Serial Killers of Venice E-Book

Davide Busato

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Helvetia
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Veneranda Porta from Sacile, the first female serial killer of the Serenissima; Daniel Lanza, the French teacher, hunting for victims in the calli during the seventeenth-century Carnival. Marcantonio Brandolini, the poisoner abbot suspected of sorcery; Paolo Orgiano, the rapist from Vicenza and his “terrible vice”; the Counts Giusti from Verona and the kidnapping of the beautiful Angela Lonardi; Count Lucio dalla Torre and the bloody murder of Noale... These are just some of the criminals who caused a sensation during the epoch of the Republic of Venice and could be considered as serial killers because of their modus operandi, if the categories of modern criminology were applied. The reconstructions suggested by Davide Busato base on the consultation of documents of the Consiglio dei Dieci archive, the most powerful and dreadful of the Venetian magistracies, often with a very much alive and disquieting picture of a gloomy Venice. They are complex investigations, sometimes opposed, cleverly solved by the police or the Avogadori de Comun by using, whether possible, their limited scientific means available at that time.

Leseprobe

Davide Busato

SERIAL KILLERS OF VENICE

Killers, Sadists and Rapists 

Colophon

Reserved literary and artistic property.

©2013 by HELVETIA EDITRICE

HELVETIA EDITRICE

via Pozzuoli 9 - 30038 - SPINEA (VE)

tel. [phone]  -  fax [phone]

[email protected]  -  www.edizionihelvetia.it

Original title: I Serial Killer della Serenissima

ISBN: 978-88-95215-36-5

Publishing planning and organisation: Diego Dal Medico

First edition: March 2013

Translation by: Jet Traduzioni Network

Anna Favaro - Tiziana Geroldi

                       www.jettraduzioni.weebly.com

Photographic References:

Davide Busato: photographs of Venice

The Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Photographic Section, has carried out the reproductions of the documents which are published according to the Act of Concession n. 71/2011, reg. 6699 / 28.13.07

Special thanks to the Tibaldo Giancarlo Museum of Trissino (VI) for the images of the surgical instruments.

Preface

by Alberto Toso Fei

This is a book about the Dark. The same dark that hides the hand of people who kill: sometimes by chance, other times for cupidity, or for a simple and dramatic desire of taking life. Once, twice, many times: strangling, stabbing, dismembering, drowning. It is a book about the Dark Side, the one that emerges from the deep and erases any trace ofhumanity and turns men and women into serial killers, beingswithout a soul, hurting our instinctive pursuit of the good, together with their victims. This book is about the Night: anever-ending night made of death and despair, of abject feelingsand a long river of blood, which seems to have crossed the centuries and the lands ruled by the Doges. Venice – and its Terraferma (mainland) – appears as a crepuscular and violent place, apparently hopeless, even though this is not the truth. In the end justice prevails, as we can read about the Dark Side in the historical documents containing the clues, telling the facts, describing trials and condemnations; through them, Davide Busato tells us about a Serenissima we did not know before.

However that may be, we will not be looking at the city with the same eyes anymore.

Introduction

by Davide Busato

During the last few years, serial murders are the subject of several analysis and an increasingly widespread interest. The headlines are nearly every day dominated by accounts of heinous and, for certain aspects, unexplainable crimes, often committed with savage cruelty. The fear generated by many of these murders is tied, most of all, to the apparently random choice of the victims. When a killer – a predator – is at large, nobody feels safe. Any dark corner could hide a death trap; anybody could be a murderer. Fear is atavistic, prehistoric; it dates back to the time when man was not the only one – nor the most dangerous – of hunters.

With a killer at large, man becomes the prey of the most fearful among predators: the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. A serialkiller is made even more perfidious by the patience with which he waits for his victim, his cleverness concerning the techniques of the hunt and the determination in the success of his mission.

The collective imagination, moreover, is upset and struck with the desire, typical of some serial killers, to live once more their crimes, taking personal objects or – what is worst – parts of the body belonging to their prey, and keeping them as trophies, fetishes or souvenirs, maybe to raise morbid fantasies.

Hundreds of innocent victims, sacrificed in the name of perverse and luxurious projects sprang from the mind of real human predators. Serial killers were born together with the violence, frustration, rage, and power… in a nutshell, they were born together with the man.

Serial killers are not a modern day’s invention: before the famous Jack the Ripper, the monster of Whitechapel, there were other cases equally – if not even more – tragic.

In 1440 Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France and companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc, massacred, killed and slit the throat of a great number of children, before being stopped and hanged.

Between 1604 and 1609, Countess Erzsébet Bàthoryexperimented several kinds of tortures and mutilations – ante and post mortem – upon young girls expressly recruited among peasant families. The chain of violence was broken only when she was captured and walled up alive.

These cases, so resounding, happened outside our borders,many others lay hidden inside Italian chronicles. Therefore, our curiosity, charmed by criminology, has been attractedby the great number of savage homicides ascribable to a single person; in particular, by the ones traceable in the archive of the “Serenissima” Republic of Venice.

The reconstruction of episodes related to possible serial homicides happened in the past, though, is pretty difficult if we consider that, at the time of facts, the notion of “serial killer” had not taken shape yet. Each homicide was considered by the detectives as a single case of murder; consequently, during the investigations they did not try to trace back to previous crimes, or to make connections among similar events.

It is only since the second half of Twentieth century that the distinction among different types of murders becomesstandard procedure; precisely when, in 1957, the criminologistJames Reinhardt will coin, in his essay Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes, the word chain killer, making reference to a chain of homicides related to a single person.

Therefore, only a re-examination of the existing material could lead to identify some serial murders, considering that the best preserved acts of trials are subsequent to the Seventeenth century.

For example, a new reading of the dossier about Veneranda Porta’s case could probably allow to redefine what, at that time, seemed to be a common case of a husband’s murder, in a more dramatic crime committed by a “black widow”.

The cases reported in the present book are taken from the Serenissima’s judicial archives. In order to reconstruct the cases of alleged serial murders, first of all, a list of the persons executed through quartering – capital punishment provided only for the most dire crimes – have been drawn up. After that, trials’ records have been analysed in order tofigure out the killer’s modus operandi, recognise his signatureand finally trace, whereas possible, a map of the places of murders.

Thanks to the elaborate Serenissima’s bureaucracy, it has been also possible to look through the archives containing additional information such as, for instance, the suspects’ addresses, testaments, declarations to the tax authority and estate value or financial situation.

Finally, the dates and burial places of the executions must be verified. In case of banishment, further information have been sought through the letters sent to the Dominio (Dominion) local authorities by the bench dealing with the case. A Serial killer’s profile has been thus reconstructed with thegreatest number possible of clues; then we indulge in a description of the case as much detailed as possible trying, nevertheless, to maintain a good degree of plausibility.

Investigations in the Serenissima

At the end of the Sixteenth century, the Serenissima Republic of Venice embraced a very large territory extended to Bergamo and Cremona in the west, while in the eastern part it included several Greek islands, as well as Istria and Dalmatia.

To control efficaciously such a wide dominion, specificadministrative bodies have been created. The law itself made use of different types of courts such as, to name a few, the Signori di Notte al Criminal (Civil Lords of the Night), the Quarantia Criminal (Criminal Quarantia), the Consiglio dei Dieci(Council of Ten), the Corte del Proprio (Court of Internal Affairs). Each one has its own specific tasks, but sometimes a crime could be supervised by two different bodies at the same time.

The paper documentation kept in the archives regardinginvestigations and proceedings is, still today, quite considerable even though a part has been lost due to the upheavals by the historical events of the past century. It is a real treasure of information, which does not facilitate, however, a study on serial crimes.

Excluding the most famous murders, in fact, it is very hard to find the details of the various trials, precisely because of the large amount of documentation produced by each single institution. Moreover, all the difficulties to find a serial killer through the official documentation of the time, come from what is called in criminology “dark number”, or those criminal events never recorded or reported. Wars, plagues and famines used to take such a heavy toll that a serial killer could work undisturbed. There were an infinite number of reasons why people could disappear.

However, this should not make us believe that crimes were not reported or passed utterly unnoticed even inside the most disreputable Serenissima’s environments. Venice, in fact, owned a very large territory which was also very well controlled. Throughout the ages, the Serenissima was often seen as a lighthouse illuminating other realities that struggled to come out from medieval obscurantism through its way of life, its laws, its bureaucracy and judiciary.

The difficulties in the search of serial killers, though, do not depend only on the “dark number”, but also on the definition itself of “serial crime”. Often, in fact, murder cases were examined individually, so they were not easily ascribable as a serial crime especially if the killer’s modus operandichanged. Two examples can be mentioned to describe these difficulties.

19th March 1456. A priest, Father Vittore, is executed on the wooden structure built as a scaffold between Saint Mark’s columns. He is the killer of a canon. This act of violence had shocked the hearts of the Venetians and left an indelible mark in the chronicles of the time; however, 1456, the anno horribilis, will be remembered for the terrible plague appeared in October and, above all, for Lorenzo Giustiniani’s death, the last bishop of Castello and the first one to bear the title of “Patriarch of Venice” after the abolition of the Patriarchate of Grado.

How did the events take place? The official chroniclesand documentation reported that Father Vittore had knownfrom hearsay that a very rich canon named Mauro d’Otranto lived in Saint Mark’s Parsonage, close to the Doge’s Palace. While the canon was singing the matins in the church, Father Vittore broke into his house in search of money. Something went wrong, though: the canon came back earlier than expected. A fierce fight broke out and Father Vittore received the worst of it. He begged for mercy and, apparently repented, asked the canon to show him to the door. As he reached the stairs, quickly the evildoer pulled out a rope, wrapped it around Mauro d’Otranto’s neck and attempted to strangle him. Failing that, the priest drew a sword and cut his throat. Then he brought the body out into the street and covered it with some wood.

It did not take a long time before the clues and the evidence nailed him. Father Vittore was soon captured by the Inquisition Tribunal and, tortured before the Patriarchal Vicar Nicolò dalle Croci, confessed committing the crime. He was therefore degraded and handed over to the secular authority that condemned him to hanging.

The story would have ended here if Father Vittore did not shout from the scaffold that this was not his first murder in front of the yelling crowd who were waiting to see him dangle between the columns. Maybe the priest had found his way or maybe he felt remorse; most of the people thought he was a very delirious diabolic, the result of that dark power the Church itself has struggled against so much. Those who were present were shocked and the event soon spread over the city.

The other crime, unsolved by the courts, had been committed to the detriment of an old woman, Elisabetta di Palinarolo, living in Malamocco. Father Vittore accusedhimself of having broken into her house, forced her to reveal the place where she kept her valuables and, eventually, killed her.

Obviously, given the similarities between the crimes, one wonders whether the killer priest had not already plannedto kill the canon too considering that, at the moment of the fight with Mauro d’Otranto, he had a rope, and even a sword, on him. Nowadays, according to the definitions of criminology the presence of a link between two victims would already imply a serial murder.

However, while Father Vittore confessed spontaneously,the same cannot be said for the case happened some thirty years later in Portobuffolè, a little village of the March of Treviso, which passed under the power of the Serenissima on the 4th April 1339.

The facts took place in 1480. Some Jews belonging to the community of Portobuffolè, including the pawnbroker Servadio da Colonia and Moisè son of Davide di Treviso, made arrangements with Giacobbe Barbato da Verona and Giacobbe da Colonia. They wanted to kidnap a child. The victim, though, must have a specific feature: blond hair

Sebastiano Novello, son of the Lombard Pietro da Seriatewas chosen. He was only six years old and homeless; he lived by begging, just like hundreds of his generation. It should have been pretty easy, therefore, to kidnap him in Treviso and get out of the city unnoticed.

The poor Sebastiano is forcibly brought near Portobuffolè,to an isolated farmhouse on the banks of the river Livenza. There were Servadio and Moisè waiting for him. The child was chained and gagged so that he could not fight back. The men struck his body with knives and awls to make a human sacrifice, collected the blood and used it to knead unleavened loaves. Then they burnt the battered body; but they left too many traces and also a witness: Donato, servant of Servadio, a Jew converted to Christianity. The man ran away, shocked, and went to the soldiers of the Podestà Andrea Dolfin to denounce what he had seen. The soldiers immediately arrested Servadio, Giacobbe da Colonia and Moisè.

The Quarantia Criminal condemned them to be dismembered and burnt in public the walls of Treviso. But the Avogador Benedetto Trevisan, sent expressly by the Consiglio dei Dieci, renewed the trial and ordered the killers’ transfer to Venice. The three were condemned to be burnt, chained on a pole in Saint Mark’s Square, on July 5, 1480. According to some chronicles, also Giacobbe Barbato was arrested, but he committed suicide in jail to avoid the capital punishment.

Perhaps this episode is connected to the inscription on a tablet located in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, bricked up in the Ashkenazi synagogue “Scola Canton”, which quotes the Psalms 32:10 “Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him”. According to the Venetian Jewish tradition, it was precisely Servadio da Colonia who spoke this sentence among the flames of the stake in Saint Mark’s Square. But how many children had they killed before being stopped? Was Sebastiano Novello really the first and only victim? It is not possible to give a certain answer, but maybe it could be useful to recall a similar case happened only five years earlier in Trento.

25th March 1475: Easter Sunday. The body of Simonino, a two years old child, son of the tanner Andrea Lomferdom, was found in Trento, in a canal close to the Jewish village of San Pietro. The archival sources did not mention the presenceof injuries on the corpse, therefore, it was impossible to inferthe cause of his death; but they spoke about the manhunt that immediately erupted after the finding which brought the arrestof two Jews, Samuele da Norimberga and Mosè diFranconia, known as “il Vecchio” (The Old). After their confession, drawn out by torture in the Buonconsiglio Castle’sdungeons, the two were burnt and beheaded.

The analogies with the case of Treviso and the motives provided to the investigators were disturbing. It seemed tobe a human sacrifice to celebrate the Pesach, the Jewish Easter.It could have been even more dreadful to read the trial’s minutes in which the defendants give detailed descriptions also aboutritual murders that occurred years before in the German landswhere they originated and in the towns of Northern Italy where Ashkenazi communities had developed. It seemed the same Jews involved in the murder of Sebastiano Novello had witnessed or taken part in these infanticides; as with other homicides, they were just reported.

The abduction of a child, his unnatural death, the probable ritual aspect: all these are important analogies with the next case of Portobuffolè and elements that could make one think this is a serial crime, where the motive seems to be a ritual of human sacrifice. It must be considered that, in the Fifteenth century, the murders committed in a contest of magical rites were investigated singularly; whereas nowadays, they could fall into the category of the crimes connected to sects, due to the fierceness the victims are battered with.

The two columns in Saint Mark’s Square in Venice

The Police in Venice

Who dealt with similar cases? The concept of “police”, as we know today, dates back to the first years of the Nineteenth century, when the famous Scotland Yard in England was born. Actually, already in the Seventeenth century, it was possible to find a sort of gendarmerie in London.

In Venice, even since the second half of the Thirteenth century, thieves and murderers clashed with a type of police who were extremely efficient and with a particularly evocative name: Domini de nocte. The Signori di Notte al Criminalenforced guard duties during the night and preparedinquiries about violent crimes, sorcery and evil spells. The Capi Sestiere (Chiefs of Sestiere), who reported to them were six, representing the sestieri (six districts) of Venice. They conducted the early investigations and reported to the appropriate courts what they noticed. Other information was gathered through the informers or spies of the Council. Secret denunciations were collected in the Boche de Leon (Denunciations mouths or Lions’ mouths), scattered around the city and inside the Doge’s Palace itself. They were slits made in a slab of marble or stone set in the wall; they were often placed near a church and were introduced since the second half of the Sixteenth century. It is still possible to see some of them in Venice. Before their creation, secret denunciations were left in places where they would have surely been collected, such as the stairs of the Doge’s Palace.

Before 1837, when the Church of San Michele Arcangelo in Campo Sant’Angelo (near the oratory) was destroyed, the Venetians lived a tragedy which remained in the chroniclesfor centuries. One day, people present in Campo Sant’Angelo saw a boy running like mad chased by several soldiers. The boy, of whom the chronicles did not report his name, was fleeing because he had left five corpses behind him. In fact, he had cut his father’s throat, his mother’s and his three sisters’. It was broad daylight and the pursers did not work for the Signori di Notte, but for the Quarantia Criminal, a court which dealt with murders and serious crimes.

The Quarantia Criminal was the most important court among the ordinary criminal courts and had the same role of the modern judiciary police. It was involved in the capture of criminals as well as the proof of the evidence that would be presented in the trial.

In its rich archives it was possible to find the minutes of the interrogations, evidence and witnesses. It can be deduced from these files that an articulated procedure was used; it consisted not only in hearing the witnesses and evaluating the evidence, but also the search of the crime scene and – in most controversial cases – the demand for medical or surgical reports. It is difficult to believe in the accuracy and usefulness of the examinations because of their limited knowledge at the time; however, despite its lack of scientific research, a symbolic case can be mentioned: the one about Franceschina da Torcello.

Summer 1348: Franceschina da Torcello was accused of killing her husband Guasperino Foscolo. The local judge, in order to draw out a confession, subjected her to torture in vain. In the meanwhile, though, during the search of her bag, a mysterious white powder was found.

The Podestà, the name of whom was not reported in thedocuments, immediately sent the powder to some pharmacistsin the capital city. Even though did not want to admit it, they did not know what it was, but confirmed there was no trace of poison. The study, therefore, was not convincing enough for further investigation.

In order to drive clear any doubt, the detective commanded to exhume the body and bring it to Venice where it was examined by an assembly of physicists and surgeons who finally certified Guasperino’s natural death. The investigationhad been thorough and any possible knowledge at the time had been used; the unlucky Franceschina da Torcello was thus released.