Succo was born in 1962 at Mestre, near Venice. In April 1981, aged fifteen, he killed his father Nazario and his mother Marisa in the family flat. He was found not responsible and sentenced to ten years in a judicial psychiatric institution at Reggio Emilia.
He escaped on May 15, 1986 and went to France. Between 1987 and 1988 he committed a series of robberies, abductions and killings in France and Italy: Andre Castillo, thirty-eight, a police officer; France Vu-Dinh, thirty; Michel Astoul, twenty-six; Claudine and others. He took hostages, stole cars, and moved constantly, and he was named public enemy number one in France, Italy and Switzerland simultaneously. French reporting called him the killer with eyes of ice.
Those named in the record are his parents, Nazario and Marisa Succo; the police officers Andre Castillo, thirty-eight, and Michel Morandin, thirty-five; France Vu-Dinh, thirty; Michel Astoul, twenty-six; and Claudine Duchosal, forty.
He was caught on February 28, 1988 in Italy, at Mestre, after a siege on the roof of his mother's building that was filmed by television crews and broadcast; the footage of him shouting from the roof is among the best-known crime images in Italy.
He killed himself in prison at Vicenza on May 23, 1988, suffocating himself with a plastic bag. The arrest and the suicide were both in 1988, months apart rather than a year.
The case produced a French book and a film and is unusually well documented for a series of this kind, in part because the French investigation could not identify him for months. He was using several names and no country's records connected the escaped Italian patient to the man they were hunting.