The Monster of Florence, or Il mostro di Firenze, is an intriguing new true crime mystery thriller series on Netflix that brings to the screen the story of the most notorious serial killings in the history of Italy. Between 1968 and 1985, 16 young men and women were found murdered in the province of Florence, leading the police on a manhunt for a vile serial killer who had been targeting couples getting intimate inside their cars parked in the countryside. The Monster of Florence essentially takes in-depth looks at the multiple suspects in the case and also tries to trace the beginning of the horrid crimes. While the 4-part series can sometimes appear a bit disjointed and repetitive, it still makes for an entertaining and intense watch.
Spoiler Alert
What is the Series about?
The Monster of Florence begins on the night of 19th June, 1982, at a deserted spot on the outskirts of the city of Florence, where a young couple, Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini, stop their car to make love before they have to return to their respective homes. Antonella is admittedly scared of such deserted places, because the news programs have been warning citizens of a serial killer possibly being on the loose, but Paolo assures her that they are parked very close to the main road and can easily drive away if they have to. However, in the moment of their intense passion, the couple do not notice a dark figure walking towards their car swiftly. By the time they take notice, and Paolo attempts to drive away, it is all too late. The stranger quickly pulls out a handgun and shoots the youngsters but has to flee the scene when other cars on the main road stop to check on the matter.
As the crowd notices the bodies and immediately calls the police to the scene, Antonella is found to have died from the gunshots, but Paolo is still alive, and so he is rushed to the hospital for treatment. When Assistant District Attorney Silvia Della Monica arrives with the police, she is confident that the couple had just been attacked by the serial killer dubbed the Monster of Florence, and it is related to the case that she has been investigating with the police for many years now. Although Paolo Mainardi dies just minutes after being taken to the hospital, Silvia decides that the public must be given a sliver of hope with regard to the case, especially since word had spread about how Paolo was the first-ever witness to the Monster of Florence. Therefore, she herself lies to the press, saying that Paolo had given the police crucial information about the perpetrator’s appearance, which she promises will be used to identify the serial killer.
But in the background, Silvia desperately searches for a pattern in the 4 gruesome murders that had taken place in a similar fashion, where a young couple had been attacked, with the man killed first and the woman’s corpse, especially the private parts, often mutilated. This is when she realizes that the weapon used in the first murder in this series, in 1974, was the same one that had been used in an earlier double murder that took place in the small town of Signe, in 1968. Believing that revisiting this murder case and its clues will help them catch the Monster of Florence, Silvia and her team set out to identify the man who had been charged with the double murder, a certain Stefano Mele.
What does Stefano Mele reveal to the detectives?
As the detectives first go to the correctional home where Stefano Mele has been incarcerated, he opens up about the murder of his wife, Barbara Locci, and a tale of extreme misogyny and abuse unfolds before us. When Stefano’s family had arranged his wedding with a local woman named Barbara Locci in 1959, her first instinct had been to run away on the very day of the marriage, for she loved someone else and did not want to be married into the Mele family. Always an extremely timid and meek man, Stefano decided to do nothing about this situation, for he too had not been keen to marry, and so his brother and cousins stepped in to stop Barbara and drag her back to the house, as they had already paid her family a significant dowry for the marriage.
This marriage was never a normal one, owing to the extremely hateful and lecherous nature of the men in the Mele family, with Stefano’s father even making sexual advances on his new daughter-in-law. His mother also actively supported her husband’s and son’s actions, with misogyny ingrained in her as well, due to the societal perspectives of the time. But Barbara was not one to put up with such horrible acts, and she not only struck her father-in-law to stop his lecherous move but also demanded that she and Stefano be built a new house to stay in. The vile old man, who had never been told no, was appalled by such a response and obviously took offense, but did sell off his old house to give Stefano and Barbara a new apartment to settle in.
Although the first few months that the couple stayed by themselves were quite happy, Stefano’s meek nature and his financial struggles soon gave birth to a slew of problems. Stefano decided that they needed to rent out a room in their apartment, and he brought a friend from his workplace (a construction lot) named Salvatore Vinci in to be the couple’s new roommate. But within just a few days of moving in, Salvatore started acting erratically, and he crossed all lines when, on one night, he entered the couple’s bedroom and assaulted Barbara while Stefano sat and cried in the kitchen, unable to muster the courage to stop the rape of his wife. This highly unnatural act broke all essence of matrimony between the couple and affected them in strange ways.
Stefano started seeing his wife as a lowly, immoral woman desperate for male attention, while Barbara was shocked at her husband’s inability to protect or defend her. She seemingly developed very low self-esteem clearly out of the shock and guilt of the event, for which she had not even been responsible. Either way, Barbara became pregnant, supposedly with Salvatore’s child, and while the man was no longer in the picture, his brother, Francesco, came to visit them a few years later. Stefano suspected that Barbara instantly grew attracted towards Francesco, and they even started going out together, which was indeed witnessed by a number of the townsfolk.
Sometime later, Barbara went out with a different man, her new boyfriend, since she and Stefano were married only on paper by this time, with no regard for the sanctity of their marriage, at least from her side. Incidentally, Barbara took her young son, Natalino, along with her for the date night with her boyfriend, Antonio Lo Bianco. It was on this very night, when the couple had stopped their car in a desolate area away from the main road, put the boy to sleep in the backseat, and started making love, that someone walked up to the car and shot them numerous times, killing them on the spot. It was Natalino who, after waking up, ran to a nearby house and informed them about what had happened, and the police were then alerted. A few days after the investigation began, Stefano Mele went to the police and confessed to having killed his wife and her boyfriend, out of anger and jealousy, with the .22 caliber Beretta handgun that he owned. The gun had crucially never been found by the police, and Stefano had claimed that he had disposed of it in a ditch near the crime scene.
Why is Francesco Vinci let go by the police?
When Silvia Della Monica and her team now interrogate Stefano Mele once more and comply with his demand to be allowed to see his son Natalino (it is unclear whether he is his biological son), he reveals a different story, one that he had kept a secret from the police all those years ago. When Barbara and Francesco Vinci had started going out, they had been very serious about being in a relationship and even marrying. Francesco had threatened Stefano into agreeing to such an arrangement, and the husband obviously did not fight back. But the issue was that Francesco himself had a wife, Melis Vitalia, who had found out about his affair and filed a complaint against him for having abandoned her. Soon, Francesco was sentenced to 6 months in prison for the minor crime, and he was out of the picture.
According to Stefano’s new statement, Francesco had apparently grown jealous over his lover, Barbara, having gone out with numerous men in town while he was in prison. He was particularly angry at her for having a new boyfriend, Antonio Lo Bianco, and so it was apparently Francesco who came up with the idea of killing the couple on that fateful night, and he had ordered Stefano to accompany him so that the husband could be blamed for the crime. Interestingly, as soon as the police lied to the press in 1982 about having found crucial clues about the perpetrator’s physical appearance, Francesco fled his house in Florence, leaving his wife alone and calling her up to direct her about what to tell the police and what to keep secret.
It does not take long for the police to find Francesco at present and arrest him based on the phone records, but he now tells a different story. Francesco admits to having been angered by Barbara’s habits, especially as his brother, Salvatore, whom he hated tremendously, told him that he had slept with Barbara once again. As a result, Francesco confronted and publicly shamed Barbara as well, but he did not play any part in her murder. One of the clues that the police have against Francesco is that he owned a similar Beretta handgun to the one used to kill Barbara and then all the other 4 couples in the next 14 years, but the fact that hundreds of men own such a gun in the very province means that they need more incriminating evidence. Francesco’s seemingly evasive movements after the police’s lie to the press in June of 1982 also made him look suspicious, but nothing concrete could be found in this regard either.
Nevertheless, the Florence police took no chances and arrested him immediately and kept him behind bars, only for another killing to take place in September of 1983, while Francesco was in police custody. A gay couple from Germany, Wilhelm Meyer and Jens Rusch, had been making love in their van when they were attacked and killed with gunshots and also stab wounds. This confirmed that Francesco could not have been the real Monster of Florence, so he had to be released by the police ultimately.
Who were the Mele family members suspected of the crimes?
As soon as this new crime takes place, and Francesco has to be released, the police confront Stefano, as he must have sold them a lie, and he now admits to having done so, changing his story once again. Stefano says that he had taken Francesco’s name only because he himself had been jealous of the man for having stolen his wife away and so had tried to take revenge. However, in an interview after being released, Francesco tells a reporter that it is uncommon to try and take revenge for something that had happened 14 years ago, and he is confident that Stefano had lied in order to protect someone else. The police stumble upon a completely new suspect when a local woman named Iolanda Libbra runs into a police station late one night to file a complaint against Stefano’s elder brother, Giovanni Mele. Iolanda reports how she had gone out for a date night with Giovanni, only for him to act extremely oddly and suspiciously, which had made her fear for her life and run to the authorities at the earliest opportunity.
According to Iolanda, Giovanni had taken her to a bar, where they had a few drinks, and had then driven her to the spot of the first official crime of the Monster of Florence, where teenagers Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini had been brutally murdered in 1974. Giovanni had then started blurting out detailed facts about the murder, as if he was obsessed with all the details, and even made Iolanda lie at the exact same spot where Stefania was murdered, only so that he could pretend to stab her 97 times, just like the real perpetrator had done. Then, he took her to a local cemetery, where he tried to make love to her and angrily walked away when she refused. Iolanda had quickly searched the trunk of his car to find knotted ropes and sharp weapons like knives and scalpels alongside pornographic magazines, which made her believe that she had mistakenly gone out with the Monster of Florence.
The collection of sharp weapons, the knotted ropes, a diary with traces of human blood and hair, and the magazines became the most significant clues that the police found against Giovanni. His habit of returning to Florence from his workplace on weekends and public holidays also matched with the dates that the Monster of Florence had killed his multiple victims, and Giovanni did not even have an alibi for the nights of the murders. To make matters even more suspicious, a handwritten note was found on Stefano by the police in 1983, which contained an instruction, seemingly written by Giovanni, to direct the investigation away from the Mele family and towards Francesco, suggesting that he had acted on his brother’s orders.
According to the police’s theory at this stage, Giovanni and Stefano had together killed Barbara, upon the former’s orders, as he and his parents felt that Barbara was bringing shame and scandal to their family. During an interrogation a year after the murder, Natalino had told the police that both his father and his uncle, Piero Mucciarini, had been present at the crime scene. It is suggested in The Monster of Florence that Piero Mucciarini, who was Giovanni and Stefano’s brother-in-law, belonged to a circle of voyeuristic creeps in the area who often sneaked on young couples making love inside their cars, even taking sound recordings for future use. Therefore, both Giovanni and Piero are now arrested by the police, and the former is put behind bars on suspicion of being the Monster of Florence.
But just like before, the next murder takes place in July of 1984, when Giovanni Mele is in prison, and Piero Mucciarini is also nowhere near the crime scene. A young couple, Claudio Stefanacci and Pia Gilda Rontini, are murdered in Vicchio, a small town in the province of Florence, with the same mutilation of Pia’s body that had become the trademark of the Monster of Florence. Thus, Giovanni too had to be released, as this was conclusive proof of him not being the serial killer.
Is Salvatore Vinci the real serial killer?
After repeated failures, the police decide to further interrogate the one remaining man who had once been close to Barbara Locci—Salvatore Vinci. In fact, Salvatore was believed to have killed his first wife by exposing her to toxic gas, but he could not be charged for the crime as he had successfully made it look like a suicide. According to this theory, Salvatore, a closeted homosexual, grew close to Stefano Mele and even started a sexual relationship with him after moving into his apartment. When Barbara showed clear signs of not supporting their affair, Salvatore forced himself upon her, only to threaten her into staying quiet and not telling anybody about his and Stefano’s secret relationship. The two men then supposedly continued to force Barbara into their intimate acts, but he left once she revealed that she was pregnant.
Salvatore was back in her life once again a few years later, but when Barbara refused to feel threatened by him anymore, he decided to kill her and took Stefano along with him. Another woman, Rosina Massa, is also spoken to, as she was the second official wife of Salvatore, and she further reveals the extent of his perverse and sociopathic nature. Salvatore apparently made Rosina get intimate with other men so that he could watch and derive pleasure, and then when the woman finally decided to leave with their children, he was left with a hole in his life. The dates of Rosina leaving her husband, returning after some time, and then permanently leaving him again do coincide with the dates of the murders, but there is still no solid evidence against Salvatore. However, when a French couple, Jean Kraveichvili and Nadine Mauriot, are found dead in their camp, and Detective Silvia Della Monica receives a letter with the flesh of Mauriot attached to it, the police decide to take the threat seriously. They arrest Salvatore Vinci on the charge of being the Monster of Florence and state that he had procured a Beretta gun from his relative (the only gun that the police could not retrieve from his village) and used it to commit all the murders. In 1988, a court trial finally took place, but the prosecutor’s argument was too dependent on the claim that Salvatore had killed his first wife.
Stefano is brought in to testify, but he claims to not remember that Salvatore had confessed to him about having killed his first wife. This naturally sabotages the whole case, and it is unclear as to whether Stefano does so intentionally or if he truly does not remember this detail from so long ago. The Monster of Florence seemingly even tries to suggest that he refuses to incriminate Salvatore because of the love that had once developed between the two men, but this is not convincing at all. More interestingly, Salvatore Vinci disappeared after he was acquitted in 1988, possibly changing identities and moving elsewhere, but the crimes of the Monster of Florence also stopped after his disappearance.
Has the real Monster of Florence ever been caught?
While The Monster of Florence’s ending suggests that Stefano Vinci had been the real perpetrator who got away only because of a solid lack of evidence, the real case never had any such conclusive finale. The Monster of Florence was never found, let alone caught, and his serial killings still remain the most significant unsolved mystery in Italy. Another man, aside from the ones seen in the show, named Petro Pacciani, was also later considered a suspect because of his past crimes, but no solid evidence against him could be found either. Although Pacciani, and three other men, Mario Vanni, Giancarlo Lotti and Francesco Calamandrei were tried as potential suspects and some of them even convicted in some of the cases, no connection to all the 8 murders could be found with either of them. Pacciani was acquitted on appeal and died before a new appeal trial could be brought against him, while Calamandrei was also ultimately acquitted. The case of the Monster of Florence is widely considered to be still unsolved, and numerous theories, such as the murders having been linked to a cult and having a connection with the Zodiac killer, have also been suggested, although none of them have stuck. Ultimately, The Monster of Florence stresses how such a horrible serial killer could have existed only in the terribly misogynistic society and times of the 1960s to 1980s, with a clear suggestion that each of the men seen in the series could have been the real killer, or perhaps numerous other men like them had come together to take advantage of the previous crimes. Each of the four men, and many more like them, only cared about dominating women and controlling them in whatever twisted way they could think of. Perhaps drawing such a conclusion is all that we can do about the Monster of Florence, as the young couples killed by the vicious killer can seemingly never get justice anymore.
