Sixteen people died in eight double killings in the hills and villages around Florence between 1968 and 1985, and no court has ever named the person who carried them out. Three men were finally convicted in connection with those deaths. One was convicted of the first double killing alone. The other two were convicted of taking part in the last four. The man the prosecutors had put at the center of the whole series was acquitted on appeal, saw the acquittal annulled, and died before a retrial could begin.
That outcome, a long investigation that produces verdicts without an answer, is one of several ways serial cases have ended in Italy, Spain and Portugal. In Bolzano, an assize court with lay jurors convicted a young man of five killings after hearing four psychiatrists argue over his mind. In Verona, a court convicted two men of ten deaths claimed by a neo-Nazi signature and acquitted them of five more. In Merano, a killer identified on the day he died by suicide was never charged. In Madrid, a court held that a man had committed eleven murders and acquitted him because of mental illness, while in the same city a former soldier was sentenced to 142 years that the law cut to 25. In Barcelona, a woman whom the newspapers turned into a figure of legend died in prison before anyone tried her, and the historians who later read the court files could not find the murders. Portugal’s two best-remembered cases are older than any of them: in 1772 the high court in Lisbon convicted a young carrier from Coimbra of killing 33 foundling infants, and in 1841 Lisbon executed a Galician gang leader for one night’s killings in one house, while the deaths that made his name were never brought before a court.
The Italian press gave the unidentified person behind the Florence killings the name Il Mostro di Firenze. The victims were, almost without exception, young couples. In 1983 they were two young German men, and in 1985 a French couple. Ballistic work eventually tied all eight double killings together. Britannica, AFP and Il Post all put the toll at sixteen.
The first case belongs to a different story. Barbara Locci and a companion were killed at Castelletti di Signa on August 21, 1968. Her husband, Stefano Mele, a Sardinian laborer living in Tuscany, was the first suspect. Il Post reports that he first denied involvement, then implicated two of his wife’s Sardinian lovers, the brothers F.V. and S.V., then cleared them, and finally confessed. Fanpage adds that he later accused another man before returning to the account given by his young son. A parliamentary report prepared for the Antimafia commission gives the court history: the Florence Assize Court convicted Mele on March 25, 1970; an appeal followed on March 4, 1971; the Court of Cassation annulled that ruling and sent the case back; and the appeal court in Perugia ruled on April 12, 1973, making the conviction final. The Florence judgment, the report says, firmly excluded the presence of any accomplices.
Reports of his sentence differ. Il Post and Fanpage give 14 years, and Fanpage says the court held him partly unable to understand and to will his actions, which reduced the term, with two more years for slander against F.V. and S.V. Il Giornale, writing in 2025, gave 13 years with the mitigating circumstance of a crime of honor. La Nazione noted in a 2024 overview that the later trials treated the Signa killings as a crime inside the Sardinian circle around Locci and her husband, and that Mele is still the only person convicted for them.
The link between 1968 and everything after it was made only in 1982. The couples killed in the intervening years were a pair at Rabatta, near Borgo San Lorenzo, in 1974; Giovanni Foggi, 30, and Carmela De Nuccio, 21, at Mosciano, near Scandicci, on June 6, 1981; and Stefano Baldi, 26, and Susanna Cambi, 24, at Travalle, in the municipality of Calenzano, on October 22, 1981. On June 19, 1982, Paolo Mainardi, 22, and Antonella Migliorini, reported as 19, were killed at Baccaiano, in the municipality of Montespertoli. After Baccaiano, Il Post and Fanpage report, a former officer from Signa remembered the 1968 case. The old file was reopened and the ballistic evidence tied together the cases of 1968, 1974, both of 1981, and 1982. La Nazione wrote in 2023 that the link came from a marshal’s recollection and an anonymous tip. The trials that followed concluded that all eight double killings were linked but that the instrument had changed hands, and Sky TG24 adds the obvious corollary: Mele was in prison and could not have committed the later ones.
The remaining killings fell on September 9, 1983, at Giogoli, on the edge of Florence, where Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rüsch, both 24 and both German students, died; on July 29, 1984, near Vicchio, in the Mugello, where Claudio Stefanacci, 21 or 22 depending on the source, and Pia Gilda Rontini, 18, died; and in September 1985 at Scopeti, in the municipality of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, where Nadine Mauriot, 36, and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili, 25, a French couple from Audincourt, died. The judgments give the date of the last as September 8, 1985, a date that is disputed.
### The Sardinian line
For seven years the carabinieri followed what became known as the pista sarda, the Sardinian line, La Nazione wrote, and it produced arrests but no case. F.V., a former lover of Barbara Locci whom the carabinieri suspected, was arrested in August 1982 for mistreating his wife and two months later was accused of being the killer. On September 9, 1983, while he sat in the Murate prison in Florence, the two German students were killed at Giogoli, and he was released. In 1993 he died with a friend near Chianni, in the province of Pisa. That double death has never been solved, Sky TG24 reports.
On new statements from Mele, investigators next arrested his brother and his brother-in-law, G.M. and P.M., in 1983. They were in custody when the 1984 double killing took place and were cleared. A man held soon after the Mosciano killing, V.S., was released when another double killing took place while he was in custody. S.V., F.V.'s older brother, was arrested in 1986 in connection with the death of his first wife in Sardinia, and was acquitted at that trial. In December 1989 Judge Mario Rotella closed the case against the Sardinian suspects and the line was formally archived. By 2024, La Nazione reported, S.V.'s whereabouts were unknown. AFP summed up the pattern in 2022: five men had been accused at different times, and each was freed when another killing took place while he was in jail.
### The farmer, the companions, and the acquittals
The investigation changed direction at the start of the 1990s. P.P., a farmer born in Vicchio, was arrested on January 17, 1993. In 1994 a court convicted him at first instance of seven of the double killings, every one except the first. In February 1996 he was acquitted on appeal. On December 12, 1996, the Court of Cassation annulled that acquittal and ordered a new appeal. P.P. died on February 22, 1998, before it was heard, which means that under Italian law he died without a conviction for any of the killings.
By then a second prosecution had begun. Mario Vanni was arrested on February 12, 1996, and he and Giancarlo Lotti, both from San Casciano in Val di Pesa, were tried for taking part in the double killings from 1982 to 1985. Vanni received a life sentence and Lotti 26 years, both final in 2000. The courts later held, La Nazione reported, that neither man was at Calenzano in October 1981, which is why their convictions begin with 1982. Lotti died in 2002. Vanni’s sentence was suspended for reasons of health in 2004, and he died in 2009. G.F. was acquitted at every level. F.C. was acquitted in 2008 of commissioning the killings. Everyone else investigated over four decades was never charged. The 1974 and both 1981 double killings were not charged against anyone after 1996.
The file has not closed. In March 2022, Il Post reported a request to reopen the investigation, and AFP, in a report carried by CBS News, described families pressing for it. In August 2024 La Nazione reported on an unidentified DNA profile, and in January 2025 it reported that Vanni’s relatives were seeking a revision of his conviction. In July 2025 the Genoa Court of Appeal declared that request inadmissible; his family’s lawyers said they would appeal to the Court of Cassation. As of January 2026 the outcome had not been reported.
Between January 1985 and August 1992, five girls and women were killed in and around Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol. Marcella Casagrande, 15 or 16, died on January 3, 1985. Anna Maria Cipolletti, 41, died later in 1985. Renate Rauch, 24, died on January 7, 1992, and Renate Troger, 19, in March 1992. Marika Zorzi, 19, of Laives, died on August 6, 1992.
Marco Bergamo was arrested in Bolzano that morning, on his 26th birthday, the news agency ANSA later noted. He admitted the killing of Marika Zorzi at once, L’Unità reported on August 7, 1992, though he denied any link to the other deaths and told prosecutors that she had provoked him. Prosecutor Mario Martin called the inquiry very delicate and said links to earlier cases were not ruled out. Within two days it had reached back to Marcella Casagrande’s death. Investigators from Trento, Treviso and Udine traveled to Bolzano to compare their own unsolved killings of women, and the paper noted that the Bolzano victims had all been killed in a similar way. In the end Bergamo admitted three of the killings and denied two, those of Anna Maria Cipolletti and Renate Troger.
L’Unità's correspondent, Michele Sartori, described him in 1992 as a loner since childhood, without friends or girlfriends, still living with his retired parents. Il Fatto Quotidiano, writing in 2023, called him the only child of a comfortable family, polite and introverted, with a steady job. The papers disagreed on that job: a carpenter and welder in August 1992, a mechanical fitter at trial.
The trial opened before the Bolzano Court of Assizes, presided over by Judge Felix Martinolli. Five of the six lay jurors were women. The central question was his state of mind. The prosecution’s expert, Enzo Conciatore, held him fully responsible. Francesco Introna, a consultant to the investigating judge, called him beyond recovery, but L’Unità reported that his report was discredited. A panel of three court-appointed experts, Ugo Fornari, Franco Bruno and Giancarlo Ponti, concluded that he could understand and will his actions, and that finding, the paper wrote, decided the verdict. In court he wore a sweater and jacket and a long beard in place of the large mustache of 1992, appeared sedated and said nothing. At one point Renate Rauch’s mother shouted that he was like Dracula, that he wanted blood.
On the evening of March 8, 1994, the court sentenced Bergamo, then 28, to life imprisonment for all five murders. He was convicted of the two killings he denied because of the similarity to the three he admitted, L’Unità reported, and Il Fatto Quotidiano wrote that the court described his conduct as the extreme perversion of murder for pleasure. The press called him il mostro di Bolzano. No appeal has been reported. He died in custody on October 17, 2017, aged 51, ANSA reported that day; Il Fatto named the prison as Bollate, near Milan, and dated his death October 16.
Two of the five convictions therefore rest on the court’s reasoning from similarity, not on an admission. In 2023 the journalist Paolo Cagnan, whose work on the case had run for three decades, set out in a new edition of his book a hypothesis that Bergamo might also have been responsible for an unsolved 1990 killing of a young woman in Rome, and sent it to Rome prosecutors, who held an open file against persons unknown. Il Fatto Quotidiano presented it as Cagnan’s hypothesis. No court has linked Bergamo to that case. In 2014 L’Adige marked the anniversary of the arrest with an interview with Alessandro Arervo, who had been a 29-year-old police officer in Bolzano that summer. He said the capture brought relief to a city that had lived for years in fear.
Maurizio Minghella was born in Genoa on July 16, 1958, and grew up in public housing in Bolzaneto, in the Val Polcevera, the valley that runs north from the city. Il Giornale reported that his parents separated when he was about six and that the man his mother then lived with was violent toward the household. Over roughly eight months in 1978 five young women were killed in and around Genoa: Anna Pagano, 20; Giuseppina Jerardi, 23 or 24; Maria Catena "Tina" Alba, 14; Maria Strambelli, 21 or 23; and Wanda Scerra, 19. Minghella was arrested on the night of December 5 to 6, 1978. After many hours of questioning he confessed to the deaths of Strambelli and Scerra, denied the other three, and within days withdrew the confession, saying it had been forced out of him, Il Giornale reported.
On April 3, 1981, the Corte d’Assise of Genoa sentenced him to life imprisonment. The reports disagree on how many killings the verdict covered. Il Giornale, in 2005 and again in 2023, wrote four; ANSA and Il Fatto Quotidiano, in 2017, said four; Mole24, Fanpage and Nuova Società said five. Il Giornale’s statement that no objective evidence allowed the Jerardi case to be reconstructed fits the lower figure. A first psychiatric examination, Fanpage reported, determined that there was no mental illness that would reduce his responsibility. He was sent to the maximum-security prison at Porto Azzurro, on Elba, where he began to insist that he was innocent and kept insisting for decades.
In 1995, at 37, after years as a model prisoner, he was granted semi-liberty and moved to the Le Vallette prison in Turin, according to Mole24 and ANSA; Il Giornale dated the decision to 1996. He worked as a carpenter for a church-sponsored cooperative. On weekdays he stayed inside until five in the afternoon, had five hours outside, and was back in his cell by ten. Ludovica Mancini, a criminologist quoted by Il Giornale in 2022, said the decision rested on objective criteria, since he had been a model prisoner.
From the mid-1990s women in Turin and its outskirts began to be assaulted and killed. Il Giornale wrote in 2005 that by 2001 fifteen women had been assaulted and ten killed. The killings fell on weekends or in the evening, the hours his semi-liberty allowed him outside. He was convicted of four: Fatima H’Didou, 27, from Morocco, on May 24, 1997; Floreta Islami, 29, in 1998, at Rivoli; Cosima Guido, 67, in 1999; and Florentina "Tina" Motoc, 20 or 21, in 2001. Minghella was arrested on March 7, 2001, on a charge that had nothing to do with murder, the assault and robbery of a woman the previous September. Searches then led investigators to property that had belonged to victims. Investigators also relied on DNA, on the timing, and on the absence of an alibi: on several of the days in question, Il Giornale reported, he had missed work or reported sick and returned to prison only at the last minute.
The Turin court sentenced him on April 4, 2003, to life imprisonment plus 30 years and to a further 30 years for the murders of H’Didou, Guido and Motoc; the sentence was upheld in 2005. The Islami case had been unsolved. On March 8, 2016, he was served with a new arrest order in Pavia prison. On December 7, 2017, the court sentenced him to 30 years for her murder, and the Court of Cassation confirmed that sentence in March 2020. ANSA reported his terms as totaling 131 years. The prosecutor in the later cases, Roberto Sparagna, told the Turin court in 2017 that Minghella was not mentally ill but a person who knew right from wrong, and that the opposite conclusion would have been more comforting. Further deaths of women in and around Turin between 1996 and 2001 were attributed to him by investigators and never tried, and in 2017 Turin police were examining five more cold cases. Il Giornale used his case in 2022 to ask whether rehabilitation is always possible. As of April 2023 he was reported to be held in Pavia.
In February 1996 Merano, a spa town in South Tyrol, lived for three weeks with a killer nobody could name. Two people died in the town center on February 8, a farmhand from the southern edge of town was dead six days later, though his death was first recorded as natural, an accountant was killed on February 27 while out walking with his fiancée, and on the morning of March 1 a farmer and a carabinieri marshal were killed at Rifiano, a village in the hills over the town. The man investigators blamed for all six deaths, Ferdinand Gamper, died by suicide as carabinieri closed in.
Gamper was never charged, so no court weighed the evidence. The case against him, as investigators described it in March 1996, rested on a ballistic match to an item recovered with him; on the description given by the fiancée who survived; and on notes in which he appeared to claim the killings.
The first victims were Hans Otto Detmering, 61, a German tourist, and Clorinda Cecchetti, 50, who lived in Merano. It was the night the Sanremo song festival was on television, as L’Adige recalled. She died at once, and he later in hospital in Bolzano. The first theories had nothing to do with a random killer: L’Unità reported two days later that investigators thought the killing looked like the work of a professional and favored a crime of passion connected with the couple’s relationship. Detmering’s wife was traced in Germany and placed under investigation, and had a solid alibi.
Umberto Marchioro, 58, lived in Sinigo (Sinich), on the southern edge of Merano. His death was first put down to natural causes, and only later did anyone realize that he had been killed; L’Adige wrote in 2021 that this cost the investigation about 16 hours and that the prosecutor on duty, Cuno Tarfusser, had been told that the death looked accidental. Ballistic tests tied it to the first killing, ORF reported. By then the word "serial" was in the headlines.
Meanwhile a young local man who had told carabinieri he had seen the killer was himself arrested. L’Unità reported that he had been taken back to his residence by police minutes before Marchioro’s death and could not explain why he had been in the area; his description of the killer was later judged false. The case against him was presented publicly as close to certain. The prosecutor said he would argue it before the Court of Assizes "even tomorrow morning," and the judge for preliminary investigations refused to release him. He was held for 22 days and released on the night of March 1, once investigators accepted that he was not the man. At the funeral of Paolo Vecchiolini on March 2 a priest told mourners, "They crucified an innocent man." The former Green member of parliament Marco Boato told L’Unità that the magistrates had been wrong to present the young man as the almost certain culprit.
Paolo Vecchiolini was killed on February 27. The fourth death brought panic: the mayor advised residents not to go out and tourists left, ORF recalled in 2016. "In hindsight everything is easier to understand," Tarfusser told L’Adige that year, "but in those days the pressure on the investigators was truly enormous." Tullio Melchiorri and Marshal Guerrino Botte were killed on March 1. Melchiorri’s son heard on the radio that he himself was being named as the killer, after a woman claimed he had quarreled with his father; the claim was repeated by news agencies before it was withdrawn. "They said I’m the murderer, do you understand?" he told L’Unità.
Gamper, born in 1957, had grown up in Kuens (Caines), near Merano. The carabinieri had filed reports on him in 1981 and 1987, both times for incidents when he was drunk, including resisting a public official. A brother had died some years before, and the death had been treated as a suicide. ORF wrote in 2016 that his hatred of everything Italian probably had roots in his family’s history: under the Fascist regime, it said, his grandparents' farm at Sinich had been expropriated. He left several notes. One read, as L’Unità printed it, "This time too you arrived late. You will not be able to stop me." Another praised a united Tyrol and a "greater Germany," and in one he took for himself the name "il mostro," which the Italian press had been using for the killer. A portrait of Andreas Hofer, the hero of the Tyrolean rising of 1809, was among his belongings, L’Unità reported.
Between 1977 and 1984, a series of deaths in northern Italy and in Munich was claimed in letters and leaflets signed "Ludwig." The writers called themselves the last heirs of Nazism and said the purpose of their lives was the death of those who betrayed "the true God." Fifteen deaths were claimed in that name. The name first appeared in November 1980, in a letter mailed from Bologna to the Venice newspaper Il Gazzettino, which claimed three killings going back to 1977 and contained details that, l’Unità reported in 1985, only the killers could have known. Later messages carried a Nazi eagle and a swastika, were sometimes written in runic script, and some bore the motto "Gott mit uns." Many arrived long after the event they claimed. "We are the last heirs of Nazism," one leaflet said after the deaths of two friars in Vicenza. Another read: "Our faith is Nazism. Our justice is death. Our democracy is extermination."
On March 4, 1984, about 400 young people were celebrating Carnival at the Melamara, a disco at Castiglione delle Stiviere, in the province of Mantua. Two young men from well-off Verona families, dressed as Pierrots, were caught there trying to set the building on fire. The fire did not spread and no one died. They were Wolfgang Abel, a German citizen born on March 25, 1959, whose family had settled at Negrar, outside Verona, and Marco Furlan. What they said that night was reported in different ways. Libero later wrote that Abel told officers he had wanted to set the disco on fire but did not know why, and that Furlan said they wanted to see how the young people would react. In 1985 l’Unità reported that Furlan had called the attempt a "Carnival prank."
Both were held in Mantua. In March 1984 the Verona investigating judge, Mario Sannite, confirmed to l’Unità that both had received judicial notices for the premeditated double murder of the two friars in Vicenza. A man and a woman who had been nearby that evening identified both in a lineup; the man was certain, and Abel’s lawyer, Giovanni Rinaldi, questioned the conditions in which it was held. An identikit drawn after the killings strongly resembled Abel. Sannite said he believed Ludwig was a sect with more than two members, and that same month a new letter signed Ludwig reached a news agency in Rome, posted from Latina, promising more. It lacked the usual eagle and swastika, and l’Unità questioned whether it was genuine. By June 1985 witnesses had identified the two men as the authors of several of the killings, some with certainty and some tentatively; handwriting comparisons were under way, and so was an analysis of saliva on the glue of envelopes that had carried Ludwig leaflets. Clothing in Abel’s Munich apartment reportedly matched items linked to the Munich case. A lecturer from Pavia, S.R., who had studied Ludwig, was held for about a week as a suspect before the arrests and released.
The trial was held before the Corte d’assise of Verona, presided over by Judge Edoardo Raimondo, and the press called it the Processo Ludwig. The prosecution relied on the claim letters, which contained details only the authors could have known; on indentation traces on blank sheets recovered at the two men’s residences, which matched the letters; and on personal items that belonged to Abel. Searches in Verona and Munich had also turned up Nazi material, l’Unità reported in 1988. The prosecutor, Pavone, asked for life imprisonment and told the court that the killings were committed "out of boredom." The defense, led by Piero Longo and Tiburzio De Zuani according to Il Fatto Quotidiano, argued for partial mental infirmity. Neither defendant confessed.
On February 10, 1987, the court convicted both men of ten deaths, recognized partial mental infirmity, and sentenced each to 30 years plus three years in a judicial psychiatric hospital, with expulsion from Italy for Abel after the sentence; the term was reduced to 27 years in the final judgment. The ten were the two friars in Vicenza in July 1982, Mario (or Giuseppe) Lovato, 70, and Giovanni Battista (or Gabriele) Pigato, 65; a priest in Trento in February 1983, Armando Bison, 71; the six people who died at the Eros cinema in Milan on May 14, 1983, among them Livio Ceresoli, 46; and Corinna Tartarotti, 20, who died after the blaze at the Liverpool dance bar in Munich on the night of January 6 to 7, 1984, about three months later. Il Fatto Quotidiano described the Eros deaths in 2023 as the worst assault on Milan since the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, yet one the city had largely forgotten. Eight people were injured at the Liverpool, where about 30 guests were present, and the claim for it was posted in Milan; German investigators traveled to Italy afterward and gathered files scattered across the north, the Berliner Zeitung reported in 2023.
The court acquitted both men, for insufficient evidence, of five earlier deaths that Ludwig had claimed: Guerrino Spinelli, 33, in Verona on August 25, 1977; Luciano Stefanato, 44, in Padua on December 19, 1978; Claudio Costa, 22, in Venice on December 12, 1979; Alice Maria Baretta in Vicenza on December 20, 1980 (the press spelled her surname several ways); and Luca Martinotti, a student from Turin, in Verona on May 24, 1981, aged 18 according to l’Unità and 17 according to Il Fatto. In law none of those deaths is theirs. A December 1983 fire at a club in Amsterdam that killed 13 people was also claimed by Ludwig, but Dutch police attributed it to a dismissed employee seeking revenge, and it was never part of the Italian case.
Abel always said he was innocent. He was released in 1988 when the time limits on detention expired, then held again; by 2009 he was out of prison and under house arrest, and in November 2016 all remaining measures were lifted. L’Adige reported in September 2021 that he was in a coma. He died at Negrar in October 2024, and within weeks Milan prosecutors reopened the Eros investigation to look for others involved. Libero reported in 2010 that Furlan would soon be free, and in February 2022 ANSA reported that he had asked Pope Francis for forgiveness. A motion to the Munich city council in January 2022 asked for a plaque for the Liverpool victims, and in May 2023 Milan unveiled a memorial near the Eros cinema.
Cesare Serviatti was convicted in July 1933 of killing three women he had met through newspaper marriage advertisements. The killings took place over four years, in La Spezia in 1928, in Rome in 1930 and in La Spezia again in November 1932. Each woman had brought him her savings. The Corte d’Assise of La Spezia, which tried him summarily from June 14, 1933, sentenced him on July 8 to death for the last killing and to life imprisonment for the other two. King Victor Emmanuel III refused clemency. He was executed at Sarzana on October 13, 1933.
The Italian press compared him with the French killer of women Henri Désiré Landru and called him the Landru of the Tiber, the Italian Landru and, in Rome, the butcher. Writers since have retold the case many times, and they disagree on details: his birth date (November 24, 1880, in Subiaco, according to La Voce del Patriota in 2019; Rome and 1875, according to il Giornale in 2005), the names and origins of the women, the date of his arrest, which officer solved the case, and how many killings he claimed. He worked with his hands. Several accounts say he was a butcher for a time and a nurse at Rome’s Policlinico until he was dismissed for mistreating patients. His wife, il Giornale wrote, had herself been introduced to him through a marriage advertisement; she was later investigated as a possible accomplice and acquitted, and a woman described as his lover who was in the household at the time of his arrest was also cleared.
The first of the three was a widow, Pasqua Bartolini, who in 1928 sold what she owned and moved to La Spezia. Her surname appears as Bartolini Tiraboschi and as Bartolini Faraboschi in other accounts. No relative raised the alarm, InLiberta wrote, and the case surfaced only after Serviatti’s arrest more than four years later. According to il Giornale he admitted bringing her to La Spezia but always denied killing her, while other accounts say he confessed to her death as well. The court convicted him of her murder. Beatrice (Bice) Margarucci died near Rome in November 1930; Città della Spezia said the commissioner who later worked the 1932 case had handled her death without identifying who was responsible. After his arrest Serviatti confessed to killing her in Rome, and the court convicted him of it.
Paolina Gorietti, about 40, had lived and worked in Rome for years. In 1932 she answered a marriage advertisement and on November 4 left for La Spezia, expecting to marry and, by the accounts in il Giornale, to open a shop with about 12,000 lire. Her friend in Rome received a letter dated November 11. After that the letters stopped. In mid-November the death of an unidentified woman came to light, and police in Naples, Rome and La Spezia began working the case together. Accounts differ on who led the inquiry: Città della Spezia and InLiberta credit a deputy commissioner named Musco, and Eurocomunicazione credits Giuseppe Dosi, then head of the mobile squad in La Spezia, who received a fee of 1,000 lire for his work and sold a detailed report to a New York newspaper for 350 dollars. The name came from Rome. In early December 1932 Gorietti’s friend read newspaper descriptions, went to the police and gave them Serviatti’s name. Police arrested him in Rome, on December 9 according to il Giornale in 2011 and December 13 according to its 2005 account. Before he confessed, il Giornale recorded, he ate a plate of pasta in front of the officers and praised the cooking. Then he confessed to killing Gorietti. After the arrest he spoke of more killings, reported as five in all or as at least four others, and none was charged.
Between January 24 and March 18, 2003, six people were killed in Madrid and three towns around it, and three others survived attempts on their lives. The victims had nothing in common. Juan Francisco Ledesma Ledesma died in Madrid on January 24. Juan Carlos Martín died on the morning of February 5, and later that day Mikel Jiménez Sánchez, 18, and Juana Dolores Uclés were killed in Alcalá de Henares; the owner of the establishment, Mikel’s mother, survived. On the night of March 18, in Arganda del Rey, a married couple of Romanian origin, named George and Diona Magda by the Diario de Arganda and spelled differently by Telecinco, both barely 40, were killed; the husband died at once and his wife two days later. Vozpópuli reported that they left two children, aged 10 and 14. A Spanish playing card was left with several of the victims, and the press named the unknown killer after it.
On Thursday, July 3, 2003, Alfredo Galán Sotillo, a former army corporal reported as 25 or 26, walked into a police station in Puertollano, in Ciudad Real province, where he was from, with his brother, and said he was the man they wanted. A Dominican newspaper’s 2025 retrospective said he told them he was fed up with how ineffective the police had been. What made the officers listen was a detail about the cards that had been kept out of the press. He retracted the confession and later said two other men had forced him to make it. Digging at a landfill near Almodóvar del Campo, where he said he had discarded the weapon, produced nothing. In the five statements he gave police and judges after his surrender, Diario de León reported, he insisted that none of his relatives knew.
The Audiencia Provincial de Madrid, Section 16, convicted him of six murders and three attempted murders, with illegal possession of a weapon. The judgment, notified on March 9, 2005, imposed 142 years and three months, with an effective maximum of 25 years; the court set compensation of about 600,000 euros and exempted the state from subsidiary liability. Diario de León reported the court’s account that he left his sister’s house near Alcalá de Henares on January 24 and drove into the city intending to kill someone if a favorable chance arose. Later accounts reported that he said he started to find out what it felt like, and felt nothing. His defense and the victims' lawyers announced appeals in March 2005. As of March 2026, Telecinco reported, he was still in prison, with release expected around 2028.
Telecinco, reviewing the case in 2026, reported that his mother died when he was a child and that he struggled at school; he tried to join the Guardia Civil, failed the physical tests, and enlisted in the army, rising to corporal. His work in Bosnia was limited to humanitarian tasks, and the forensic psychologist Victoria Trabazo told the channel that he came back from the first mission bringing gifts and from the second more withdrawn. After an anxiety crisis he was admitted to the psychiatric unit of the Gómez Ulla military hospital. El Debate wrote in 2025 that no mental disorder was identified during the investigation or at trial. He later worked as a security guard at Barajas airport.
Enriqueta Martí was arrested in Barcelona on February 27, 1912, after a five-year-old girl taken on February 10 was recovered alive from her keeping in the Raval district. Within days the city’s newspapers had made her a figure of horror, a woman said to have abducted and killed children. She died in the Reina Amalia women’s prison on May 12, 1913, without being tried. More than a century later, writers and historians who went back to the newspapers and court files concluded that the murders had never been shown. The abduction of the girl is the one crime the record supports.
Her origins are disputed: 3Cat says she was born in Sant Feliu de Llobregat on February 2, 1868, betevé says Sant Pere de Ribes in 1871. Muy Interesante describes her as living by begging and by selling objects recovered from rubbish, caring for her sick father, who was in hospital at the time of her arrest. She had lost a son as a baby; elDiario.es and 3Cat report that he died of malnutrition. The later legend gave her a double life, a beggar by day and a figure in the casinos and theaters of the wealthy by night. The historians who studied her, Jordi Corominas and Elsa Plaza, describe a poor woman, probably unwell, scraping a living at the margins of the city.
The break in the case came from the neighborhood: 3Cat reports that a neighbor saw a girl she did not recognize at Martí's window and passed word through a mattress maker and a municipal guard to a police brigadier named Ribot. On February 27, police came upon two girls. One was the missing child, whose hair had been cut. The other, a younger girl, was presented by Martí as her own daughter; Plaza concluded that she was most likely Martí's niece. Martí told police she had taken in the five-year-old because she was hungry. Muy Interesante reports that the five-year-old was returned to her family in good health.
Police and press then built the legend. Muy Interesante says police concluded from what they seized that she had made ointments and potions from children; 3Cat reports that the press described a list of names of upper-class people; Catalan News, summarizing the accusations, says police claimed a long history of trafficking and murder linked to the fate of dozens of children in the Raval. No victim was ever identified. The list of names, read as a roster of rich clients, turned out to be, 3Cat reports, the names of people who regularly gave her alms. elDiario.es reports that forensic experts later determined that part of the material seized was animal, not human, and that the newspapers paid little attention. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that the human material belonged to one unknown person in their mid-twenties, and Plaza suggests that Martí collected it from a cemetery, at a time when local superstition gave such objects value as charms. The stains were attributed by betevé, Muy Interesante and the historian Patricia Melgar to the uterine cancer from which she was suffering, the illness that killed her, according to the death certificate cited by Barcelona Metropolitan. The popular story that fellow inmates beat her to death is treated by historians as legend.
The press of 1912 gave the case up to four pages a day, elDiario.es reports, and then dropped it almost at once when Holy Week and the sinking of the Titanic took over the front pages; no paper apologized. 3Cat reports that in the same week as her arrest a real case of child exploitation in the Raval came to light, one in which police complicity was alleged, and that the legend served to explain the loss of children in the district.
In June 2004 a 15-year-old girl named Sandra died in a hospital in Melilla, the Spanish city on the north coast of Africa, and her 12-year-old brother was admitted with similar symptoms. Doctors reported the case to the courts. Within days police arrested their mother, Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla, known as Paqui, born in the Valencia region. She confessed to police, Diario de León reported on June 10, 2004, that she had given a pharmaceutical product to her husband and their two children; she told police that her husband was an alcoholic who mistreated her and had threatened to leave her. Investigators believed, the paper wrote, that she had been carrying out her plan for at least two years. Later that month, 3Cat reported, she admitted that she had also killed a baby daughter, Florinda, in 1990.
Her husband, Antonio González, 42, who worked for the state at the border with Morocco, had died in January 2004; El Español and Noticias Argentinas give the date as January 12, Diario de León as January 7. His death was recorded as natural, and El Español reported that the official cause was a heart attack. From the second half of 2003 his health had been failing, and in October he was admitted to intensive care. About a month later, El Español reported, the whole household except Ballesteros was taken to hospital; she blamed a recent fumigation, and the explanation was accepted. After the father’s death the children looked sickly and painfully thin, neighbors told Diario de León. The alarm was raised by relatives: the children’s grandmother insisted on seeing Sandra and refused to accept that a doctor had already been called, and the children’s uncle called an ambulance himself.
El Español reported that she had met a man in Tenerife online, traveled there in December 2003, accepted his proposal of marriage, and told him she was a widow whose husband and daughter had died in a traffic accident; Noticias Argentinas said investigators later learned she was in contact with at least three men. Her son survived after long hospital care. She was committed to Melilla prison on June 9, 2004, and moved to Alhaurín de la Torre, in Málaga province, late that month.
On September 26, 2005, the Audiencia Provincial de Málaga, sitting in Melilla, convicted her of the murder of her husband, the murder, with other charges, of her daughters Sandra and Florinda, and the attempted murder, with other charges, of her son, and sentenced her to 84 years, with loss of parental rights and compensation to her son. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence and described her conduct as an abuse of her role as mother and wife. Her account of the motive changed. At trial, El Español reported, she said she had wanted to spare her children suffering. In June 2024 MelillaHoy reported that she was serving her sentence in a prison far from Melilla.
Francisco García Escalero was a man in Madrid who between 1987 and 1993 killed people living rough, most of them men who slept outdoors as he did. He had been admitted to psychiatric hospitals since his teens. NVI Noticias reported that police took him to the Hospital Psiquiátrico Provincial de Madrid several times and that each time he was released. On December 15, 1990, he was admitted there and told doctors that he felt the need to kill, but they did not believe him. The forensic doctor Juan José Carrasco, quoted by NVI Noticias, said: "the problem with Escalero is that he was not admitted to hospital and was not receiving treatment." He was caught only in 1993, after he threw himself in front of a moving car, broke a leg, and told the nurses at Ramón y Cajal hospital that he was a killer and would kill again if he stayed free; El Cierre Digital and El Independiente reported that he asked them to have him arrested.
He was born on May 24, 1954, in Madrid. Years later El Cierre Digital quoted him describing his childhood: "I liked going to lonely places, and the idea of killing myself would come to me." He said that voices had told him to go to cemeteries and that he had to kill. A motorcycle theft brought his first serious arrest and a spell in a reformatory. In the 1970s he and other young men sexually assaulted a woman near the Almudena cemetery, and he was sentenced to ten, eleven or twelve years, depending on the account. In prison he covered himself in tattoos, one of which read "Naciste para sufrir," "You were born to suffer." He left prison at about 30, could not hold steady work, drank heavily and took pills. After his father’s death he lived rough and told psychiatrists the voices were telling him what to do. Police could later attribute eleven killings to him from the 14 he confessed to, El Independiente reported in 2023. The press gave few details of the victims' lives. Named in later reporting were Paula Martínez and Mario Román González in 1987, Juan Cámara Baeza in 1988, Ángel Heredero Vallejo and Julio Santiesteban in 1989, and, in 1993, a fellow psychiatric patient, Víctor Criado Martí, 34, who left a hospital with him and died about 48 hours later. The police inquiry into that death led investigators to García Escalero, El Independiente wrote. Published accounts differ on some names and dates, and the eleven killings the court accepted have never been listed in full.
The case was heard by the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid, with José Manuel Maza presiding. NVI Noticias dates the trial to February 1996; Noticias Argentinas dates it to February 1995. The forensic experts agreed that he remained dangerous but was not responsible for his acts, attributing his condition to chronic alcoholism and schizophrenia. The court held that he had committed eleven murders, a sexual assault and an abduction, and acquitted him on grounds of mental illness; he was committed to the prison psychiatric hospital at Fontcalent, near Alicante, with reviews every six months. He was never convicted. He died there on August 19, 2014, aged 60. The Spanish press called him "el matamendigos," the beggar killer. The case drew attention less for its numbers than for the warnings that went unheeded.
Between April 1987 and April 1988, sixteen women aged 61 to 93 who lived alone died in and around Santander, the capital of Cantabria. Thirteen of the deaths were recorded as natural, usually as heart failure, according to Cantabria24Horas; Cuatro reported that the first seven were classified that way. Four forensic doctors who had certified deaths testified at the 1991 trial, Servimedia reported, that they first recorded them as natural. By late 1987 reporters at the Santander newspaper El Diario Montañés had begun to look into the run of deaths, and Público wrote that the Cantabrian authorities at first denied that a serial killer was at work, and that public pressure forced the police to investigate. Police officers told the trial their investigation began in August 1987, about five months after the first killing.
The first of the women named by Cantabria24Horas was Victoria Rodríguez Morales, 61, who died in April 1987. Margarita González Sánchez, 82, died in August 1987. Natividad Robledo Espinosa, 66 or 67, and Josefa Martínez Collantes, 84, died in October 1987. Carmen Martínez González, 65, died in January 1988, and her daughter refused to accept the death as natural and pressed for years to have it investigated; officials warned her not to keep using the word "crime." Julia Paz Fernández, 71, who lived in Muriedas, died in April 1988; she was the last of the sixteen. Because her death was outside the city, the Guardia Civil handled the inquiry. Servimedia’s trial report said the decisive lead was that the defendant had worked for her two months before her death. The head of the Santander police ordered him watched for about four weeks, and on May 19, 1988, officers arrested José Antonio Rodríguez Vega in Santander.
He had been born in Santander on December 3, 1957. A bricklayer, he had left his parents' house at 17 after violence toward his father, and married at 18. In October 1978 he was arrested for a series of sexual assaults on women and in 1979 sentenced to a combined 27 years; Infobae reports that eleven of the twelve women forgave him, which under the Penal Code in force before 1995 could extinguish criminal liability for offenses of that kind. He was released on provisional release in November 1986, and the Tribunal Supremo, as Servimedia summarized its judgment, placed the start of the killings in April 1987. The court held that he took advantage of the women’s frailty, acted suddenly after first gaining their trust, and robbed them afterward. Several of the women had known him through small building jobs.
On December 5, 1991, the Audiencia Provincial de Santander convicted him of sixteen murders, nine counts of indecent assault (abusos deshonestos), six thefts and two minor thefts. Servimedia reported a total of 440 years, with a legal limit of 30 to be served, and an order to pay 8 million pesetas to each victim’s family; the Tribunal Supremo upheld the judgment, Servimedia reported on April 30, 1993, though its headline gave the term as 400 years. The trial court noted that he blamed his mother, and his mother-in-law, for what he had become. He spent fourteen years in Spanish prisons. In October 2002 he was transferred to the prison at Topas, near Salamanca, and two days later, on October 24, he was killed there by other inmates. The press had named him El Mataviejas. In 2026 the writer Silvia Cosio argued in Público that the women had been reduced in the coverage to a single label, "viejas," old women, while the man who killed them became the story.
Manuel Delgado Villegas, called El Arropiero, confessed in 1971 to 48 killings. Spanish police investigated 22 of the cases he described and came to treat seven as proved, according to Infobae and Vice; Telecinco, in 2026, put the proved cases at eight. He was never put on trial. After he had spent about six and a half years in custody without a defense lawyer, the Audiencia Nacional closed the case in 1978, held him not criminally responsible on psychiatric grounds, and ordered him held in a penitentiary psychiatric hospital. Spanish media have long described him as the country’s most prolific serial killer, and Telecinco was careful to say why: the title rests on the number of crimes he confessed, not on any conviction. No court ever held him responsible for a single death.
He was born in Seville, on January 25, 1943 according to Telecinco and Infobae, though Vice reported that his papers did not agree. His mother died giving birth to him. His father sold arrope, a sweet syrup made from fruit, in the summer and scrap metal in the winter, and the son took his nickname from that trade. He never learned to read or write, and the father later sent him to live with his grandmother in Mataró, north of Barcelona. Vice reported that under Franco he was arrested several times under the vagrancy and social danger law and was repeatedly sent to psychiatric institutions rather than prison.
The cases police attributed to him spanned seven years and several regions, and the people who died had little in common. Adolfo Folch died in January 1964 at Garraf, south of Barcelona, the first. Margaret Boudrie, 21, a young Frenchwoman, died in Ibiza in 1967. Venancio Hernández died near Chinchón in 1968; his death had first been recorded as accidental, Infobae reported. Ramón Estrada, a wealthy Barcelona businessman, died on April 5, 1969, according to Infobae, which said the case drew wide press coverage. Anastasia Borrella, 68, died in Mataró on November 23, 1969. Francisco Marín, 24, a friend, died at El Puerto de Santa María in 1970, and Antonia Rodríguez, 38, his girlfriend, in January 1971.
He was arrested at El Puerto de Santa María on January 18, 1971, in the inquiry into Antonia Rodríguez’s death, according to Telecinco. His first answer was an alibi: he said he had been at the cinema and produced a ticket. Inspector Salvador Ortega, a film lover according to Vice, asked him about the film. He could not describe it, and the alibi collapsed. He then confessed to her death and went further, telling the police he had killed about 48 people, while admitting that he had trouble keeping count. Telecinco reported that he also claimed to have killed in France and Russia, but the evidence was too thin to investigate. Infobae called the six and a half years without a lawyer a record in Spain for a suspect held in pretrial detention without representation. Throughout that time psychiatrists and forensic doctors agreed that he was mentally unbalanced and not criminally responsible. Vice reported that doctors determined he carried an extra Y chromosome; Telecinco named the genetic finding as Klinefelter syndrome and said the link to violence was never scientifically proven. The two outlets do not agree on the name of the condition.
He spent about 26 years in psychiatric prisons and hospitals, first at the Carabanchel penitentiary psychiatric hospital in Madrid, later at a psychiatric hospital in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona, and finally at liberty in Mataró. In 1993 the public broadcaster’s program Dossier 21 recorded a long interview with him; Telecinco recalled another, in which he spoke of his fondness for gazpacho. He died at Can Ruti hospital in Badalona on February 2, 1998, aged 55. In 2009 the director Carles Balagué released a documentary about him. The total of 48 is his own. The figure of seven proved cases reflects police findings, not court rulings; the Audiencia Nacional never heard evidence on any of them.
The oldest of these cases is also the one with the clearest verdict. In the spring of 1772 the city of Coimbra learned that babies taken from its foundling wheel, the roda dos expostos run by the Misericórdia, had been dying in the hands of a woman trusted to carry them to their nurses. Luísa de Jesus was a carrier in her early twenties, a recoveira who moved goods for pay, born at Figueira de Lorvão near Penacova according to a baptism record cited by Correio da Manhã and to the Coimbra city council. The foundling house paid an advance of 600 réis for each child, with a cradle and a length of cloth, to the woman who took it to be nursed, and the historian Maria Antónia Lopes of the University of Coimbra describes her as a woman who "went to fetch them in the name of others." She gave the house the names of real or invented women, the city council records, and the children never reached them.
The system made such a thing possible. Lopes’s study of foundling care in the Coimbra region shows the wheel taking in more than 200 children a year in the 1770s, nearly all of them placed with poor rural nurses outside the house, paid late when they were paid at all, and dying in such numbers that in 1813 an observer put the toll at three-quarters of all foundlings. In early April 1772 a worker at the foundling house found a baby’s body at Montarroio, below the house, and recognized the clothing of a child Luísa de Jesus had collected days before, the city council’s account says. By April 19, with 15 children found, she admitted killing nine. In all, 33 of the 34 children the house’s records showed as handed to her were accounted for, Lopes writes, and she eventually confessed to 28. The rodeira who ran the house and a wet nurse who worked there were held in the Coimbra jail from April 6 to October 7, 1772, for having handed the children over without checking.
The case went not to the Relação do Porto, whose jurisdiction covered Coimbra, but to the Casa da Suplicação in Lisbon, the Lusa news agency and Lopes record; the reason is not recorded. Her defense argued that at 22 or so she was a minor, since a woman came of age at 25. The judges, unanimously by the city council’s account, held that anyone old enough to commit such crimes was old enough to be tried for them, and sentenced her to death in a decision dated "Lisboa, 1 de Julho de 1772." She was executed in Lisbon the same year. Lopes, who has studied every woman sentenced to death in Portugal from 1693 to abolition, counts 28 women among 444 executions for civil crimes between 1693 and 1800, and concludes that Luísa de Jesus "foi a última mulher executada em Portugal, mas não a última condenada à morte": the last woman executed in Portugal, though not the last sentenced to death. Her sentence, Lopes writes, was the harshest given to any woman in the series. Correio da Manhã, in 2015, called her the first Portuguese serial killer; a novel, a stage play in Lisbon in 2021 and an RTP documentary have since retold the case.
Portugal’s best-known nineteenth-century case is also the furthest from a court record. Diogo Alves was born in 1810 in Santa Gertrudes de Samos, in Lugo province in Galicia, and left home for Portugal at about thirteen, according to the Galician edition of Público and the Brazilian scholar Nilce Camila de Carvalho. In Lisbon he worked in wealthy houses, Xataka reports, among them those of the marquises of Penalva and of Castelo Melhor, first in the stables and then as a coachman, and he was known as o Pancada. In 1836, at 26, he was dismissed by Dr. João Tomás de Carvalho, Xataka writes, and the popular works that Carvalho studied put his decline down to taverns and gambling.
The deaths for which he is remembered took place at the Aqueduto das Águas Livres, the eighteenth-century water channel that carries a public path across the Alcântara valley at a height of about 65 meters. Between 1836 and 1839, by the dates Carvalho, Público and Xataka give, a run of deaths at the aqueduct, mostly of small traders and farmers going home from the city, was first taken for a wave of suicides. As the count rose, the authorities closed the path; the Diário de Notícias dates the closing to 1837 and says it stayed shut for decades. No investigation was opened into those deaths, the Diário de Notícias wrote in 2018, and Alves was never charged with any of them. The number has never been established. The Diário de Notícias wrote of more than seventy and Correio da Manhã of more than a hundred; the historian Anabela Natário puts it at about twenty, Xataka reports, and Carvalho calls the figure of seventy "very probably false and imprecise."
The case a court did hear came afterwards. By the late 1830s Alves led a gang that, in the pamphlets of the period, included two soldiers, several fellow Galicians and the tavern keeper Gertrudes Maria, known as a Parreirinha. After the aqueduct path was closed, the gang raided a house in Rua das Flores; Carvalho, summarizing the pamphlets, gives the dead as a widow, her two daughters and her son, a student at Coimbra, and Público and Xataka describe them as a Lisbon doctor’s family. Alves was arrested in 1839, according to Xataka, handed over, the Diário de Notícias says, by a member of his own group. A letter of June 22, 1840, in the archive of Portugal’s Procuradoria-Geral da República records the "processo crime de Diogo Alves e seus cúmplices" before the Relação de Lisboa and the Minister of Justice’s own interest in its progress. He was sentenced to death in 1840, Xataka reports; by the popular works' account three accomplices received the same sentence and the others, Gertrudes Maria among them, perpetual exile in Portugal’s African colonies.
Alves was executed at the Cais do Tojo in February 1841, the Diário de Notícias and Público report, on the same day as his accomplice António Martins, Carvalho writes. The claim, often repeated, that he was the last person executed in Portugal does not hold: Carvalho cites the execution of Francisco de Matos Lobo in Lagos in 1846. Three pamphlets on his life and death were printed in 1841, and a short film, Os Crimes de Diogo Alves, followed in 1911. His head passed to Lisbon’s medical school and is held today by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, under a label that says only that it is "possibly" his, Xataka reports. Carvalho’s conclusion about the aqueduct story is that it is a popular legend; Público’s is that it is impossible to know how many crimes he committed.
Set side by side, the cases show how differently the two countries' courts ended the same kind of case. Convictions at trial came in Bolzano, Genoa and Turin, Madrid, Santander, Melilla and La Spezia, and they carried very different weights: life imprisonment in Italy, 142 years cut to 25 in Madrid, 440 years cut to 30 in Santander, 84 years in Melilla, and, in 1933, a death sentence carried out just over three months after the verdict. In Verona and Florence the courts convicted part of what had been claimed or charged and acquitted the rest. In Madrid García Escalero was held to have committed eleven murders and was never convicted, and Delgado Villegas, who confessed to 48, was never tried at all. Gamper and Martí did not live to face charges.
What those outcomes share is a gap between what was said and what a court could establish. Mele, convicted in 1973 of the first Florence double killing, is still the only person convicted of it, and La Nazione was still asking in 2023 who could have supplied him. Delgado Villegas gave a number, 48, that no court tested. Luísa de Jesus, the last woman Portugal executed, was convicted in 1772 of all 33 deaths that were found, though she confessed to 28. Diogo Alves was executed in 1841 for one night in one house, and the aqueduct deaths that carry his name in Lisbon were never put to a court at all. Bergamo was convicted of two killings he denied on the strength of their likeness to three he admitted. In Merano, a young man spent 22 days in custody as the culprit while the killings went on. The person who carried out the Florence killings has never been named by a court.
• April 1772: Luísa de Jesus arrested in Coimbra after a foundling’s body is found at Montarroio; by April 19, 15 children found and nine killings admitted.
• July 1, 1772: The Casa da Suplicação in Lisbon sentences Luísa de Jesus to death for the homicide of 33 foundling infants; she is executed in Lisbon the same year.
• 1836 to 1839: Deaths at the Águas Livres aqueduct in Lisbon later attributed to Diogo Alves; the path across it is closed, in 1837 by the Diário de Notícias’s date.
• 1839: Diogo Alves arrested after the Rua das Flores household killings in Lisbon.
• June 22, 1840: Procuradoria-Geral da República letter on the criminal case of Diogo Alves and his accomplices before the Relação de Lisboa.
• February 1841: Diogo Alves executed at the Cais do Tojo, Lisbon.
• 1846: Francisco de Matos Lobo executed in Lagos, by the account of Leite Bastos cited by Carvalho.
• February 27, 1912: Enriqueta Martí arrested in Barcelona; dies in prison on May 12, 1913.
• 1928: Pasqua Bartolini, first of three women Cesare Serviatti was convicted of killing.
• December 1932: Serviatti arrested in Rome.
• July 8, 1933: Sentenced at La Spezia; executed at Sarzana on October 13, 1933.
• 1964 to January 1971: Killings attributed to Manuel Delgado Villegas.
• August 21, 1968: First of the eight Florence double killings, at Castelletti di Signa.
• March 25, 1970: Florence Assize Court convicts Stefano Mele of the 1968 killings; conviction final April 12, 1973.
• January 18, 1971: Delgado Villegas arrested at El Puerto de Santa María.
• August 25, 1977: First death later claimed by Ludwig.
• 1978: Audiencia Nacional declares Delgado Villegas not criminally responsible.
• 1978: Five young women killed in and around Genoa; Maurizio Minghella arrested December 5 to 6.
• April 3, 1981: Genoa Corte d’Assise sentences Minghella to life.
• June 19, 1982: Baccaiano double killing; investigators link it to the 1968 case.
• July 1982 to May 1983: Deaths in Vicenza, Trento and Milan for which Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan are convicted.
• September 9, 1983: Giogoli, the double killing that cleared a Sardinian suspect held in the Murate prison.
• March 4, 1984: Abel and Furlan caught at the Melamara disco, Castiglione delle Stiviere.
• January 3, 1985: Marcella Casagrande killed in Bolzano, first of five attributed to Marco Bergamo.
• February 10, 1987: Verona Corte d’assise convicts Abel and Furlan of ten deaths.
• 1987 to 1993: Killings attributed to Francisco García Escalero.
• April 1987 to April 1988: Sixteen women killed around Santander; José Antonio Rodríguez Vega arrested May 19, 1988.
• December 1989: Judge Mario Rotella closes the case against the Sardinian suspects.
• December 5, 1991: Rodríguez Vega sentenced in Santander.
• August 6, 1992: Marika Zorzi killed; Bergamo arrested the same day.
• January 17, 1993: P.P. arrested.
• 1993: The Tribunal Supremo upholds Rodríguez Vega’s sentence.
• 1994: P.P. convicted at first instance of seven double killings.
• March 8, 1994: Bolzano Court of Assizes sentences Bergamo to life.
• February 1996: P.P. acquitted on appeal; García Escalero acquitted on grounds of mental illness (February 1995 by one account).
• February 8, 1996: First two deaths in Merano attributed to Ferdinand Gamper.
• March 1, 1996: Last two killings at Rifiano; Gamper dies by suicide; the young man held for 22 days is released.
• December 12, 1996: Court of Cassation annuls P.P.'s acquittal.
• May 24, 1997: Fatima H’Didou killed in the Turin area, first of four later attributed by court to Minghella.
• February 2, 1998: Delgado Villegas dies in Badalona.
• February 22, 1998: P.P. dies before the new appeal is heard.
• 2000: Convictions of Mario Vanni (life) and Giancarlo Lotti (26 years) become final.
• March 7, 2001: Minghella arrested in Turin.
• October 24, 2002: Rodríguez Vega killed by fellow inmates at Topas.
• January 24, 2003: First of six killings attributed to Alfredo Galán in the Madrid region.
• April 4, 2003: Turin court sentences Minghella for three murders.
• July 3, 2003: Galán surrenders in Puertollano.
• June 2004: Sandra’s death in Melilla; Francisca Ballesteros arrested.
• March 2005: Galán sentenced to 142 years and three months.
• September 26, 2005: Ballesteros sentenced to 84 years.
• October 17, 2017: Bergamo dies in custody.
• December 7, 2017: Minghella sentenced to a further 30 years for a fourth murder.
• October 2024: Abel dies at Negrar.
• July 2025: Genoa Court of Appeal declares inadmissible the request to reopen Vanni’s conviction.