Before being known as the serial killer “La Savonnière du Corrège”, Leonarda Ciaculli was a typical Italian mother. A mother who wanted to do everything to protect her son, especially during the horrors of the Second World War.
No one would have thought that Leonarda would murder three women and use their remains to make Italian soap and tea cakes.
Leonarda Cianciulli was born on April 18, 1894 in the town of Montella, in southern Italy, and from the start her life was colored by sadness and loss.
Leonardo in her youth.
Unhappiness from the start
She appears to have been an unhappy child and teenager and made two suicide attempts before reaching adulthood. In 1917 she married a clerk named Raffaele Pansardi, but always maintained that marriage never stood a chance.
She told her mother to blame, but Leonarda said she put a curse on the couple on the wedding day because she didn’t like her daughter’s human nature. Had she bitten another son-in-law that Leonarda hadn’t looked at.
In 1927 Leonarda was imprisoned for embezzlement, and after serving her sentence the couple moved to another town, Lakedonia, partly to avoid the scandal of her sentence. On July 23, 1930, a massive earthquake hit the area, one of the largest in Italian history, and Leonarda and her family were among the thousands who lost their homes in the disaster.
The Loss of Children and the Fortune Teller
Leonarda became pregnant 17 times during the marriage. She had three miscarriages and ten of her children died in infancy.
Suicide attempts, her mother’s alleged curse, imprisonment, loss of home and children probably caused Leonarda to lose reality in the end.
And it didn’t help when she turned to a fortune teller, a Roman woman, for news of a better future. But the fortune teller did nothing to calm her fears.
“In your right hand I see a prison,” the fortune teller told her. “On the left, an insane asylum. A total of 33 years.”
Leonarda had been through tremendous hardship and there is no doubt that the loss of her child filled her with chronic depression and sadness. Today, she would surely have received proper help and medication, but at that time it did not exist.
Instead, Leonarda became obsessed with superstition and paranoia.
To put it mildly, the Leonards overprotected the four surviving children.
Human sacrifice is the only way
Guiseppe was Leonardo’s eldest son and his favorite child. When the Second World War broke out, he decided, like many young Italians of the time, to enlist in the army. He wanted to establish his home ground among many others.
Leonarda was not happy with this decision, to say the least, the thought of losing Guiseppe overwhelmed her, and so began a very strange and frightening sequence of events.
Leonarda was sure that her mother’s alleged curse and the Roman woman’s prophecy only meant one thing: human sacrifices would be needed to protect him. It would be the only way to keep his son alive.
Which is a peculiar result since Leonarda was a strict Catholic and the Roman Catholic religion forbids human sacrifice as an abomination before the gods.
It’s impossible to say where Leonarda got this terrifying idea from.
The victims, Virginie, Faustine and Francesca Clementina,
The sewer
Leonarda’s first victim was a city seamstress named Faustina Setti. Leonarda invited Faustine to visit her in 1939 on the pretext that she knew a good man for her, knowing that Faustine was very interested in getting married. Leonarda asked Faustine to write a letter to her family telling them not to worry, she was going to meet a man who lived far away and they wouldn’t hear from her for a long time.
But Faustine never went to meet a potential boyfriend. Leonarda put a sedative in her wine glass and murdered Faustina with an ax while she was unconscious.
Then she cut Setti into nine pieces and collected her blood in a bowl.
Leonarda will later describe what happened next.
“I threw the chunks into a pot, added seven pounds of mordant I had bought to make soap, and stirred until the chunks dissolved into a thick paste and dark, which I poured into several buckets and emptied into a nearby septic tank..
Italian tea cake
I waited for the blood in the bowl to thicken, then dried it in an oven and ground it. I then mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, eggs and a little margarine and kneaded everything. I then baked a cake from the mixture and invited my family and friends to taste it. Them and I thought the cake was so good there was none left.”
Leonarda also withdrew Faustina’s savings, which at today’s Icelandic exchange rate would be around ISK 50,000.
If Faustina had paid everything to Leonarda in the hope of a husband.
The teacher
On September 5, 1940, Leonarda found another victim and her name was Francesca Clementina Soavi, who was a children’s teacher. She promised Francesca a good job tutoring abroad and, like the previous victim, Leonarda asked Francesca to write a letter to her family and friends saying she was not expected home. .
Then she repeated the game, poisoned Francesca, killed her with an axe, dismembered her, drained her of blood, threw away the jug and baked cookies. And again, Leonarda was highly regarded for her cooking.
However, his third victim was the last.
The Tasteful Singer
Virginia Cacioppo was a soprano who once sang at the famous La Scala opera house in Milan. Leonarda had promised her that she had found her a first-class agent, which led to Virgina accepting an invitation on September 30, 1940.
It was the same for Virginie and her predecessors, except on one side. This time, Leonarda did not throw away the “jukke” but turned it into soap, which she then sold.
“It had beautiful white fat, so I added more spices and cooked it for a long time. The soap was fragrant and soft like whipped cream.”
However, the blood entered the cookies as before.
“Her cakes were also better than the others, this woman was cuter in every way than the others,” Leonarda later said.
Although Leonarda Cianciulli thought she had committed the perfect murder, she was wrong.
The relatives of the two previous victims were not worried and had contented themselves with the letters. But Virginia had a sister-in-law who was very worried about her disappearance and didn’t trust the letter she had received. On top of that, she had seen Virginia enter Leonarda’s world the night she disappeared.
She surrendered to the police, who immediately opened an investigation.
You can still find a lot about the crimes in a museum in Rome.
The Fortune Teller’s Strange Accuracy
At first, Leonarda denied all the charges, but when the police turned their suspicions on her beloved son, Giuseppe, she broke down and confessed everything.
Leonarda’s trial lasted only a few days. She was found guilty of her crimes and received a 33-year sentence. The same echoes the prophecy of the Roman woman with terrifying precision: 30 years in prison and three years in a mental asylum.
On October 15, 1970, Leonarda Cianciulli died of a stroke. She was 79 years old.
His body was returned to his family for burial, but the murder weapons, including the pot in which his victims were boiled, and the axes were donated to the Museum of Criminology in Rome.
They are still on display there today.
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