Who doesn't love a satanic panic. That's a rhetorical question and a troubling one. Welcome back to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. We are introducing a classic episode about satanic panic, not in the United States, but in the Atlantic.
No, that would be good if only if probably the rhyme scheme work.
In Italy out in all of garden countries there you go, yeah.
Wow, well, but actually it makes a lot of sense.
Guys.
Where better to have a satanic panic than where the Catholic Church is located.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They called me Ben. It's good to be back. We joined with our super producer Paul Decint as always and most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Matt, that Ben shaped hole from last time is filled in with a Ben shaped figure.
Oh my gosh, it's filled in so much like he. Not only did he go on adventures and come back, he brought us gifts he did.
Oh thanks, yeah. Behind the behind the curtain, all of our birthdays occur in a very close.
Span of time, totally unplanned.
Totally unplanned. Unless our parents are part of a conspiracy, we have yet to discern.
We were all accidental births as well.
And I did not know that about you, Gil and Uh. One of the practices that I personally like to do, and I highly recommend anyone listening, is that when you celebrate your birthday, the only real New Year's you get, take some time to appreciate your friends and family, give them presents instead. Think of it as a loyalty program, but not as creepy as the big data grocery store cards.
Okay, I think we can all do that.
Wait, are you saying you don't use a Kroger Plus card? Man, I still don't think. But they give you.
Such value and the gash It's.
The only way I can afford food for my family.
It's interesting, though, because if you're old enough to remember the times before the introduction of those cards, the prices were initially lower if you use the card, but then they just upped the prices gradually on all the other products, so you're getting the normal price.
Are seeing taking me for a ride?
I'm saying they're taking your data for a ride, for sure. But speaking of rides, speaking of traveling, I want to thank you guys for doing what I hear is a fantastic episode while while I was away that you told me that, Oh cool.
We got we got through it.
We did, We did get through it. Listeners right in did we did? We say? But be nice?
Yeah?
I can't wait to hear it. It's only the It's only the second episode I've ever missed, and I was. I really missed you, guys, So it's great to be back. And one place that I have not traveled to in all this gallivanting and globe trotting is Italy. Have you guys ever been to Italy?
Not once, but definitely I want to go there. I would very much like to go, but not so much after this episode.
Maybe not to Florence. Right spoilers, Hey, Paul, have you ever been to Italy? Oh my gosh, so Paul just said he's been to Italy and Florence. We might, uh, we might consult you a little bit for some background information today, Paul, what do we think of when we think of Italy just just like off the top of the Dome, first impressions.
Olives there we go.
Yeah, I would say the canals of Venice.
Maybe gondolas also in Venice.
Pizza clearly, the Pope, yeah, making a return, Yes, yeah, the Pope in the Vatican fresh steaming pasta maybe right, And I.
Thought you're gonna say something else.
Perhaps that as well. Let's go the whole nine with the stereotypes. Maybe somebody's singing amore right.
Possibly while piloting a gondola and wearing a black and white striped shirt very similar to the one you wear right now, Ben.
Oh mean, yeah, this one is. I think this is from Korea. It was way hotter there than I thought it would be. But beyond these images we see of Italy, the country also has a dark side, a history of violent murders that some allege border on the occult. And he here are the facts. In today's episode, we're exploring some of the most well known homicide cases in modern Italian history. Will start with the Beasts of Satan and then eventually will meet maybe the Monster of Florence. So
the Beasts of Satan. This is Beast's plural, yes, beasts plural monster singular but asterisk. Yeah, right, so the beast of Satan. This story begins in January of nineteen ninety eight when two young people, two utes of Italy, Fabio Tullis and Chara Marino, disappear. They're teenagers, they're both just around sixteen. They have been drinking at a pub called The Midnight.
Sounds like a respectable neighborhood, watering.
Home, real family place, but no.
As it turns out, it was sort of a meetup spot for folks in like the black metal scene.
Right, yeah, yeah, the real dark stuff.
Which is, you know, the stuff like you hear about with the Swedish death metal bands. Well black metal, I think if we're talking stylistically, black metal has the witchier vocal.
Yeah, it's and death metals more.
Right right there, they were both involved in black metal and death metal. I'm glad you brought up Scandinavia, Noel, because a lot of members of black metal and death metal bands in Scandinavia were implicated in church burnings, right, That's what I was getting to.
And also even like the ones that maybe didn't actually murder each other, like members of the band Mayhem.
I think you may remember hell Hammer, yeah exactly, or that was that a guy or a band?
They all I can never I always confuse them because they all have these crazy names. But there's there's a story where the cover of a Mayhem record I believe, had an actual image of a dude's suicide. Like they walked in and this former band member had blown his brains out and they took a picture of it. And then there was a whole thing where one of the members was implicated and stabbing one of the other members to death many many times.
Then the church burning all in service of Satan, yeah, I guess.
Yeah, or just psychological issues. There was also a little bit of cannibalism alleged in that case.
So let's get let's get back to fab Fabio.
And Kiara Kiara Shara. Yeah, they were as we said, they had sixteen. They were out drinking at the midnight, participating in the heavy metal scene in Milan, and they never came home. A lot of their friends claimed that the two had just run off together, and the police initially seemed to accept this explanation as well. However, Fabio's father, a guy named Michelle Tolis, didn't buy it. He started
doing his own research, which we always applaud. He attended metal concerts in this scene, and he went to festivals not just in Italy but across Europe searching for his son. And as we mentioned, Fabio and those in his circle were into extremely extremely dark metal, the genres of death metal and black metal, both known for their use of gruesome satanic imagery like.
Corpse paint, right, corpse paint?
Yeah, which is the white and black stuff meant to give you a pollor think of a less cartoonish kiss.
Yeah, I mean a little more hardcore. And they were even known for like carrying around severed or dead animals in bags that they would smell before going on.
Stage, a real kind I don't know some of it.
You read these stories and you're like, is this all just for show and kind of just like sort of like an extreme version of punk rock or something, or was their actual satanic ritual going on? Not really clear even when you read the stories about these Scandinavian bands.
Yeah, how much of it is sort of Alice Cooper performative stuff and how much of it is a reflection of their genuine beliefs. The weird thing here is that Fabio was very into this stuff, and it turned out that his girlfriend also had a pretty extensive collection of Satanic literature and quote paraphernalia. So paraphernalia, as we know, is a pretty large term, right yeah, like glass pipes,
right yeah, right, like glass pipes. So this could have been just chalices, could have been pentagrams, could have just been jewelry.
Or things that maybe were even interpreted as Satanic investigators.
Yeah, yeah. And in his search, Fabio's father became convinced that the two had not just disappeared. He became convinced that Satanism had something to do with his son's disappearance. It did not help that Michelle felt his son's former friends grew increasingly squirrely and evasive when he asked them about the disappearance.
His friends, the people who should be there, like worried.
Yeah.
Can we also point out real quick, this is something that's probably obvious to everybody that's that's looked into this stuff. The idea of Satanism is often a huge misnomer because like the Church of Satan and like Anton Levy, it's much more of a it's not a joke religion but it's like much more anti God than pro Satan, or like anti religion in general than pro the deity of Satan.
He's a symbol of.
Like you know, revolution or liberation and kind of libertae, like the French notion of that. So it's interesting to see these things referred to as Satanic panics, like the murders at robin Hood Hills, the Memphis ZIP six.
How many of them were there?
You know those kids there, the documentary is made about them getting railroaded for these supposedly satanic ritualistic murders. Satanism is they're not really about that kind of stuff.
Well, it's okay, So this is an interesting thing. Longtime listeners you'll probably remember how we had covered this in some earlier episodes, I believe. So there's the Satanism that is typically referred to here in the US as exactly what you're describing NOL the Anton Levey do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and that's more about a spiritual liberation from rigid metaphysical hierarchies, right,
whether they're treated as metaphors or actual things. But there's another genre of Satanism called deistic Satanism, meaning that yes, there is a God, yes there is a great adversary, and we're cool with the latter. Yeah, So there is a difference. I think often for people who are experiencing or civilizations, whether they're experiencing a Satanic panic, they're thinking not of the more philosophical free yourself from free yourself
from Christian ideology kind of satanism. They're thinking of the deistic the devil is alive. I hear them breathing kind of satanists.
Oh absolutely.
I think what I was saying was more in reference to the whole idea of the death metal bands and black metal and all that. I don't know that that is necessarily based on like doing any kind of devil worship per se. It's more just like we hate God and hate religion and think what represents is bad for humanity in some way.
Yeah.
And interestingly enough, it's a misnomer that goes beyond the label of Satanism, because a lot of Scandinavian metal bands in particular are rejecting Christianity and in turn embracing a neo pagan approach. So they're worshiping Woden and things like that so to them, Christianity is an impressive force, which historically is very true.
It can be a little heavy handed, as history has shown.
But let's get back into the beasts.
So, as I was saying, Michelle spent six years on his own, out in the cold, on this search, and he was extensively documenting connections between the people his son knew, his quote unquote friends from the metal scene and their areas where they hung out, their haunts, if I could do that word, yeah, their bands and their mutual associates and connections. And in two thousand and four, Michelle is watching the news when he learns of a brutal murder
in a nearby town, Soma, Lombardo. A young man named Andrea Volpe is arrested for killing his ex girlfriend, a woman named Mary Angela Pezzotta, and Vulpe quickly admits to the crime. You got me, I did it, not framed. Michelle, however, recognizes this name. You see. It turns out that Volpe played in a band with Michelle's son, Fabio.
Oh geez.
So six years later, he decides to call the police and they're impressed, but initially they're skeptical. Of course, there's nothing law enforcement hates more than a self appointed law expert. Absolutely, and so they find when he presents his evidence that he has actually done a bang up job with his investigation. They're impressed by the thoroughness of it and the quality.
They actually use his work, his research. When they're interrogating Volpe about the disappearances, and he breaks Yeah, he confesses. He says, your son and his girlfriend didn't just disappear, they were murdered. Furthermore, he tells police, I can show you where they are buried.
Yeah, my god.
And it turns out that this other dude, another one of Fabio's friends, this guy named Mario Macione or Machione, he confessed himself to the murder of these two individuals. He said he'd beaten Fabio to death with a hammer, of all things. And then he also revealed that he was not the only person involved in these murders, and there were actually a group of them, a group of boys. They were part of this network. It was a Satanic community that called itself.
The Beast of Satan?
Was that also the name of their band? Because that is a real missed opportunity.
If it wasn't I believe it was the I believe it was the network's name. It may have been a name for a band as well, but it was definitely the name of this conspiracy, and this is an act of conspiracy. Police also learned that, in addition to murdering these two children, there was a drummer in the metal scene named Andrea Bontade who had been driven to suicide by the same group. They gasled him, they got in his head, they emotionally, mentally terrorized him, until one day
he committed suicide. He ended his life by purposely crashing his car while inebriated. And we have to stop for one note here. It's a little bit difficult in those sorts of cases, is to know for sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a weather a drunk driver meant to kill themselves in a vehicle. Absolutely so, it could have been that he was just depressed and too drunk to drive, But the press and law enforcement treated
it as a suicide. And while this is all happening, Italy at the time, a very conservative, very Catholic country, already has this boiling fear right just simmering right under the surface. And the fear is that there would be some arcane, some hidden, some occulted, occult network, a little wordplay there that is actively undermining the power of the church and is a threat to good Christians or good
Catholics everywhere. And this story, the Beast of Satan, this is the powder keg that ignites in Italian culture, and a genuine Satanic pan hits the zeitgeist. Again, it had already been there under the surface. And if you look at the timeline, similar things are happening in the United States. I'm sure anybody alive during the late eighties early nineties
can recall that. It goes back to Memphis too, like you had just mentioned ol and he goes back to talk shows, Yeah, and it goes back to talk shows too, Matt, You're right, I.
Blame Marilyn Manson.
Oh yeah, you leave Brian out of this.
Oh, haven't seen him lately. He is a mess.
He is a big, old sloppy mess. He's not quite Billy Corgan mess.
Ye.
When I say a mess, I just mean like every time he's on camera talking that he seems like completely drunk at yeah of his mind.
Yeah, fames of Fickle Mistress for sure. And this panic. Yeah, Panic's a good word for it. This panic hit police just as much as it hit the public and the tabloids, so much so that in the course of this event investigation, they decide they will create a special unit focusing on quote new religious sects, particularly Satanist of any variety and
violent quote ritualistic groups. They want to coordinate nationwide investigations into potentially dangerous new religious movements, and they plan to include not only psychologists and investigators, but a priest who is an expert on the occult. That sounds like wow, comic book in the making, doesn't it.
It really does, but it seems like probably the right move if of this is the kind of thing you're targeting.
And if you want to learn more about the context of Italy at this time, check out our episode on the Vatican and exorcism, especially the chief exorcist.
Right what is it? Father a more No, what's his name? Amorth, which you can find a documentary on Netflix on Netflix about right.
Now and he is a very conservative man. He also associates Harry Potter with the rise of Satanism. Several other people are convicted in the trials that result in this beast of Satan investigation, Paolo Leoni, marcos Ampoalo Aros, Manteroso, Elizabeta Ballerin and the leader, a plumber named Nicola Sapone who is not a musician, but is the spiritual guru of this group and is thought to have been the
sort of Charles Manson behind the murders. Right, so maybe not himself wielding the hammer in this case, but being the operative mental force behind it. And this means that in at least one case, although people will say that Satanic panics are often overblown, in at least one case here there was an active Satanic conspiracy occurring in Italy, confirmed,
proven and real, and luckily fortunately officially solved officially. You're right, officially, but that takes us to another case and something even more I guess notorious would be a good word. This is going to contain some graphic sexual content. I want you to know that before heading in. This may not be suitable for all listeners. This is the story of the Monster of Florence.
Which we will get to right after a quick break.
And we're back and we're going to jump into the Monster of Florence. In the nineteen eighties, there were a series of murders, the first of which that was discovered by police. It looked a little something like this, and as Ben mentioned before, this is going to get graphic,
so please stop listening if you need to. Someone was finding that were out in the in the countryside around Florence, and inside these cars there were usually a male and a female who were a bit younger, at least one of them was a bit younger, usually unmarried, and they were engaging in amorous acts in their vehicles.
And it's really interesting.
There's an article, really more of an account, a true crime story called the Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston from the Atlantic, where he points out that for it's just kind of a historical thing in Italy that folks would live with their parents until they got married, and so this culture of like having sex in cars very much a thing. And they were even kind of creepers that were called like Indiani, I believe, which is a little bit of a racially problematic term because it translates
to Indians. It meant kind of people kind of creeping around, you know, so not the best look in terms of racial sensitivity there. But they would even like have like listening devices, and it was like a total culture of this kind of behavior. So I just want to point that out in front, that this wasn't just like an isolated event, and it was a total hunting ground for the person we're about to talk about.
Yes, so lover's lanes.
Yeah, even people who were engaged to be married would still participate in this. So in June of nineteen eighty one, June sixth, this is one of the first cases they find initially, although there's another There are another couple that we'll get to later, a couple of cases. Rather. There's a guy named Giovanni Fogi Foggi. He works at a warehouse. He's thirty years old. His fiancee is I went a
little southern there. His fiance is a shop assistant named Carmela Dinuccio, and they are found shot to death and stabbed near the town where they both live, an area called Scandici. Denuto's body was pulled out of the car, and this is the graphic part. The killer had cut out her pubic area.
Her the entire her reproductive work, and not just cut out like some sort of brutal, you know, blunt instrument act. It was an act of precision, of almost surgical precision.
And the next morning a guy who was known to be one of these peeping Tom characters, a paramedic by trade named Enzo Spillati, went around and apparently was talking in town about the murder before the corpses have been officially discovered. So he gets arrested, just bracket him will
come back. He's in jail for about three months at this time, and the police don't really have any leads, but let me clarify something here, so we said nineteen eighty one, right June of nineteen eighty one, that's when the police find the bodies of Giovanni and Carmela. They also at some point think they're there might be other things occurring. Other murders start happening. In October twenty third of the same year, a couple Stefano Baldi and Susanna Camby,
are also engaged. They're going to be married. They're in a car and they are found shot to death and stabbed. Another wrinkle occurs here because an anonymous person calls Susanna Camby's mother the morning after the murder to talk about her daughter, and a few days before the murder, it turns out Susanna had told her mother that there was someone stalking her, chasing her by car. And then another murder occurs in June nineteenth, nineteen eighty two, Paolo Maynardi
and Antonola Miguelorini. I should say apologies for our pronunciation of the Italian names here also engaged they are. They are found shot to death, but this time the killer does not mutilate the theme victim. She is still alive when she is found, but she dies a few hours later at the hospital. And it looks like when the police are trying to reconstruct this, that the killer drove the car a few feet to hide the vehicle and corpses in a wooded area, but then lost control of
the car and eventually abandoned the scene. And that's when something even more strange happened, because originally now the police believe these murders begin sometime in the eighties, right, But twelve days after that murder, in June of nineteen eighty two, the police in Florence received an anonymous letter.
It's right inside was an aged clipping from La Nazione, which was the paper of note, and it was about a kind of long forgotten double murder from nineteen teen sixty eight, where a man and a woman were slain while having sex in a parked car, and scrawled on the article was a little bit of advice said, take another look at this crime.
And that's it. No fingerprints, no forensic evidence. This was clean. So someone had at least taken the care to make sure it was truly anonymous.
Right.
The nineteen sixty eight murder had previously been considered solved. It occurred on August twenty first a worker, a mason worker named Antonio Lo Bianco and Barbara Locchi were shot to death with a twenty two burretta in a small town west of Florence. Unfortunately, there was a kid asleep in the car. Yeah, woke up, found some other dead. Jesus ran to a nearby house like two in the morning, opened the door, let me in. Get this. I'm tired and my dad's sick in bed. He has to drive
me home. My mom and my uncle are dead in the car. That's right. The woman who was in the car was married, and she was not. The guy she was sleeping with was not her husband. Her husband was a man named Stefano Melee and he was arrested for this crime.
That's right.
He was an immigrant from Sardinia, and they actually did a test on him that showed that he had recently fired a gun, a handgun, and he confessed to doing this murder, these murders in an act of just, you know, complete passionate jealousy.
Hees not premeditated. That that was his initial argument. He would spend six years in jail, and it was considered an open and shut case until other very similar murders occurred, and when the nineteen eighty one murders were committed, and it was demonstrably true that he could not have committed these because he was.
Yeah, he was incarcerated at the time.
Right, he would not have been capable physically doing these murders. And he became the number one interview that Italian journalists wanted to acquire. And then he said something very troubling in an interview with Spezi, which I found in that Atlantic article that think we mentioned earlier. He is pacing around, He seems a little discombobulated, but he mutters, they need to figure out where that pistol is otherwise there will be more murders. They will continue to kill, they will continue.
That's right, folks.
They yeah, a single pistol and they so.
When I take a quick moment to give props to this guy, Mario Spezi, who kind of became a hot shot crime reporter in Italy around this time and was the guy who the inspector in Thomas Harris's sequel to Sounds of the Lamb's Hannibal was based on, and in fact, that story in general was inspired by these cases, and Harris himself went to a lot of the trials and spoke to Spezzi in person and was a big part
of this whole world. And I believe Bezzi was even a little irritated that a spoiler alert for Hannibal, the character that was based on him, gets hung by his own guts out of the balcony of a piazza.
And this statement, this plural statement, they will continue to kill, led journalists and investigators in police to believe that Mele, while responsible for the nineteen sixty eight murder, had not acted alone, had not acted in a fit of passion.
It had not been a spontaneous crime, but rather what they call a diletto des clan, a clan killing which others from what would later be called the Sardinian Circle had participated, so investigators started to theorize that one of the killers had enjoyed this experience in nineteen sixty eight, so much so that he had gone on to become the Monster of Florence, using, in a massive stroke of stupidity,
the same gun. And the next murder cases that proceed after this, after nineteen eighty two on through nineteen eighty three and up to nineteen eighty five, they were all connected by location type by them, you know, people in cars sleeping together, and the same twenty two caliber casings that were found at crime scenes.
And I believe that they all had the same unique signature of the muzzle of that Barretta in question.
Yeah, I think persisted throughout these cases.
That's correct, And we know a little bit about the method of attack. The killer would wait until the couple was engaged in intimate activity so their guard would be down right, and then typically shoot the male first and use a flashlight to both illuminate the vehicle and lower the chances of the killer being clearly identified, and then
they would shoot the female occupant. Then they would use a knife to stab both victims multiple times, which tells us a little bit about the emotional state of the killer, because a gunshot would already have for lack of a better phrase, done the task at least right, depending on how you shoot someone with the twenty two, they could die quite quickly, right, So the stabbing seems to be
an active rage of some sort. Then the body of the female victim was dragged away and the knife was used to mutilate them, the same knife most likely used to do the stabbing after the initial shooting.
Which I think I read would have been the kind of knife that a scuba diver would use that has kind of a hook on it notches. Yeah, and again that very surgical precision. And one of the murders, I think only one, I believe a breast was removed as well, so it was definitely someone who's theorized that they might have been a butcher or possibly someone that had some experience in a surgical theater.
And there was a later correspondence where a single left nipple was mailed to law enforcement.
Yeah, okay, so we haven't got into There's a lot more about this case, and we need to keep exploring, and we'll do that right after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. To this day, as we record this in twenty eighteen, despite multiple investigations, despite numerous trials, the case of the Monster of Florence remains officially unsolved. Multiple people were arrested and even convicted over the years, but further killings using the same gun that twenty two under the same circumstances. While these suspects were imprisoned, ultimately
exonerated them. Investigators questioned more than one hundred thousand people to some degree in hopes of gathering new evidence, and they had numerous suspects. Remember Enzo Spillati we have mentioned earlier. He was the ambulance driver who was initially suspected his car been parked near the scene of the crime, and as law enforcement officers asked him more and more questions, he gave vague, conflicting alibis, probably because he didn't want to say that he was a voyeur part of that
culture we mentioned earlier. More evidence revealed that he had told his wife about this incident before it was announced in the paper. He was charged with two counts of homicide. He was sent to prison to stand trial several months later, However, a new murder led police to believe they got the wrong guy. He was just a creepy dude, not a murderer.
But they also questioned a farmer named Pietro Pazziani, who was a former rapist and murderer who had been arrested in nineteen fifty one when he caught his fiance sleeping with a traveling salesman and killed the guy.
And here's the thing about him too. Even his family, who admittedly hated the guy because he was a drunk and an abusive bully. Even they said, yeah, this guy's the worst, but he didn't do this. And you know, our journalist friend Spetsy also didn't buy it, because you know, these were very precisely carried out acts with that surgical attention to detail.
And this guy was kind of a big, bumbling, drunken buffoon.
Yeah, but they he also investigators thought he was quite intelligent. Investigators thought he was quite.
Intelligent despite his alcoholism.
Yes, and he was. He stated, like, just listen to this, that nineteen fifty one murder where he found his fiance in the car with a traveling salesman. He said in the trial that he he saw the image of her left breast. When he looked in the car and saw her left breast with another man in the car, it sent him into a rage and he killed that man.
Wasn't that one of the things that led them to connect it with him because of the severed left.
Breast and just the you know, his fiance, the love of his life supposedly or whatever was cheating on him and all this, and it's just like the rage that he went through, right, But it.
Was it was the left breast of one of the victims that was removed.
Yes, I get this. At the time of this new investigation, he's already been released after serving check it out, thirteen years in prison for ordering this guy in fifty one. That's it, thirteen years.
So yeah, he's been out of prison for a while.
Yeah, that's the price you pay, thirteen years. Think about it when you're in Italy. But in trial in nineteen ninety four, he is convicted for fourteen of the sixteen counts of murder attributed to the Monster of Florence, all many tied together with the use of this twenty two because there is supposedly a twenty two caliber round found in his garden. More or less the European word for yards that we would use in the States, and this
round matched the rounds used in the monster slains. However, I believe it was Spezi who, when he was on assignment from a television station, videotaped a police officer at the search of the property saying that this is the police officer talking. And the police officer said he believed the chief inspector had planted this round in that guy's garden.
And it was an unspent round.
It was it wasn't a casing, and it certainly didn't have the markings in question of the of the weapon we're talking about.
Right, right, So it's not it's not anywhere near as rock solid as perhaps some factions of law enforcement wanted people to believe. And in nineteen ninety six and Appeal's court overturns this conviction. They say, a lack of solid evidence.
Yeah, and it's crazy because in fact, this is something you just don't even hear happening. The prosecutor who was on the case actually refused to prosecute because it had been such a just an abomination of justice. He said it was something like the level of it was like the work of Inspector Clouseau, the famous bumbling pink panther detective. And he was acquitted and it was sent back to
be retried. But he actually Paciani passed away in February of nineteen ninety eight, or this new trial could could happen.
So there's some stuff that happens before he passes away. Yeah, the investigators, despite the overturning for the lack of evidence, and despite the advocacy of the foreign prosecutor, the investigators still believe that Pacianni is guilty.
Yeah, even though he's you know, it's been overturned.
Right, they believe they've found evidence the monsters not acting alone. And they get a confession from two other guys that are friends of Passianni's.
Yeah, Mario Vanni and gian Carlo Lotti, and they confess, like they sat down and they confessed, Yes, we helped Paciani kill these guys, kill these people. And these two men end up getting convicted for four of the double murders. Vanni was given life in prison and Lottie was given a reduced sentence of twenty six years.
And at this point in the investigation, this is you know, we've gone back a little Passianni is still alive. The investigator believe that Pascianni is the leader of a group of killers, and that's when they begin this retrial. And as we said, days before this retrial, Passianni is found dead in his home, allegedly officially from heart related issues. But there are some questions about that.
Right, oh, big ones, that that tie back into the aforementioned satanic panic of the beasts of Satan case that we talked about at the top of the show.
Was he dead due to simple health issues or was there something rotten in Florence? Right, So, then there's the Sardinian connection, which we mentioned earlier. At one time, the investigation focuses on three Sardinian brothers, Francesco Salvatore and Giovanna Venci. All three had been lovers of the woman who has murdered in nineteen sixty eight, and one or more have
been present at her death. First, the police arrests Francisco in September of nineteen eighty three, with Francesco Vinci in jail, the monster strikes again.
Yep, So it keeps happening.
It keeps happening, and so initially police think, well, maybe one of Francesco's affiliates has committed a new murder matching the mo just to create a false lead, so cold blooded that they said, let's kill two people and make them just to make a red herring.
Right.
So the police arrests Antonio Vinci on firearms charges, which are admittedly kind of trumped up. They're an excuse for them to get him in the room, and they question him intensely, but they're unable to break him and eventually they have to release him. Francesco remains in prison. So the police believe Francesco, while perhaps not be the murderer, knows the identity of the true killer. And then later there's another guy who becomes implicated in this, a fellow
named Ricardo Vitti. Viti's arrested for the suspected murder of several prostitutes in areas of Florence very close to the site of the monster's murders. Currently is not considered the murderer, and a lot of people say that the Italian courts and law enforcement were just trying to get their man to get their case closed. But then, you know, we go back to the thing we've been talking about this entire time, which is is this a lone serial killer
or is this something deeper? Is there a cult at play? Like similar to Berkowitz and the Son of Sam murders. Various investigators and criminologists have all argued that the Monster of Florence homicides are the result of not only a group, but maybe even a group practicing occult esoteric rituals.
Yikes.
Yeah, this whole notion that this man who took the fall for these murders not only wasn't acting alone, but was like the least of the involved parties, that he was something more along the lines of a courier providing these sex organs for the purposes of Satanic rituals or black masses. Right, there's an article in the Guardian called Italian mass killer was quote servant of Satanic sect Yeah.
Yeah, and that comes in two thousand and one, right, pretty pretty recent in consideration of the times in which these murders occurred. And we should also note here that if there's any sand to this, that means the time in which the murders we know about occurred. So, Noel, can you tell us a little bit about what happens in this Guardian article?
I do, but first I need to make a quick correction and I'm so sorry. Earlier I said that it was the journalist who was used as the inspiration for the character in Thomas Harris's Hannibal.
It was actually the chief.
Inspector Ruguero Perugini who was used as that inspiration. So I just want to clarify that real quick. But yes, Italian mass killer was the servant of a Satanic sect. And our Guardian article by Rory Carroll writing from Rome, and like you said in this from two thousand and one, it's just the notion that there was some kind of high level society of Tuscan elite that were carrying out these murders, or at least it was on their behalf.
There was an investigation, a raid that took place in the offices of a leading psychologist who was a member of the Secret Service, and it uncovered computer discs and notes and books and all kinds of things detailing the killings and these men who were rated and weren't necessarily considered suspects, but it kind of points to some kind of deeper cover up involving Paciani, that he was a patsy more or less or that he, you know, maybe did carry out the murders, but it was that it
was at the behest of some much more sinister figures in high society. They were kind of pulling the strings.
Like De trou and the De Troux affair in Belgium exactly.
Yeah, But in this case you've got two guys, Aurelio Metti, he's a psychologist with the Secret Service, and this other dude, Francesco Bruno, who was a leading criminal criminal psychologist, who are actually working on the case of the flor the Monster Florence. And what's alleged here is that these guys were actually kind of withholding certain parts as Pacciani is going to trial and evidence is coming up because they are actually implicated in it or part of the major reasons for happening.
Yeah, and the mystery deepens as well, because in two thousand and four there's another inquiry that reopens. The wife of a or the ex wife of a chemist named Francesco Kalamandre comes forward and accuses her husband, Francesco, her ex husband, of being associated with the killings. There's an article in the Telegraph Monster of Florence killed on Coult's order. In this description. The pharmacist or the chemist is sixty years old, and his home is searched for eleven hours.
Police find ten boxes of pornographic material and associated paperwork, and Francesco is one of thirteen people that are put under investigation. Officials at this point in two thousand and four say they have concrete proof to unmask those behind the murders, and they have been carried out according to a quote precise esoteric ritual. WHOA.
So it goes deeper.
Right, And still, let's say we have to point out still this case is considered officially unsolved, and as crazy as it might sound to say there's some kind of possible occult angle or a cover up recurring, there are a lot of troubling, circumstantial things to this case.
Yeah, And one of them in particular was that in nineteen ninety eight, when Paciani died of this supposed heart attack, a magistrate who was investigating the case, a guy named Paolo Kanesa he'd be, actually said on the record that he believed that this death was the cause of some kind of poisoning to silence him from pointing the finger at the real killers.
And the last lie.
In this article in the Guardian is what kind of leaves me with some chills, and I don't really know where to go from here, but I'm gonna give it to you. Apparently, Pacian he died with quite a bit of assets. He had two homes and about fifty thousand lira in the bank, and the idea is that this was money that he had been paid hush money. And they conjectured that the leader of this sect could have been someone like a doctor or a lawyer, or someone very high up in that society.
So I don't know, yeah, very troubling.
I've found some other strange stuff too, about purported collateral deaths occurring in the Monster of Florence case. You can find in various forms lists of numbers of suspicious murders, deaths, or suicides that surround the case. And there's a lot of i would say, allegation or maybe speculation that these might be related. These are names of everyone from prostitutes to hotel workers, psychists also active or active at the time that they were alive, active wizards, warlocks, magicians. It
gets very fuzzy, very very quickly. And the allegations here again, one of the things that I keep going back to in this case is that the question of collaboration and conspiracy seems pretty it seems very possible. The question to me now is just like, what what is the nature of this group? Is it a group of people who are related to each other and making repeated killings? Is it a group of a network in acting rituals, a network with enough influence to cover it up or keep
it keep it from being officially solved? You know, I think I think off Air Noel you had compared it to True Detective.
Oh yeah, I mean, it's got that.
And then, like we said, Thomas Harris definitely drew a lot of inspiration for this for his fictional book Hannibal. So I mean, it certainly has the stuff of great storytelling.
And I read another. I read another allegation that didn't
relate to clan killings or to serial killers. An article from July twenty seventeen, the Italian Insider mentions the reopening of the Monster of Florence murders and also mentions a new suspect, a guy named Jimpario Vigilante, who was eighty six years old at the time, and the investigation argues that this series of murders occurs to function as a false flag, a pieta neetra, meaning that according to the lawyers arguing this Vieira Rani, he says that the crime
serve as distractions for magistrates and public opinion from what was happening in Italy during the strategy of Tension, the series of terrorist acts throughout the seventies and eighties committed by right winging extremists, such as the Bologna bombing, which aimed to shift the blame onto communists to call communist movements to gain support for right wing causes.
Wow, that's a big conspiracy.
Yeah, you gotta like the simplicity of it, right, And they were like, ah, what if the game mousetrap was what if we just did that?
Yeah?
But what if that's actually what happened.
I don't know, it seems it seems sort of far fetched, doesn't it.
It certainly does.
I mean, I guess we could see some of that tail wagging the dog in other journalistic aspects, but it seems like a lot to murder people because whatever the motivation of the cause is, the truth is that real people did die, and that seems it seems like actually murdering people is going a bit far to distract from this. But again, the Bologna ball meme was a real thing. So we have at this point no official conclusions or answers.
And I don't know what do you guys think? Do you think there's U Do you think there's a cover up afoot?
Yes?
I think there is. There was some kind of cover up, But you know, there are two guys who went to jail for most of it, and maybe they were just Patsy's, but they did give confessions.
I think weird rich dudes do stuff like this all the time. Probably, I'm not kidding. I really wait, really, Oh, I definitely do.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean I think any I think as perverse and twisted a thing as you can imagine. Somebody is paying a bunch of money to do it and are able to continue doing it because of their position of power and prominence.
I have no doubt in my mind that's true.
I argue that there's another force. I bet that could be true, But I argue there's another force that actively aids and a bets this, which is that governments and especially intelligence agencies, when they're functioning on rogue level, do encourage these things in order to have I'm not saying these murders in particular, but do encourage illegal activities in order to have dirt on people. It's blackmail later if
you can get somebody in a honeypot situation. I'm not saying it has to be something wild and out there like cannibalism or crazy abuse.
It could just P tape.
Yeah, it could be a P tape. It could be a prostitute, it could be anything like that, and that is a proven tactic of intelligence agencies. We've also heard allegations that that extends to much darker and more twisted territory than the public knows about. But yeah, that's the scary thing about this. We don't have definitive proof that it happened, but we have pretty good evidence that it's plausible, And.
We have pretty good evidence of like the level of depravity that human nature can now push people to.
That's true, especially when it's slowly.
Escal and when they're corrupted by ultimate power. I don't I hate to sound like such a downer on the human race, but man, we've seen some stuff.
Yeah. I would even say just lack of consequences is enough. It might not even have a benefit man. Well, the terrible news is that modern ritual murders do continue to occur in Italy even today. In February of twenty eighteen, an eighteen year old girl named Pamela Mastro Pietro was discovered in two suitcases.
Yes, her dismembered body had been left alongside this rural road near Maserata, Italy. And this is gruesome again here you go. Her heart and internal organs were all missing, and she's been struggling with drug problems. She recently went to this recovery clinic to try and get some help. And she was to some degree familiar with the air as well as the criminal underground that's there, the people who are moving in the shadows giving her pass with drug abuse, yes, just getting it.
So the investigation led law enforcement to the home of a twenty nine year old man named Innocent Osagale.
Well he's fine then, right right.
Right, nominative determinism all the way. He is in a legal immigrant at the time, and he has a criminal record for drug dealing and it was probably still selling drugs at the time. They believed two of his associates are also arrested. Police find blood covered clothing belonging to Mastro Pietro, along with knives and blades with her blood on them, and her body had been washed with bleach.
He had washed his hands with bleach. The absence of her heart, internal organs, and sexual organs led police to suspect the girl may have been sacrificed in what and this is the law enforcement's term and what they called quote some kind of ritual. According to criminologist Alessandro Muluzi, it is a routine to cut victims into pieces and in some cases to eat parts of their body in
this criminal underworld. Mlusi claims that cannibalism is more of a rule than an exception in these situations, and then people often refuse to speak out about the practice due to concerns being called racist. So again we see racism raising its head here in Italy because in these reports we'll see things where someone will say utto immigrants, or murdering people and eating them and whatever other scary thing
you can think about. But in this case, it does appear that at least this guy did kill someone ritualistically in order to through supernatural means, accomplish some task in the material world. That's what we mean when we say ritual murders. Ritual murder is not just to kill someone in a way that the killer finds interesting for its own sake. It is supposed to create some sort of
effect in the world. Italian law enforcement claims other drug dealers participate in ritual murders with the goal of causing madness and death amongst the police population. In December of twenty seventeen, a forty six year old Morocco woman was found in a forest near Verona and her body was dismembered into approximately a dozen pieces. There are a number of other cases like this you can unfortunately find in
Italian media. However, the big question is are these actually ritualistic murders or is law enforcement portraying them as such? And there's a huge historical and cultural context bubbling again
just under the surface here. How much of the motivation for the betrayal of these things as religiously motivated ritual murders, how much of that motiveation comes from religiously motivated hysteria, how much of it is corruption or incompetence in the Italian law enforcement system, and how much in recent cases could be attributed to racism. These are questions that are
tough to answer, but one thing is for sure. There was at least one proven active satanic conspiracy slash ritual murder group in Italy, and the case of the Monster of Florence remains to this day unsolved.
So don't listen to death metal if you're in Italy. That's a bad idea because there's probably some ritualistic murders happening somewhere near you within that scene. And then two, don't park your car and get amorous with someone in the countryside ever, unless you're married and you've got documents on the windows.
This is like Jason vorhe's rules. Dude.
Yeah, that's where that's where we're at.
Can you do it in a tent? No? There, I don't think we talked.
About at least you want to get stabbed in his head or shot in hand.
And how about we just be safe and to say no sex before marriage.
Dune, that's it, don't do it hard pass, don't wait, both of you guys stop right now.
Oh that's right, Bat, you are married. So at this point we end on a question too. We would like to hear your perspective on these murders. Do you do you think this stuff is being I don't know, like falsely advertised as a cult in nature or do you think that there's and there is an active cover up And if so, does it continue today? And if that is the case, then who's doing the covering? Is it the Secret Service? Is it an elite group of disgusting, perverse aristocrats.
Is it a.
Family with a dark secret? We'd like to know. You can tell us about it on Instagram, you can reach us on Facebook, you can reach us on Twitter.
Hey, don't forget, We're coming to a city near you very soon on our first ever live tour.
Yes, we're gonna be on tour in the Northeast. You can find more information about it right now if you go to stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com and click on the live shows tab. You'll see everything there and you can get tickets directly.
Who knows, we might be talking about more Satan stuff.
Yeah, maybe or not. Could be anything.
Yeah, we don't really know yet, but we're figuring it out.
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