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.
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
