Crimehub: A True Crime Podcast · Crimehub Studios

The Monster of Florence: Italy's Jack the Ripper | Part 1

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Ballistics linked the 1974, June 1981, and October 1981 killings to the same .22-caliber Beretta rounds.

Florence becomes the center of a serial murder case that darkens the Tuscan countryside. Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples are killed in parked cars in the rolling hills around the city, and that geography shows how beauty and danger sit side by side. The killings become one of the costliest criminal investigations in Italian history. Each time it seems the nightmare is over, Florence gets a brief breath of relief, then the case opens up again. Police believe at different points that they have captured the killer. That mistake matters, because every false ending makes the next murder feel even harsher. The story follows how investigators consider the possibility of a sexual predator in the area, while rumor, false accusations, and investigative rivalries start to pile up. It also tracks the social world around lovers in parked cars and the voyeurs who prowled the same rural roads. Some of those watchers used suction cup microphones and night vision cameras. That scavenging attention gives the sense that the hills were already full of eyes before the murders began. Investigators recover five .22-caliber Beretta long-rifle shell casings from the car. The rounds are matched to a defective firing pin, leaving a distinctive mark on the shell rim. Ballistics experts compare the evidence to older cases. No match appears. The search widens anyway. More than 100,000 men are investigated, and more than a dozen are arrested. The story treats those numbers as proof of how fear spreads outward and damages ordinary lives. False accusations, investigative rivalries, and suicides become part of the case's shadow. Eventually the murders are closed as isolated, and the case stays shut for nearly seven years. By the end, the story leaves Florence in that uneasy space between closure and certainty, where the worst answer is that the danger may still be unfinished.

As heard by us

A bleak, patient study of how Florence was kept in fear by false closure.

The Monster of Florence: Italy's Jack the Ripper | Part 1 uses the Tuscan hills as a grim stage for a case that denied the comfort of closure.

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Why you'd press play

You want a Florence serial-killer case that keeps collapsing the moment police think it is solved.

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