VII a Dark and Furious Murderer

Venetian Thrillers – Episode VII

A Dark Furious Murder

The double homicide was discovered only a few days after it had happened, in a modest but dignified apartment in Favorita, a small town in the Venice hinterland on the border of the province of Treviso. The agents of the San Marco police station, their suspicions having been aroused by the unreported absence of their colleague, Inspector Nazario Succo, decided to go and look for him and also doublecheck at the man’s house. The scene that met their eyes was terrible: the policeman was upside-down in the bathtub, with a plastic bag over his head and numerous blade wounds all over his body, and as if insufficient, further ferocious injuries had been inflicted with an ice pick. Under his body was that of his wife, slashed with a knife over the breast, neck and face.

Only a few days were needed to bring the assassin into custody: the couple’s son, Roberto, a taciturn nineteen year old who at the “Morin” Lyceum – where he studied – had no friends, but had never shown any signs of mental imbalance. He had attacked his mother pitilessly because the woman had refused to let him use the family car, an Alfa Sud. He then also killed his father, as he himself explained, “because I didn’t want him to suffer seeing his wife dead”. The homicide took place on April the 9 th , 1981. Roberto Succo would be declared mentally ill and interned at the psychiatric hospital in Reggio Emilia, where he finished his studies, went to the gym and in general was a “good boy”. Until, in May of 1986, he disappeared without leaving any traces.

A devastating sequence of terrifying rapes and murders across France and Switzerland took place whereby the elusive young man thrust all his maddened cruelty largely upon women and men in uniform. At first he was calm enough, working as a waiter in Aix-les- Bains, where he was involved in a relationship with a sixteen year old, Sabrina. But in March 1987 his irrepressible homicidal fury re-exploded:

© artifex 2008 1 near Toulon, for no apparent reason, he killed a twenty-six year old woman he had just met; a month later he killed a gendarme brigadier as the officer was on his way to work early in the morning, using the man’s own service pistol. He fled to the lakeside at Annecy where he stayed with France, a young girl of Vietnamese origin.

Taken in by this young dark angel, she didn’t even become nervous when Succo killed a doctor right before her eyes while they were travelling. She herself ends up killed and her body thrown from a cliff. After having attacked and forced another woman to strip (though without doing her any bodily harm) he kills yet another, a housewife from Annecy named Plaudine, who would be found naked with a bullet in her head. Not even this latest bloody contribution is sufficient to placate the mad streak of slaying and deaths produced by the man.

Back in Toulon, Succo gets into a fight with an ex-convict in a local night club, over two girls that he had just approached, and shoots him without warning, the bullet lodging in the man’s spinal column. He flees the scene only to burst into the hotel room, a few hours later, where a pair of Gendarmerie officers are questioning the two women (it is the same hotel where he himself is a guest); he kills them all mercilessly.

This time he distractedly overestimates his own capacities: fleeing the room he leaves several of his personal effects behind, among which, a photograph of himself which soon ends up in the newspapers. Sabrina, the sixteen year old, recognizes him, and despite the fact that the noose is already tightening in around him, Roberto Succo vanishes again without a trace. He reaches Switzerland, where he kidnaps and wounds a gas station attendant and takes a woman hostage, whom he almost immediately releases however.

He hides out in Lyss, where he breaks into the house of two women, whom he rapes while threatening them with his pistol. And while half of the police forces in Europe are looking for him somewhere between Switzerland and France, he slips back into Italy, returning to San Marco, in front of the police station where his father worked. No one recognizes him.

The police of Treviso arrest him on February the 28th , 1988, in the countryside, after following him over the fields, where he was going to meet an adolescent with whom he had made a date.

Two days later, after escaping from his cell, he puts on a “show” on the rooftops of the Treviso jail, slinging obscenities - and green beans – on to the crowd below. While trying to pass from one building to another he slips on an electric cable, falls and dislocates a shoulder.

After being taken to the prison at Vicenza, his delirious mission of death ends on an infirmary bed on May the 23 rd , 1988, with his head inside a plastic bag into which he had released the content of a gas flask.

But Roberto Succo’s story has a new and unexpected macabre twist to it, ten years later. Exhumed in order to send the remains to the charnel house, the corpse is discovered to be still intact, it is dumped back into the grave just as soon as it has been covered with special enzymes to speed up its decomposition. Unburied again in 2001 to obtain a tissue sample necessary to help a criminal investigation in France, again, the body is discovered to be still intact! Succo is buried in the Mestrino cemetery, beneath a simple wooden cross to which has been affixed a photo taken from a newspaper. Sometimes, a pink rose appears on the tomb, almost always in the hours before a storm, but this – perhaps – is already part of the black legend that has grown around it...

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