SERIAL KILLER SECRETS
ONE OF ITALY’S WORST PREDATORS TARGETED VULNERABLE WOMEN IN TWO SEPARATE KILLING SPREES
On 2January 2003, convicted serial killer Maurizio Minghella was taken from his prison cell and rushed to hospital complaining of chest and stomach pains. At some point during the visit, the then-46 year old was allowed to use the toilet unaccompanied by any of the six police officers who were there with him. He immediately opened the small bathroom window, jumped out and fled on foot. A huge manhunt was mobilised, with 200 officers, helicopters and sniffer dogs searching the surrounding area.
Late that night, Minghella was taken back into custody. But the residents of Biella, 30 miles northeast of Turin, had been terrified for the eight hours he had been on the loose –and with very good reason. Minghella was a merciless killer, convicted of possibly only a fraction of the crimes he’d committed in two separate spate of attacks.
GROWING UP
Minghella was born on 16 July 1958, in Bolzaneto, Genoa. At the age of six, his parents separated and his mother was left to bring up her five children alone. She went on to remarry, but her husband was a brutal and violent man, an alcoholic who beat all of the children. Minghella came to despise his new stepfather, and began having vivid fantasies about strangling him with rope –fantasies that would begin to take root, then branch in a different direction as he grew into adolescence.
Minghella struggled badly at school, and he was kept back in the early grades while his peers progressed. It would later be discovered that he had an IQ of only 70. Isolated and angry, he would frequently bully the other kids, and his favoured form of torture was to drag them around by the mouth or the neck, another foreshadowing of the crimes he would go on to commit.
When he left school with little prospects, Minghella began drifting between low-paid menial jobs, while spending much of his time racing stolen mopeds and cars around the local area. For a time, it seemed that a talent for amateur boxing might channel his natural propensit y for aggression, but he was thrown out of his local club for badly beating another boy. He spent his evenings frequenting nightclubs, and his good looks, passion for disco dancing, and ability to charm women would earn him the nickname “the John Travolta of Val Polcevera”, after the actor’s role in Saturday Night Fever.
In 1977, when he was 19, Minghella married 15-year-old Rosa Manfredi, who experienced depression and was dependent on drugs. It was a miserable marriage, with Minghella frequently visiting sex workers, and itwould end with Rosa dying of adrug overdose following a miscarriage. It’s not known if this triggered the events to come, but Minghella already had a fascination with death, after losing his brother in
