By the summer of 1984, 19-year-old Pia Rontini was still relatively new to her job as a barmaid at La Nuova Spiaggia in her hometown of Vicchio, 17 miles northeast of Florence, and she was still not used to some of the less-welcome attention she received from customers.
She confided to a friend that one man in particular appeared to follow her after she left work. Some weeks later, a restaurant owner in nearby San Piero a Sieve would tell of seeing a man watching Pia intently one afternoon around that time as she enjoyed a drink with her 20-year-old fiancé, Claudio Stefanacci.
Piazza in San Piero a Sieve
Photo by sailko
Such incidents may have seemed a little odd, but not enormously significant, nor did the moment at around 9:40 PM on the night of July 28, when a farmer living a few miles outside Vicchio heard several loud bangs from a scooter backfiring.
At least, that’s what he thought he heard.
In the hours that followed, Claudio’s mother became alarmed that her son had not returned home, and called Pia’s family. When they said they hadn’t seen the pair since just after 9 PM, Signora Stefanacci contacted the couple’s friends. Some of the youngsters who had seen Claudio and Pia earlier knew they had been heading out into the night for a romantic drive. These young people also knew what terrible dangers lurked for couples brave enough to venture into those hills in search of intimacy.
They headed out to look for their friends, and when the increasingly frantic search finally ended by some woods known as La Boscetta in the early hours of the morning, their worst fears were confirmed.
Inside Claudio’s sky-blue Fiat Panda they found the young student, shot three times and repeatedly stabbed. A short distance away, in an open field only a couple of hundred meters from the farmer’s home, they found Pia. The Monster’s trademark mutilation had been performed on her partially clad body, and this time, there was a sickening new horror to behold. He had hacked off the girl’s left breast.
Pia Rontini & Claudio Stefanacci
Victims
The Monster was still at large, and his murderous rituals were becoming even more twisted.
At least there was more evidence for investigators to go on. Knee prints had been found in the dust on the car door at around 24 inches high, suggesting, again, a man of 5’10” or more.
Almost immediately, the now-familiar sense of shock among the local community darkened into fury at the authorities’ evident failure to catch the killer, although their arrest list had long since reached double figures.
The pressure on the police was intense. Perhaps inevitably, it led to conflict among those tasked with bringing the Monster to justice. Public opinion had reached a rather arbitrary consensus that the killer must be some kind of medical practitioner, perhaps a gynecologist.
In such a deeply religious country, popular suspicion was also widespread that some form of occult rituals could explain the mutilation of the victims. Meanwhile, the apparent cunning and cool execution of the killer’s work led many to conclude that the killer must be from the upper echelons of society, perhaps an intellectual or high-ranking professional.
The interest in the case was so intense that some even took to roaming the woods vigilante-style in the hope of catching the killer in the act. The elusiveness of this phantom-like figure was so enduring that they probably had as much chance as traditional crime-prevention agencies of finally catching the Monster.
Unless, of course, the killer was someone that you could just walk by in any situation and never, for a second, suspect that he might be up to no good.
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