The Circeo massacre (Italian: massacro del Circeo) was a rape and murder case that occurred in the Italian town of San Felice Circeo, in the Province of Latina in the Lazio region, on 29 and 30 September 1975. The case involved three men who kidnapped and raped two young women, one of whom died.
Timeline of events Donatella Colasanti (12 May 1958 – 30 December 2005) and Rosaria Lopez (1956–1975) were both raised by working-class families in the Montagnola neighbourhood of Rome. When the crime occurred, Lopez, 19, was working as a bartender, and Colasanti, 17, was a student.
Colasanti and Lopez met Angelo Izzo, 20, and Giovanni Guido, 19, through a mutual friend, Gian Pietro Parboni. The men were using aliases to obfuscate their connection to prior sexual assaults and cover their tracks. Parboni invited them a few days earlier to a bar at the "Il Fungo" tower in Rome's EUR district. Colasanti and Lopez liked the two men, who seemed polite and approachable. Izzo and Guido invited Colasanti, Lopez, and a third friend, who at the last moment decided not to join the group, to a party at Ghira's house in Lavinio, Anzio, about 50 km south of Rome. They met in front of the Ambassade Cinema on 29 September at 3:30 PM.
Abduction 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 km south of Rome. The villa belonged to the family of the men's friend, Andrea Ghira, 22. They told Colasanti and Lopez 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 Colasanti and Lopez. When they refused to reciprocate, one of the men pulled out a gun and told Colasanti and Lopez 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.
Attack Throughout the next 35 hours, Izzo and Guido proceeded to rape and torture Colasanti and Lopez. They were joined by Ghira, who claimed to be a capo of the Marseille gang. Later, Colasanti and Lopez 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 abuse 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 Colasanti and Lopez: "Shut up, we have two bodies on board." and "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 parked on Viale Pola in the Trieste quarter.
Escape
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: "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 alongside Lopez's corpse. Colasanti was rushed to the 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.
Arrest and conviction 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 behaviour" 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.
Perpetrators
The perpetrators came from affluent Roman families and displayed far-right tendencies:
Andrea Ghira was born on 21 September 1953, to construction contractor and water polo player Aldo Ghira, who was part of the gold medal-winning Italian team at the 1948 Summer Olympics, and his wife Maria Cecilia Angelini Rota. While studying at Liceo classico Giulio Cesare ("Giulio Cesare High School"), he became involved in far-right circles. At the school, he had formed a group that theorised crime as a means of social affirmation. His first trouble with the law came at age 16, in 1970, due to his participation in far-right demonstrations and episodes of political hooliganism. Infatuated with the myth of the Marseilles gang, he often used the pseudonym "Jacques" in honour of Jacques Berenguer, a member of that gang who had pulled off a series of kidnappings for extortion in Rome. Ghira had received an initial charge for seditious demonstration, then, in 1972, was charged with armed menace and aggravated injury. In 1973, he and Izzo carried out an armed robbery and were sentenced to five years in prison in Rebibbia, but served only 20 months. Angelo Izzo was born on 23 August 1955, the son of a builder, and lived in the middle-class Roman neighbourhood of Trieste-Salario. At the age of 13, he joined Giovane Italia ("Young Italy"), the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). At the end of 1969, he and Ghira were expelled from the group for using the inner courtyard of the movement's Trieste-Salario section to hide stolen mopeds. From 1972 to 1975, Izzo took part in attacks alongside other Roman right-wing youth, notably against the Trieste quarter section of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). He also participated in: numerous self-financing robberies, robbing banks, jewellery stores, and post offices; drug trafficking, cultivated in agreement with the common underworld; and many gang rapes, employing the same technique (i.e., luring an already known girl into a house) that was used for the Circeo episode. By 1975, Izzo had enrolled as a medical student. He attended classes only occasionally and, instead of studying, preferred to frequent bars and attend parties organised in the homes of other young right-wing extremists, in which political ideology, drugs, and violence against women were mixed. He also had a criminal record even before the Circeo massacre: he had raped two women in 1974 and received a two-and-a-half-year suspended sentence. Giovanni "Gianni" Guido was born on 10 January 1956, the son of Raffaele Guido, an official of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and his wife Maria Pia Ciampa. At the time of the crime, he was an architecture student living with his parents on Via Capodistria in the Trieste quarter (near Viale Pola, where the trio abandoned their car).
Aftermath
Ghira's escape to Spain and death 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), claiming to have been born in Rome in 1955. He then served at Tercio 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 Cádiz for a "crime against public health." In 1982, Ghira was assigned to Special Operations in Málaga 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 tumour, 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 .
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. 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. 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.
Izzo's attempts at escape 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.
Additional murders