March 01, 2011
The Monster of Florence. A True Story
Preston, Douglas and Spezi, Mario. Pub. 2008
That’s right! She is in Perugia. And so, it’s not until the reader reaches the Afterward on page 315 of the paperback version that some semblance of believability enters the reader’s mind on this tale. For it is in the Afterward (added in 2009) that Douglas Preston reveals the coincidental morsel that the same chief prosecutor involved in the Monster of Florence case for so many years is the very same chief prosecutor, Judge Giuliano Mignini, involved in the murder case of American college student Amanda Knox. Even if one is only marginally informed about her situation, one detects at best incompetence, at worst conspiracy in the handling of her arrest and conviction for the murder of her British roommate in 2007. Today, Amanda is serving a 26-year prison sentence and at this point, who really knows who committed the crime as there are as many missed trails, questionable witnesses and contaminated evidence as there have been in the forty plus years since the first murder attributed to the Monster of Florence.
The story takes place in one of the most serene and beautiful landscapes in the world, the hills of Tuscany, Italy where since 1974 young couples have been discovered in their parked cars: the male shot in the head, the female stabbed and vaginally mutilated. Totaling fourteen people and one other female later linked to the same criminal, the victims’ murderer is still unaccounted for although several men have been held, tried and later released. Indeed, the comings and goings of the arrests, releases and trials involved in this story are no less numerous than the court appeals of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dicken’s Bleakhouse.
The story was written by Douglas Preston, already a renowned thriller fiction author and Mario Spezi, the crime reporter for La Nazione, the city newspaper in Florence. Spezi had more information and documentation on the crimes than anyone, except possibly the dysfunctional legal system (much of which was likely fabricated) since it was Spezi who was among the very first on the scene of the first murder and every one of the ensuing murder scenes. Spezi has a nose for detail and an ability to sniff out clues that other journalists and evidently police don’t seem to catch on to. His long tenure on the crime beat also afforded him intimate contacts in the police and coroners’ offices. It was Spezi who “christened” the killer il Mostro di Firenze, Spezi who came to be known locally as the papers’ “Monstrologer” and Spezi who himself would be arrested, tried, and absolved as an accessory to the crimes and even rumored to be the murderer himself! Preston too was harassed by the authorities as an accessory and escaped back to the safety of Maine to avoid arrest. Even today, he cannot return to Italy.
Theories and accusations in the beautiful city of Florence came from all comers, including fears that the killer must be a gynecologist because of the surgical nature of the mutilations. Most baffling, about the investigation and court proceedings was the attention given by the justice system to a cloying, vociferous blogger named Gabriella Carlizzi, who ran a conspiracy website. It was Carlizzi who propounded the idea that the murderer was a member of a secret ancient Masonic cult, which was behind everything from the kidnapping of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, a Belgian pedophile ring and the September 11 attacks on New York. It was she who led the prosecution’s trail toward a vast, secret society of wealthy and powerful individuals who wanted the body parts for satanic and human sacrificial rituals, eventually including Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi in that group, leading to their legal troubles.
The Monster of Florence oddly mirrors the fictional book Hannibal by Thomas Harris, which is also set in Tuscany and Florence and uses the environs to describe that criminal’s sojourn in Europe. Throughout The Monster of Florence, the native citizens recall with pleasure the author’s stay in their city and they lap up every mention of the place in Hannibal. They are not lapping up their real monster, though. The locals have stopped parking their cars in hideaway places to have romance and the later murder victims are travelers and hikers who know nothing of the dangers in the hills.
The Monster of Florence follows the tradition of true crime stories, as a sub-genre of fiction called by some: “faction” for its combination of factual crime and fictional storytelling. First labeled faction with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the genre (or sub-genre) is believed to have earlier roots.1 The term “faction” is an interesting “portmanteau” in it’s linguistic formation of the words “fact” and fiction. Other faction stories I’ve read include Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, The Alienist by Caleb Carr and Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. Until I thought about it for this assignment, I had no knowledge that I was attracted to this genre. In fact, as I read The Monster of Florence I was grateful that although it describes the victims’ circumstances, the author did not dwell on the goriest of imagery, as did Bugliosi or Capote, both of whose descriptions of the crime scenes and reenactment suppositions were particularly horrific.
Other similarities in the genre include the investigator or storyteller. In The Monster of Florence, it is a journalist and a fiction author, but told from a journalistic point of view (a point often employed by both Preston and Spezi in declaiming their innocence of participation in the crimes. Similarly, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is told by a journalist who stumbled upon the story as did Preston. The Alienist is not a true “True Crime” story, since it is actually a fictional story, however, it fits in this category because it includes as a main character Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner of New York at the fin de siècle, the setting of the story and intermixes enough factual information about the new psychological investigative methods and setting to be included.
Like The Alienist, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Monster of Florence make use of the cities they’re based in to great advantage in the telling of the story. Florence and its environs is portrayed as a beautiful, ancient city where anything build later than 1600 is considered new architecture; located in the muted pastoral hills of Tuscany with its vibrant impressionist coloring. Savannah is given full homage to its lovely tree-lined squares and southern charm and New York during the gritty, tough years of The Alienist is portrayed as gloomy, dirty and fearsome. Each of these books’ authors use the setting as a character in the story; an unchanging character, as a backdrop to their stories of continuously changing victims, theories and suspects. The settings are described with such eloquence, as such nearly unearthly paradises that contrast so brutally with the sinister nature of the crimes that only a true novelist could write. And so it is that the reader is drawn into these utopistic environments, making the murders seem so fictional and divorcing the reader from the realities of the gruesome and true nature of the events. Upon finishing these books, the reader is compelled to rush to the internet and research the crimes to ascertain if they really did happen.
These stories are interesting to me, even though I do not at all like vivid descriptions of the criminal’s actions, but for the investigative and analytical quality of the stories as laid out by the author. The puzzle nature of the story is paramount, so I am looking forward to the next paper I will write about: a spy novel, as I have never read one and hope that the puzzle is the framework.
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