Lotti hypothesis

The recent release of an interview with me in Vice (see) revealed even more than I wanted the hypothesis I’ve been working on for years – but it was inevitable, thanks anyway to Riccardo Conti for taking it very seriously – which sees Giancarlo Lotti as the only Monster of Florence. A simple intuition born about ten years ago from a suggestive video found on YouTube (this one) turned then into a cast-iron belief progressively consolidated by the study of the documents I was little by little able to obtain. In a way it’s a shocking scenery, aprioristically refused both by whom is skeptical toward every interpretation of the case and by whom has one or more specific culprits in mind. Presented with this eventuality, the followers who discuss on social media almost always indulge in sarcastical and anyway averse comments, often demonstrating extreme superficiality or poor knowledge of the documentation, limited to the reading of the usual books, where the character is described as a fool who used to go after UFOs or as a vicious man inclined to sell out for a plate of soup. They basically think Giancarlo Lotti was too stupid or too vicious to be the Monster. Nonetheless, someone considered so worthless, with his extremely poor language skills – or rather, actually even thanks to them – withstood very well Vanni’s defense’s attacks, in any case well enough to be able to convince the judges.
It’s presumable that among the people who got in contact with the hypothesis of Lotti as the only Monster of Florence through the interview in Vice there are many who aren’t influenced by the usual hasty judgments acquired through the assidous reading of the forums and the books I was talking about (it’s a fact that more than once someone showed interest in looking into the character for possible future works). It’s especially for their beneft that I decided to write and upload the writing below, where the essential elements of this hypothesis are reported.

Lies. On September the 26th of 2000 the Court of Cassation confirmed once and for all Mario Vanni’s life sentence and Giancarlo Lotti’s 26 years jail sentence for taking part, along with the meanwhile deceased Pietro Pacciani, in the last four double murders ascribed to the so-called Monster of Florence. The only (ridiculous) judicial truth reached by our judiciary – the one about an unlikely town gang, the so-called “snack companions”, who isn’t clear if killed for getting money, and therefore instigated by alleged commissioners, or out of mere perversion – was entitely based on the claims by the alleged repentant informer Giancarlo Lotti, caught because of clues regarding his involvement, who it seems was forced by Vanni and Pacciani to act as a “lookout”.
Today we know for sure Lotti lied, and not only because an unbiased examination of the scenery resulting from his confessions brings out unsolvable paradoxes. We do because his accounts about all four murders he allegedly took part in are denied by the related reconstructions, not enough taken into account by the judges who conversely believed him.

• In 1982 in Baccaiano the numerous witnesses who passed by the crime scene just in the momets the murder was being committed should’ve seen Lotti’s and Pacciani’s cars, according to Lotti’s statement parked in the narrow road a few meters away from the widening. And they didn’t.
• In 1983 in Giogoli the first two shots were reportedly fired in quick succession by Lotti – with no experience at all concerning firearms but in spite of that forced by Pacciani – through one of the windows on the van’s right side. Instead, those two shots were fired one from a window and one from another, and by whom had already used a gun, since both accurately hit their difficult target.
• In 1984 in Vicchio the murderers, leaving San Casciano at 22:00, reportedly got to the crime scene at 23:00, finding their victims in the act of getting undressed. But the guys had gone out a little after 21:00, and, as always, their parents were waiting for them in an hour. Moreover, two witnesses separately claimed they’d heard gunshots coming from the area around 21:45, time in which the murder must therefore be placed.
• In 1985 in Scopeti, according to Lotti’s claims, the french guys were killed on Sunday night on the 8th of September, agreeing with the autoptic doctor’s original opinion. But that opinion was wrong, like vast evidence acquired later demonstrates, including the development stage of maggots found on the corpses. The two unlucky french tourists were killed on Friday night, a few hours after their arrival in the tragic glade.

It’s just a short synthesis of the contradictions that make Lotti’s accounts false. But then we have to wonder: why did the man lie, sure accusing Vanni and Pacciani of the most serious crimes, but himself too, although in a secondary role that still took him to a 26 years in jail final sentence? Many people regard him as a sort of mental defective not involved in the crimes at all, led to confess by the perspective of the witness protection program through which he got room and board. But Lotti wasn’t a mental defective at all (and not a mythomaniac either), as it was demonstrated thanks to the examination by two experts, Fornari and Lagazzi, and above all as the unbiased examination of the trial’s transcriptions and videos, where his undoubtful difficulty in expressing himself can’t hide an excellent ability of dealing with whom was questioning him, still nowadays demonstrates. So the man was perfectly able to understand that at the end of his judicial path he’d lose the advantages of his role as repentant informer and join Vanni in jail. One should also consider his previous condition wasn’t that miserable, being anyway able to rely on the bed the priest would give him and on occasional jobs that allowed him to eat, maintain a car and pay regular visits to his prostitute friends.
When someone, over whom there are various clues involving them, lies confessing serious crimes but blaming the major responsibilities on someone else, why do they do it? The most simple and logical answer is by far this: they do it for not having to confess something worse hoping to get away with it through the lesser evil. Well, in Giancarlo Lotti’s case everything leads to hypothesize this precise scenery.
If he’d been utterly stranger to the murders, the alleged repentant informer would’ve had lots of occasions for retracting during an almost five years long judicial path. On the contrary he stubbornly stuck with his personal version of Vanni and Pacciani’s secondary accomplice, in the hope, supported by his defense’s approach, of being able to get an appropriate plea bargain for minimal involvement and collaborativeness (an attempt, unfortunately for him, without success). All this even during the short hearing at the appeal, when he refused the chance offered by Vanni’s lawyers – through which he could’ve asserted he hadn’t been in possession of the red car seen in Scopeti for months – choosing instead to defend his first-degree sentence by any means. And it meant 30 years!
Taking into account Giancarlo Lotti’s will to stick at any cost with the prosecution’s direction, we can only think that, by detaching from it, he was afraid of something worse, basically a life sentence with the key thrown away, since he himself was the actual murderer. And various elements made any attempt of pulling out by pretending he was totally unaware impossible.

Clues and weak points. Filippa Nicoletti, prostitute and friend of his too, testified she’d been taken more than once by Lotti to the widening in Vicchio, where the two made love with the car parked exactly in the same position of the victims’ one. When? As long as four years before the murder. If you think the place was extremely far (60 or 70 km away) from Lotti’s town, San Casciano, and little known to Vicchio residents themselves, this coincidence appears highly astonishing. Indeed we would have a future confessed criminal who years before had hung out in the most hidden and remote of the crime scenes, also situated a few km away from one of the previous crime scenes, Borgo San Lorenzo’s one. Instead, thinking about a murderer who discovered it during his perlustrations, continued to keep an eye on it in the following years and eventually, at the right moment, took advantage of two incautios guys who’d often go there, the coincidence is easily explainable.
On September the 8th of 1985, Sunday, the two poor french tourists had already been dead for two days, killed on the night of the 6th, Friday, we saw this. So, what were Lotti and his friend Fernando Pucci doing standing below the glade in the afternoon for hours while the corpses were waiting to be found? A couple of spouses’ reliable testimony described indeed a car highly compatible with Lotti’s one – even rare, since the model was old and uncommon – with two men whose physiognomies were very similar to Lotti e Pucci’s ones beside. The same car was later on seen in the same place in the evening too by another one of Lotti’s prostitute friends, Gabriella Ghiribelli (see La macchina rossa). Many murderers return to their crime scenes to enjoy what happens around, and thinking it went just like this in Lotti’s case too is legitimate. Could Lotti and Pucci be there just as curious people who’d realized there had been a murder and wanted to enjoy the corpses’ finding? This extremely weak possibility utterly vanishes before their future false accounts.
Then there are the claims by Fernando Pucci himself, the best friend with whom the alleged repentant informer was always together in the years of the murders. Pucci told he’d been together with him spying just on the victims in Vicchio in the widening where a few days later they’d be killed. And he also told about a stop in Scopeti while Vanni and Pacciani were killing, in this case lying. From his accusations against Vanni and Pacciani – and along with them against Lotti – Pucci had nothing to gain. He too is regarded by many opinionists as a person with very poor intellective skills, even oligophrenic, manipuleted by the investigators as much as Lotti or more, but this doesn’t seem true. Pucci was examined by the same experts of Lotti’s examination, who found indeed a personality disorder – impossible to define accurately, because of the subject’s scarce collaborativeness – and intellective deficiencies, but not that serious. After all an unbiased analysis of his deposition at the trial reveals a man who had something to hide and very shrewd in not letting people corner him.
Everything leads to think that, in the years, Pucci was subjected to ambiguous confidences by Lotti and to an involvement in his perlustrations in search for potential victims, that he fully realized his friend’s guiltiness just after the last murder, when he was probably taken to see the corpses.
At the end of 1995, while questioned with regard to a search for Pacciani’s possible accomplices – as only murderer he’d almost surely be acquitted at the appeal –, Lotti realized he was about to be unveiled. Pucci, not really his friend anymore since the time of the last murder, and not by chance for sure, was his weak point, since he knew; so we have to think Lotti went search for him to reach an agreement over a common approach meant to deal with their future questionings, for sure threatening him with serious consequences (as demonstrated by the common lie of the stop in Scopeti to pee). The two were then led in a more or less conscious way by the investigators themselves – for whom, out of surely not commendable but easy to figure out reasons of self-interest, the culprit had to remain Pacciani – to outline a scenery where the murderer wasn’t Lotti, but the unlikely gang of the three snack companions in which Lotti acted as lookout, and Pacciani was the leader.

Why would Lotti kill. The first murder, the 1968 one in Signa, was committed with the same gun of the seven following ones, but who killed Barbara Locci and her lover Antonio Lo Bianco were the woman’s husband’s relatives, with him taking the blame for everyone. The gun, a .22 Beretta used in shooting ranges, was left on the spot hoping it’d incriminate who’d furnished it, another one of the woman’s lover, as an accomplice, although in the dark about the murder (see Una strana malattia and Natalino, fanciullo intelligente e sfortunato). This would keep away the law enforcement from the real culprits, who they were afraid would be sought out because of the husband’s clear incapacity of doing all by himself. But the carabinieri didn’t find that gun. Someone must’ve taken it, someone who then kept it for six long years before using it to kill another couple in 1974 in Borgo San Lorenzo. That someone was a repressed individual, attracted by Barbara Locci’s reputation as a libertine woman, and he used to follow her without being bold enough to attempt an approach. On the night of her murder he must’ve gotten in the movie theatre just after the couple, then realized what was happening, and after the fact went to the deserted crime scene and picked the gun up.
Currently there’s no direct evidence, but the subsequent events would tell that individual was Giancarlo Lotti, one of the many outsiders of our society, because of his limitations, sure, but also for a lack of sensitivity by other people, always ready to take advantage of those limitations. A simple outsider turned into the Monster of Florence by an odd twist of fate that made him find and pick up the gun in Signa (in La scatola di cartucce one of the reasons presented by the detractors of this scenery is disproved).
Giancarlo Lotti lived in the same town as Barbara Locci, although in a different section – Romola for her, Bargino for him – and, as plausible hypothesis, he was the man about whom the woman told she’d been followed on scooter. Indeed Lotti didn’t have a driving license and a car in that time, just a scooter. He was a very lonely person, uncapable of beginning a common relationship with a woman, probably devoid of any sexual experiences until he’d become an adult for a while. In the subsequent years he must’ve followed other women as he’d done with Barbara Locci, peeping on them even in the intimacy of their sexual intercourses in a car. In the while the gun picked on Signa’s crime scene – that he learned to use after somehow getting a copper layered cartridge box – was producing its malevolent and suggestive effect on his wretched personality. After a while he must’ve begun to take it along, dreaming about how he could use it to reach the object of his desire. Until, on a September night of 1974, he actually used it to kill Stefania Pettini’s boyfriend, before attempting a clumsy approach, killing her too and hideously exploring her lifeless body, something he was stranger to (see La dinamica di Borgo).
The enormity of the deed must’ve meant a turning point in Lotti’s life, who from that moment began to meet prostitutes in Florence, at first going there by bus, then by a car he’d finally bought after getting a license with difficulty, in 1978. Other positive elements gotten into his life in that time were a tough but steady job in a gravel cave, and his friendship with Fernando Pucci, with whom he shared his passion for streetwalkers. A passion shared with postman Mario Vanni too, an outsider as well but known to everybody, thanks to whom he could satisfy his whim of meeting Pietro Pacciani, a murderer like him, well-known and respected – rather, inferior to him, two victims against just one, which might lead to think Lotti felt gratified by the wretched comparison! Law enforcement knows that a thief attracts a thief, in this case a murderer attracted a murderer…
Meanwhile the 1974 double murder was progressively getting older. Until in the spring of 1981, when Lotti, by then unsatisfied with the modest improvements in his daily condition, and therefore filled with envy toward who had a better life, met a character on celluloid who blew him away: Frank Zito, Maniac’s serial killer protagonist. While watching the trailers obsessively broadcast on private channels he fancied an analogous career for himself, including the wretched satisfaction of reading about his deeds in newspapers: he, less than nothing in daily life, could actually become the most feared murderer. This mad thought, mere temptation for some angry people, for him, having already killed and kept the gun, became a real project. The film also gave him the idea for the excisions, pubic skin instead of Zito’s scalp (see Così brutto e cattivo: Maniac).
The scenery outlined above can explain a unique charateristic of the Monster of Florence, the one of a murderer driven by apparent sexual urges, like a common maniac of the lust murderer kind, but who actually was no maniac at all. The examination of the crime scenes from his serial phase 1981-1985 (the 1974 murder had a different mode and different reasons) reveals a character who’d kill in the shortest time possible, with his gun and not with his knife, a weapon he could handle well, but which he just used to ascertain his victims’ death. For his abject colleagues, on the contrary, a knife is the favorite weapon, since it allows to enjoy the contact with blood and flesh.
The Monster had no wish to interact with his victims, just a will to kill and then mutilate the girl, that too an absolutely aseptic act, almost as if performed during an autopsy. Everything makes think the Monster killed out of anger and while looking for fun, then enjoying the shock aroused by his wretched deeds he consciously tried to spectacularize through his excisions too. He acted when he wanted, without being driven by any unstoppable maniacal instincts. We can therefore call him a lust murderer by imitation, a unique case in the whole world. And Giancarlo Lotti’s character, who wasn’t a maniac but a frustrated individual, devoid of empathy, envious, perfectly matches this.

The mad project. Probably as a memento, Giancarlo Lotti kept one of the copper layered cartridges from the box he’d bought before the murder in Borgo. Perhaps back then already he took a box with bare leaden ones too – 50 bullets, the standard format –, maybe he got it in 1981 from the same source. In any case, at the threshold of his mad project, the man had 51 cartridges he meant to use up. Then, after using them up, his project would be completed, as it really went.
From June the 6th of 1981 to September the 6th of 1985 Giancarlo Lotti murdered six couples of innocent youths firing 44 cartridges of the bare leaden kind taken out from the new box, plus a copper layered one left from the old box. Supposing a few ones fired to try them out, he ran out of all cartridges at his disposal, except one, perhaps, that he left on the ground inside the hospital complex in Ponte a Niccheri, who knows, maybe together with his gun thrown in some sewer hole and never found. The corpses of his last victims had been found for a few hours and the letter by which he’d crowned his wretched epic sending to the investigators Nadine Mauriot’s left breast fragment had to be arrived. Everything was ready for his exit, which would’ve been hard, if not impossible, for a maniac, but not for him, who wasn’t a maniac.
After the 1985 murder in Scopeti the murderer inside Lotti got back in the darkness from which an odd twist of fate had let him out, while the man’s daily life suffered a significant decay – in 1987 he lost his home and his steady job – making him even less suspectable. For ten years he was able to get away with it, until his friendship with Pacciani and the ambigous confidences to his friend Pucci had their consequences.

Many compatibilities. We saw how Lotti’s non-maniacal features matched the analogous ones supposable in the Monster well. But the compatibilities don’t end here for sure. Let’s see some more in brief.
The Monster was someone with a low cultural level, as the letter sent after the murder in Scopeti demonstrates, the only letter ascribable to him. Everything in it tells us about an unprecise, illiterate individual, a feeling highly confirmed by the lack of a text explaining the breast fragment, if nothing else for erasing any possible doubts for who’d receive it, a very strange circumstance. Actually it’s reasonable to believe the Monster wasn’t capable of writing in a correct way, just like Lotti, who’d dropped out during the fourh years of elementary school when he was 14. His well-known “spontaneous letter” (see) easily conveys the idea of the macabre hilarity an attached writing by him could’ve aroused.
In spite of his clear will of showing off, the Monster never made any phone calls claiming responsibility. Of course this might have very different explanations, it anyway fits Lotti’s character, whose depositions and wired-tapped calls are a measure of his difficulty in expressing himself. Beside the strong dialectal inflection denoting a coarse and unpolished tuscan man, he lacked words very often, replaced by “thing” and “to thing”. Try to imagine Lotti who calls to claim responsibility for a crime, and you’ll easily understand why the Monster never did.
Most likely the Monster was a bachelor who lived by himself or, if anything, together with a relative like his elderly mother. This is asserted both by Francesco De Fazio and the FBI experts, but even more by common sense. It’s hard to think that in a large family, for instance with a wife and some kids, no one realized anything, during the long years of his activity, and didn’t react in some way. In 1974 Lotti lived with his mentally ill mother, and later alone. After all a person like him was entirely above suspicion: who could’ve noticed if, in conjuction with the murders, he’d gotten home bloodstained, perhaps late at night?
Still De Fazio and the FBI experts tell us the Monster must’ve been a sexually immature person, uncapable of a normal relationship with a woman. Lotti was like that, like Fornari and Lagazzi accurately desribe him. Moreover, his character perfectly matches an individual curious about the female body, probably unknown to him, who in 1974 performed the hideous deed of puncturing Stefania Pettini’s body. Almost surely in 1974 Lotti hadn’t had any sexual experiences yet, at least this can be inferred from Fornari and Lagazzi’s examination; the earliest ones with prostitutes might’ve taken place just in the following years. And as a matter of fact seven years later, before Carmela De Nuccio’s corpse, the Monster didn’t show any curiosity about her body, which he didn’t even undress.
The Monster of Florence wasn’t a skilled shooter at all. In 1974 he fired nine shots in a confused and uncontrolled way against poor Pasquale Gentilcore, missing him as much as four times despite the short distance. Then, little by little, he got better, but never reaching an excellent level, as the experts pointed out (De Fazio and Iadevito, for instance). Also, his gun choice – a very low caliber pistol produced for shooting sports – wasn’t smart, since he could’ve benefited from a higher caliber. A .22 was ok not for him, but for an expert killer, able to accurately hit vital organs like head or heart. Just to give an example, if in Baccaiano Paolo Mainardi had been hit to his face by a .9 caliber, even with a nondeadly wound hardly could he have had the vitality to attempt an escape, which he did instead. In this case too someone totally inexperienced with firearms and devoid of any connection with environments where they were common like Giancarlo Lotti explains this scenery well: he found that gun on Signa’s crime scene – used by Stefano Mele’s family members, them too not experienced criminals at all – and he managed with that gun.
Let’s now move to the stature topic. The position of the bullet hole corresponding to the first shot against the van in Giogoli at about 150 cm from the ground gives us the height of the murderer’s shoulder, whose arm must’ve been adducted while his eyes were close to the glass. Other positions are possible, but unnatural too. The equivalent stature is around 180 cm (see La dinamica di Giogoli). After all the knee prints on the Panda in Vicchio too allow to establish an analogous stature, once you accept the reasonable eventuality the murderer stood on tiptoe during one phase of the attack (otherwise he’d be almost 200 cm tall…, see La dinamica di Vicchio). Last, there are two couples of boot prints, in Calenzano and in Scopeti, corresponding to a 44 (EU) size and associable with a tall person. The fans of the short Salvatore Vinci – but the ones of the not too taller Pietro Pacciani as well – pull a face before such clues, always trying to belittle them, like in Vicchio case where the prints could’ve been produced by anyone (but who, when and for what reason should’ve pressed their knees against the Panda’s door?). Who supports Lotti hypothesis needn’t to make up unlikely explanations, because the man was 178 cm tall.
Just like Lotti, who to be precise was a left-handed person who’d been forced to use his right hand, the Monster was ambidextrous. Many clues suggest this, among which the ones discussed in the article La dinamica di Scopeti, to which I refer you. Here I’ll just point out that the position of three of the cases found in front of the french guys’ tent demonstrates the gun was turned clockwise at 90° at least, so necessarily handled with the left hand. Then two stabs were inflicted from behind with the left hand to the guy who was running away, all the others with the right hand.
Last, this synthetic list can’t lack the scooter matter. Giancarlo Lotti bought his first car in 1978, so in Borgo four years before he must’ve gone on a scooter, which from Fornari and Lagazzi’s examination we know he had. The arguments of whom regards a 60 km journey from San Casciano to Borgo on such vehicle as impossible are biased, since it could be made in little more than one hour and without needing to fill up the tank for the return either (the speed of the geared scooters from back then went beyond 70 km/h, and their tank capacity beyond 200 km). But there’s more. Stefania Pettini’s purse, found on the right side of the possible escape path, five meters away from the roadside, could’ve been thrown just from a two-wheeled vehicle (see La dinamica di Borgo, article at the bottom of which this topic is deeply analyzed).

Conclusions. In this short article I tried to give an idea of the so-called “Lotti Hypothesis”, too often dismissed with mere sarcastical jokes. Sure, to accept the fact the investigators had the Monster of Florence under their nose without recognizing him – or anyay without declaring it – might seem impossible. That’s how it went nonetheless, and perhaps the time is ripe for this astonishing scenery to be taken into account and openly discussed, and not just on social media among tooth-yankers and other windbags of various kinds.
In conclusion, I’ll report the words by judge Daniele Propato, the only law enforcement’s and judiciary’s representative who expressed his doubts over a possible identification of Lotti with the Monster of Florence. He did as public prosecutor in his indictment at the appeal trial, where he uselessly asked for Mario Vanni’s acquittal. The magistrate didn’t believe to Lotti’s account, but he was compelled to admit: “Many details he recounts somehow match the facts… and this for me remains the Lotti mystery”. A mystery leading him to these reflections:

Here the best culprit for these crimes, in my opinion, is Lotti, sexual perversion, homosexual instincts. Lotti is left-handed but for some things uses both hands and there’s one thing that alarms me, the french guy, one time he says he was grabbed with the right hand and stabbed with the left but the experts say from right to left, which makes precisely think to a left-handed person […]
He says that while he’s a person with limited cultural and social resources, he was able to skilfully face his interlocutors in a colloquy, it’s the attitude of a person who paid a lot of attention to what he was saying, a lot of attention to what he wasn’t saying. […] He behaved like a meek man, a victim of other people but the consultants don’t agree on this valutation and this is Lotti.

Addendum. I forgot no occasion could be better than this to explain this blog’s title, which might not be comprehended by everyone. In the summer of 1995 Lotti dated Alessandra Bartalesi, Mario Vanni’s niece, who’d later have the occasion of recounting many interesting ocurrences about this relationship of theirs and the individual’s unsettling personality (here, here and here the corresponding minutes, here the deposition). One time, during one of their car rides, Lotti would’ve liked to stop in Baccaiano’s widening, but the girl refused. You can read in the minutes: “I said to him: «I don’t like to stop there, you know there has been the Monster» […] And he said to me: «When you’re with me there’s no Monster for sure»”.