In Correggio, Italy, a shopkeeper named Leonarda Cianciulli was known as a helpful neighbor who gave advice, baked cakes, and helped women solve their problems.
Her life was marked by hardship and tragedy. Out of 27 pregnancies, many of her children died young, leaving her deeply traumatized and obsessed with protecting the few who survived.
By the late 1930s, her fear grew even stronger when her beloved son prepared to join the Italian army during the years leading up to World War II. Convinced that disaster would strike him, Cianciulli began to believe that human sacrifices could protect him from death.
Between 1939 and 1940, she murdered three women in Correggio.
Her first victim was Faustina Setti, a lonely woman looking for a husband. Cianciulli told her she had arranged a marriage for her in another city and convinced her to keep it secret. Cianciulli offered her wine, killed her with an axe, and dismembered the body.
She then dissolved the remains in a large pot using caustic soda. Later, in her own confession, Cianciulli described boiling the body until it turned into a dark liquid that she disposed of in a septic tank. She also dried the victim’s blood, ground it into powder, and mixed it to bake tea cakes, which she served to neighbours.
Her second victim, Francesca Soavi, was a former schoolteacher struggling to find work. Cianciulli promised her a job at a school in another city. When Soavi came to visit her, Cianciulli drugged her with wine, killed her with an axe, and disposed of the body in the same way.
The final victim was Virginia Cacioppo, a former opera singer who had once performed at La Scala. Cianciulli told her she had arranged a secretarial job in Florence. Cacioppo visited her home and was murdered the same way. This time Cianciulli used the body fat to create bars of soap, later claiming she added perfume to make “creamy soap,” which she gave to neighbours.
Cianciulli was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in prison, followed by three years in a criminal asylum.
She died in 1970 in a criminal asylum in Pozzuoli, Italy.
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