Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan
serial killer
Wolfgang Abel (25 March 1959 – 25 October 2024) and Marco Furlan (born 16 January 1960) were a German-Italian serial killer duo who were arrested for a series of murders in northern Italy and one in West Germany between 1977 and 1984. They claimed innocence, saying they were scapegoats for a police force that could not find the real criminals.
Origins
The two members of the Ludwig group were both sons of the upper bourgeoisie of the city and came from the Verona hinterland: Marco Furlan, resident of the prestigious Borgo Trento district, was the son of the Head of the Burns Unit of the Ospedale Civile Maggiore in Verona (in this regard, many of "Ludwig"'s victims who were burned alive was emblematic) and at the time of his arrest he was about to graduate in physics at the University of Padua; Wolfgang Abel lived in Negrar di Valpolicella, where his family had moved to after a period in Munich. The son of a managing director of the Italian branch of a German insurance company, he was a graduate in mathematics with honours and worked in the same insurance company as his father.
Furlan and Abel met in high school, soon finding themselves in agreement about needing to clean up the world from everything that they thought was "deviant": prostitutes, homeless, gay people, drug addicts, "sinful" priests, nightclubs, and pornographic cinemas. Their relationship continued beyond school and was consolidated by virtue of the fact that both were part of a group of young people at the time, who used to meet in Piazza Vittorio Veneto in Borgo Trento.
The crimes
At each of these crime scenes was a leaflet, written in Italian, headed with the name "Ludwig" over a Nazi eagle and swastika. Each had a slogan, such as "We are the last of the Nazis" and "Death comes to those who betray the true god", and explained the reason for each murder.
Abel and Furlan's criminal career together began on 25 August 1977 in Verona, when they burned Roma drug addict Guerrino Spinelli alive with four molotov cocktails in his Fiat 126. On 17 December 1978, the murder of homosexual waiter Luciano Stefanato followed, stabbed 30 times in Padua, with two blades later being stuck in his back.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.