Il Mostro: The Monster of Florence

by Johnny Sharp, Marilyn J. Bardsley (Editor)

Between 1968 and 1985, a monstrous serial killer stalked the picturesque Italian countryside around Florence, shooting and mutilating eight couples on moonless nights in dark lovers’ lanes. The desecration of the women’s bodies was a scene beyond the wildest imaginations of movie scriptwriters. Il Mostro tells the exceptionally bizarre and twisted tale about a city gripped by fear, dozens of suspects arrested, a string of charges and convictions followed by embarrassing acquittals and pardons, and an ever-raging whirlpool of theories, rumors and conspiracy that still divides Italians to this day. The anonymous assailant, called The Monster of Florence or Il Mostro di Firenze, has since become infamous, and the enduring mystery he has created has all the hallmarks and enduring intrigue of a modern-day European Jack the Ripper. Most disturbingly of all, it’s just possible that he may still be at large … The problem is that after a quarter of a century of failure, it would be a brave detective indeed who took the plunge back into the impossibly murky waters of this uniquely baffling case. The politics, egos, rivalries, conspiracy theories and other agendas that have hampered the various investigations would still overshadow any new search for the killer. The investigation also has intriguing links to the 2008 murder of British student Meredith Kercher, for which American student Amanda Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted and then freed. The same Perugian judge who propagated outlandish theories of Satanic sex rituals in that case also used such ultimately baseless hypotheses to falsely accuse many prominent Italians of these serial killings, and even threatened to arrest an American writer who was planning a book on the case. The story once more proves the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Indeed, the story is currently being made into a major Hollywood movie, The Monster of Florence, starring George Clooney, scheduled for a 2013 release. Johnny Sharp is a British investigative journalist who covers music and sports. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Independent newspapers and to BBC Online. He first became interested in the Italian serial killer case while traveling in Italy in the late 1980s, and has since followed the seemingly never-ending investigation for more than 20 years.

100 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 23, 2018