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The Brigate Rosse had kept Italy on a cruel seesaw of suspense since Moro's abduction on March 16. They had spurned pleas for mercy from the Vatican, from the Pope himself ("I beg you on my knees") and from the United Nations as they dangled their victim like a political puppet. The end came when they executed Moro with eleven shots fired from a Czech-made Skorpion 7.65-mm pistol and a still unidentified 9.-cal. handgun. Eight shots were centered around his heart. The hatchback Renault in which the body had been placed was left on a narrow, one-block street, Via Michelangelo Caetani, almost equidistant from the nearby headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Communists. The location was a contemptuous taunt at both of the parties that Moro, more than anyone else, had worked to bring closer together in a political accommodation aimed at keeping Italy's government functioning.
From the first, there was no doubt that the goal of the Red Brigades' attack against what they called "the heart of the state" was the destruction of that accommodation and the fomenting of chaos that would lead to civil war. Moro was seized on the same day that the governing agreement he had succeeded in obtaining, bringing the Communists into the parliamentary majority, was to be voted on in parliament. In a series of haranguing "communiqués," the kidnapers pointedly indicted their victim as his party's "political godfather" while attacking the Christian Democrats as "antiproletarian criminals" and the Communists as so many "bourgeois revisionists." Their attempt failed; both parties sensed the danger to the political process, and the government refused to bargain for Moro's life.
The murder followed by five days the receipt of the ninth and last communiqué from the kidnapers. It stated that they were carrying out Moro's death sentence, handed down after a "people's trial," in the face of the government's refusal to negotiate the release of 13 of their colleagues in prison. Shortly after followed a letter of goodbye from Moro to his family. "Dear Nora," Moro wrote to his wife of 33 years, Eleonora, "soon they will kill me. The friends could have saved me but did not. I kiss you for the last time. Kiss the children for me." In a series of late-night phone calls to party leaders, Mrs. Moro pleaded once more for a change in the party's stand against negotiations, but the government held firm.
Shortly before 1 p.m. last Tuesday, an anonymous man telephoned the Christian Democratic headquarters. "Go to Via Caetani," he said. "A red Renault. You will find another message." Police quickly spotted the maroon Renault 5-L and its grim contents. An autopsy showed Moro had been shot earlier that morning, then dressed in the same navy suit coat he wore when he was kidnaped. There was also a partly healed bullet wound in his buttocks, apparently incurred in the abduction.