There was a full moon the night Fabio Tollis and Chiara Marino were slain in a wood outside Milan in January 1998. Witness statements would later testify the young couple, just 16 and 19 respectively, died during a cocaine-fuelled ritual murder ‘involving sex and heavy metal music’, carefully planned out by their peers.
Tollis, an aspiring young singer, had joined the Beasts of Satan band as a fan of the heavy metal cover songs they performed together at venues across the city. It was only when his girlfriend had thoughts about leaving the circle that things took a sudden turn.
Many years later, Tollis was discovered to have been bludgeoned to death that night when trying to intervene in the slaughter of his girlfriend, stabbed through the heart with a knife in the moonlight in what local media reported as a ritual sacrifice.
Across the city, Tollis’ father, Michele, had begun a desperate search for his son after receiving an unusual call before his disappearance. But it was too late. Years later, police would learn how Tollis and Marino were buried in a hole in the woods, their killers dancing on the grave chanting: ‘Zombies, now you are only zombies!’
In the first few days of his son’s disappearance, as police tried to assure Michele his son had run off with Marino in some youthful fit of passion, the determined father became convinced a trail of Satanic artefacts and a strange detail in the suspects’ alibi would lead him to his son. He would be proven right.