Estibaliz Carranza ran an ice cream parlor called the Schleckeria on Oswaldgasse in Meidling, a working district in the south of Vienna. Between 2008 and 2010 she shot two men who had shared her life and her business: her former husband, Holger Holz, and her later partner, Manfred Hinterberger. She hid their remains in concrete in a cellar compartment under the shop and carried on serving customers upstairs. In June 2011 workers renovating a neighboring unit broke into the compartment and called the police. Carranza fled to Italy and was arrested in Udine three days later, pregnant by a new partner.
At her trial in November 2012 she admitted both killings. A court psychiatrist found that she had a severe personality disorder but knew what she was doing, and judged her a danger to future partners. A Vienna jury convicted her of two murders, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment with committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders. The sentence became final in March 2013. Since then she has married and divorced in prison, published a memoir, been the subject of a second book about a love affair with a fellow detainee, and asked to serve the rest of her sentence in Spain.
Carranza was born in Mexico in 1978 and moved with her family to Barcelona, according to her publisher's description of a 2018 book about her. She holds Spanish and Mexican citizenship, the news agency AFP reported in 2012. ORF, Austria's public broadcaster, reported in September 2012 that she would turn 34 that week, which places her birthday on September 6.
At her trial she described her father as a tyrant who allowed no noise at home and wanted her to work hard and hide her feelings, and said her mother seldom stood up for her. She said she had wanted a family and children from an early age. The court psychiatrist, Adelheid Kastner, later traced her disorder mainly to this childhood and to a dominant, at times brutal, father. These are her own account and the expert's reading of it; no other family member's version appears in the sources.
She told Kastner that she had once thought about killing her first boyfriend in Spain, and she told the court she had fantasized about a car accident or tampering with a water heater. She did not seek help, she said, because she believed there were worlds between such fantasies and acting on them. She also told the psychiatrist that while working in an ice cream parlor in Berlin she had wanted to set the business on fire because of the working conditions.
She came to Germany as an au pair, AFP reported, and there she met Holger Holz, a German. They married, and in 2005 they moved to Vienna and opened their own ice cream parlor. Carranza later called the business a financial disaster.
Holz's closest friend, who had been best man at the wedding, told the court that the marriage had been harmonious on the whole and that the unhappiness grew after the move to Vienna and the opening of the shop. He said Holz had wanted to get out of the ice cream business but had not told his wife. A long-time friend of Carranza described Holz as a "teddy bear" and said the marriage had been fine until he ignored her strong wish for children. A tobacconist next door to the parlor testified that Holz was hardworking and did help in the shop, contrary to what Carranza claimed.
Carranza's account was different. She told the court that after the wedding Holz changed, shouting at her, insulting her and mocking her German. She said she worked about 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in the parlor, while he joined the Hare Krishna movement and largely stopped working. Money ran short, and the couple ended up living in a converted storage space with no kitchen and no windows and a toilet in the hallway. Her parents were shocked when they visited, she said.
The couple divorced, but Holz did not move out of the shared home. Prosecutors said this was her motive: he would not leave, and she wanted to be free for a new partner.
According to the indictment, on April 27, 2008, Carranza shot Holz twice in the back of the head from about 10 to 20 centimeters while he sat working at a computer, and then once more in the temple. Speaking to the court, she said she had taken a pistol from a shelf and shot him after an argument one Sunday. Guns were not hard to find, she said, because he was keen on them. She had thought about it for months, she told the jury, but had never believed she would do it, and for a moment she expected him to get up again. Reuters reported her saying she shot him three times; at the start of the trial, the German agency DPA reported, she said she could not remember how many shots she fired.
A phone call then summoned her to the parlor. Over the following days she tried and failed to dispose of the body, then learned how to use a chainsaw at a hardware store and dismembered it. The remains were frozen and, in the autumn of 2008, set in concrete in the cellar compartment beneath the shop. Friends who did not know what they were carrying helped her move a freezer down to the cellar.
To the people around her she explained Holz's absence by saying he had gone away. The indictment said she told acquaintances he had moved back to Germany. She went on running the Schleckeria.
Manfred Hinterberger sold ice cream machines, and the Schleckeria was one of his customers; that was how they met, police said in June 2011. A long-time business partner told the court that he looked resolute from the outside but was a soft person at heart. A former employee of the parlor remembered him as very kind and well mannered; the tobacconist next door found him somewhat condescending.
Carranza told the court that she met Hinterberger while still married and asked Holz for a divorce, but Hinterberger then broke off the relationship abruptly. They kept working together, often quarreling. In 2009 he came back and wanted to resume the relationship. Her friend testified that Carranza was very much in love with him and wanted a child with him.
Carranza said she later found messages on his phone, a profile on a dating site and another woman's cosmetics in the bathroom. She said she still wanted him, but began to think about killing him. At the trial she said he had asked her to have several cosmetic operations and to train hard, often after 12-hour shifts in the shop, and she described the relationship as like having a plastic bag over her head. She said she felt financially dependent on him. The same friend testified that Carranza had spoken of pushing him from a height and making it look like an accident, or of shooting him, but that she had not taken the remarks seriously.
The prosecution's case was that the second killing was prepared in advance. In the summer of 2010 Carranza took shooting lessons, and she bought a chainsaw, concrete and plastic tubs before the killing, the indictment said. On the opening day of the trial the prosecutor said she had also laid plastic sheeting at the spot in the cellar where the body was to go. Carranza told the court that taking up shooting practice again in early 2010 felt like a liberation and was not linked in her mind to what she had done to Holz.
Investigators also looked at whether she had tried to poison Hinterberger first. In November 2011 the magazine News reported that police had found searches about poisons on her computer from July 2010, and that she had ordered seeds of two tropical plants online. Hinterberger had been in hospital several times in his last months with stomach complaints that doctors put down to food poisoning or viral infections. The Vienna prosecutor's office confirmed that it had commissioned a toxicologist. A later report on the autopsy findings said damage to his organs was consistent with poisoning but that no traces of the substances were found. Carranza denied being a poisoner at the time, and no poisoning charge was brought.
Carranza and Hinterberger spent the evening of November 21, 2010, at the MuseumsQuartier, Vienna's museum and arts complex, where, she told the court, he flirted with another woman. At home she confronted him. In her account, he turned to the wall and fell asleep, treating the matter as closed. She took the same .22 Beretta, which she kept under the mattress, and shot him in the back of the head as he slept. The indictment counted four shots.
Prosecutors said she put the remains in tubs and mortar containers and set them in concrete in the cellar, next to those of her ex-husband. DPA reported from the trial that her brother, visiting from Spain, helped her with the concrete work without knowing what it held. Police later said he had been listed as missing since November 2010.
She went on running the shop. According to the indictment, the men she was involved with after the killings noticed nothing different about her. By the spring of 2011 she was in a new relationship and was pregnant.
On June 6, 2011, a neighbor in the building on Oswaldgasse, the owner of a hair salon next to the parlor, was having renovation work done. The building's drain ran through the cellar, and workers opened a storage compartment assigned to the ice cream parlor. They found a handgun, freezers and mortar tubs filled with concrete, and called the police.
Over the next days police recovered human remains from tubs, flower pots and freezers. Police spokesman Mario Hejl confirmed that freezers and mortar containers had been found. Two rifles and a pistol were also recovered, and forensic tests began. On June 9 police announced that one set of remains belonged to Manfred Hinterberger, then 48 by the police count, a sales representative missing since November 2010. His relatives were informed that afternoon. The identity of the second man was not confirmed at first, though residents of the building suspected it was Carranza's former husband. A forensic expert later matched the remains to both men.
Carranza learned on June 7, at the parlor, that the neighbor had found her missing partner in the cellar. According to ORF's chronology of the case, she withdrew 10,000 euros, booked a flight, and then took a taxi to Udine in northeastern Italy instead, where the driver booked her a hotel room. Police waited for her at Vienna airport in vain. The Spanish news agency EFE reported at the time that she was thought to have booked a flight to Barcelona; ORF later named Paris. On June 8 the Vienna prosecutor's office issued a European arrest warrant.
In Udine she left her hotel and, at the railway station, approached a street performer who gave her a place to stay. He noticed her following the Vienna cellar case on the internet and alerted the police. Italian officers arrested her on June 10, 2011. Doctors found that she was in the second month of pregnancy; the father was her new partner.
On June 13 a court in Trieste confirmed her detention because of a concrete risk of flight. She declined to answer the judge's questions, and her Italian lawyer asked for alternatives to custody because of the pregnancy. Austrian and Italian police said she had confessed; her Vienna lawyers at the time denied that any confession existed and accused the media of a witch hunt. Her mother visited her in prison in Italy and said afterward that her daughter looked emaciated. Italy handed her over to Austria on June 24, 2011, and she was taken to the Josefstadt jail in Vienna.
In late June her lawyer asked for a psychiatric examination to establish whether she had been criminally responsible at the time of the killings. In July details from the police file began to appear in the press, including her statement that she had lost control. In August 2011 she brought a media-law claim over newspaper articles that had called her a "death witch," which was her first court date in Vienna.
On January 11, 2012, she gave birth to a son by caesarean section in a Vienna hospital. The child was taken from her straight away, and the youth welfare office placed him with his father. She first held him at the end of January, during a supervised visit. In April 2012 the boy was taken to her parents in Barcelona, according to News.
On March 29, 2012, she married the child's father, then 47, in an interview room at the Josefstadt jail. The civil ceremony took about 15 minutes, with two witnesses and no celebration, and she was returned to her cell afterward. The wedding had been delayed while documents were obtained from Spain.
Adelheid Kastner, head of forensic psychiatry at the neuropsychiatric hospital in Linz, delivered her report in July 2012 after more than 30 hours of interviews. She found a severe combined personality disorder with dependent, narcissistic, histrionic and dissocial features, and marked deficits in empathy. She concluded that Carranza had been criminally responsible at the time of both killings. She also found her particularly dangerous: under the influence of the disorder, Kastner said, she was likely to commit further serious offenses, and those most at risk were her partners and anyone she saw as standing in her way. In court Kastner put the statistical probability of another serious offense within ten years at 31 percent.
The psychiatrist explained the pattern as an inability to end relationships in the ordinary way. Carranza, she said, could free herself from a man only by getting rid of him. She ruled out a crime of passion and said Carranza had always known clearly what was right and what was wrong. She recommended that, if convicted of murder, Carranza be committed to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders, a measure under Austrian law that lasts as long as the danger is judged to persist.
Prosecutor Ursula Kropiunig completed a 21-page indictment for double murder in early September 2012. It described the defendant's cold-bloodedness and lack of scruples as almost unique and asked for committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders as well as a murder conviction. The trial was set for November, before a jury presided over by Judge Susanne Lehr, and was later extended to four days with 47 witnesses summoned. Security was tight because of expected crowds, including Spanish journalists.
Her defense lawyers, Rudolf Mayer and Werner Tomanek, told the Austria Press Agency (APA) before the trial that she hoped the proceedings would bring her help, that she knew she was a danger to others, and that she wanted to bring her thoughts of killing under control. The defense argued that her responsibility was diminished by her condition.
The trial opened on November 19, 2012, in the main jury courtroom of the Vienna Regional Criminal Court. Carranza took the stand that morning and pleaded guilty. Under Austrian procedure the jury still had to decide what she was guilty of.
Prosecutor Petra Freh, who presented the case in court, called her an ice-cold and highly dangerous woman with two faces, and warned the jury not to be deceived. She said Carranza had put her wish for a family and a child above everything, at the cost of two lives, and had been fully responsible for her actions. Reuters quoted her calling the defendant a ticking time bomb who could kill again.
Mayer told the jurors that his client was a deeply disturbed person who had not chosen to be disturbed, and that she had acted out of extreme suffering, not for fun or greed. He said the treatment of the bodies, while repellent, was legally irrelevant to the charge, and noted that the psychiatric report found her danger to others could be brought down to zero with proper treatment. He described Holz as a mean man.
Carranza called her own acts repulsive and said that everything she had done was wrong. She told the court she would rather hang herself than harm anyone again. She said that everything she had fought for, Holz had tried to sabotage, and that she had felt helpless. When a juror said she showed no remorse, she answered that the acts were abhorrent and that she was trying to hold herself together. She said she took tranquilizers that made her feel distant, and that she suffered from anxiety and a racing heart. The prosecutor pointed out that she had seen a psychiatrist only three times in custody.
On the second day her husband, the father of her son, was called as a witness. He used his right as a spouse to refuse to testify and avoided looking at her. Three former boyfriends testified. One, with whom she had been involved in the spring of 2008, said she would do anything to please a man; he had not wanted children, which was one reason they broke up. Two others described her as pretty and pleasant and said they had noticed nothing unusual.
On the third day the forensic pathologist Johann Missliwetz testified that both men had been shot at close range from behind or from the side, and that the two chainsaws had been set in the concrete along with the remains. Witnesses spoke about the two men and about her friendships, as described above.
On the evening of Thursday, November 22, 2012, after a four-day trial, the jury unanimously found Carranza guilty of two counts of murder. Judge Lehr sentenced her to life imprisonment, the maximum, and ordered her committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders. The court counted her confession and her considerable psychological impairment in her favor. Against her it weighed the careful planning, the surprise attacks on the two men and the dismembering and concealing of their bodies.
Asked whether she had understood the verdict, Carranza said that she had, and she showed no visible emotion. In her final words to the court she had wept and said she regretted the killings. After consulting her lawyers, she lodged a plea of nullity and an appeal against the sentence.
The plea of nullity, which could have challenged the conviction itself, was not pursued, so the double murder conviction became final. The committal order was not challenged either. Mayer and Tomanek pursued only the appeal against the length of the sentence, arguing that a fixed prison term would have been possible and appropriate, that the trial court had given too little weight to her confession and her personality disorder, and that she had been in an emotional crisis at the time of the killings. Carranza asked not to be brought to the hearing, and the court agreed.
On March 20, 2013, a panel of the Vienna Higher Regional Court presided over by Ingrid Jelinek dismissed the appeal after a very short deliberation. Senior prosecutor Katja Wallenschewski had argued that the victims had no chance to defend themselves and that only life was appropriate. Jelinek said the court could find no further mitigating circumstances and that the sentence matched her guilt and the offense. The judgment was final.
Carranza served the first years of her sentence at Schwarzau, the women's prison in Lower Austria. In November 2014 she published a memoir, Meine zwei Leben (My Two Lives), written with the journalist Martina Prewein. In written answers to the Swiss paper SonntagsBlick that month, given through her lawyer, she said she regretted the killings, doubted that the men's families could forgive her, and wrote that she had killed because she loved. She said she had believed she had to serve men in order to be loved.
In 2017 she was moved to the forensic center at Asten in Upper Austria, a facility for offenders held under the mental-health committal measure, which had opened a unit for women that year. Reports differ on the month: the Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten said January, and APA later said autumn 2017.
At Asten she met a fellow detainee, serving a sentence for attempted murder and arson, whom the press identified as Martin L. According to Bernhard Salomon's book Zelle 14 (Cell 14), published in September 2018 and based on four years of conversations with her, the relationship began in August 2017 and the two met secretly. He proposed in January 2018. When staff found letters on his laptop in the spring of 2018, he was transferred to the prison at Garsten and contact between them was banned. A member of parliament, Hannes Jarolim, asked the justice minister about the book's account of sexual contact inside the institution. In his written answer of November 19, 2018, Minister Josef Moser said the ministry had examined the events described in the book and concluded that they could not have happened as described, giving details about separate sports areas and a locked storage room.
The book also carried new claims from Carranza herself, as reported in the Austrian press: that money troubles at the parlor were among her motives, that she had once planned to kill her father, and that she had tried to poison Hinterberger with plant seeds before she shot him. These claims were not tested in any court.
Her marriage ended in a consensual divorce at the district court in Schwechat in September 2018, after six and a half years, with Carranza taking part by video link. The Kronen Zeitung had reported that her husband had not visited her since the autumn of 2015. Her son was living in Spain with her parents, who had custody.
Her lawyer Rudolf Mayer told the magazine News at the time of the divorce that in his own lay view she was cured, crediting a new therapy, and said that if she was released from the committal measure she would serve the rest of her sentence in an ordinary prison. Life sentences in Austria allow conditional release after 15 years at the earliest, he noted, so she might be released at around 50 if all went well. Her preferred option was to serve her sentence in Spain, close to her son, but Spain then had no comparable therapeutic facility.
In September 2021 the newspaper Heute reported that she was again held at Schwarzau, and that she would work remotely by laptop for three months for the publisher edition a, which had published both books, as part of a distance-learning degree in business education from a Spanish university. The publisher, Salomon, confirmed the arrangement.
In January 2024 the Austrian Justice Ministry confirmed to APA that a request had been filed to transfer Carranza to Spain to serve her sentence. The ministry said the request was under preliminary review and that Austria had asked the Spanish authorities whether the sentence could be carried out there under conditions comparable to Austria's. If Spain answered yes, a formal application would follow. The ministry could not say how long the process would take, and noted that about 400 prisoners a year are transferred from Austria to their home countries.
In November 2025 ORF broadcast a documentary, Die Eislady: Gedanken einer Moerderin (The Ice Lady: Thoughts of a Murderer), by Simone Scheid and Nadine Kriegelstein. ORF said it drew on personal recordings of conversations with Carranza, a book she wrote in prison and her conversations with her lawyer, and that it focused on her life after the verdict and her conflicts with the Austrian justice system.
Carranza was arrested in June 2011, so under the 15-year rule her lawyer described she became eligible to be considered for conditional release in 2026. Release would also depend on the committal measure, which runs for as long as the danger she poses is judged to continue. No report of a release hearing, a decision on conditional release, or a completed transfer to Spain was found in the Austrian and Spanish news coverage searched through October 2026. The latest reports found describe her as serving her sentence.
The case drew wide coverage in Austria, Spain and the international press, which seized on the image of the ice cream seller and the frozen remains. Austrian media gave her the name "Eislady," and some later called her the "ice cream killer." She has been the subject of two books, the 2014 memoir and Salomon's Zelle 14, and of the 2025 ORF documentary.
Little is recorded publicly about the families of Holger Holz and Manfred Hinterberger, beyond Carranza's own statement in 2014 that she doubted they could forgive her. The trial testimony of their friends and colleagues is the main public record of who the two men were: a hardworking man his best man remembered as being in a happy marriage until the business strained it, and a salesman his business partner described as tough on the surface and soft underneath.
Proven by final conviction: the murders of Holger Holz in April 2008 and Manfred Hinterberger in November 2010.
Suspected but never charged: an attempt to poison Hinterberger in 2010. Investigators examined the evidence, a toxicologist was commissioned, and pathologists found organ damage consistent with poisoning but no trace of the substances. Carranza denied it in 2011; in 2018 she described such an attempt to Bernhard Salomon. No court ruled on it.
Her own claims, not tested in court: that money worries at the parlor were among her motives, and that she had at one time planned to kill her father and her first boyfriend in Spain. These come from her statements to the court psychiatrist and from the 2018 book as reported in the press.
Contested: the account in Zelle 14 of sexual contact with a fellow detainee at Asten. The justice minister told parliament in November 2018 that the events could not have happened as the book described.
Her description of both men as controlling, unfaithful or abusive is her account. Witnesses for Holz described him as hardworking and good-natured, and the court psychiatrist ruled out a crime of passion.
Details that vary between sources: whether she shot Holz three times (Reuters, the indictment) or could not say how many times (DPA); the destination of the flight she booked on June 7, 2011 (Barcelona in early EFE reports, Paris in ORF's chronology); Hinterberger's age (47 in APA's trial and appeal reports, 48 in the police statement of June 2011); the month of her move to Asten in 2017 (January or autumn); and her age in some reports.
September 6, 1978: Estibaliz Carranza is born in Mexico; she grows up in Barcelona.
Early 2000s: comes to Germany as an au pair and meets Holger Holz; they marry.
2005: the couple move to Vienna and open an ice cream parlor, later the Schleckeria on Oswaldgasse in Meidling.
About 2007 to 2008: divorce; Holz stays in the shared home.
April 27, 2008: she shoots Holger Holz; his remains are later frozen and, in the autumn, set in concrete in the cellar.
2009: Manfred Hinterberger, an ice cream machine salesman, resumes a relationship with her.
Summer 2010: shooting lessons; purchase of a chainsaw, concrete and tubs; internet searches on poisons (reported later).
November 21 to 22, 2010: she shoots Hinterberger as he sleeps and later reports him missing.
June 6, 2011: a neighbor's renovation work uncovers the cellar compartment; police find the remains.
June 7, 2011: she flees by taxi to Udine, Italy.
June 8, 2011: European arrest warrant issued.
June 9, 2011: police identify Hinterberger.
June 10, 2011: arrested in Udine; she is two months pregnant.
June 13, 2011: court in Trieste confirms her detention.
June 24, 2011: handed over to Austria.
January 11, 2012: gives birth to a son in custody.
March 29, 2012: marries the child's father at the Josefstadt jail.
July 4, 2012: psychiatric report finds her responsible and particularly dangerous.
September 5, 2012: indictment for double murder.
November 19 to 22, 2012: jury trial at the Vienna Regional Criminal Court; she pleads guilty.
November 22, 2012: unanimous verdict; life imprisonment with committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders.
March 20, 2013: Vienna Higher Regional Court dismisses the sentence appeal; judgment final.
November 2014: memoir Meine zwei Leben published.
2017: moved from Schwarzau to the forensic center at Asten.
August 2017 to spring 2018: relationship with a fellow detainee, later described in Zelle 14.
September 2018: Zelle 14 published; divorce finalized.
November 19, 2018: justice minister answers a parliamentary question on the book's claims.
September 2021: reported to be at Schwarzau, working remotely for a publisher.
January 2024: Justice Ministry confirms a request to transfer her to Spain is under preliminary review.
November 13, 2025: ORF broadcasts Die Eislady: Gedanken einer Moerderin.
June 2026: 15 years since her arrest; no release decision reported as of October 2026.