The Monster of Florence Read Online Free PDF

was in fact a Peeping Tom, that he had been out and about the evening of Saturday, June 6, and had, in fact, parked his red Taurus not far from the scene of the crime. “And so what?” he went on. “I wasn’t the only one out that evening spying on couples in the area. There were a whole bunch of us.” He went on to say that he knew well the copper Fiat belonging to Giovanni and Carmela: it came often and was known as a “good car.” He had watched them more than once. And he knew for a fact that there were other people nosing around that field the night of the crime. He was with one of those people for quite a while, who could vouch for him. He gave the police the man’s name: Fabbri.
    A few hours later Fabbri was hauled downtown to police headquarters to see if he could confirm Spalletti’s alibi. Instead, Fabbri stated that there was a period of an hour and a half, right around the time of the crime, when he was not with Spalletti. “Sure,” Fabbri told investigators, “Spalletti and I saw each other. As usual we met at the Taverna del Diavolo,” a restaurant where the Indiani would gather to do business and swap information before going out for the evening. Fabbri added that he saw Spalletti again at the end of the evening, a little after eleven o’clock, when Spalletti stopped on his way down Via dell’Arrigo. Spalletti must have therefore passed not ten meters from the scene of the crime at around the time investigators estimated it occurred.
    There was more. Spalletti insisted that he had immediately returned home after greeting Fabbri. But his wife said that when she went to bed at two o’clock in the morning her husband had still not come back.
    The interrogators turned back to Spalletti: where had he been between midnight and at least 2 a.m.? Spalletti had no answer.
    The police locked Spalletti up at the famous Florentine prison of Le Murate (“The Immured Ones”), accusing him of
reticenza
, reticence—a form of perjury. The authorities still did not yet believe he was the killer, but they were sure he was withholding important information. A few days in jail might just shake it out.
    Forensic crime scene investigators went over Spalletti’s car and house with a fine-toothed comb. They found a penknife in his car and in the glove compartment a type of gun called a
scacciacani
, a “dog flattener,” a cheap pistol loaded with blanks for scaring off dogs, which Spalletti had bought through an ad on the back of a porn magazine. There were no traces of blood.
    They interrogated Spalletti’s wife. She was much younger than her husband, a fat, honest, simple country girl, and she admitted that she knew her husband was a Peeping Tom. “Many times,” she said, weeping, “he promised me he’d stop, but then he’d get back into it. And it’s true that the night of June 6 he went out to ‘have a look,’ as he used to call it.” She had no idea when her husband had returned, except that it was after two. She went on, protesting that her husband had to be innocent, that he could never have committed such a terrible crime, since “he’s got a terror of blood, so much so that at work, when there’s been a highway accident, he refuses to get out of the ambulance.”
    In the middle of July, policed finally charged Spalletti with being the killer.
    Having first broken the original story, Spezi continued to cover it for
La Nazione
. His articles for the paper were skeptical and they pointed out the many holes in the case against Spalletti, among them the fact that there was no direct evidence connecting him with the crime. Nor did Spalletti have any connection to Borgo San Lorenzo, where the first killing occurred in 1974.
    On October 24, 1981, Spalletti opened the paper in his prison cell and read a headline that must have brought him great relief:
    THE KILLER RETURNS
    Young Couple Found Brutally Murdered in Farmer’s Field
    By killing again, the Monster himself had proved the innocence of the