Modena, September 5, 2026 – The reopening of investigations is underway for the crimes attributed to the so-called Monster of Modena: ten women, all young prostitutes or girls with drug addiction problems, killed between 1985 and 1995 in our province.
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Searching for artifacts from the time
The investigations are ‘running’ on multiple fronts: the carabinieri recently went to the legal medicine department in Modena in view of the analyses on the artifacts preserved since then: it is plausible that the work will start in the coming days. What they are trying to understand, precisely, is whether there are still artifacts from that time, kept in the legal medicine department of Modena and seized from the crime scenes, useful for the investigations.
They will dig into the victims’ lives
At the same time, the agents of the mobile squad – who investigated most of the crimes at the time – are working to analyze the investigation files and possibly identify useful elements for the inquiries, perhaps never thoroughly examined in those years. In particular, they will dig into the victims’ lives to reassess the figures who at the time ‘gravited’ around the young women killed.
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The mandate to lawyers by the families
The analysis of the artifacts through new scientific techniques is one of the requests made in the petition presented by lawyer Barbara Iannuccelli for the family of Anna Maria Palermo, who died on January 26, ’94. Meanwhile, the relatives of four other victims have given a mandate to the lawyer so that the case can be reopened and investigations resumed. In past years, then chief prosecutor Giovagnoli had reopened the case, which was then closed shortly after due to lack of elements useful to consider new hypotheses.
In recent days, other relatives of the victims have given a mandate to lawyer Iannuccelli. The number has risen to five, in fact, the relatives who have given a mandate to the lawyer to submit a request to the Prosecutor’s Office for the reopening of investigations into the murder of the young women. After the requests filed for Anna Maria Palermo and Marina Balboni, the relatives of Giovanna Marchetti, Donatella Guerra, and Claudia Santachiara have now given the mandate to the lawyer. The related requests will soon be filed, within which elements are listed that, if analyzed today with much more advanced scientific techniques, could provide important insights. For example, Santachiara apparently had some hair in her possession, which at the time could not be examined.
