On the night of August 21, 1968, at Signa, west of Florence, Antonio Lo Bianco, twenty-nine, a mason, and Barbara Locci, thirty-two, were shot dead with a .22 handgun in a parked car while Locci's six-year-old son, Natalino, slept in the back seat. He woke, found his mother dead, and ran in terror to a nearby house. Locci, a Sardinian known in the town as the queen bee, had several lovers, and her much older husband, Stefano Mele, was charged, convicted in 1970 and sentenced to fourteen years. Six years later, while he was still in prison, another couple was killed.
On September 15, 1974, near Borgo San Lorenzo, Pasquale Gentilcore, nineteen, a barman, and Stefania Pettini, eighteen, were shot and stabbed in his Fiat 127 on a lane near a discotheque where they were supposed to be with friends. Pettini's body was violated with a grapevine stalk and bore ninety-seven stab wounds. Hours earlier she had told a friend a strange man was frightening her. Then nothing for nearly seven years. On June 6, 1981, near Scandicci, Giovanni Foggi, thirty, and his fiancée, Carmela De Nuccio, twenty-one, were shot and stabbed, and the killer pulled her from the car and cut away her pubic area with a notched knife. A young voyeur, Enzo Spalletti, who talked about the murder before the bodies were found, spent three months in jail before the killer cleared him by killing again. On October 23, 1981, near Calenzano, Stefano Baldi, twenty-six, and his fiancée, Susanna Cambi, twenty-four, were killed the same way. Cambi had told her mother someone was tormenting her and following her by car, and the morning after the murder an anonymous caller rang her mother to talk to her about her daughter.
The pattern held for every killing from 1974 on: young couples seeking privacy on dirt roads and in wooded places around Florence, on dark summer weekend nights or before a holiday, often at the new moon; the man shot first; the woman then dragged out, stabbed and mutilated; and always the same .22 Beretta, loaded with Winchester ammunition stamped with an H on the base. On June 19, 1982, on a provincial road at Montespertoli, the killer shot Paolo Mainardi, twenty-two, and Antonella Migliorini, twenty, just after they had had sex in his car, but the road was too busy for him to mutilate her. Mainardi was still alive when found and died hours later. That July an examining magistrate found five bullets and five casings misfiled in the Mele case file, and it was established that the 1968 killings had been done with the same gun. Mele was released. On September 9, 1983, at Galluzzo, two twenty-four-year-old students from Osnabrück, Wilhelm Friedrich Horst Meyer and Jens Uwe Rüsch, were shot in their Volkswagen bus; investigators thought the killer may have taken Rüsch, with his long blond hair and slim build, for a woman.
On July 29, 1984, near Vicchio, Claudio Stefanacci, twenty-one, a law student, and Pia Gilda Rontini, eighteen, a barmaid, were shot and stabbed in his Fiat Panda, and the killer removed Rontini's pubic area and her left breast. She had told a friend an unpleasant man had been bothering her at the bar. On the night of September 7 to 8, 1985, near San Casciano in Val di Pesa, the killer shot and stabbed Nadine Mauriot, thirty-six, and Jean Michel Kraveichvili, twenty-five, a musician, both from Audincourt in France, as they slept in a small tent; Kraveichvili was killed a short way off, running for his life, and Mauriot was mutilated. Because they were foreigners, no one had reported them missing. Days later an anonymous envelope reached the prosecutor in charge of the case, Silvia Della Monica, containing a piece of the woman's breast. A mushroom picker had found the bodies a few hours before it arrived. The journalist Mario Spezi gave the killer his name. Flyers warned couples against making love in cars, and the fear changed how a whole province lived.
The investigations lasted decades and followed one theory after another: a Sardinian clan connected to Locci and her lovers, a group of local men, a satanic cult, and a secret society linked to the Perugia doctor Francesco Narducci, whose body was found in Lake Trasimeno in 1985. Pietro Pacciani, a farmer, was convicted of seven of the double murders in 1994 and acquitted on appeal in 1996. The Court of Cassation annulled the acquittal and ordered a new appeal, but Pacciani died in 1998 before it was held. Giancarlo Lotti confessed and named Pacciani and Mario Vanni as accomplices. Vanni protested that they were only friends who met for meals in local bars, which gave the group its name in the press, the compagni di merende, the snack buddies. In 2000 the Court of Cassation finally convicted Vanni of five of the double murders, sentencing him to life, and Lotti of four, with twenty-six years; the testimony of Lotti and Fernando Pucci was decisive, and a third man, Giovanni Faggi, was acquitted.
Beyond that verdict, no DNA or fingerprint of the killer or his accomplices was ever found at any scene, the Beretta has never been traced, and the parts taken from the women have never been found. Investigations in Florence and Perugia into possible instigators, including an esoteric motive, continued into the 2010s and 2020s without confirmation. Who fired the gun, and why, remains unknown.