Directed by: Tonino Valerii
Stars: George Hilton, Salvo Randone, William Berger
Language: Italian | Subtitles: English
Country: Italy | Imdb Info
Also known as: Mio caro assassino, Folie meutrière, Sumario sangriento de la pequeña Estefania
Description: An insurance investigator is standing beside a lake when the mechanical arm of a construction vehicle suddenly closes around him, killing him in a murder staged with cold industrial precision. Inspector Luca Peretti is assigned to the case, but the man operating the machine is found dead before he can provide an explanation.
What first appears to be an isolated act of violence soon opens a trail of blackmail, concealed evidence, suspicious deaths, and frightened witnesses. Each person Peretti questions seems connected to another secret, and anyone who comes close to revealing the truth becomes a possible target.
The investigation eventually leads back to the unsolved kidnapping of Stefania, the young daughter of a wealthy family. She vanished from her parents’ country villa and was later found dead, leaving behind a household fractured by grief, suspicion, and mutual resentment.
Peretti begins examining everyone who surrounded the family: relatives, servants, neighbors, business associates, and those who may have tried to profit from the tragedy. The suspects appear to share little except their connection to the old case and their determination to keep some part of it buried.
His most important clue is a drawing made by a little girl.
At first, the childlike image appears too simple to carry any meaning. But Peretti realizes that its shapes, figures, and apparently innocent details may preserve something the adults overlooked. The drawing becomes a silent witness, linking the original kidnapping to the new wave of murders.
As Peretti reconstructs the past, the killer continues removing anyone capable of completing the picture. What began with a mechanical decapitation expands into a carefully organized campaign of silence, forcing the inspector toward a final gathering where every lie, relationship, and hidden motive must be placed in order.
My Dear Killer is a giallo built as much around police investigation as visual shock. Instead of following an endangered amateur detective, it stays close to Peretti as he interviews suspects, studies timelines, revisits evidence, and gradually untangles an unusually dense mystery.
Beneath the elaborate plotting lies a profoundly sad story. Every murder in the present grows from the death of a child in the past, while Ennio Morricone’s eerie, lullaby-like music turns the entire investigation into an echo of stolen innocence.
Legacy Note:
Directed by Tonino Valerii, best known for his work in the spaghetti-western tradition, My Dear Killer brings the filmmaker’s command of suspense, landscape, and confrontation into the giallo form. Valerii favors a comparatively disciplined procedural structure, but punctuates it with several striking and brutal murder sequences.
George Hilton gives Inspector Peretti an intelligence and weary determination that distinguish him from the genre’s more frantic amateur investigators. His performance anchors a story filled with false leads, overlapping motives, and a large circle of suspects, culminating in a lengthy explanation closer to Agatha Christie than to Dario Argento.
The supporting cast is filled with European genre regulars, including Marilù Tolo, William Berger, Patty Shepard, Helga Liné, Salvo Randone, and Manuel Zarzo. Their presence gives the film a rich Italian-Spanish exploitation texture while allowing nearly every character to appear credible as either victim, accomplice, or killer.
Manuel Rojas’s photography moves between pale interiors, deep shadows, autumnal landscapes, and sudden flashes of violence. Morricone’s score provides the emotional center, contrasting childhood voices and delicate melody with the cruelty unfolding on screen.
For giallo collectors, My Dear Killer stands out as one of the genre’s more complicated and melancholy mysteries. Its famous murder set pieces provide the immediate shock, but its lasting power comes from Stefania’s drawing — a fragile fragment of memory that survives while the adults around it lie, kill, and destroy one another to keep the truth hidden.
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