He was 59 years old, in 2015 he had been identified thanks to the cameras and his library card. Then he was sentenced to 8 years in prison and 3 in a psychiatric facility
His lawyer doesn’t believe it: «When I read the news from Piazza Aulenti I said to my family: he seems like an old client of mine – says Cinzia Pezzotta, of the Bergamo Court -. I can’t believe he fell for it again, it means that rehabilitation doesn’t work.” Apparently, given that ten years have passed and Vincenzo Lanni has replicated in Piazza Aulenti the same type of attack committed in Val Seriana (in the Bergamo area) which had already landed him in prison.
It’s August 20, 2015, a pensioner is sitting on a bench in front of a bar in Villa di Serio when a man arrives, stabs him and runs away. Luckily the shot is superficial. Same day, twelve hours later: an eighty-year-old is in the Montecchio park, in Alzano Lombardo, heading to the library. When he enters he says to the librarian: “I feel a pain in my back”. He hadn’t noticed that two hundred meters earlier, while he was walking through an underpass, a knife had been stuck in his back and had remained there. He is rescued and operated on, luckily the knife did not nick his lung.
It is precisely the first attack that allows the police to reach Lanni. They check the images of the cameras installed by banks and clubs along the street, they discover that at 6.05 and 48 seconds the lens of a bar recorded a man on foot coming from the centre. They show the images to the first victim, who identifies him: a tall man, about forty years old, slightly balding and wearing eye-catching glasses and in his right hand a canvas bag with something heavy inside (just like the one with which he was filmed in Piazza Aulenti): inside there was the kitchen knife with the white plastic handle and 23 centimeter blade with which he would have struck. Another customer of the bar also sees the photo and says that it is “someone from the area, very strange and taciturn”, and a frequenter of the Alzano library. Library employees recognize this: “He comes here often, but he’s a closed guy, he never talks to anyone.” The librarians scroll through the membership lists and come to the photo of the attacker, his name and age, 49 years old. That same evening they go and knock on his door. «Are you here for the people I stabbed?» he says to the soldiers.
The trial reveals that Lanni is suffering of a schizoid personality disorder and a “greatly diminished” ability to understand and want. He says he doesn’t know what happened to him: «I’m not violent, I’ve never hurt anyone». He says he is repentant, he writes a letter to the injured: “I wasn’t myself, I also apologize because I hit people who could have been my parents.” This leads to a sentence of 8 years in prison and 3 years in Rems, rehabilitation facilities for convicts with mental problems.
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When questioned, he said that he had decided to kill as a reaction to the profound state of frustration he felt about his life, which he judged to be a failure.. Originally from Bergamo, with no criminal record, never in psychiatric care, in recent years he had lived in a residence not far from the home of his first victim. He was the only regular guest there. The others lived there for a few months while they were in the area for work. Instead he had chosen it as his home.
Three years earlier Lanni had lost his job as a computer programmer, and since then he had gotten by thanks to the savings he had aside. Three difficult years, during which he had lost all relationships. He had stopped attending the Excelsior chess club in Bergamo, to which he had been a member since 1999, and with which he had participated in 41 tournaments since 2004. The last one was on 7 December 2011, and since then even the chess players from Bergamo had not seen him again. Precisely at that time dark clouds had begun to gather over his mind. Dissatisfied with his life, he began to contemplate suicide, but then, “being too cowardly”, he explained, “I decided to kill someone”.
He had thought about it for a long time, spending his evenings immersed in the many detective books and criminology treatises that were found in his room.. He had thought about the weapons to use, the methods of attack and the possible victims, choosing lonely elderly people, who in his opinion were easier to hit without expecting resistance. Finally he decided to act, not surprisingly just as the money was running out.
He didn’t want to limit himself to the two elders. Just as 40 carabinieri were already engaged in a manhunt, he was in the Rocca park in Bergamo Alta. In his pocket, a harmless iPod headphone cable, which in his hands was to become a noose to strangle the first lonely woman he encountered. Luckily the right opportunity didn’t present itself. A jogger doesn’t know she had a narrow escape: Lanni had seen her running alone and was about to take action when the girl was joined by another athlete. The would-be assassin had thus given uppromising to try again the next day. But the police had preceded him.
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