Donato Bilancia (10 July 1951 – 17 December 2020) was an Italian serial killer who murdered seventeen people – nine women and eight men – on the Italian Riviera in the period from October 1997 to April 1998. Bilancia's inconsistent modus operandi made him difficult to identify and capture. There were no obvious links between the majority of his murders. He chose most of his victims at random, across a vast area of Northern Italy, and became a synonym for fear among the people living along the Italian Riviera. He was given the nicknames Mostro della Liguria ("The Liguria Monster") and L'assassino dei treni ("Killer on the trains"). Initially attributed with only nine homicides by the Italian police, Bilancia later confessed to having killed eight other people. With a sentence to 13 terms of life imprisonment, and no possibility of release, Bilancia has been defined by some newspapers as "the worst serial killer in the history of Italy". Despite confessing to the killings, Bilancia never explicitly regretted his crimes, claiming that he did not consciously commit them because he was "possessed" by a disease. Bilancia died on 17 December 2020, in prison, from COVID-19. Biography Background and early crimes Bilancia was born in Potenza, Basilicata, in 1951. When he was about five years old, his family moved to northern Italy, first to Piedmont and then to Genoa in the Liguria region. He was a chronic bedwetter until age 10 or 12, and his mother shamed him by placing his wet mattress on the balcony where it could be seen by the neighbours. When undressing him for bed, his aunt would shame him by pulling down his underwear in front of his cousins to show his underdeveloped penis. At age 14, he decided to start calling himself Walter. He dropped out of high school and worked at jobs such as mechanic, bartender, baker and delivery boy. While still underage, he was arrested and released for stealing a motor scooter and for stealing a truck loaded with Christmas sweets. In 1974 he was stopped and jailed for having an illegal gun. At some point he was committed to the psychiatric division of the Genoa General Hospital, but escaped. After he was apprehended, he spent 18 months in prison for robbery. He served several prison terms in Italy and France for robbery and armed robbery. In spite of his history of psychiatric problems,