The Soap-Maker Who Murdered For Love

Leonarda Cianciulli is one of the most disturbing figures in the entire history of crime — the “Soap-Maker of Correggio,” an Italian woman who, in the space of a year, murdered three women and rendered their bodies down into soap and teacakes, some of which she served to her unsuspecting neighbours. But what makes her story so genuinely unsettling is not only the grotesque method. It is the reason she did it: a warped act of what she believed was a mother’s love, born of grief, superstition, and a mind that had been broken by a lifetime of loss.

To understand her, you have to understand that lifetime of loss. Leonarda Cianciulli was born in 1894 in southern Italy, and by every account her life was one of deep hardship and sorrow. She was troubled from a young age, attempting to take her own life more than once. When she married a registry clerk in 1917, against her family’s wishes, she believed her own mother had cursed the union. And whether or not you believe in curses, what followed was a genuine tragedy on a scale that is hard to comprehend: over the course of her marriage, Cianciulli endured seventeen pregnancies, and lost most of her children — several to miscarriage, and ten more who died in childhood. Only four of her children survived to adulthood. This was a woman shaped, and ultimately shattered, by relentless grief. And she was deeply, fatally superstitious. She clung to the words of fortune-tellers, and one prophecy in particular haunted her — a palm reader who had reportedly studied her hands and told her: “In your right hand I see prison, in your left, a criminal asylum.”

Above all, Leonarda was obsessively devoted to the children who had lived — and especially to her eldest son, Giuseppe. And in 1939, as the Second World War descended on Europe, her worst fear took shape: Giuseppe announced that he intended to join the Italian army. To a woman who had already buried so many of her children, and who was convinced dark forces were arrayed against her family, the thought of losing her favourite son to the war was unbearable. And in her broken and superstitious mind, she reached a monstrous conclusion. She came to believe that she could protect Giuseppe — that she could buy his safety — through blood. Through human sacrifice. She convinced herself that if she offered up the lives of others, fate would spare her son. “If I saved one,” she would later say of him, “I saved my Giuseppe.”

The Horror

What she did next was carried out with a chilling, domestic calm. Cianciulli was a warm, respected, motherly figure in her town of Correggio, known as a good neighbour and a fine cook — and she used that trust to lure her victims. Her three victims were all middle-aged women she knew, women who were lonely and looking to change their lives, which made them vulnerable to her lies. The first was Faustina Setti, whom Leonarda promised to find a husband in another town. She persuaded Faustina to keep the plan secret and to write postcards and letters to her family in advance, to be posted later — so that after she vanished, her loved ones would believe she was alive and well somewhere far away. On the day of her supposed departure, in December 1939, Faustina came to Leonarda’s home for the last time. There, Leonarda gave her drugged wine, and then killed her with an axe.

And then came the part that gave her her terrible name. Cianciulli dismembered the body, and she rendered it down. She used caustic soda to dissolve the remains into a thick, dark paste, which she then turned into bars of soap. And she took the victim’s blood, dried it, and mixed it into the batter of teacakes and pastries. She would later describe the process in her own memoir with an appalling, houseproud pride, writing of one victim that “her flesh was fat and white; when it had melted I added a bottle of cologne, and after a long time on the boil I was able to make some most acceptable creamy soap.” The soap she distributed; the teacakes, she served — to visitors, and to her own neighbours, who ate them and complimented her baking, never knowing what they were eating. Over the following months, she did it twice more. Her second victim was Francesca Soavi, lured with the promise of a job at a school. Her third was Virginia Cacioppo, a former opera singer tempted with the offer of work in the city. Each was told to write reassuring letters, each was given drugged wine, each was killed with the axe, and each was boiled down into soap and cakes. Three women, murdered and consumed by a town that thought Leonarda Cianciulli was simply a kind and talented cook.

The Modern Relic

She was undone by the last of her victims. Virginia Cacioppo, the opera singer, was a more prominent woman, and her disappearance did not go unnoticed. Her sister-in-law had seen her going to Cianciulli’s house and had grown suspicious, and she went to the police. When the authorities investigated and searched Leonarda’s home, they found the evidence of the horror — human remains, and the victims’ belongings. And when confronted, Cianciulli did not deny it. She confessed fully, and completely — and, disturbingly, she confessed with something like pride, insisting throughout that she had done it all to save her son, and correcting anyone who understated the details of her crimes. At her trial in 1946, she was almost theatrical, calmly describing her methods, showing no remorse, seemingly more concerned that the story be told accurately than that she be forgiven. She was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum — and so the fortune-teller’s grim prophecy of “prison” and “a criminal asylum” came true after all. She died in the asylum in 1970. And in a final, bitterly ironic tragedy, her sacrifices had been for nothing: her son Giuseppe survived the war regardless. She had murdered three women to protect a boy who was never going to die.

The relic is real, and you can go and stand before it. The instruments of Leonarda Cianciulli’s crimes were preserved by the authorities, and since 1949 they have been held in the Criminological Museum — the Museo Criminologico — in Rome. There, among the dark artefacts of Italian criminal history, sits the iron cauldron, the pot in which she boiled down the bodies of Faustina Setti, Francesca Soavi, and Virginia Cacioppo — the actual vessel at the centre of one of the most grotesque crimes of the twentieth century. It remains a genuine, physical relic of the case. And perhaps the most haunting detail of all comes from the nun who cared for her in prison, who remembered that even behind bars, Leonarda would bake. “She prepared very tasty sweets,” the nun recalled — but “no inmate ever dared to eat” them. Even the hardened women of the prison, it seems, could never quite look at a cake made by the Soap-Maker of Correggio without wondering what she might have put inside.

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