Soap-Maker

The transcript is about a podcast host named Camilla who is passionate about true crime and psychology. She decides to focus on Europe's eerie and brutal stories, starting with the case of Leonardo Cianciulli, known as the soap maker of Corveggio. Camilla gives background information on Leonardo's early life and her move to Corveggio, where she is respected but has a hidden criminal record. Leonardo believes she is cursed and consults witches in search of a spell to break it. After finally having four children, Leonardo becomes obsessed with protecting them and starts committing murders. One of her victims is Faustina Setti, an elderly woman looking for love. Welcome to Eerie Europe, True Crime Oddities. I'm Camilla and I'm your host for this journey into the darkest and strangest corners of European crime. I'm 28. I'll actually be 29 in July, but let's forget about that for a second because I'm panicking a little bit. And I'm originally from the beautiful Dolomites region in Italy. I decided to move to Ireland in 2021, at the end of 2021, and I think that's going to be my main base for the foreseeable future because I really like it here and I love Irish people. So welcome to all Irish and non-Irish, but yeah, I definitely have a soft spot for you Irish guys. Now I live near Galway on the eerily enchanting west coast of Ireland and my passion for true crime and psychology really fuels this podcast. I basically devour every podcast and documentary about murder, kidnapping, crime that I can find. And I know it sounds a bit weird, but I'm sure that many share the same passion. And I know that girls and women especially like this particular topic. I don't know why, but I think we might be very fascinated by human psychology. In general, I think people are so fascinated by murder because we want to really understand how humans are capable of such horrible actions. And as I said, the human brain is such a fascinating organ and I think that we know very, very little about it still, even if we're so advanced when it comes to medicine and technology and science. So I think it's really interesting to kind of take these stories and really analyze them and try to understand how everything started. One thing that kind of bothered me was that I think most of the podcasts you find on Spotify or Netflix mainly focus on American serial killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson and so on. But from now on, I really want to focus on Europe's equally eerie and brutal stories, especially into the ones that are a bit weird or might even have something ironic about them. There's always, I think you can always take something funny out of the most terrible stories. But of course, whenever it gets really, really bad, I won't make jokes out of them. So don't worry. In this first episode, I want to introduce you to a less known case in Ireland, which is actually very famous in Italy and has particularly intrigued me. This first story is about Leonardo Cianciulli. I can do a proper Italian accent, so I know you'll all love it. And she is famously known in Italy as the saponificatrice di Corveggio, the soap maker of Corveggio. And actually, I'm kind of surprised that not many people here know this story because it's mad. But follow me. You'll understand why. Well, the name kind of gives it away, soap maker, but there's more to the story. So I'll tell you more about her early life and background. You have to go back in time a little bit. In the early 28th century, Montella was a traditional Italian town in southern Italy, not super far from Naples, just for context. And it was characterized by narrow, winding streets, centuries-old stone buildings and a slow pace of life, kind of typical to the region, really. The town's economy was largely based on agriculture, with chestnut cultivation being particularly significant. Life here was simple and revolved around the cycles of nature and community. Now picture this. You have this little village. It's April 1894, so almost a century ago. Early spring is in the air and the days are getting longer. And at 5 in the afternoon, 5 p.m., in Viespinella, a narrow alley winding up the hill, evening has already fallen. And there's this modest little house, a number three, welcoming a new baby girl into the world. The next day, her father, Mariano Cianciulli, registers her at the local registry office with the names Leonarda, Vincenza, Giuseppa, which is actually kind of funny because they're really old-school names in Italian. I don't know any baby called Leonarda nowadays, but you probably know Leonardo. Leonardo is quite popular. Leonarda, not as much. But back to the family. The Cianciulli family isn't rich, but they're not too poor either. They have just enough so that Serafina, Leonarda's mother, isn't forced to work in the fields like most of the women in Montella. Instead, she can focus on the house and on her children. Serafina is actually the youngest of six, so it's a big family, and unfortunately she will turn out to be the sickest, perhaps the least loved, which is quite sad. And this is actually a common pattern for all the serial killer stories, where people committing heinous crimes usually have really, really horrible childhoods, so at the beginning of the story, you kind of tend to justify them, at least me. And then, as the story progresses, you can't really, but the psychology and the stories behind them are really, really terrifying themselves. Yeah, as I just mentioned, among Mariano Cianciulli's children, Leonarda will actually be the one to break free from the anonymity that awaited those born in such a little place. On that spring afternoon in 1894, no one could have predicted that this little girl with black eyes and dark hair would become a figure of such interest in Italy that books, essays, songs, and even movies would be made about her. To really recount this story properly, we have to leap forward in time and location as well to the autumn of 1930, to the third floor of a modest flat, number Corso Cavour in Corveggio, a town in the province of Reggio Emilia. For those who aren't super familiar with Italian geography, Reggio Emilia is a town in the center of Italy, not too far from the more famous Bologna. And you probably know the Parmigiano-Reggiano, I feel like food references always help to kind of stimulate memory. And Parmigiano-Reggiano is the most famous Parmesan in the world, I'd say, and it's produced here. So here in Corveggio, Leonarda and her husband, Raffaele Pansardi, have just moved. And Raffaele is originally from the province of Potenza, southern Italy as well, and formerly a land registry clerk in Montella. And he found a new job at the Corveggio registry office after a devastating earthquake. So after the earthquake, they decided to move and try to have more luck in life, really. In Corveggio, Leonarda quickly integrated into the community. To the locals, she was an exemplary mother and a fervent fascist. You have to take into consideration that it was 1930, and Mussolini was gaining momentum, so fascism was unfortunately quite big back in the day. And however, she had this respectable surface. She was respected. She was well known in the community, but actually she had a very big hidden criminal record. She had several convictions for theft and threats with a dagger, and had spent over 10 months in prison for scamming a farmer, poor farmer. And as we progress with the story, you'll notice a pattern. She really loves to scam people and take their money, but we'll come to that more in depth afterwards. Despite her troubled past, no one in Corveggio suspected the darkness that lingered in her mind. And according to her accounts, marrying Pansardi, her husband, against her family's wishes, had incurred her mother's wrath, who cursed her on the eve of the wedding. And this curse haunted Leonarda, shaping her actions and the horrific, horrific events that would unfold in the years to come. She was obsessed with this particular curse, but also with bad luck in general. And to be honest, that's quite typical in Italy. Sorry, you might hear the dog in the back barking. That's what happens when you have homemade Spotify podcasts with no production behind. So, let's go back to it. Leonarda was obsessed with curses, but like I mentioned, bad luck in general is a big topic in Italy. We're very superstitious folks, and we always try to avoid the malocchio, which is how we call bad luck, really. And according to her story, a gypsy woman had also made a terrible prophecy that was also a confirmation later. She said, you will get married, and you will have children, but all your children will die. And indeed, the Correggio years were marked by pain, and mourning, and tragedies. Leonarda's first 13 pregnancies ended in three miscarriages, and unfortunately, ten babies died in the cradle. And if you think about it, it's really, really horrible, and you can kind of understand that her mental health was severely, severely broken, and yeah, she was just devastated. Even losing one child, I think losing one child is the most terrible thing that can happen in your life, but if you lose 13, you probably never really recover from it. So Leonarda then, in despair, begins to consult the local witches, sorceresses, in search of a spell capable to break the curse. And thanks to a fortune teller, at least, it is Leonarda's belief, I have to stop saying Leonarda, Leonarda's belief, that the first pregnancy is finally brought to term, and she follows with three other children, so she has four children at the end. And they become an asset to be defended at any price, and I could not bear the loss of another child. She wrote in the memoirs from prison, and she also said, almost every night, I dreamt of little white coffins, swallowed one after the other by the black earth. Then I started magic, I wanted to learn everything about spells, to be able to neutralize them. And it's from this point that the murders begin, unfortunately. Let's tape another leak back. It's December 17, 1939, an elderly woman rings the bell of Leonarda's house. Her name is Faustina Setti, known to everybody as Rabitti, her widow's surname. Faustina is a lonely woman, who despite her age, has not given up on dreaming of love. Thanks to Leonarda Cianciulli, she has found a man willing to marry her. She hasn't met him yet, which is a big red flag, if you ask me. But Leonarda assures her that he is waiting for her in Pula, nowadays also known as Pula, a seafront city on the tip of Croatia's eastern peninsula, but back then used to be an Italian territory. Faustina is almost illiterate, so it was easy for Leonarda to take advantage of her, because she was quite gullible, and she was illiterate. So Leonarda helps her sign a letter to be sent to her friends in the Paltorini to manage the sale of her property, so she was actually interested in her money. Leonarda then promises to send the proceeds to the new city, but at the end of this meeting, instead of wishing her friend the best, she proceeds with killing her with an axe on her head. So terrible. Faustina's corpse is dragged into a small room, where it is bled and dissected into nine parts, and Leonarda later recounts, I threw the pieces into the pot, added seven kilograms of caustic soda, which I had bought to make soap, and stirred everything until the dissected body dissolved into a dark mush, with which I filled some buckets and emptied them into a Nurbi well. As for the blood, I waited for it to curdle, dried it in the oven, ground it, and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, and eggs, mixing it all together. I made pastries and served them to the ladies who came to visit. She also said she ate the pastries themselves and gave them to her husband. Imagine going over to a friend's house, getting some nice sweets and pastries, and then you find out it's actually human bodies. Not the best. Kind of reminds me of Hannibal the Cannibal. According to Leonarda's explanation in prison, the murder stemmed from a dream in which her mother appeared to be asking for fresh blood, and in her unstable mind, human sacrifice was meant to keep her children safe, but one death was not enough. The second victim is lured to No. 11 Corso Cavour for other reasons, and not for love promised this time. Francesca Soavi is a teacher, and she's promised a job at a girls' boarding school in Piacenza, in the same region, so not too far away. You also have to remember that it's the 30s, so whenever you move away, you don't really have contact with the people staying in your old town. There's no WhatsApp, no Facebook, so letters are the only way to communicate, really. On September 5, 1940, less than a year after the first murder, Francesca falls into the trap. Leonarda advises her to sell all her possessions, makes her sign some postcards and necessary proxies, and then the terrible scene is repeated once again. Francesca is killed and dissected. Leonarda then orders her son Giuseppe, a student at the University of Milan, to send the postcards to bamboozle people, basically people around Francesca. Meanwhile, on June 10, 1940, Mussolini announced Italy's entry into the war. Terrible times. Francesca Soavi's disappearance quietly slipped into oblivion. So the times were terrible, but it was actually very advantageous to Leonarda, because nobody was really thinking about disappearing women, with no big families around them. They were focused on the war, and everybody was quite scared, or thrilled, depending on your ideas. Leonarda also feared that her son Giuseppe would be called to the front, to the war front, and she's desperate, and she plans another sacrifice. This time, the third one, is 59-year-old Virginia Caccioppo, a former soprano. Leonarda promises her a singing job in Florence, and also she would be the secretary to a theatrical impresario, and teases her with the idea of a possible future engagement with the theater, so she would kind of go back to the roots, and was delighted with this plan, and with this offer. But unfortunately, on November 13, 1940, Caccioppo also ends up in the pot. Leonarda details in her memoirs, her meat was fat and white, when it was dissolved, I added a bottle of perfume, and after a long boiling, came out some creamy soap. I gave the soap as gifts to neighbors and acquaintances. Even the sweets were better, that woman was really sweet. Concerned about Caccioppo's silence, her sister-in-law, Albertina Fanti, reports her missing to the Carabinieri, it's a particular type of Italian police. The investigators initially don't open a file, but Fanti turns herself into a detective and learns of the disappearance of the other women, and by early 1941, rumors in the village became so persistent that the police decided to investigate. The turning point comes thanks to a treasury voucher bond belonging to Caccioppo, presented to a bank, the Banco di San Prospero, by the parish priest, Don Adelmo Frattini. It's kind of like a cheque, really. So basically, this cheque was presented to the bank by this priest, and the priest explained that he received it as payment from a farmer called Abelardo Spinabelli, who says he got it from Leonarda originally, and he also was Leonarda's friend and possible lover, by the way, just in brackets. Leonarda is the red thread linking all these women with this cheque, and alongside the priest Don Frattini and Spinabelli, two other men also come under investigation, all people that Leonarda knew, and they were all involved in various business dealings with her. She denied all accusations, but her son Giuseppe got arrested as well, and his confession complicates matters. So he basically confessed that he killed the women. Giuseppe's story changes constantly, and that's further muddling the case. And initially, Leonarda claims that her two youngest children have fallen ill, and the supposed prize for her children's health was two souls to be sacrificed, because she wants to save her son. Nowadays, it's actually still unclear who killed the women. She said that she killed the women by herself, but it's kind of tough for a... She was a tiny woman. It's kind of tough for a woman to literally make loads of pieces of the corpses and turn them into soap by herself, so they probably did it together. Her story is that even when she confesses to kind of save her son, her story shifts with each interrogation, alternatively accusing and exonerating various people. And when faced with the possibility of her son being executed, she takes all the blame. So she was charged with the three murders, and amidst suspicions of other disappearances potentially linked to her, Leonarda is transferred to the judicial asylum in Aversa. There she is entrusted to the care of renowned psychiatrist Filippo Saporito, who encourages her to write her memoirs. In these writings, in this diary, Leonarda describes the killings in great detail, all for the salvation of her family. Her memoir also reveals that Leonarda had a dual personality. She spoke of herself as Nardina, on the one hand, her mother called her dad, or Norina, nickname given to her by her father. The former was the mother who suffered, so Nardina was the poor mother that suffered because of the loss of so many children, and the latter was the evil woman who acted. So Nardina Norina was not afraid to get her hands dirty to defend her children, and she never made a fuss about it. I did not kill out of hatred or greed, but only out of love for my mother, she said in her memoirs, which she entitled something like Confessions of a Bitter Soul. Did Leonarda Cianciulli really turn her victims into soap bars? It's tough to say nowadays. Some experts at the 1946 trial doubted that she had managed to slice up bodies weighing at least 20 kg by herself, and that she had managed to soap them with caustic soda. But we don't know for sure yet. And also, it's important to mention that the trial was spectacular and full of twists and turns. So in order, imagine this, in order to convince the jury that she had managed to do it all by herself, legend has it that Cianciulli cut up a corpse of an unidentified person in just 12 minutes. So imagine, you're in trial, you're in court, and you just have to prove that you can cut up a corpse. And you have this random corpse, and you can just cut it up in 12 minutes. The reality was that it was only mined, thanks to a prisoner who volunteered to act as a dummy. The defense taked everything on the total insanity of the defendant, supported by a memoir written by Cianciulli herself, the ones we mentioned before, the Confessions of a Bitter Soul. The verdict was one of semi-mental insanity, recognizing the actual purpose of the robbery and the killing of the three victims. So she wasn't fully senseless, the story about saving her children and sacrificing the souls wasn't completely true, because she also robbed the victims of their possessions and money. So remember when I mentioned that she had been to jail for 10 months before moving to Corveggio? Yeah, she's never been an innocent soul, let's say that. Giuseppe, the son, Giuseppe Pansardi, managed to avoid being called a cultist because of his mental instability. He also claimed to be mentally unstable, and for that reason he didn't have to go to war, and he also was acquitted for lack of evidence. She, on the other hand, was sentenced to 30 years in prison, three of which were to be spent in a psychiatric institution. In fact, she spent the rest of her life in the Pozzuoli Asylum. Pozzuoli is not far from Naples, just for reference. And she died on October 15, 1970, and was buried in the town cemetery, but her body and her bones were never claimed by anyone, which doesn't really surprise me, to be fair. I couldn't find anything about the rest of her, like the other three children, I'm not sure what happened to them, but there is some pictures of Giuseppe in the 70s, I think around the time of her death. So I'm going to post them on Instagram if you want to look at them, and I'm going to post some pictures of Lunarda as well. So on Instagram you can find us on irieurope underscore podcast. Psychologically speaking, we could say that her actions were driven by a complex interplay of superstition, mental instability, protectiveness, but also greed. Her belief in curses and prophecies created a psychological landscape where murder seemed necessary, but as I mentioned before, I think it was also a matter of money, like in many cases, but this case also exemplifies how deeply rooted beliefs and psychological trauma can manifest in horrible, horrible ways. Her story is one of the most bizarre and chilling in Italian history, and it's a reminder of how superstition, desperation, can lead to horror, and yeah, this is a case that particularly triggered me, because when I was researching it, I basically was watching Hannibal, like the series on Netflix. Is it Netflix though? I'm not too sure, I have to check, but this is the series with Mads Mikkelsen. There's a similar book, Hannibal the Cannibal, basically, who served his victims to the police. Like, he was a very good cook and served his victims to the police, and this case kind of reminded me of that. She just made like, the idea of eating someone I know and I used to be friends with, and serving his bones and remaining body parts as pastries to my friends, really makes me sick to my stomach. So, the fact that also, like that it all happened in Italy, when you hear similar stories from America, also really kind of intrigued me, and yeah, it's mad to think. I actually have to research if there are similar cases in Ireland, but please let me know in the comments or send me a message on Instagram if you want any case to be talked about. I really, really love researching in depth about all these, the weirder the better, about all these weird cases. So, let me know what you think, and thank you so much for joining me on this first episode on this journey into Europe's eerie criminal past, and stay tuned for more strange and unsettling tales from the continent. Until next time, stay safe and curious, and please bear with me, it's my very first episode, I've never recorded anything before, so I kind of learn as I go. But yeah, thank you so much, stay safe, and until next time, bye bye!