10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Hannibal Lecter

Between 1968 and 1985, a total of 16 people were murdered in or around Florence, Italy. The case became highly publicised due to the horrific nature of the crimes, usually involving couples who were killed and the female victims' bodies mutilated. Before long, the media were dubbing the killer 'The Monster of Florence', or 'Il Mostro Di Firenze.'

Thomas Harris, the author behind the Hannibal Lecter books, saw an idea he could use and began to research the case for his 1999 sequel 'Hannibal.' After attending the trial of a suspect, Pietro Pacciani, in Florence (Pacciani was later convicted, then acquitted), Harris decided to introduce a subplot within the main narrative of Hannibal that saw Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi, now hot on the heels of Lecter, to suspect that Lecter and Il Mostro were in fact one and the same person.

In the movie Hannibal, several deleted scenes depict how after witnessing Lecter murder Pazzi in the Palazzo Vecchio, a caretaker escapes the scene, revealing him to be Il Mostro. Pazzi's disgrace over his failure to capture the real Il Mostro spurned him on to make the connection between the Lecter murders and the crimes of The Monster of Florence. In the TV show Hannibal, it is heavily implied that Lecter and Il Mostro are the same person after a series of highly artistic murders remind Pazzi of the Mostro case he had been obsessed with for decades.