Rozina Zammit was fifty-four and lived at Triq Hlantun in Safi. On February 8, 1984 she was stabbed thirty-seven times, in the neck, chest and abdomen, at her own door. Mangion said later he had followed her home and knocked, and that when she opened it and began shouting he stabbed her, went for the money, and ran when he realized she was dead. The sum taken was two hundred Maltese liri, about four hundred and sixty euro. Her body was found on her doorstep; one account says on February 8, another the next day.
Maria Stella Magrin was sixty-eight and lived at Cospicua. She lived a few doors from the former President, Ugo Mifsud Bonnici. On October 30, 1986 three men knocked at her door and she opened without asking who it was: Mangion and an uncle and nephew, Leli and Oswaldo Spiteri. None of them wore a mask. The electricity was off, and she led them through the house by torchlight and handed over some six thousand liri, around fifteen thousand euro in 2012 terms. Then Mangion stabbed her thirteen times so that she could not identify them.
Francesco Cassar was seventy-five and was Mangion's neighbor in Zejtun. On August 16, 1998 Mangion swallowed pills and drank to work up his nerve, rang the bell, and came at Cassar's sister Giuseppa, seventy-one, with a knife when she opened the door. He stabbed her in the stomach and right arm; she fought and called her brother, and Mangion stabbed Frenc Cassar in the chest. The sight of him bleeding on the floor frightened Mangion off. He threw the knife and his bloody T-shirt into a reservoir on President Anton Buttigieg Street. She lived, and the attempt on her is one of the counts he was convicted on.
Two of those three cases went unsolved for the better part of twenty years.
What broke them was prison conversation. Mangion was inside for the Cassar killing, and about a year after his conviction he began talking to other inmates at Corradino about the two older murders. One of them, Steven Spiteri, went to the police. Questioned, Mangion confessed, walked investigators through the Magrin house and described its layout accurately, and in 2005 he was charged with the killing of Rozina Zammit.
The prosecutions then ran in the reverse of the order the killings had happened. A jury found on November 26, 2002 that he had been sane when he killed Cassar, and on January 5, 2004, as his trial opened, he pleaded guilty to that murder and to the attempt on his sister, and was given twenty-one years. He was tried by jury for the 1984 murder of Zammit and convicted by eight votes to one, and on June 23, 2010 he was sentenced to life. He was tried last for the 1986 murder of Magrin, and received a second life sentence.
Judge Joseph Galea Debono, presiding over the last jury trial of his career, called him a serial killer and a threat to society who could not be trusted.
He was born at Zejtun in 1965, was unemployed, and had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and depressive episodes. He was dependent on alcohol and on prescription medicine. On the Magrin count he did not contest having killed her and pleaded insanity, and a court had to determine whether he was fit to stand trial at all. A police inspector, Chris Pullicino, testified that he had known exactly what he was doing, because he wanted to rob her and to silence her permanently. The motive in all three, on the finding of the courts, was robbery.
During the proceedings an inspector asked him about two tattoos, an S on one ear and a K on the other. Mangion said they stood for his name and his nickname, Silvio Kalang. Then he asked, by way of a joke, whether they were not for serial killer.
He is at Corradino and he is alive.
The two men who went to Magrin's door with him were both dead before he named them to the police. Leli Spiteri died in 2000. Oswaldo, his nephew, hanged himself in custody after his arrest in 2005, having first admitted his own part in the murder and his uncle's.