Leonarda Cianciulli, also known as the Soap-Maker of Correggio, has certainly worked her way into the serial killer hall of infamy just for her deranged originality.
Imagine this: One day your neighbor, a loving mother and good friend, invites you for cake and coffee. You accept the offer and are greeted with some sweet-tasting cakes. Only you don’t know that the cakes are part human.
Yes, this is what Leonarda Cianciulli did. However, this madness doesn’t end here. She also started making lumps of soap out of the people she killed and handed the bars to her neighbors.
So what exactly drove her to this point of insanity? Buckle up for the big reveal of one of the weirdest tales from the dark side of humanity.
Early Life
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Leonarda Cianciulli, the human soap-maker, was born in 1894 in Correggio, Italy. Her childhood wasn’t easy, and reading about it, you might not be surprised that she turned out a little odd.
Apparently, her mother was a nasty woman, telling Leonarda that she was cursed by the devil and that her life would come to nothing.
When she was a teenager she tried to commit suicide not once but twice. Unfortunately, her life wasn’t getting any better and survival was a daunting task for her every single day.
She then met a fella when she got older, a registry office clerk, but he wasn’t quite what her mother was expecting and so the man was vociferously disapproved of.
Her mother was yet another serial killer with what is known as an “overbearing mother” as she made her life miserable.
Cursed
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Leonarda Cianciulli had in total 17 kids, but unfortunately, only 4 of them lived past the age of 10. You could say after all that heartache and pain, she was a protective mother to those who survived.
She doted on her kids, but she was full of anger at what life had thrown at her. And it threw a lot more than dying children and miscarriages.
Perhaps it was very much her fault when she got imprisoned for fraud at the age of 33, but when an earthquake destroyed her house a few years later, that seemed like rotten luck again.
Nonetheless, this unlucky woman was apparently well-liked in her community, if not in her mind doomed somewhat. It’s said she even believed that her mother was right, and indeed, she was cursed.
She went to see a gypsy fortune teller, but that just made matters a lot worse, as it’s said this is what she was told, “In your right hand I see the prison, in your left a criminal asylum.”
Sacrifices
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Leonarda Cianciulli had had a brutal life, but on the surface of things, she looked ok. Her neighbors liked her, and she was a loving mother to her dear children.
But something sinister was lurking behind the scenes. Between 1939 and 1940 (when she was about 42), Leonarda murdered three local women.
The story goes that she wasn’t just killing because she was inherently evil, but she believed, again, that she was cursed, and that to keep her remaining kids alive, she had to make some sacrifices.
She was particularly concerned about her favorite son, Giuseppe, who’d just signed up for the Italian army and was about to join the battlefields of bloody Europe.
So, that’s what she did, she made some sacrifices to lift her curse like those old-school Aztecs who propitiated the Gods with human blood.
Soaps and Cakes
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Leonarda Cianciulli lured these women into her shop and then drugged them. After they passed out, she finished them with an axe and tried to get rid of their remains with the help of caustic soda.
However, that doesn’t mean everything just disappears. In her diaries, Leonarda described what was left as a “thick dark mush.” So, she went a step further. You might know that regular soap often contains animal fats.
So, Leonarda Cianciulli realized she could turn human fat into soap. After turning them into soap bars she did the unthinkable. She gave those soap bars to neighbors and acquaintances.
However, she didn’t stop there, though. She used part of this mush to make what she called crunchy teacakes and served them to her neighbors.
This wasn’t, it seems, out of rage towards her neighbors, because she said she and her sons also ate the delicious cakes. Leonarda went as far as to call the remains of her victims very sweet.
Discovery
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However, Leonarda wasn’t exactly a clever killer and was easily found out. She didn’t just make things from her victims, but she scammed them out of money too.
She went as far as to tell these women that she had found a great teaching job for them abroad, and just before they set off, Leonarda coerced them to write to their family and friends explaining that they would be leaving the country for a while to work.
There was no job of course, and a fate worse than cake awaited them. One such victim, Virginia Cacioppo, had disappeared and her sister had said the last person who had seen her was that shopkeeper called Leonarda.
She didn’t buy into the teaching job and believed a cunning canard had taken place. She was right. At first, the Italian cops accused Leonarda, who denied any wrongdoing.
But then, the cops accused her son, Giuseppe, and that was too much to bear for the doting mother. She confessed to everything, even the soap and cake bit.
Trial
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Later Leonarda would remark that Virginia Cacioppo was her best victim in terms of how she turned out on the plate and in the bathroom. In her diaries, she wrote, “The cakes, too, were better: that woman was really sweet.”
Not surprisingly, this soon became a cause celebre in Italy. The trial lasted three days, and after that, she would spend a total of 30 years in prison and three years in an asylum. She died at age 76 from a cerebral apoplexy in 1970.
Leonarda Cianciulli still causes shivers down people’s spines today, as you can see her axe and other instruments, including the pot in which she boiled the bodies, at the Criminology Museum in Rome, Italy.
Well, that’s all we have to say about this strange cannibal. Only in Italy can a cannibal turn her victim not only into a delicious dessert but also a sweet fragrance. What are your thoughts regarding this serial killer? Pure evil or worthy of sympathy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
