He was responsible for seventeen murders. Like the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, but in just six months – a semester oozing blood. The so-called ‘serial killer of the trains’ was captured twenty-five years ago, and in the spring of the year 2000 was handed thirteen life sentences for the seventeen homicides he claimed he was guilty of. This is his story, split into the seventeen dramatic moments that sealed his fate: seventeen steps to descend to spiral swiftly down to evil. Behind bars, Donato Bilancia got a college degree, though barely literate when he went in. He caught Covid and died just before Christmas 2020, in a cell full of his ghosts and after refusing treatment. Did he turn to religion? Perhaps it crossed his mind. Did he feel remorse? Was he insane, or just overwhelmed with resentment? The case of Donato Bilancia, known as Walter, remains inexplicable today.

Carlo Piano was born in Genoa in 1965. In 1998, he covered the Bilancia case as a correspondent for a national newspaper. He is a contributor to La Repubblica, La Stampa, and Il Secolo XIX. Together with his father, architect Renzo Piano, he wrote Atlantide (Feltrinelli), while E/O published, among others, his book Il cantiere di Berto, on the tragedy of the bridge collapse in Genoa and its rebirth.