Free Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky Page A

director of the Verona branch of a German insurance company—were charged with twenty-seven homicides. One victim was a priest who had a nail driven through his forehead followed by a chisel with a cross attached to it.
    More recently, in Apulia, in September 1997 police arrested a suspect in the murders of at least eight elderly women, each of whom lived on the ground floor of her building. Meanwhile in Verona, Gianfranco Stavanin was convicted in 1998 of murdering and dismembering six women between 1991 and 1994 and burying their remains in nearby fields.
    That same winter in 1998, Italy was electrified by a dramatic series of murders of women on trains along the vacation coast between Genoa and Monte Carlo. The killer would surprise women inside the washroom by opening the door with his own special key. After murdering his victim, he would relock the door and slip back to his compartment in the dark while the train was passing through a tunnel. By the time a conductor would get around to checking the locked toilet, the killer had long ago gotten off the train. Police eventually arrested forty-seven-year-old professional gambler and petty criminal Donato Bilancia and charged him with a total of seventeen homicides over a six-month period. His victims consisted of nine males and eight females and included not only women on the train and roadside prostitutes, but criminal associates and friends and acquaintances. One victim was strangled; the rest were shot.
    But Belgium appears to be inexplicably emerging as Europe’s newest serial slaughter hot zone. After awaiting trial for eight years, Marc Dutroux, 47, and his two accomplices, one of whom is his ex-wife Michel Martin, 44, finally went on trial in March 2004 for the horrific kidnapping, rape, and murder of four girls during the mid-1990s. Dutroux, a previously convicted rapist and pedophile is also charged with killing a fifth victim, anaccomplice who Dutroux claims allowed the girls to die from starvation during their captivity in a secret dungeon. In court, Dutroux admitted to the raping of the kidnapped girls, some were as young as eight, but he denies killing them. The bodies of the girls and the accomplice were found on Dutroux’s property. Police also rescued two girls, ages 12 and 14, found alive in a cage in Dutroux’s house. Dutroux admitted to raping the twelve-year old victim at least twenty times during her seventy-nine-day captivity. Belgians have been angrily protesting the eight-year delay of the trial amidst allegations of the existence of a highly placed and powerful pedophile ring in that country.
    In another case, in October 1997 Belgian authorities charged a man identified as Andras Pandy—a seventy-year-old Protestant pastor from Hungary—with the murder of two of his ex-wives and four of his children. His daughter, Agnes, confessed to helping him kill five relatives—her mother, two brothers, a stepmother, and her daughter—and is now being investigated for possible links to the disappearance of others in the family. Authorities have also linked Agnes to the disappearance in 1993 of a twelve-year-old girl whose Hungarian mother had a relationship with Pastor Pandy. It was reported that Andras Pandy fostered an undetermined number of orphaned or homeless Romanian children in his home in Brussels. The children—who became orphaned or homeless in Romania’s 1989 revolution that toppled communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu—were taken in by a charity club named YDNAP (PANDY backward) founded by the pastor. They stayed under his care for varying periods of time, “and nobody knows what happened to them or if they returned home.”
    Also in Belgium, police admitted they were nowhere near finding the serial killer who scattered up to thirty bags of severed and precisely measured body parts of six women around the city of Mons. The city’s public prosecutor’s office said eight inspectors and a police