Circeo massacre

On 29 September at 6:20 PM, Izzo, Guido, Colasanti, and Lopez arrived at Villa Moresca, located on Via della Vasca Moresca in the Punta Rossa area of Cape Circeo, in the San Felice Circeo municipality, about 100 kilometers south of Rome. The villa belonged to the family of Izzo's and Guido's friend, Andrea Ghira.[3] They told the girls that they would meet another friend there and then go to a party at Parboni's house together. However, after a few hours of chatting and listening to music, Izzo and Guido suddenly made explicit sexual advances toward the girls. When they refused to reciprocate, one of the boys pulled out a gun and told the girls that he belonged to a criminal gang from Marseille and that the gang's leader, Jacques, had given orders to kidnap them since he wanted two girls.

Throughout the next 35 hours, Izzo and Guido proceeded to rape and torture Colasanti and Lopez. They were joined by the home-owner's son, 22-year-old Andrea Ghira, who claimed to be a capo of the Marseille gang. Later, the girls were drugged, then Lopez was dragged to the upstairs bathroom, where she was beaten and finally drowned in the bathtub. They then attempted to strangle Colasanti with a belt and abused her. While her attackers were momentarily distracted, she reached a telephone and tried to call for help but was discovered and hit with an iron bar. She then let herself fall to the ground and pretended to be dead. Believing that they had killed her too, the trio locked her and the corpse of Lopez in the trunk of a white FIAT 127. They then left for Rome, intending to dispose of the bodies. Colasanti later recounted that while driving, the trio was laughing merrily and listening to music while making fun of the girls: "Zitti, ché a bordo ci sono due morte" ("Shut up, we have two bodies on board.") and "Come dormono bene queste" ("How well do they sleep.").

Having arrived near Guido's house, the trio decided to go to a restaurant for dinner, where they were involved in a fight with two young communist militants whom they had crossed paths with by chance, so they left the car (with the two girls still inside the trunk) parked on Viale Pola in the Trieste quarter.

The discovery of Donatella Colasanti

As soon as the trio had left, Colasanti, though in shock, began shouting and throwing blows at the trunk walls to draw attention. At 10:50 PM, a night watchman heard the noises. He alerted police in a nearby Carabinieri squad car, who raised the alarm with the following coded message: "Cigno, cigno... c'è un gatto che miagola dentro una 127 in Viale Pola" ("Swan, swan, there's a cat meowing inside a 127 on Viale Pola"). This was intercepted by photojournalist Antonio Monteforte, who rushed to the scene and was able to photograph the opening of the trunk and the discovery of Colasanti and Lopez's corpse.[1] Colasanti was rushed to hospital, where she was diagnosed with several severe injuries and a fractured nose. In addition, the ordeal caused her very serious psychological damage, from which she never fully recovered.

Izzo and Guido were arrested within a few hours, while Ghira, alerted by a tip, went into hiding. The following day, the Carabinieri discovered the latter's mother and brother near the Circeo home and speculated that Ghira had warned them and asked for help in making any traces disappear.

A few months later, Ghira wrote a letter, intercepted by investigators, to his friends Izzo and Guido, in which he assured them that they would be out soon "for good behavior" and threatened to kill Colasanti if she testified against them.

The investigation was entrusted to the Carabinieri, led by Marshal Gesualdo Simonetti, who, partly thanks to Colasanti's testimony, reconstructed the events of the massacre.

Colasanti, who later formed a civil party against her assailants, was represented by a lawyer, Tina Lagostena Bassi. Several feminist associations constituted themselves as civil parties and attended the trial.

On 29 July 1976, a first-degree verdict of murder was handed down, sentencing Izzo and Guido, and Ghira in absentia, to life imprisonment without parole.

It was later discovered that Ghira had managed to flee to Spain, where on 26 June 1976 he enlisted in the Spanish Legion in Madrid under the fake name of Massimo Testa de Andrés (Andrés being the Spanish version of his first name Andrea),[5] claiming to have been born in Rome in 1955. He then served in Tercio Duque di Alba in Fuerteventura, Ceuta and Melilla. However, during his service he developed a drug problem and, on 28 May 1980, began a six-month sentence in prison in Cadiz for an "alleged crime against public health". In 1982, Ghira was assigned to Special Operations in Malaga before being sent to Melilla, where he suffered "numerous penalties for possession and consumption of drugs." On 21 July 1993, he was admitted to a military hospital, possibly for a head tumor, and was forcibly retired due to his poor psychophysical condition. Without a passport, he was now stuck in Melilla, where he lived with a girlfriend who ran a soda stand and continued to do drugs. It was in Melilla that he died on 2 September 1994 of a drug overdose. His body was found a week later on 9 September. He was buried in the local cemetery.[6]

In 2005, the Rome Prosecutor's Office requested the body's exhumation, which took place on 14 November 2005 in the presence of Italian investigators. A femur was then taken to Rome for investigation. On 26 November 2005, the DNA testing confirmed Ghira's identity. However, the analysis raised doubts.[7] Reportedly, the test, conducted in the laboratories of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at La Sapienza University, was carried out by geneticist Dr. Carla Vecchiotti, who turned out to be a former student and pupil of Prof. Matilde Angelini Rota, the forensic scientist in charge of the rape clinic at the Institute and Ghira's maternal aunt. Because of this, Colasanti declared that Ghira was still alive and staying in Rome, and that the remains were those of one of his relatives. Rosaria Lopez' sister Letizia also expressed doubts.[5] To dispel them, in January 2016, the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office reopened the case and ordered that the body be exhumed again to undergo a new, more thorough DNA test. The report, filed in June 2016 by Professors Giovanni Arcudi and Giuseppe Novelli, attested that the results of this test, carried out on bone marrow samples, confirm that the remains of the Spanish Foreign Legion NCO belong to Andrea Ghira.[8]

In January 1977, Izzo and Guido attempted to escape from Latina Prison by taking the prison guards' marshal hostage, albeit unsuccessfully. In January 1986, Izzo again failed to escape from prison in Paliano. On 25 August 1993, taking advantage of the premio permit, he failed to return to jail in Alessandria and fled to France. On 15 September, he was captured in Paris and extradited to Italy.[9][5]

In December 2004, Angelo Izzo was granted semi-freedom from Campobasso Prison in order to work at the Città futura co-operative. Nearly five months later, on 28 April 2005, he murdered 49-year-old Maria Carmela and her 14-year-old daughter Valentina Maiorano in Ferrazzano. They were the wife and daughter of his former cellmate Giovanni Maiorano, a Sacra corona unita turncoat, who had been sentenced to life in prison for the 1990 decapitation of 17-year-old Cristiano Mazzeo for drug debts. The two women were bound, suffocated and buried in the courtyard of a small villa in Mirabello Sannitico, owned by the Città futura association secretary Guido Palladino. The double murder was revealed on 30 April by Palladino and his associate Luca Palaia, who were both initially arrested for illicit arms trafficking. Palladino's plea-bargain led to three years and two months' imprisonment for conspiracy to conceal a corpse, while Palaia was sentenced to 24 years for conspiracy to murder, concealment, and attempted destruction of corpses, which was increased to 30 years on appeal and upheld in the Supreme Court. For these murders, Izzo was again sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 January 2007.[10]

In November 2009, journalist Donatella Papi announced she wanted to marry Izzo and fight to reopen the two trials that led to his incarceration. They were married on 10 March 2010, in Velletri prison.[11] Their relationship ended about a year later.[12]

In October 2021, Izzo made a statement before the Antimafia Commission regarding Rossella Corazzin, a Friulian woman who had disappeared aged 17 on 21 August 1975 while on vacation with her family in Pieve di Cadore in the province of Belluno. Izzo traced her disappearance to the Masonic Lodge and claimed that she was targeted because of her virginity and used as a sacrificial victim in an initiation ceremony by the Confraternity of the Red Rose and the Golden Cross at Dr. Francesco Narducci's villa on Lake Trasimeno. Once the macabre Masonic ritual was over, the girl was let out of the room where the ceremony took place "and that's the last time I saw her." Izzo says he is confident that the woman was murdered and the body would be found buried in the woods.[13]

During his incarceration, Izzo wrote several manuscripts, including "Decameron 1975", in which a group of neo-fascist youth flees Rome during a communist terror for a villa in San Felice Circeo, where they take turns telling each other stories due to a temporary lack of high-quality narcotics.[14]

Guido's prison sentence was modified on appeal on 28 October 1980, being changed from life imprisonment to 30 years, following a declaration of repentance and compensation of 100 million lire to the Lopez family.[7] In January 1981, he escaped from prison in San Gimignano and fled to Buenos Aires, where he was recognized and arrested a little more than two years later. While awaiting extradition, on 17 April 1985, he escaped from the Manuel Rocco hospital in Buenos Aires, where he had been hospitalized for hepatitis (probably contracted years earlier in jail due to the use of drugs taken intravenously). He later resurfaced in Panama in June 1994, where he had made a new life as a car dealer and was extradited back to Italy.

On 11 April 2008, Gianni Guido's sentence was commuted to community service following 14 years in Rebibbia Prison, where he graduated with a Foreign Languages and Literature degree. He finished serving his sentence on 25 August 2009, enjoying an eight-year discount thanks to a pardon. Letizia Lopez, Rosaria's sister, reacted negatively to this development, particularly about Guido's long absconding abroad, the absence of any signs of repentance on his part, and judging his detention regime to be insufficiently rigorous.[15][16][7]