Il Mostro

The Monster of Florence
Other names	Il Mostro (The Monster), The Surgeon of Death, Il Mostro di Firenze, The Monster of Florence
Killings
Victims	14-16 (sources differ)
Span of killings	August 21, 1968–September 7–8, 1985
Country	Italy
Date apprehended	Unapprehended

The Monster of Florence, also known as Il Mostro or Il Mostro di Firenze, is an epithet commonly used for the perpetrator, or perpetrators, of 16 murders, nearly all of them couples, that took place between 1968 and 1985 in the province of Florence, Italy. The same gun and pattern were used in all the murders.

Four local men – Stefano Mele, Pietro Pacciani, Mario Vanni, and Giancarlo Lotti – were arrested, charged, and convicted of the crime at different times. However, these convictions have been criticized and ridiculed in the media; critics suggest that the real killer or killers have never been identified. Several other suspects were arrested and held in captivity at various times, but they were later released when subsequent murders using the same weapon and methods cast doubt on their guilt.

Particularly, Pacciani was suspected to be guilty according to the modus operandi similarities between monster's victims and a man murdered by Pacciani in 1951 (in which he was condemned to prison for 13 years) who loved his old-time girlfriend.

The English author Magdalen Nabb wrote the 1996 novel The Monster of Florence based on her extensive research and documents from the actual case. Although the book is a work of fiction, Nabb states that the investigation in the novel was real and the presentation as fiction was a protective measure. In their 2008 non-fiction book The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi suggested the same perpetrator that Nabb had identified: Antonio Vinci (the nephew and son of two Sardinian brothers each suspected of being the Monster) as a likely candidate for being the real killer. Vinci denied this in a Dateline NBC interview with Stone Phillips.

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Wikipedia