The Chilling True Story Behind The Monster of Florence

Between 1968 and 1985, a series of brutal murders in Italy transformed the area around Florence into a landscape of fear. The killer targeted and gunned down couples parked in secluded spots on the city’s outskirts, and in several cases, the bodies of female victims were discovered to be mutilated. Nicknamed the "Monster of Florence" (Il Mostro di Firenze), the identity of the killer remains one of Italy’s most haunting mysteries.

Netflix’s new four-part limited series, The Monster of Florence, created by Leonardo Fasoli and Stefano Sollima, opens in 1982, when a young couple is found murdered in their car. The police reopen an earlier case from 1968 with striking similarities—the first killing linked to the same .22 caliber Beretta. From there, investigators, journalists, and suspects become entangled in a labyrinth of fear, obsession, and paranoia.

Sollima, who directed the series, tells TIME that the decision to focus on the early years of the investigation stemmed from the case’s complexity. “There was not a single perpetrator who has been sentenced for all 16 murders,” he says. “We decided to tell the story from the beginning, when investigators started connecting the dots and realized this might be the act of a serial killer.”

Based on legal proceedings and real investigations, The Monster of Florence revisits one of Italy’s darkest chapters through the eyes of those accused over the years—the possible monsters—exposing how hysteria and speculation blurred the line between truth and myth. Sollima emphasized that the series does not take a stance on who the Monster actually was. “We wanted to tell the story of the Monster without taking a position,” he says. “Instead of focusing on the investigation, we kept it in the background and decided to focus on the individual suspects who, in each episode or case, were considered by the investigators to be the culprits.”

Here’s everything you need to know about the true story behind The Monster of Florence, premiering on Oct. 22.

The victims

The first murders attributed to the Monster occurred on Aug. 21, 1968. Barbara Locci, 32, and her lover Antonio Lo Bianco, 29, were shot while sitting in a car near Signa, a small town outside Florence. Locci’s six-year-old son, asleep in the back seat, survived and later sought help.

Over the next 17 years, seven more couples were murdered in similar circumstances, usually on weekends, in isolated areas where lovers met in cars. Victims ranged from local Italian youths to German and French tourists. In total, 16 people were killed. The use of the same .22 caliber Beretta pistol with Winchester “series H” bullets linked the murders, suggesting either a single perpetrator or someone with repeated access to the weapon.

The last murders attributed to the Monster of Florence occurred in September 1985, when French couple Jean Michel Kraveichvili and Nadine Mauriot were shot and stabbed while camping in a forest. Mauriot’s body was mutilated.

The investigation and its many turns

The investigation was plagued by mistakes, leaks, and false leads. Stefano Mele, husband of Barbara Locci, initially confessed to killing his wife and her lover but later retracted his statement. In his shifting accounts, he implicated several men of Sardinian origin—alleged lovers of his wife—leading investigators to pursue what became known as the “Sardinia Trail,” an unfound theory that the murders were linked to a group of Sardinian men living in Tuscany. The line of inquiry would dominate the early years of the case, only to prove a costly distraction as new killings emerged.

Francesco Vinci, a former lover of Locci, was arrested first and held for over a year. Judge Mario Rotella also detained Mele’s brother Giovanni Mele and brother-in-law Piero Mucciarini, but the 1984 murders occurred while they were in custody, forcing their release. Rotella then focused on Salvatore Vinci, Francesco’s brother and another former lover of Locci. Linked to his wife’s suspicious death in Sardinia, he was arrested but later acquitted. By 1989, all Sardinian suspects were officially cleared. 

In the early 1990s, suspicion shifted to Pietro Pacciani, a farmer with a history of assault and sexual violence. Convicted in 1994 for several of the murders, his conviction was overturned in 1996 after he was acquitted on appeal due to lack of evidence and sloppy police work, and he died of a heart attack in 1998 before a retrial could take place. Two of his alleged accomplices, Giancarlo Lotti and Mario Vanni, were convicted in 1998, largely based on Lotti’s confession, which experts later questioned as inconsistent. Both men died in prison—Lotti in 2002 and Vanni in 2009.

To this day, no forensic evidence definitively links any of these men to all the murders, leaving the identity of the Monster of Florence an enduring mystery. Nearly 40 years after the last known murder in 1985, the Beretta pistol used in the killings has never been recovered. DNA from a bullet at the Mauriot-Kraveichvili crime scene matched DNA from bullets found after the September 1983 murders of two German students, Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rusch, though it doesn’t belong to any victims or convicted suspects and could have been left by anyone who handled the evidence over time.

Between theories and truth

Over decades, the Monster of Florence case became fertile ground for speculation. Some investigators argued for a lone killer, while others suggested a network of individuals acting under occult motivations. Theories involving satanic rituals, secret societies, or wealthy patrons commissioning killings circulated widely but were never substantiated.

For Sollima, creating a series where truth is so blurred was one of the most challenging aspects of The Monster of Florence. “When we read the material, we realized the story had been told in many different ways by different people,” he explains. “So it was extremely difficult for us to organize without embracing one version or thesis rather than another.” He added that all names used in the series are real, noting that this imposed legal constraints. “So whatever you see in the series is what really happened and part of the dialogues that you hear are dialogues which really took place among and between the people.”

Sollima hopes viewers will take away more than just the details of the crimes and learn something about Italy’s history. “The country being represented in this period of time is very different from what we might imagine Italy of the ‘60s or ‘70s to be. It was much more backward culturally—a peasant and patriarchal society,” he says. “The violence against women still exists and is present today. The cultural environment in which that violence was perpetrated and cultivated has taken on different features, but it is still present today. So this story can be considered, in my opinion, still very relevant, still very topical, and still very contemporary.”

Are the Monster of Florence and Amanda Knox cases connected?

Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was involved in both cases, acting as the lead prosecutor. The connection between the two cases lies in his approach and the use of controversial theories involving rituals and hidden motivations, which drew significant criticism of his conduct as a prosecutor.