Wolfgang Abel was born in Munich in 1959, the son of a senior insurance executive, and grew up in Verona in considerable wealth. He met Marco Furlan, the son of a doctor, at school. Both were intelligent, well-off, well-travelled young men with no criminal record and no obvious grievance, which is a large part of why nobody found them for seven years.
From 1977 they attacked people they regarded as impure. The victims were homeless men asleep in doorways, Roma, drug users in derelict buildings, prostitutes, gay men, and a priest. The methods were fire and blunt force: petrol poured over a sleeping man, a hammer, a chisel. At least ten people died and many more were injured, in Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Trento and across the border in Germany.
After several of the attacks a typed leaflet was left or sent to newspapers, in mangled German and Italian, headed with a Nazi eagle and signed Ludwig, declaring that the killings were the work of a group carrying out God's will against the corrupt. There was no group.
In January 1984 they set fire to a cinema in Milan showing pornographic films, killing six people. On March 4, 1984, they were caught at the door of a discotheque in Castiglione delle Stiviere near Mantua, the Melamara, with petrol cans, attempting to set fire to it with hundreds of young people inside.
They were tried in Verona and convicted in 1987 of ten murders and a series of attempted murders and sentenced to thirty years, the sentences reduced on appeal. Both were later released, Furlan having spent four years at large in Greece after failing to return from prison leave in 1991. Neither has ever explained it. Abel has consistently denied everything.