Circeo massacre

Donatella Colasanti, 17, and Rosaria Lopez, 19, grew up in working-class families in Rome's Montagnola neighborhood; at the time of the crime, Colasanti was a student and Lopez worked as a bartender. In late September 1975 the two young women were introduced to Angelo Izzo, 20, and Giovanni Guido, 19, who were using assumed identities to obscure earlier sexual assaults. On 29 September, Izzo and Guido invited Colasanti and Lopez to what they described as a party at a villa in the Punta Rossa area of San Felice Circeo, on the coast roughly 100 km south of Rome. The villa, called Villa Moresca, belonged to the family of a third man, Andrea Ghira, 22.

After the group arrived at Villa Moresca on the evening of 29 September, Izzo and Guido made sexual advances toward the two women. When they refused, one of the men produced a gun and falsely claimed the group belonged to a criminal gang that had ordered the women's kidnapping. Over the following roughly 35 hours, Izzo and Guido, joined by Ghira, raped and tortured Colasanti and Lopez. Both women were drugged. Lopez was beaten and drowned in an upstairs bathtub. The men then tried to strangle Colasanti and, when she reached a telephone to call for help, struck her with an iron bar; she fell to the floor and feigned death. Believing both women dead, the three men locked Colasanti, still alive, in the trunk of a car with Lopez's body and drove toward Rome.

After stopping for dinner near Guido's home in Rome's Trieste district, the men left the car parked on Viale Pola. Still in the trunk, Colasanti began shouting and striking its walls; a night watchman heard her and alerted police shortly before 11 p.m. on 30 September. She was freed and hospitalized with severe injuries, including a fractured nose. Izzo and Guido were arrested within hours; Ghira fled and was tried in absentia. On 29 July 1976, a court convicted all three men of murder and sentenced each to life imprisonment without parole. The Carabinieri investigation, which relied heavily on Colasanti's testimony, was led by Marshal Gesualdo Simonetti. Colasanti later brought civil claims against her attackers, and several feminist associations joined the trial as civil parties.

Ghira lived as a fugitive under a false name, enlisting in the Spanish Legion in Madrid on 26 June 1976. He developed a drug dependency during his military service and was forcibly retired in 1993 due to declining health. He died in Melilla, Spain, on 2 September 1994 of a drug overdose; his body was found a week later. A 2005 DNA test meant to confirm his identity raised doubts after it emerged that the geneticist who conducted it was related to Ghira's family; a second, independent test filed in June 2016 confirmed the remains were his.

Guido's sentence was reduced to 30 years on appeal in October 1980 after he expressed repentance and paid compensation to the Lopez family; he later escaped custody twice, in Italy and while awaiting extradition in Argentina, before being returned to Italy. His sentence was commuted to community service in April 2008, and he completed it in August 2009. Izzo, while on supervised prison release, murdered 49-year-old Maria Carmela Maiorano and her 14-year-old daughter, Valentina, in Ferrazzano on 28 April 2005; he received a second life sentence for those killings in January 2007. Donatella Colasanti died of breast cancer on 30 December 2005, at age 47. In 2020, her former home was reopened as an anti-violence center.