Personal Terror Political Terror

Shortly after 7:00pm, after a quick dinner, Vittorio had gone out to the cinema and had not seen the news on television as he usually did. He had not even watched the late night news when he returned, because he had immediately gone to bed to read a book until he fell sleep. He had therefore only heard about the crime the following morning, from an article by Carla Garibaldi that reported the details.

My friend had phoned Evaristo who was happy to receive him in his office this time too.

The Commissioner had said to him: "Unfortunately for the victim, a German Shepherd dog that the couple kept to guard their apartment and also for personal defense, actually died yesterday morning not many hours before Mrs Ferini's death which took place, according to the coroner’s initial findings, between 3:00pm and 5:00pm. As the widower told us, the animal's body had been cremated for reasons of hygiene by the family’s veterinarian, where his mistress had taken him during the morning for that very purpose. Given that I believe very little in coincidences, I suspect that the murderer had thrown a few poisoned treats to the dog when the animal was in the communal garden downstairs early that morning when the man had let him off the leash. As he sobbed for his wife, the poor man told us he always did that. Their dog Lampo had started to feel ill as they were going up in the elevator and when they went into the house he lay down prostrate on the floor with no strength left. The husband and wife then took him downstairs, with the man carrying him in his arms, and loaded him into the wife's runabout for her to take him to the vet, but at that point the dog died; then, while he certainly went to the bank in his own car in order not to arrive late, his wife took the animal to the vet in her car as planned, but only to have it cremated at that point."

"So, Evaristo, the murderer would not be in the throes of sudden raptus, but carefully prepares his crimes."

"If my idea that the dog was poisoned is true, I would agree."

"It’s bad luck that the animal's body is no longer available for an autopsy."

"That's right."

The fourth murder took place on Sunday, between midnight and 2:00 am according to the coroner. It had been carried out with the usual method of the ice pick jabbed in an ear, but the victim had been a man, a certain Alessandro Cipolla, sixty-six years old, retired, and he had been killed in the street.

My colleague Carla had found out from her deputy, who had had picked up a press release at Police Headquarters, that the dead man was a homeless drunk who in recent years had been living as a vagrant, sleeping under packing boxes in some corner of public galleries or doorways, and that he was already known to the police because of a call from a mobile phone to 113 a couple of months earlier from a woman who was very old but still clear-headed, and had previously been an English teacher. He had pestered her under the colonnade of Via Roma with a surly request for money and when he got nothing from her, he had spat at her. As soon as a patrol car had arrived, the grim teacher had asked the agents to take the particulars of her harasser, who in the meantime had continued to walk around her making raspberries and, alternately, belching foul-smelling effluvia at her.

She had subsequently made a complaint at Police Headquarters the same day but had withdrawn it, however, the following day out of compassion, "after a night of remorse like the Unnamed of Manzoni"4 it seems she had said in all seriousness to the perplexed assistant chief on duty.

The homeless Cipolla ate at soup kitchens and drank away not only his entire pension in bars and wine shops, but also what he could put together from begging, always with an aggressive manner because he was drunk from morning to night. He was a remnant of a man that no person in their right mind would be ruthless enough to strike physically in any way, let alone kill and in such an atrocious manner.

Considering the asocial status of the last victim, Deputy Police Commissioner Giandomenico Pumpo, mindful that he had been the head of the Anti Sect Team, had suddenly had the idea that it was a ritual murder by fanatics of the so-called acid youth satanism, not new to attacks on defenseless sleeping bums. Some had been seriously injured, some killed, even though their actions had been performed, until then, by covering the victims with flammable liquid and setting them on fire. Dr. Pumpo had oriented Evaristo Sordi along that line too.

With my mediation, Vittorio had informed Carla Garibaldi of the new lead and she had consequently published an investigative story in La Gazzetta Libera on diabolical sects, which made reference to the Ear Monster’s crimes. My friend was anonymously described as 'a source close to Police Headquarters'.

Chapter 4

[From "La Gazzetta Libera"]

Would the Ear Monster

actually be a diabolical group?

---------------------------------------------------------------

Deputy Police Commissioner Giandomenico Pumpo

has oriented investigations also towards the possibility of satanic ritual crimes

Carla Garibaldi

According to a source close to Police Headquarters, after the Ear Monster’s latest murder, the victim a homeless man named Alessandro Cipolla, as we had written previously, it seems that the head of the Homicide Section of the Squadra Mobile, Dr. Giandomenico Pumpo, has turned the investigation in the direction of the small satanic and para satanic youth groups, as it is not unusual fort these cliques to attack victims who are alone and helpless, vagrants in particular, who can easily be assaulted at night while they are sleeping rough.

The phenomenon of Satanism is quite widespread in Italy and particularly in our city, although until now it did not seem to have grown beyond alarm limits: Turin, with Prague, Lyon, London and San Francisco, is one of the princial centers of the cult of Satanism.

As CASOC, Centro Anti Sette Occulte Cattolico 5 made known some timeago, there are three major types of diabolical sectarianism: youth acid Satanism, of which an unidentified group is suspected of the Cipolla murder, historic-traditional Satanism, which is made up of adults, and psycho-sects. CASOC has been led for three decades by the canon Vincenzo Scofiani Biancon, who also performs the task of exorcist at the Curia, but it was founded in 1965, and directed for about a decade by Father Giulio Colamont. At the end of 1970 he had been moved from that role, then becoming parish priest of San Taddeo, a parish he still leads today. The priest had been moved after he was attacked by three young satanist drug addicts in February of that year – hallucinogens are commonly used by youth acid sects. He had been hospitalized with serious injuries and in a state of shock. For many months he had remained psychologically exhausted and underwent neurological therapies.

Juvenile diabolical cult worship, unlike adult and traditional cult practices, spreads propaganda about itself. Its promotion is found first and foremost in the lyrics of songs by famous rock group. These songs are in free trade and some words, if listened to in reverse, sing the praises of the Devil with a subliminal effect on listeners. Worse still, there is music circulating secretly that expressly celebrates atrocities such as rape or even the gutting of children and the killing of Jews, nomads, immigrants and vagrants with gas or fire: the so-called Nazisatanism. For some time now, there are some6 sites on the internet, that wallow in the macabre and demonic salaciousness, and they are increasing. The people influenced by this kind of propaganda practice the teachings they receive in a naïve way, and are therefore of greater danger for the public. On those websites, reviews of literary and cinematographic works of horror and satanic music intermingle with exaltation of the practice of all kinds of wickedness, and consider the various crimes against indiviuals and property as something normal.

Young people are the first to be influenced, but there is no shortage of adults. All of them are attracted by the idea of exercising absolute freedom in transgressing ordinary morality: in reality sheer license is being touted and put into practice, while freedom always presupposes, as a counterpoint, the exercise of one’s duty towards others, an indispensable condition for lasting social coexistence, according to the classical ethical teaching which, in the West, has a biblical matrix.

The step from theoretical learning to implementation is not far, with the result that many Satanists, individuals or, more often, are people in small groups; and it is precisely these people, according to the Police and Carabinieri as well as CASOC, that are the most dangerous for the physical safety of citizens. Do it yourself Satanism is composed of many more people than the official figure says, and there are at least a few thousand elements in our country.

The AST, Anti Sect Team of Police Headquarters, had told the press some time ago that the practice of young Satanists normally follows a precise process. At the beginning, they just indulge in, so to speak, desecrations of graves and other macabre rites in isolated areas where they use human remains and latex sexual simulacra, and sprinkle poultry or sometimes human blood taken intravenously at the time, or that comes from blood bags stolen from blood banks.

The small deconsecrated Santissimo Crocefisso cemetery at number 28 in Via San Pietro in Vincoli in the Aurora Rossini district had been an habitual place for this kind of nefariousness until a couple of years after the attack on Father Colamonti, which took place in that particuar area. To combat things like this, the Municipality had even used it later as an arena for cultural events on summer evenings and the devil worshippers had moved to other places, in the woods around Turin. Acid Satanists quickly switch to more criminal practices, such as carnal violence, carried out even on minors, up to the not remote possibility of ritual killings. Satanic rites can reach horrific levels.

Classical adult Satanism, instead, is much less visible than acid youth satanism and is very well organized, both ideologically and, in particular, in the theological, indeed antitheological sense seeing that the Judeo-Christian God is the object of contempt and the Devil is worshipped as god, considered a martyr of freedom, muddied with wilfullness. This planned and traditional Satanism has a very ancient even pre-Christian origin. It was hounded, mostly from the Renaissance onwards, by both the Inquisition and Protestant tribunals, and unfortunately this hunting also ended with the persecution of many innocent people who had nothing to do with Devil worship.

Classical demonism, even if it does not show itself blatantly and no longer reaches the point of ritual killings of newborns and virgins as in the past, is nevertheless ideologically responsible, because of its terrible masters, for the modern crimes of the acid Satanists and, in general, is the demonistic form most opposed to social goodness, because it broadly fights any traditional moral and civil value with psychological force and ample economic means: its members are socially elevated in unsuspected environments, and constitute lobbies of real economic, political and artistic-cultural power. Many of the intellectuals among them are strongly critical, if not actually caustic, versus Christianity and, above all, against the Catholic Church, pretending to be atheists, but in reality, in their demonic upside-down way, they firnly believe in the supernatural.

This adult demonism is also elitist in terms of the number of members. In Italy, according to CASOC, it consists of just ten groups with a few dozen members each: a few hundred people in all. It is sure that there is one such conventicle in our city, which is among the oldest, again according to CASOC.

Finally, with regard to the third typology of the satanic groups, the psychoscects, according to both Police Headquarters and CASOC they include the largest number of followers, in our country a few hundred thousand, and represent a de facto Satanism that is practiced in the psychological and economic subjugation of the members to their leaders, even as far as slavery, starting with the systematic mandatory donation of their personal patrimony to the group, meaning, in essence, to its leaders. Psychosects, however, do not present external forms of demonic adoration so, like adult Satanists, even these people can arguably be suspected of the Ear Monster’s crimes: as long as, of course, that they are indeed ritual murders as the Deputy Police Commissioner suspects.

Moreover, while on one hand we hope that the new line of enquiry indicated by Dr Pumpo will lead to a rapid end to the evil affair, we must not overlook the fact that the previous victims were assaulted in their own homes.

[e-mail]

Chapter 5

The body of the fifth victim, again a female, had been found by the police a few days after her death, thanks to a complaint from a friend and colleague, who had become suspicious because the woman had not showed up at work and had not answered her phone calls. After obtaining authorization fron the magistrate to enter the house, the police had managed to get in by breaking down the door, closed with only half a turn, just like in the first three murders. The victim’s name was Mosca Scrofagnocca, a 58-year-old saleswoman in a maxi shop selling kitchen and bathroom accessories. Unmarried with no relatives, she lived alone, renting an old two-room apartment in Via Stampatori. The crime, according to the magistrate, must have taken place the day after the Cipolla murder. This corpse also showed the signs of a forceful knock to the head prior to the perforation of the cerebrum with an ice pick.

The day after the body was found, Vittorio had learned from Evaristo that counter-terrorism had kept an eye on Scrofagnocca in the 70s and 80s: there were notes about her at the DIGOS office at Police Headquarters, from which it appeared that Scrofagnocca’s revolutionary ideas ran in the family, her parents having been die-hard Stalinists in Togliatti’s Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, and had been known to Police Headquarters as habitual agitators and had occasionally bashed Christian Democrats bill-posters during the first election campaigns. The the two had unfortunately given their daughter the name of Mosca Stalina7 , although, after the tumultuous riots that began in '68 and then collapsed in the 80s, she had used just the name Mosca, which did not immediately recall the now defunct Soviet Union.

An intriguing detail had also emerged from the archives that could prove useful to the investigation into the Monster: the woman been a warehouse worker in the past in the same factory making shower doors where the second victim had also been employed, and more or less in the same years. This could make you think a little more attentively about the political lead, though not disregarding the leads of the demonic group and the psychopathic serial killer.

In the event that the murderer had been a serial killer, it was and interesting fact, according to criminologists and social psychologist counselors at Police Headquarters, that he had never contacted either the media or the police, unlike those serial killers who loved to grandstand with messages, challenging society, like the archetype of all serial killers, the infamous London perpetrator of at least five murders, carried out from 31 August to 8 November 1888. He had sent three letters to the press, presumed to be authentic, and in the first he had signed himself Jack the Ripper, as he would later be called in the newspapers and would go down in the annals of criminology, and in all three missives he had provided alleged clues ridiculing Scotland Yard.

In the case of the Ear Monster, the absence of postal, telephone or e-mail messages had led psychiatric experts to outline some features of his character, albeit with reservations: he, or she if it was a woman, probably suffered from a profound inferiority complex; moreover, he had to experience pleasure, both sadistic and self-damaging respectively, in looming covertly over Turin, scaring it with cruelty and, at the same time, denying himself the intimate satisfaction of revealing himself, at least a little, to the world.

For Deputy Commissioner Pumpo, on the contrary, the Monster's silence validated the idea of the demonic group that killed for ritualistic reasons and that had every interest in remaining in the shadows, like all the satanic communities.

For Commissioner Sordi, the hypothesis of a common killer was worth considering, because the fact that there had been more than one would have favored the perpetration of the murders, but it did not necessarily mean a lot of people and not necessarily a demonic environment. In his opinion it could have been, instead, one of the amateur cases that criminologists called magister-alumnus, meaning a pair of serial killers comprised of one person who conceived the murders and the way to implement them, and an apprentice pupil, the perpetrator or co-perpetrator.

At the time Vittorio considered all the conjectures important and, not being in favor of any of them, he waited for more relevant data.

Chapter 6

Two days after the murder of Mosca Stalina Scrofagnocca, my friend and I were having dinner together around 8:00 pm, like we did almost every week during our long friendship. We always ate at the same place, a restaurant in Corso Palestro not far from our apartments.

After skipping the "appetite killer" starters as he defined them in agreement with me, and after the first course of spaghetti with shellfish which was practcially an obsession for him, being Neapolitan, Vittorio had turned the conversation to the Ear Monster: "Evaristo told me that, apparently, none of the victims had ever complained to relatives or friends, and certainly had never reported receiving threats in general or, political threats in particular, thinking about the two victims who had been involved with the extreme left in the past. Think too that the four prople who were killed in their own home, or so it would seem at least, had let the murderer in: that could make you think that they had been in prior contact with the murderer or murderers."

"Look, Vittorio, it seems the Monster entered from the garden through a window for the first victim."

"I know there is this hypothesis, but that certainly can’t make us rule out that instead the victim had let the murderer into the house. All we can be sure of is that no front door was forced in any case."

"Could the Monster have had the keys to the aparrments?" I had suggested.

"From the victims themselves?"

"Well, no, I'd think of fake copies made in advance, I don't know, somehow getting a cast."

"It's not that easy, you know? It’s only in th movies tat they secretly take key prints on wax and make perfect copies of it. Locksmiths don’t work like that, they start from an original or, if there is no key, they work directly on the lock, and sometimes just replace the whole lock. If anything, I would think of a bump key that can easily open a door if there is just the half turn, apart from the fact that nowadays, as a rule, people lock up as much as possible, even if they’re inside at the time: to the right, to the left, above and below" – he had made the gesture of turning an imaginary key in an equally non-existent keyhole several times – "and I think the half-turn that the relatives found later and, in the case of Scrofagnocca the police, was the obvious consequence of the fact that the murderer had pulled the door closed behind him each time as he escaped, not that there was already just the simple turn when he arrived, except in the first case, because the maid had told Evaristo that she had left a half-turn as usual when she went out. I imagine that poor Mrs. Tron felt safe thanks to the wall surrounding the house and, on the other hand, either she or the maid had opened the windows on the ground floor to let some air inside because it was a warm day, and it would not have made sense to lock the front door with three turns.

"The determing factor, after all, is that all the victims were at home and if the killer had tinkered at the door trying to get in, they would have heard it. So, if in the Capuò Tron case he may have sneaked into the house by climbing the fence and getting through window, for the other crimes someone must have opened up to him from the inside: the victims themselves, I imagine."

"Listen, Vittorio, even if my idea is a bit like soap opera perhaps, couldn’t the murderer have been their lover, for all four women, hence each of them let him into the house without having any suspicions?"

"Their lover? All four of them? That’s an idea which is really over the top, I have to say, although it can’t be ruled out one hundred percent. But what about that old flea-ridden drunken bum? Was he the Monster’s lover, too? Let’s even say he’s bisexual, but I could believe in a relationship if the victim had been a handsome young man; but copulating with a dirty stinking..."

"Oh, if it comes to that, there are all kinds of disgusting sexual tastes, Vittorio! Think of the people who even do it with an aninal, which seems even worse than coupling with an old flea-ridden drunk."

"Yes, and incidentally, I don’t want to rule out the possibility that marriages with an animal or, I don’t know, other depravities such as paedophile sex will unfortunately be legalized in the future: there are many politicians these days with no natural morality, people immersed in weak thinking8 and all they care about is following any change in how his potential voters feel. But leaving aside moralistic concerns, let’s go back to the case of the Monster: if the murderer is always the same for all five victims, we can assume that both the vagrant and the four women had known him before: and didn’t need to have been his lovers! Nevertheless, Cipolla may have been killed not by the Monster as a serial killer, but by an admirer-imitator, or by a personal enemy who wanted to throw off the investigation by using the same method as the Monster."

"All right, Vittorio."

"It’s not unlikely, though, that the serial killer knew at least three of the victims and that they had opened the door to him, and there is another thing too: I suspect that the deceased all knew each other in the past, and indeed in two cases, according to something Evaristo told me confidentially, it’s almost certain. So tomorrow morning I’lll go and check on something in this regard myself and if I get lucky I’ll let you know for your newspaper as well, whereas if it’s a fiasco, nothing doing."

At this point he had started eating the second course, which a kind woman had already brought him a couple of minutes earlier: autumn mushrooms and breaded and fried zucchini flowers, not exactly the maximum for good digestion, especially for a stomach over 80 years old like his.

The next morning, in excellent health, Vittorio had gone to the Registry Office, asking for an executive he knew because, like himself, he was parishioner of Santa Barbara.

Knowing he was Emeritus Commissioner, and ignoring the privacy law, his acquaintance had made an archivist available to him and with his help my friend had discovered the professions of the five victims, according to their old identity cards. Little by little, he had discovered that Capuò Tron, Picozza Ferini and Cipolla had also worked in a warehouse for a long time. It remained to be seen where: had they been at the same shower door factory too?

In the afternoon Vittorio had telephoned Commissioner Sordi to let him know of the coincidence, suggesting that he investigate the archives of the Turin Employment Office to find out in which companies those three had been warehouse workers: "I’m wondering, Evaristo, whether they had been employed in the same company where Peritti and Scrofagnocca had worked."