The faded striped socks on a woman whose legs were cut off below the knee, wrapped in cellophane and neatly packed into separate suitcases may provide the only clue to who she is. Her remains, and those of a dismembered man with a tattoo on what's left of his right forearm, were found in three muddy suitcases Monday and Tuesday in the Florentine hinterland below an overpass from which they were likely thrown.
Police originally thought the body parts were those of at least three victims, but in piecing the evidence together, they have a nearly complete corpse—without the head—of the man and most of the body of the woman. Police are now searching for a fourth suitcase that likely contains the woman's missing body parts which could help identify her or provide clues to who killed them.
An investigator with the Careggi Institute of Forensic Medicine investigative unit confirmed to The Daily Beast that they are working on the theory that the victims, who are white and appear to be between 40 and 60 years old, could be a couple. The location of the suitcases, some 100 meters apart, implies they could have been launched from a car moving slowly along the highway above, suggesting more than one person would have had to be involved. The macabre discovery was made by a 74-year-old retiree who was cutting weeds in a municipal garden. The land had been tilled in the spring, but the weeds had not been cut for two years, which means the suitcases could not have been there longer than that.
Police say that a couple who lived in the area disappeared in 2015, but the murders seem more recent than that. The couple’s son is in the nearby prison on drug charges and the daughter of the couple says she cannot be sure her father had a tattoo.
