April 11 and the confession placing the killings on the evening of April 9 come from Nazzi, whose account is the most detailed.
The morning after the killings, according to Nazzi, Succo took his father's pistol and 300,000 lire and went by train to Milan and then to Brescia, where an uncle lived. He did not tell his uncle what had happened. He went back to Mestre, drove to Treviso, slept in the car, and returned to Mestre again, intending to get rid of the bodies, but found police seals on the apartment door.
Two days after the bodies were found, carabinieri found him eating alone in a pizzeria in San Pietro al Natisone, in Friuli. Local people had recognized the car from news reports. He reached for his father's pistol, which was hidden in a camera case, but could not get to it in time. The car carried a license plate stolen in Udine. Il Giornale adds that investigators had already found his bloodstained clothes and that neighbors' accounts pointed to him.
At first he said he was innocent and blamed an organized-crime group, Nazzi writes. Then he confessed, describing what he had done calmly and precisely. He told the magistrate that he would do it all again, and he described his mother, in Nazzi's account, as "un mostro a due teste" (a creature with two heads). He said he had killed his father to spare him: how, he asked, could his father have lived with his wife dead and his son in prison? He spoke in a lecturing tone, asked for the transcript of his statement to be read back to him several times, made corrections, and ended with a short "that is all."
In custody, il Giornale reports, he gave confused explanations, blaming his mother for shutting him out and his father for refusing to lend him the car. Psychiatrists who examined him after the arrest concluded, in Nazzi's words, that no one had understood who he really was or what drove him; they described him as a time bomb.
On October 8, 1981, the investigating office (ufficio istruzione) of the Venice tribunal declared that Succo was not punishable because of total mental infirmity, on the strength of psychiatric reports that diagnosed schizophrenia, according to il Giornale. It ordered him committed to the judicial asylum (manicomio giudiziario) at Reggio Emilia for at least ten years. This was not a conviction, and there was no trial.
At Reggio Emilia, il Giornale reports, Succo wrote to a priest about his criminal fantasies, and he met Wolfgang Abel there; il Giornale describes Abel as a killer who had acted together with Marco Furlan. Succo's behavior inside was good. He finished his secondary schooling and enrolled at university, in natural sciences according to il Giornale.
In 1986, during one of these study leaves, he left and did not return. Il Giornale says he went to Paris. Fanpage.it gives the date of the escape as May 17, 1986, while il Giornale gives only the year.
In France, Nazzi writes, the press called him "André l'anguille" (André the eel) and "André le fou" (André the madman), and he was listed as the country's most dangerous fugitive. Screen International's review of the film, summing up the real case, says he was living in the south of France under a false name, telling people he was an English sales representative or a secret agent, and that the crimes laid at his door included car thefts, kidnapping, burglary and several killings, one of them of a police officer.
None of the French cases was ever tried. The dates of the French cases are those given by il Giornale in 2023.
On April 2, 1987, at Tresserve in Savoie, André Castillo, a brigadier of the gendarmerie, was killed. Il Giornale names Succo as the man who shot him.
On April 27, 1987, il Giornale reports, France Vu-Dinh, described as a young Vietnamese woman, was killed at Annecy. Her body has never been found. With no body, her death has never been established in court, and the accusation against Succo was never tested at a trial.
The same day, il Giornale reports, Michel Astoul, a doctor, was killed at Sisteron, in Provence, after he had picked up a hitchhiker. Il Giornale names Succo as the man.
On October 24, 1987, Claudine Duchosal was shot and killed at Menthon-Saint-Bernard. Succo was accused of her death in the Italian press after his arrest; he was never tried for it.
On January 27, 1988, according to il Giornale, a man was shot and wounded during a fight in a bar in Toulon, and the shooter was known there as "André." The next day, January 28, 1988, two police inspectors went to a hotel in Toulon looking for him. Both were shot. Michel Morandin died. His colleague was wounded and survived. Il Giornale's account names Succo as the gunman. Over the following days, il Giornale writes, sightings and reports of Succo multiplied, placing him on the run between France and Switzerland.
Deborah Streifford Reisinger, of Duke University, wrote in 2007 that he was captured after a young woman turned him in to the authorities, a detail she set against the Paulin case, in which a police officer came upon the suspect by chance. Screen International's account of the real case says a witness saw his photograph on a police poster and came forward, and that police tracked him to Mestre with Interpol's help.
He was arrested on the evening of February 28, 1988, at Santa Lucia di Piave, near Conegliano, in the province of Treviso. Il Giornale says about ten officers were needed to hold him, and that he was carrying false documents, cash and a map that showed a plan to reach Sicily and then North Africa. Screen International's review of the film says the Italian police arrested him in Mestre.
In custody, il Giornale reports, he admitted the killings without remorse, telling officers, "Sono un killer, ammazzo la gente" (I'm a killer, I kill people).
He was taken to the Santa Bona prison in Treviso. On March 1, 1988, at about 1 p.m., during the exercise hour, he climbed onto a canopy and then onto the prison roof, took off his clothes and began shouting to the crowd that gathered below, Nazzi writes. He called out that he was a bird and no one could hold him, and he named the only woman, he said, he had ever loved. Then he tried to cross a cable toward the prison director's house, pretending to be a paratrooper, and fell while trying to reach a small terrace.
Il Giornale says he fell about six meters, broke three ribs and dislocated a shoulder. In the hospital he said he felt fine and called the fall "solo il primo tentativo," only the first attempt, Nazzi writes, and he was tied to his bed. Heavily sedated, he was transferred to the Le Sughere prison in Livorno, according to il Giornale.
France pressed for his extradition, il Giornale reports. On May 17, 1988, Nicola Maria Pace, the investigating judge of the Treviso tribunal, declared him incapable of understanding and willing (incapace di intendere e di volere), and he was due to be moved to a forensic psychiatric institution.
He was held in isolation in the prison at Vicenza, near the courthouse, il Giornale reports. On the night of May 23, 1988, he died by suicide in his cell, by asphyxiation. He was 26; Il Post gives his age as 26 in March 1988.
With his death, the proceedings over the killings in France, and over the shootings in Toulon, ended without a trial. The 1981 ruling on his parents' deaths had found him not punishable and was never followed by a trial either. In the strict legal sense he was never convicted of anything.
In Italy he was called "il killer dagli occhi di ghiaccio" (the killer with eyes of ice), and "il mostro di Mestre," according to il Giornale. Nazzi calls him "il cherubino nero," the black cherub, a phrase taken from Canto XXVII of Dante's Inferno. In France, Nazzi writes, he was "André l'anguille" and "André le fou."
The French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès based his play Roberto Zucco on the case, changing the hero's name, inventing the characters around him and leaving out his death, according to Reisinger, who dates the play to 1990. Its only trace of the media, she notes, is a wanted poster in one scene. The play was picketed by protesters who had not seen it and was never staged in Chambéry, Reisinger writes; she argues that the protests showed a real fear that the stage Zucco would take the place of the real man in public memory, and that the attempt to stop the play spread Succo's name further. Screen International's review says French police picketed the play because they saw it as romanticizing a man who had killed a police officer.
Reisinger also places the Succo case beside that of Thierry Paulin as one of the sensational crime stories of 1980s France, crimes with no stated motive that the political right used in its campaigns on crime and immigration, to argue that the left had failed to keep people safe.
The French director Cédric Kahn wrote and directed Roberto Succo, a 124-minute feature that was shown in competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and opened in France on May 16, 2001, according to the festival and Cineuropa. It was based on a book about the case by the journalist Pascale Froment, according to il Giornale and Screen International. Stefano Cassetti, a non-professional in his first role, played Succo, under the name Kurt; Isild Le Besco played Léa, a high school student he meets in the south of France, and Patrick Dell'Isola played the detective. In the festival's synopsis, a series of burglaries, muggings, assaults and unexplained killings along the road between the Mediterranean and Savoie leads the French police to a dangerous Italian on the run.
In 2023 the Italian journalist Stefano Nazzi included the case in his book Il volto del male, from which Il Post published the chapter on the 1981 killings.
The French killings were never tried. They are attributed to him by investigators and in the press, and il Giornale reports that he admitted them after his arrest. No court weighed the evidence against him.
France Vu-Dinh's body has never been found. Her death is attributed to him in the Italian press; the evidence for it has never been tested in court.
The date of the killings in Mestre is given as April 9 (by his confession, in Nazzi's account) and April 12, 1981 (il Giornale and Fanpage.it). The date of his departure from Reggio Emilia is given only as 1986 (il Giornale) and May 17, 1986 (Fanpage.it).
The place of the 1988 arrest is Santa Lucia di Piave in il Giornale and Mestre in Screen International's review.
His birth date is given as April 13, 1962, by il Giornale.
1962: born in Mestre, Venice (il Giornale gives April 13).
April 1981: the deaths of his parents in the family apartment in Mestre; by his confession, on the evening of April 9.
April 11, 1981: police find the bodies after his father misses two days of work.
Two days later: arrested by carabinieri at San Pietro al Natisone, Friuli; he confesses.
October 8, 1981: the Venice tribunal's investigating office rules him not punishable for total mental infirmity and commits him to the judicial asylum at Reggio Emilia for at least ten years.
1986: leaves during a study leave and does not return (Fanpage.it: May 17).
April 2, 1987: André Castillo, a gendarmerie brigadier, is killed at Tresserve, Savoie.
April 27, 1987: France Vu-Dinh disappears at Annecy; Michel Astoul, a doctor, is killed at Sisteron.
October 24, 1987: Claudine Duchosal is killed at Menthon-Saint-Bernard.
January 27, 1988: a man is shot and wounded in a Toulon bar.
January 28, 1988: police inspector Michel Morandin is killed and a colleague wounded at a hotel in Toulon.
February 28, 1988: arrested at Santa Lucia di Piave, near Conegliano.
March 1, 1988: climbs onto the roof of Santa Bona prison, Treviso, and falls; later moved to Livorno.
May 17, 1988: the Treviso investigating judge declares him incapable of understanding and willing.
May 23, 1988: dies by suicide in his cell in Vicenza prison, untried.
2001: Cédric Kahn's film Roberto Succo competes at Cannes.