No motive found as Italy's worst serial killer gets life

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.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK%2Bfp7mle5FpZ2lnkaW%2FcH2TaKmoqqmYrrO%2BzqWj