Florence, 8 June 2024 – Let’s start from here, from the night of August 21, 1968. Which is perhaps the moment it all began. Or where everything got tangled up. TO Signa, near the Castelletti cemetery, there is a white Giulietta. In the front seats a man and a woman making love. Her six-year-old son is sleeping on the rear ‘sofa’. Suddenly, out of the dark, a hand armed with a .22 caliber pistol he shoots at the two lovers. He kills them, leaving Winchester H-series shells lying around. The boy wakes up to the noise. Unharmed. Is called Natalino. A few hours later the doorbell rings at a house two kilometers away. “Open the door to me, I’m sleepy and my father is sick in bed – she says to the owner of the house looking out the window –. Then take me home because my mother and uncle are there who died in the car”. Mom is Barbara Locci. The ‘uncle’ is Antonio Lo Bianco. The police descend on Barbara’s husband, Christmas’ father: Stefano Mele. They arrest him. He begins a whirlwind of versions, but without the gun. And later, he will also be the only one convicted. It is immediately said that Locci cheated on her husband out in the open. And that he, a semi-literate labourer, even tolerated her encounters. Among Barbara’s lovers, who in Lastra a Signa – where she lives – they call the queen bee, there are two in particular: the brothers Francesco and Salvatore VinciSardinians from Villacidro.
Stop. Let’s go back to Castelletti. We return to Natalino with only socks on his feet (the sandals will be found in the car), sleepy, who travels all that way. That child was never able to indicate how he had arrived at that bell. And even when he became a man he never focused on the memory of that night that marked his life: Natalino is grew up in an orphanage, without his mother and with his father in prison. Often reliving the nightmare of the gun going off.
However the mystery remains. Together with a doubt: why Signa’s murderer spared that child, witness to a crime, and perhaps even accompanied her to the nearest house (the socks were clean, said the lawyer Bevacqua at the Pacciani trial), putting it on his shoulders, humming a hit from that summer, ‘La tramontana’. Today the ROS carabinieri took the opportunity to put their hands back on a crime from 56 years ago. Which is not just half an unsolved case, or perhaps entirely unsolved given that Stefano Mele would hardly have known how to do harm, especially alone. It is the labyrinth, ’68, within which the case of the monster of Florence is also lost. Because in 1982 the investigators who were hunting the couple’s killer remembered – officially through the memory of a marshal, but it is also suspected of an anonymous note – of the double murder in Signa. And they discovered that the gun was the same. A few days ago, the ROS found Natalino. Today he is a 62 year old used to making do. They got him a DNA sample. It could be yet another flop, or the turning point. The genetic data of the survivor of the monster will be compared with that of the Vinci (already acquired in the past) in search of a familiarity. Because if Natalino was not the son of Mele, but of one of his mother’s loving brothers, the Sardinian trail – which has always been beaten by the police – could be completely reinterpreted. And interpreted: a killer who begins with a crime in which he saves (or makes him save) his son, then over the years becomes increasingly cynical and elusive, in an escalation that goes from 1974 to 1985. Francesco Vinci is died in 1993, tied up and burned. He was the main suspect after 1982, but the next crime, in Giogoli, cleared him: two men killed (with the same .22 caliber) and no excision, one of the strangest actions of the monster.
Salvatore Vinci is disappeared for almost 40 years. Starting in ’84 he was searched, followed and interrogated. He is accused of the murder of his first wife, Barbarina Steri, who officially committed suicide. After the acquittal of the Cagliari court, he disappeared. Even the investigating judge Mario Rotella dismissed it on the Sardinian track, with a sentence that still lends itself to guilty interpretations. Comparisons with Natalino’s DNA could rekindle the ‘Sardistas’. Science fiction? To genetics, the arduous sentence.
