Tag: Stefano Mele

NEED TO KNOW

• A serial killer named Il Mostro terrorized Florence, Italy, from the late 1960s through the 1980s

• Though multiple people have been suspected — and even convicted — of some of the killings, many believe the real murderer has never been caught

• Netflix’s four-part miniseries The Monster of Florence revisits how Italian police first connected the series of murders

The Monster of Florence was as terrifyingly real as it gets.

For two decades, an unidentified serial killer terrorized young couples throughout small towns in Florence, Italy. However, it wasn’t until 1982 — 14 years after the first murder — that police realized a string of seemingly random unsolved double-homicides were connected, per Biography.

That turning point was when director and co-creator Stefano Sollima decided to begin his four-part limited series for Netflix.

“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,” he told TIME in October 2025. “We wanted to tell the story of the Monster without taking a position. 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.”

The culprits in question were a group of Sardinian men known collectively as the “Sardinia trail.” The theory began after bullets from the 1982 murders of Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini matched those from the 1968 killings of Barbara Locci and Antonio Lo Bianco.

At the time, Locci’s husband, Stefano Mele, was incarcerated for her murder. But because the killings continued while he was imprisoned, police believed the real Il Mostro (Italian for “the monster”) was still on the loose.

Multiple men were suspected and even convicted in some of the 16 murders linked to the serial killer. But as Sollima noted to TIME, no perpetrator has been sentenced for all eight double homicides, and the initial suspects sent police in circles while the bodies kept piling up.

Here’s everything to know about what The Monster of Florence got right and which elements of the real case were fictionalized.

Warning: The Monster of Florence spoilers ahead!

Did police not discover a serial killer until after Migliorini and Mainardi’s murders?

Yes, Italian police did not investigate the possibility of a serial killer until Migliorini and Mainardi’s murders in June 1982. Like the other eight couples who were killed, they were found shot and stabbed in their cars.

At the scene of the crime, investigators found Winchester “series H” bullets, which were used with a .22-caliber Beretta pistol, per TIME. They later received an anonymous tip that led them to link the gun to the 1968 murders of Locci and Lo Bianco, according to The Guardian.

That discovery led police to connect those two cases to three other double-homicides from the past decade: Pasquale Gentilcore and Stefania Pettini, Giovanni Foggi and Carmela De Nuccio and Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi. Though police linked the .22 Beretta to all eight crime scenes, it was never found, per The Hollywood Reporter Roma.

Were Lo Bianco and Locci Il Mostro’s first victims?

Yes, Lo Bianco and Locci — found fatally shot inside a parked car in August 1968 — are widely believed to be the first victims of Il Mostro. At the time of the killing, Locci’s 6-year-old son was asleep in the backseat of the car. He survived the attack and reportedly ran to get help.

However, not everyone considers Locci and Lo Bianco to be victims of Il Mostro. Michele Giuttari, a former lead investigator for the case, told The Guardian in October 2025 that the “Sardinia Trail” was a red herring and that the ballistics connection between the 1968 and 1974 murders had not been proven.

Was Mele convicted of Lo Bianco and Locci’s murders?

In the real-life case, Locci’s husband was convicted of the double homicide in 1970 and sentenced to 45 years in prison, per Biography and Forbes. Mele had initially confessed to killing his wife and Lo Bianco, with whom she had been having an affair, according to TIME. However, he later retracted his statement and shifted the blame onto several Sardinian men who allegedly had romantic ties to Locci.

One of those men was Francesco Vinci, whom Locci also allegedly had an affair with. He was arrested along with his brother, Salvatore Vinci, Mele’s brother, Giovanni Mele, and Mele’s brother-in-law, Piero Mucciarini.

Mele was freed when police linked Locci and Lo Bianco’s murders to other killings that had happened when he was incarcerated. The same happened to all the Sardinian suspects, who were officially cleared in 1989.

Did Salvatore Vinci kill his first wife?

When police focused on Salvatore Vinci as a suspect, it came to light that his late wife had died in the 1960s under suspicious circumstances in Sardinia, according to The Guardian and TIME. Police believed he was romantically involved not only with Locci but also with Mele.

In 1985, he was tried and acquitted for the murder of his first wife. After that, he disappeared. The last Il Mostro murder — when French couple Nadine Mauriot and Jean Michel Kraveichvili were shot while on a camping holiday — happened that same year.

Read the original article on People