Nearly thirty years on from his horrific crimes, Donato Bilancia remains Italy‘s most notorious serial killer.
Dubbed the ‘Monster of Liguria’ and the ‘Riviera Killer’ for his terrorising of the region in the late 90s, Bilancia murdered a shocking total of 17 people over the course of just six months.
He targeted women at random, killing four who were working as prostitutes in the Liguria region and two unsuspecting train passengers, sparking panic across Italy and headlines that a ‘train murderer’ was on the loose.
He also murdered a total of nine men and two of their wives, who he stole from before mercilessly shooting dead as the women screamed.
After his eventual capture, the twisted killer was examined by at least a dozen psychologists, who found he was motivated by loneliness, hatred and resentment, and that he was plagued by sexual disorders.
He told one psychiatrist that he had wet his bed into his adolescence, and had been left traumatised by his mother airing out his mattress on the balcony of their home for all their neighbours to see.
His father also publicly humiliated him, stripping him naked during a family holiday in front of his three little cousins so they could laugh at his small penis, despite it being the result of atrophy of the lower limbs.
The torment these events caused him stayed with him into adulthood and he reached breaking point after his only brother committed suicide.
Michele Bilancia threw himself under a train with his four-year-old son in his arms a day after he separated from his wife, who had asked for a divorce and custody of the child.
Psychologists said that the loss of his brother and young nephew stirred in Bilancia a contempt for his sister-in-law – and by extension all women.
‘It is one of the darkest, most engaging, most frightening, but perhaps also most instructive stories about the dark side of human nature,’ journalist and documentary director Pino Corrias said of Bilancia’s notorious killing spree.
His criminal career started, it seems, with the theft of some panettone, and he was a petty criminal from his teenage years after dropping out of school.
Bilancia was convicted of stealing and armed robberies throughout his 20s and 30s, but the killer would not engage in the sort of bloodthirsty violence he became known for until he was 47-years-old.
By the late 90s, his already fragile mental state reached breaking point after being betrayed by his only friend, and Bilancia ‘learned to kill’, as one judge put it.
A gambling addict, his first murders were of the owner of a betting den and a friend who helped to entrap him with a rigged card game.
He lost around £185,000 (220,000 euros) and took revenge by strangling game operator Giorgio Centenaro on October 16, 1997.
The death was originally put down to natural causes and believed to have been a heart attack – something that is said to have embittered the egotistical Bilancia, who saw it as the first step in his career as a serial killer.
Still bent on vengeance, Bilancia’s next two murders were of Maurizio Parenti, 42, who he had considered a close friend before learning of his deceit, and his 24-year-old wife Carla Scotto.
The couple had just returned from their honeymoon on October 24 when Bilancia paid a visit to their home.
The depraved killer described taunting the couple, forcing them up to their bedroom to take money out of a safe for him before shooting Parenti as Scotto watched then shooting her in the chest.
His first killings, he later said, gave him a taste for murder. Just three days later, he killed another husband and wife in their home.
Bilancia followed jeweller Bruno Solari to his house with the intention of robbing him, and shot both him and his wife Maria Luigia Pitto dead when she began screaming.
He next robbed and murdered currency exchanger Luciano Marro in the picturesque coastal town of Ventimiglia on November 13.
The killer waited until January 25, 1998 to take his next victim – a night watchman called Giangiorgio Canu. He is said to have targeted night watchmen because he ‘didn’t like’ their profession.
In March, he killed two women, Albanian national Stela Truya, 25, and Ukrainian Ljudmyla Zubskova, 23, who were working as prostitutes in towns on the Ligurian coastline.
Two days after killing Zubskova, and a few months after slaying Marro in Ventimiglia, he murdered another money exchanger in the same town by the name of Enzo Gorni.
Four nights later he killed two more night watchmen – Massimiliano Gualillo and Candido Randò – in the town of Novi Ligure.
They had attempted to stop him when, in front of a secluded villa in Novi Ligure, he also tried to kill a transgender prostitute by the name of Lorena Castro.
Believing she was slain, he left the scene, but his intended victim incredibly managed to play dead and escaped the shooting with her life.
Her testimony from hospital allowed the first identikit to be made of Bilancia, and provided information about his car – said to have been a dark Mercedes with a baseball cap seen in the back of it.
His next murder would be of Nigerian woman Tessy Adodo, who was aged 27 and also working as a prostitute, on March 29.
This marked a turning point for investigators, who recognised that the weapon using in the fatal shooting – a Smith & Wesson caliber 38. – was the same gun used in earlier killings.
But the ruthless Bilancia continued to strike, killing another sex worker on April 14, a Macedonian woman by the name of Kristina Valla.
Just two days earlier, a killing which was the first to bring Bilancia’s crimes to public attention and would later earn him the nickname ‘the train killer’.
On April 12, 1998, on the Intercity La Spezia-Venice, he stalked 32-year-old Elisabetta Zoppetti to the bathroom, broke through the door and shot her dead, escaping before anyone could see.
The brutally random killing took place on Easter Sunday, and Zoppetti, a cancer nurse from Milan, tragically left behind a four-year-old daughter.
Just days later on April 18, he chose another victim to kill in the same way on another intercity train.
The sick killer followed 29-year-old babysitter Maria Angela Rubino to the toilet cubicle and made her kneel down in a ‘Nazi-style’ execution, according to il Fatto Quotidiano.
He then shot her in the head before horrifically abusing her corpse by masturbating on it.
The final murder Bilancia admitted to was at a gas station on the Genoa-Ventimiglia highway on April 20.
He robbed and then killed attendant Giuseppe Mileto after he refused to give him credit for a tank of petrol.
It was through his car that Bilancia was finally caught out. A man who sold him his vehicle began to be inundated with fines after the career criminal – who had not transferred ownership over – repeatedly dodged toll booth payments.
The man reported him to the Carabinieri – who were looking for a car of the same description after the tip-off from Lorena.
Detectives followed him to various bars, collecting his DNA from coffee cups and used cigarettes, and were able to get a positive ID.
Bilancia was finally arrested on the morning of May 6, 1998, in front of the San Martino hospital in Genoa. He put up no resistance.
When he sat down before the Public Prosecutor, the serial killer proudly admitted to all of his crimes.
‘If you want me to tell you my story, we have to start from the beginning,’ he said. ‘And the beginning is not one murder, not eight murders, but seventeen.’
With this, he admitted to all the murders, including the first which was originally thought to be down to natural causes.
For his unspeakably depraved crimes, Bilancia was sentenced in April 2000 to 13 life sentences and 28 years in prison.
The judge ordered that he never be released, and he died from Covid in jail aged 69 in 2020.
