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I'm not a hard-core true crime reader, but I do dip into the genre occasionally, and when I came across a book titled The Monster of Florence, about a serial killer who operated in Tuscany, I went ahead and picked it up. Interestingly, the timing of my reading the book coincided with the Amanda Knox case (which I hadn't followed due to somehow not seeing any news about the story until recently) - the link between the two is that not only is it a murder case set in the same general Italian locale, but the same Italian prosecutor figures in both cases.
Between 1968 and 1985, seven couples were murdered in the vicinity of Florence. They were young couples out parking, or camping, and the murderer would shoot them and then mutilate the woman's body. Over the years, new suspects, new theories, and wildly implausible theories on Satanic rituals would spring up. Eventually, the Italian journalist who covered the case for most of his career, Mario Spezi, would be accused of being the murderer, and Douglas Preston, an American crime/thriller writer, would be accused of helping him plant evidence, obstructing justice, and other assorted crimes. Preston was eventually told to leave and never come back, under threat of prosecution. Here's a little book-trailer that gives a bit of an overview about the story. Here's the wiki entry on the topic.
Since I wrote this post about reading police procedurals set in Italy, I haven't really returned to my stray thoughts about justice, police, and society in Italy. I did read several Andrea Camilleri books to finally get a perspective on how Italians themselves enjoy police procedurals, and perhaps a clue into how they view a policeman as the hero of the story. It confirms a lot of what I already thought - that Italians prize cunning and the ability to bend departmental power-games and bureaucracy to achieve their goals, which in this case results in solving the crime. The stories are less bleak than the ones written by foreigners seem to be, or at least that's my perception of them - there's a strand of hope that as long as these good, smart people are out there surreptitiously gaming the system for good, and not personal gain, that things will be ok.
With this book, detailing real investigations of a real case, I was interested to see how it compared to fiction. I'm not qualified to do any heavy lifting on the topic, for a variety of reasons - I'm not Italian, I haven't even been immersed in the society for long periods of time (two summer stays, and a lot of reading, that's it), and I'm no cultural scholar. But a part of me is still fascinated - and was really saddened - by the book and the light it sheds on the Italian justice system, the Monster of Florence crimes, and also the Amanda Knox case (which a newly-added afterword to the book discusses). It essentially confirms the most cynical view of Italy as a modern, first-world society but where, if you turn the wrong corner, you find yourself face to face with entrenched attitudes about power, justice, and the law that are purely medieval and less interested in finding the guilty and preventing them from doing any more damage. It's pretty shocking to an American, because no matter how cynical we get about our justice system, we don't believe corruption on these levels truly exists here, and we tend to think of Italy in the same ways as we do the rest of Europe (probably for us, Europe=England, which is wrongheaded but tempting to do). American law has more built-in protections to help the accused, and seeing a justice system without those things in place makes us blink and do a double-take. Set this story just about anywhere else in the world, and it becomes less shocking, rightly or wrongly.
Like I said earlier, I came away from this book very saddened. I have a special love for the city of Perugia, which is where I lived for my first visit (Amanda Knox was a student at the same university where I took classes. Thinking so badly of it hurts me - how bad must it be for the citizens who live there, and who see this sort of thing go on?
The book itself is fascinating, particularly for those who are interested in true crime. But it's also immensely frustrating, because there is no tidy resolution, there is no killer behind bars at the end of the book. He's still out there.
Between 1968 and 1985, seven couples were murdered in the vicinity of Florence. They were young couples out parking, or camping, and the murderer would shoot them and then mutilate the woman's body. Over the years, new suspects, new theories, and wildly implausible theories on Satanic rituals would spring up. Eventually, the Italian journalist who covered the case for most of his career, Mario Spezi, would be accused of being the murderer, and Douglas Preston, an American crime/thriller writer, would be accused of helping him plant evidence, obstructing justice, and other assorted crimes. Preston was eventually told to leave and never come back, under threat of prosecution. Here's a little book-trailer that gives a bit of an overview about the story. Here's the wiki entry on the topic.
Since I wrote this post about reading police procedurals set in Italy, I haven't really returned to my stray thoughts about justice, police, and society in Italy. I did read several Andrea Camilleri books to finally get a perspective on how Italians themselves enjoy police procedurals, and perhaps a clue into how they view a policeman as the hero of the story. It confirms a lot of what I already thought - that Italians prize cunning and the ability to bend departmental power-games and bureaucracy to achieve their goals, which in this case results in solving the crime. The stories are less bleak than the ones written by foreigners seem to be, or at least that's my perception of them - there's a strand of hope that as long as these good, smart people are out there surreptitiously gaming the system for good, and not personal gain, that things will be ok.
With this book, detailing real investigations of a real case, I was interested to see how it compared to fiction. I'm not qualified to do any heavy lifting on the topic, for a variety of reasons - I'm not Italian, I haven't even been immersed in the society for long periods of time (two summer stays, and a lot of reading, that's it), and I'm no cultural scholar. But a part of me is still fascinated - and was really saddened - by the book and the light it sheds on the Italian justice system, the Monster of Florence crimes, and also the Amanda Knox case (which a newly-added afterword to the book discusses). It essentially confirms the most cynical view of Italy as a modern, first-world society but where, if you turn the wrong corner, you find yourself face to face with entrenched attitudes about power, justice, and the law that are purely medieval and less interested in finding the guilty and preventing them from doing any more damage. It's pretty shocking to an American, because no matter how cynical we get about our justice system, we don't believe corruption on these levels truly exists here, and we tend to think of Italy in the same ways as we do the rest of Europe (probably for us, Europe=England, which is wrongheaded but tempting to do). American law has more built-in protections to help the accused, and seeing a justice system without those things in place makes us blink and do a double-take. Set this story just about anywhere else in the world, and it becomes less shocking, rightly or wrongly.
Like I said earlier, I came away from this book very saddened. I have a special love for the city of Perugia, which is where I lived for my first visit (Amanda Knox was a student at the same university where I took classes. Thinking so badly of it hurts me - how bad must it be for the citizens who live there, and who see this sort of thing go on?
The book itself is fascinating, particularly for those who are interested in true crime. But it's also immensely frustrating, because there is no tidy resolution, there is no killer behind bars at the end of the book. He's still out there.
