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On April 12, 2000, Donato Bilancia, 49, was sentenced
by a Genoa court to 13 life sentences. Bilancia, a compulsive gambler,
confessed to slaying 17 people in a six-month killing spree on the
Italian Riviera.
Donato "Walter" Bilancia
(born July 10, 1951) is a serial killer who murdered 17 people – nine
women and eight men – on the Italian Riviera in the seven months from
October, 1997 to May, 1998. He was sentenced to 13 terms of life
imprisonment, with no possibility of release.
Background
Bilancia was born in Potenza, in southern Italy, in
1951. When he was about five years old, his family moved to northern
Italy, first to Piedmont and then to Genoa in the Liguria region.
He was a chronic bedwetter until age 10 or 12, and
his mother shamed him by placing his wet mattress on the balcony where
it could be seen by the neighbors. When undressing him for bed, his aunt
would shame him by pulling down his underwear in front of his cousins to
show his underdeveloped penis. At age 14, he decided to start calling
himself Walter. He dropped out of high school and worked at jobs such as
mechanic, bartender, baker and delivery boy.
Early crimes
While still underage, he was arrested and released
for stealing a motor scooter and for stealing a truck loaded with
Christmas sweets. In 1974 he was stopped and jailed for having an
illegal gun. At some point he was committed to the psychiatric division
of the Genoa General Hospital, but escaped. After he was apprehended, he
spent 18 months in prison for robbery. He served several prison terms in
Italy and France for robbery and armed robbery. In spite of his history
of psychiatric problems, up to age 47 he had no record of violence.
The murders
Bilancia was a compulsive gambler who lived alone.
His first murder was the October 1997 strangulation of a friend who
betrayed him by luring him into a rigged card game, in which he lost
£185,000 (about $267,000). The authorities originally thought this death
was a heart attack. Bilancia's next two murders were the revenge
shooting of the game's operator, and of his wife. He emptied their safe
afterward. Bilancia later said these first killings gave him a taste for
murder. In all his killings he used or carried a .38 caliber revolver
loaded with wad cutter ammunition. He made no attempt to conceal his
victims' bodies.
That same month, he followed a jeweler
home to rob him, them shot him and his wife to death when the wife began
screaming. He emptied their safe of jewelry.
He next robbed and murdered a money changer. Two
months later, he killed a night watchman making his rounds, simply
because he did not like night watchmen. He killed an Albanian prostitute
and a Russian prostitute. A second money changer was killed next, shot
multiple times and his safe emptied.
In March 1998, while receiving oral sex at gunpoint
from a transsexual prostitute, he shot and killed two night watchmen who
interrupted, then shot the prostitute, who survived to help develop a
police sketch and later testify against him. He also killed a Nigerian
prostitute and a Ukrainian prostitute, and robbed and assaulted an
Italian prostitute without killing her.
On April 12, 1998 he boarded the train from Genoa to
Venice because he "wanted to kill a woman". Spotting a young woman
traveling alone, he followed her to the toilet, unlocked the door with a
skeleton key, shot her in the head and stole her train ticket. Six days
later, he boarded the train to San Remo and followed another young woman
to the toilet. He used his key to enter, then used her jacket as a
silencer and shot her behind the ear. Excited by her black underwear, he
masturbated and used her clothes to clean up. The murders of two "respectable"
women sparked a public outcry and the creation of a police task force.
In his last killing before his arrest, Bilancia
murdered a service station attendant after filling up with petrol, then
took the day's receipts, about 2 million lira (about $1000).
Arrest
Based on the description of the black Mercedes one of
his prostitute victims was seen entering the night she was killed,
police considered Bilancia "suspect number one" and followed him for ten
days. They collected his DNA from cigarette butts and a coffee cup,
matching it to DNA found at crime scenes. On May 6, 1998 he was arrested
at his home in Genoa and his revolver seized. After eight days in police
custody he confessed, speaking for two days and drawing 17 diagrams.
Sentence
On April 12, 2000, after an 11-month trial, Bilancia
was sentenced to 13 terms of life imprisonment plus an additional 20
years imprisonment for the attempted murder of the transsexual
prostitute. The judge ordered that he never be released.
Wikipedia.org
No motive found as Italy's worst
serial killer gets life
By Rory Carroll - Guardian.co.uk
April 14, 2000
A compulsive gambler who hated to be alone has
been given 13 life sentences for murdering 17 people in a six-month
rampage that terrorised the Italian riviera.
Donato Bilancia, 49, shrugged and sucked on a
cigarette after a court in Genoa ordered that he never be freed for a
blood lust that consumed friends and strangers and baffled psychologists.
His victims included four prostitutes, a newly-wed
couple, two jewellers, two security guards and two women attacked in the
toilets of moving trains. Bilancia strangled or shot them in a rage
after he felt "swept by a fire" and a "bite in the head".
The court rejected a plea of diminished
responsibility and pronounced its verdict after deliberating for five
hours, ending an 11-month trial and satisfying the victims' relatives,
who wanted him transferred to a harsher prison. An appeal has been
allowed.
Bilancia confessed to the murders but could not give
a motive. He did not attend court and watched the proceedings on closed
circuit television in his cell at Chiavari prison.
The hunt for the so-called monster of the riviera
gripped Italy after police suspected that one man was responsible for
the corpses they began discovering in October 1997.
Thousands of police were drafted into north-west
Italy and female travellers were told to be wary as the death toll
mounted.
Bilancia, a dapper dresser nicknamed Angel Voice
because of his rasp, was not suspected by friends or relatives, who
knew him as courteous and unflappable.
He was a fixture at Genoa's backstreet gambling dens
and Foce, its prostitute's quarter, and was a successful burglar. But he
had no record of violence until 1997, when he was allegedly cheated at
cards by two friends, Maurizio Parenti and Giorgio Centenaro.
He bought a .38 calibre revolver and ambushed
Centenaro but the shock caused his friend to have a heart attack. Police
assumed natural causes had killed him.
Bilancia broke into Parenti's home and shot him and
his wife. He then tried to rob a jewellery shop, and shot two of the
staff when they screamed.
At this point he acquired a taste for killing,
psychologists said. His motive was uncertain. Prostitutes he visited
alleged that he had a tiny penis and was impotent.
Bilancia, who lived alone, borrowed a friend's car
and murdered four prostitutes - "one for each nationality that worked
the streets".
His lawyer, Umberto Garaventa, said: "For me that man
is crazy."
It was suggested that he was unhinged by the suicide
of his brother, who jumped under a train with his infant son.
On the Milan-Venice and Milan-Genoa intercity trains,
after losing hundreds of pounds at roulette, he followed a nurse and
cleaner into toilets, unlocked the door with a pass key, threw a jacket
over their heads and shot them. He could not bear to look at his victims'
eyes, he said.
It was the murder of two "respectable" women that
sparked the outcry and the creation of a police task force.
The squad tailed their suspect around Genoa's bars
and streets, collecting his cigarette butts for DNA sampling. They
swooped on May 6 1998 as he emerged from a routine hospital appointment.
Eight days later he confessed and spoke almost
without pause for two days, mechanically cataloguing 17 killings with
diagrams. The worst serial killer in Italian history asked if doctors
could explain to him why he did it.
Police hunt Italian Riviera killer
Sunday, April 19, 1998
Italian police are looking for a suspected serial
killer whose latest victim, a 32-year-old woman, has been found shot
dead, locked in the toilet of a local train at Ventimiglia on the
Italian Riviera. David Willey has the story from Rome.
Italian television and press are reporting panic among
regular travellers on the railway line, which runs along the steeply
mountainous Mediterranean coast between the French frontier and the
Italian port city of Genoa.
A 32-year-old woman was found dead locked in the
toilet of an almost empty local train when it arrived at the town of
Ventimiglia on the French border last night.
This is the second such killing in recent days. Two
Italian women have now been shot in the head at close range and locked
in the toilet of a Riviera train within the space of a week.
Police say they believe they are dealing with a serial
killer. They believe the same person may also be responsible for four
other murders this year of foreign prostitutes along the Italian
Riviera.
The prostitutes, from Albania, the Ukraine and
Nigeria, were also shot in the head with a pistol of the same calibre
used to kill the two women found in the train toilets.
A special serial killer detection squad has been set
up by the Italian police.
Its commanding officer, a former chief of liaison in
Washington between the Italian police and the American FBI, was
responsible for helping to bring to justice one of the most notorious
Italian serial killers of recent years.
This was a man found guilty of taking part in a series
of murders of courting couples, mostly foreigners, near Florence over a
period of twenty years. He died recently of natural causes.
