On Easter Sunday afternoon, Giulio Pesce took his wife, Elisabetta, to the train station in Chiavari, just down the Italian Riviera coast from Genoa. Like thousands of other Milanesi, the couple and their four-year-old daughter had come down from Milan to spend the Easter weekend at a holiday home owned by their in-laws.
Elisabetta (32), a staff nurse at Milan's Istituto Tumori, had to cut short her weekend break in order to do a Sunday evening shift at the hospital. As he was waving goodbye to his wife, Giulio Pesce noticed a man, in his mid-30s, passing by her compartment in the first class carriage. The man looked a little odd but Giulio Pesce thought nothing more of it. After all, his wife was travelling first class on an Inter-City train and she hardly seemed at risk.
However, she was at risk. Not long after the train pulled out of Chiavari station, Elisabetta was apparently forced out of her seat and dragged down the first class carriage to the toilet. Her assailant had perhaps acted in the dark, waiting for the train to go into one of those never-ending tunnels that are so typical of the spectacular Ligurian coastline.
Once in the toilet, the assailant forced her to take off her jacket and hand it to him. He then made Elisabetta kneel down and, using the jacket as a silencer for his .38 revolver, shot her once in the back of the head. Her dead body was discovered by train cleaners in Verona station, on the other side of the country, about four hours later.
Six days later, train cleaners on the Genoa-Ventimiglia line were surprised to find a toilet door jammed on the train that had just pulled into Ventimiglia station. Eventually, they had to resort to a sort of passepartout wrench to open the door and when they did, they found the lifeless body of 32-year-old Maria Angela Rubino, bent forward on her knees and a sickening pool of blood trickling out from under her brown hair.
Maria Angela Rubino was travelling home to Ventimiglia after attending a the funeral of a family relative. She had been travelling on her own in the second-last carriage on the train. Like Elisabetta, Maria Angela had been forced to her knees by her killer who then shot her through the head, using her black anorak as a silencer for his .38 revolver.
Neither woman had been sexually molested before or after her death, while the killer appears to have rummaged through both their handbags. It does not require Sherlock Holmes to conclude that the two murders, carried out in practically the same townland, bear remarkable similarity.
In themselves, these killings would have been enough to prompt widespread media speculation about the existence of a "serial killer" in the Genoa area. However, Maria Angela was in fact the eighth woman, aged between 23 and 39, to have been murdered in Liguria since January. Nearly all the victims were shot in the back of the head by a .38 calibre revolver and many of them had been made to kneel, as were Elisabetta and Maria Angela.
In the wake of these killings, "Serial Killer" phobia has inevitably struck in and around the Genoa area. Anxious parents are banning their children from taking the train or, if there is no alternative, instruct their loved ones to sit in the most crowded carriages.
Curiously, even though six of the victims had met with violent and similar deaths in a seven-week period in February and March, it was not until Maria Angela and Elisabetta were murdered this week that public opinion became concerned about the presence of a serial killer. The reason for this is both understandable and simple. The other six were all prostitutes, three of them Albanian, one Ukrainian, one Nigerian and one Italian.
Until this week, public opinion and police investigators alike had conceived of the grisly killings as perhaps an extended version of mob-land warfare with rival gangs trying to intimidate their "competitors" by killing one another's "employees". In a country with an ever-increasing army (50,000 at least) of mainly East European and African prostitutes, such an interpretation was logical.
The killings of Elisabetta and Maria Angela have radically changed that analysis, at least in the public mind. Elisabetta and Maria Angela were two ordinary, decent and attractive young women going about their business discreetly (both of them were "quietly" dressed and could in no way have been mistaken for prostitutes). The killings of Elisabetta and Maria Angela lead inevitably to the uncomfortable conclusion that, rather than dealing with gangland settling of accounts, here we are dealing with a psychopath, someone who clearly hates women, not just prostitutes.
For the time being, and perhaps in an attempt to reassure public opinion, police investigators refuse to admit that they are looking for a serial killer.
The investigators doubtless recall the difficulties of the infamous "Monstro Di Firenze" (Florence Monster) case involving an alleged serial killer responsible for 16 similar killings in and around Florence between 1968 and 1985. In the end, investigators had to conclude that the man they claimed to be the "monster", a certain Pietro Pacciani (now dead), had not acted alone but rather may have been "helped" by friends.
In the meantime, public feelings about this latest "serial" killer or killers were perhaps best summed up by 31-year-old Giovanni Capaldo, boyfriend of Maria Angela: "This guy is no serial killer, it would be better to call him what he is - a bad bastard".