On the evening of March 4, 1984, about four hundred young people, most of them masked for a carnival party, were inside the Melamara disco at Castiglione delle Stiviere, in the province of Mantua. In the confusion one young man dressed as Pierrot opened an emergency exit and let in another carrying two bags filled with as many gasoline cans as he could hold. Half hidden in a dark corner, they poured gasoline on the carpet and set it alight. They had not reckoned with the fireproof coverings Italian venues were required to install after the Cinema Statuto fire in Turin in February 1983. The carpet resisted, the flames spread slowly, and a security guard put them out. The two tried to fight past the bouncer, were surrounded by the crowd and were arrested by police who saved them from being lynched. They were Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan, and they had been killing for seven years.
Abel was born on March 25, 1959. His father was managing director of the Italian branch of a German insurance company, and after a period in Munich the family settled at Negrar in the Valpolicella, outside Verona. He graduated in mathematics with honors and worked at his father's company. Furlan, born on January 16, 1960, lived in Verona's prosperous Borgo Trento district, was the son of the head of the burns unit at the city's main hospital, and was about to graduate in physics at the University of Padua. They met in high school and agreed that the world had to be cleansed of everything they considered deviant: prostitutes, the homeless, gay men, drug addicts, sinful priests, nightclubs and pornographic cinemas. They were rich, educated and had no criminal records, and for years nobody looked at people like them.
On August 25, 1977, in Verona, they burned Guerrino Spinelli, a Roma drug addict, alive in his Fiat 126 with four Molotov cocktails. On December 17, 1978, in Padua, Luciano Stefanato, a gay waiter, was stabbed thirty times and two blades were left in his back. On December 12, 1979, in Venice, they stabbed Claudio Costa, a twenty-two-year-old drug addict. In 1980 in Vicenza they killed Alice Maria Baretta, a fifty-two-year-old sex worker, with an axe. On November 25, 1980, they claimed the killings for the first time, in a letter signed Ludwig sent to the Mestre office of Il Gazzettino. At each scene they left leaflets in Italian headed Ludwig over a Nazi eagle and swastika, with slogans such as "We are the last of the Nazis" and "Death comes to those who betray the true god." There was no group behind the name.
On May 25, 1981, a fire was set in an abandoned tower of the old Austrian fortifications on the Lungadige San Giorgio in Verona, used as a shelter by the homeless and addicts; Luca Martinotti, seventeen, died and his friend was badly hurt. A Ludwig letter reached La Repubblica, but the two were acquitted of that fire. On July 20, 1982, in Vicenza, they attacked two seventy-year-old friars of Monte Berico, Father Gabriele Pigato and Father Giuseppe Lovato, with hammers as they walked along the monastery wall; both died. On February 26, 1983, in Trento, Father Armando Bison was found with an awl driven into his skull and a crucifix attached to it.
On May 14, 1983, they set fire to the Eros, a pornographic cinema in Milan, killing six people and injuring thirty-two. Among the dead was Livio Ceresoli, a forty-six-year-old doctor who went into the building to help and was awarded a posthumous medal for civil valor; the others were Giorgio Fronza, Ernesto Mauri, Pasquale Esposito, Elio Molteni and Domenico La Sala. On January 8, 1984, a fire at the Liverpool disco in Munich killed an Italian waitress who worked there and injured seven, and a Ludwig leaflet sent to newspapers mocked the victims. In all, the attacks attributed to Ludwig left fifteen dead and forty-one wounded.
Psychiatrists appointed at the trial said Abel's capacity to understand his actions was reduced and that he had grown up without the affection needed for a healthy personality, a finding that was bitterly disputed; he refused to be interviewed. On February 10, 1987, both men were sentenced to thirty years for ten murders, though the prosecution had asked for life. The sentences were later reduced on appeal to twenty-seven years. Furlan fled in February 1991, just before the final ruling, and was caught in Crete in 1995 living under a false name. The Ludwig name was later taken up by younger far-right copycats in Tuscany who beat street vendors and bombed Roma camps, and who said they had never met either man.
Furlan was released on probation for good behavior in November 2010. Abel was moved to house arrest at his family's home in the Valpolicella in 2009 and, after a period of probation, was freed on November 24, 2016. Both men said they had no further contact with each other, and both continued to claim they were scapegoats for a police force that could not find the real killers. Abel fell at home in 2021 and never recovered from the injuries. He died on October 25, 2024, at the Sacro Cuore Don Calabria hospital in Negrar, at sixty-five.