Free The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb Page B

victims were transported to the Medico-Legal Institute where an autopsy revealed that both had died from gunshot wounds whilst still inside the car. Successively, the man had received three stab wounds, two of them near the neck and superficial, the third a deeper wound in the chest. The excision of the girl’s pudenda had been done with an extremely sharp knife. The clothing, particularly the belt, jeans and pants, had been slashed with great precision and decisiveness, denuding in one stroke the area to be excised without the slightest damage to the underlying skin. According to the pathologist, Professor Mario Forli, this implied some skill and experience on the part of the murderer. Further, the cleanness of the cuts excising the pudenda and the evenness indicated an ability in the use of cutting instruments and that in his opinion this constituted a point of considerable, even decisive importance. A witness saw a car, a red Taurus, parked a few metres from the scene of the crime that night.
   The ballistics reports indicated that the two people were killed by a minimum of seven wounds from a firearm and that the said firearm was a Beretta 22-calibre automatic pistol used in the Galli/Palladini murder of 1974. The ammunition was also of the same type, Winchester H, but in this case the bullets were not copper coated.
Oct 1981
Only a very few months were to pass before the next murder of a courting couple. Silvio Benci and Sara Contini went out on the evening of Thursday 22nd October because there was to be ageneral strike the next day so they needn’t get up for work. At the end of their evening out, they parked their car in a country lane between the vineyards near Calenzano to the north of Florence. Their bodies were discovered lying on each side of their VW Golf, the man half naked and riddled with bullet and stab wounds; the girl lying supine near the edge of a ditch with similar wounds and the pubis excised. Dr. Forli concluded in his autopsy report that both had been shot through the front window on the passenger side of the car and that they were still alive when the first stab wounds were inflicted. The knife was single edged, approximately 3 cm wide and not less than 5–7 cm long. The bodies showed signs of having been dragged.
   The excision appeared to have been done with the same knife as the stabbing, but differed from the preceding murder in that it was done with considerably less precision and took in a much larger area so that the abdominal wall had been cut through all its layers, leaving a large area of the abdominal cavity exposed and part of the intestine punctured.
   Ballistics reports identified the same Beretta 22 used in the two preceding murders. A red Alfa GT was seen leaving the scene by two couples approaching it in search of somewhere to park. An Identikit was prepared from their description of the lone male driver.
1982
The murderer struck again on 19th June 1982 at approximately 23.45 in the countryside near Montespertoli to the south west of Florence. This time the victims of the Beretta 22 Long Rifle were Piero Merlini and Anna Montini, both residents of Montespertoli. They had parked in a little clearing off the country road where a stream ran parallel to the road on the opposite side. For the first time, the killer made a mistake. He failed to shoot the young man to death in seconds as he had always done before. Merlini, badly wounded but still capable of movement, managed to start his car and tried to drive away. In his panic-stricken attempt to back out of the clearing he overshot the road and backed his car into the stream where itstuck. The killer calmly following him, shot out the front lights with one bullet each. After emptying his pistol into the two victims he smashed the rear lights with some pointed object and removed the car keys which he tossed away. The killer was sufficiently disturbed by the episode as to leave without further damage to the bodies. In fact,