LEONARDA CIANCIULLI: THE SOAP MAKER OF CORREGGIO

Article BY LORI BELL

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Sometimes when life becomes unbearably tough, one may find respite in doting on others. Dispensing with motherly duties and those of a housewife, Leonarda Cianciulli murdered three women and made their bodies into tea cakes, candles, and soap following a life of elopement, dabbling with the occult and the eventual writing of her own cannibalistic cookbook – cum – memoir. She became known as the Soap – Maker of Correggio, her tale a strange recipe of determination to rise from the flames of her family, no matter what the cost.

The woman who would grow up to be a family matriarch was born in 1893 in the small town of Montela, Italy. Her mother’s feelings towards her had been poisoned from the start because her very life was the result of a sexual assault.

Leonarda was not a happy child and tried to remove herself from the world not once but twice, surviving both times. After surviving into adulthood, Leonarda came to her first great obstacle. She had fallen in love with Raffaele Pansardi.

Spurning the Beau her mother had arranged for her she eloped with her love. Her mother was enraged by her defiance and, not being aloud to attend the wedding, cursed the marriage, dooming the pair’s children to die.

Determined to outrun the wicked woman’s words, the lovers fled to Lariano in the south of Rome, where she and Raffaele conceived 17 children together. While infant mortality was still comparatively high in the early to mid - 20th century, advances in medicine were improving disease control.

Nevertheless, one by one, not one, not two, but ten of their children had died. Three more left her before birth through miscarriage. Leonarda fiercely protected her remaining four infants. She visited every fortune teller she could find in the hope of changing her family’s fate. One told her that she would spend her final days in prison and in an insane asylum, another that she would actually witness the death of all of her offspring.

Leonarda started soothsaying as a way of safeguarding her family, learning the hidden arts as a shield and to pay to put food in her growing children's bellies. She had an uncanny knack for charming everyone she met. Unknown to her, another had been studying her to what would become devastating effect.

Giuseppe, Leonarda’s oldest child, now a youthful young man, was determined to help his country. Of all of the children Leonarda had loved and lost, he was her favorite and was terrified for him. Maybe her combination of unbelievably bad luck and the local’s belief in her ability to perform the impossible, made Leonarda lose her grip on reality and think she could save her son.

She thought she could stop her son’s military maneuvers with murder. She not only committed murder, she killed someone who trusted her as a friend. Faustina Setti had long been a guest at Leonarda’s shop and offered her life savings in exchange for matchmaking services.

The spell for success was sealed with secrecy when Leonarda asked Faustina to write letters that would be posted to her friends that would reassure them that she was well when she vanished to meet with her love.

Leonarda fed the lady a drugged drink, waited for her to drift into a daze, then picked up a hatchet and smashed her in the head with it. Leonarda dodged the spew of sticky blood that the body vomited all over the wall. Faustina’s 30,000 lire was more than enough to pay for a new paint job. Leonarda believed that she had saved her precious son in the process.

Now for disposal : taking up her implements, she collected nine Faustina cutlets and popped them in her kettle to cook, thanking the eyes in the sagging head as she did so. But this wasn’t just any murder, this was a Leonarda Cianciulli murder. So she prepared pastries from the porcelain flesh of her victim.

Sodium is extremely caustic as well as being the partner of pepper in cooking. It eats away at the tissues with which it is placed in contact with, and so was poured in Leonarda’s kettle with a great vigor. By filleting Faustina, she made it easier for the furious substance to do its work while it was boiling in the pot.

Leonarda spent the night with a rag over her wrinkled nose, watching the body slough off the bone into a slurpy , blackish sludge. When the stuff cooled, it was tipped into buckets destined for septic tanks. Following occult traditions, she began to bake the blood.

When it had dried to a powered and passable visual substitute for chocolate, she beat the blood into eggs, sugar, milk and cocoa. What emerged from her baking tray were neat, crunchy ceremonial biscuits that she took delight in feeding to the villagers gossiping to the whereabouts of their disappeared friend.

However, Mussolini entered the war and Leonarda panicked that her sacrifice hadn’t cut the mustard. It didn’t take long to plan her next course of action with Francesca Soavi, another friend whose life had not panned out in the way she’d imagined.

The sneaky chef offered the downtrodden dame the same deal as Faustina. The guarantee of travel to a new start on payment for a ritual. Leonarda even repeated the same steps, only this time she maximized the ‘waste – not, want – not ‘ mentality by shaping the lady’s fat into soap and candles. She even lit some of the candles as a representation of her son’s passage to safety.

Secure with her newly found salary, she started giving her ‘products ‘ away. But living off the fat of the land can make a person greedy, and it wasn’t long before Leonarda encountered her third and final victim, Virginia Cacioppo, who also wanted flight.

This lady went the same way, with Leonarda recalling “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 cakes, too, were better. That woman was really sweet.”

The letter about the dead lady’s new life ( courtesy of her killer) found its way to her family within days. However, the key to cookery is to correctly predict how all of these ingredients will work together, and not to hurry the process.

In her rush to get Virginia’s payment, Leonarda turned the heat on herself. She committed all of the murders in this one town in quick succession. Her final victim’s sister-in-law knew the woman would never break off contact, noted the similarities between the cases, and promptly called the police.

They visited the perplexing pudding maker and were astounded when Leonarda confessed immediately. Leonarda made her human soap, tea cakes and candles using equipment any industrious cook would have handy . . . or not.

A hatchet with a sharp blade and sturdy handle was used to down the deranged chef’s victims. Bringing the weight down through air made it tricky to maneuver and hit on target --- Leonarda needed several attempts with her first victim.

Leonarda dismembered her friends by parting the limbs at their joints with a thin saw that slid between the gaps and in the middle of the gristle. Taking the flesh from the body was not as simple as tucking into a standard Sunday roast.

Leonarda didn’t have the muscle to make her boning knife dig in so she used a hammer to drive it deeper. Leonarda’s fast-paced production helped her process the pieces of her former female friends. She kept the heads melting in kettles that would be dropped into buckets. Once the gloopy mix was done, each person patty was patted into a pleasing teacake shape and placed on a flat pan for the oven. Leonarda laid them out with love.

Media – christened as the Soap – Maker of Correggia, Leonarda was brought to trial in 1946. No doubt utterly deranged by 50 years of emotional turmoil, she corrected the prosecution on their inaccuracies.

For instance, her maternal sterns reared it’s head when it was assumed that Giuseppe must have helped with the murders. Leonarda was quick to put them right. While he had disposed of some bones in a nearby river, he had not one clue as to what the carcass actually was. Leonarda was disturbingly proud to claim her diabolical achievements in ‘up cycling ‘ the remains to feed and scrub people.

Though cannibalism is taboo in many parts of the world, there are cultures where it has been overlooked. Even Christianity has the ceremony of communion at its core, where those seeking salvation eat a representation of the body of Christ as symbolic of his care.

Though horribly twisted, Leonarda saw her crimes in a similar fashion, and as such an achievement that she wrote An Embittered Soul’s Confessions to detail her methods, clubbing the snide gossips she could not otherwise speak out against.

Psychiatrists could not decide if she was insane or gastronomically ‘evil’. Regardless the judge recognized her pride and misdemeanors as a recipe for disaster. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with three to be spent in an asylum.

While the fortune tellers prophecy of her incarcerations came to pass, it is not known whether she outlived her remaining children. Leonarda Cianciulli, the woman who changed from caring mother to killer cake maker, died in prison in 1970.

It is almost impossible to make any sense of so traumatic a life or indeed such bizarre and gruesome crimes. It seems the only way to understand them is through boggled disbelief. She got her just desserts in the end.

Gillis tried to pursue a career in computers, but found it difficult to hold down a steady job. He did find a steady girlfriend, Terry Lamoyne, who managed a local convenience store. The two moved in together in 1995, and she obtained a job for Gillis at that same store.

He worked day shift and she worked night shift. They rarely saw each other. One of the other frustrations for Terry is that they weren’t having sex at all. He didn’t seem sexually aroused by her. He started taking long drives where he was gone most of the night. Of course Terry thought he was having an affair.

One morning, Gillis picked up Terry following her shift at the store. She noticed a foul odor in the car, as well as blood stains. His explanation was he hit an animal. More than once Gilles invited Terry to view pornographic images, depicting dead and naked women. He actually showed her some of the web sites that he was looking at, and on these web sites were women being raped and violated and dismembered.

None of this meant Sean Gillis was a killer, but once his DNA profile came back, little doubt remained. Still Terry Lemoyne didn't believe her mild-mannered boyfriend could ever commit such heinous crimes.

Terry went down to the police station and demanded time with Gilles to ask him and look him in the eye, whether he was responsible for killing these particular women. Surprisingly enough, he says “Yeah that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”

Soon Gillis made a full confession to Baton Rouge detectives and FBI. He laid it all out, all about how he committed murders and perpetrated these crimes, each and every single one of the women, and the crime locations.

Gillis says that he would watch them first of all, then would stalk and prey upon particular women and lure them into his car. He described how he strategically planned out each of their homicides, how he very much enjoyed trying to play these mental chess games with the police, trying to outsmart them.

When he was asked how many women he actually killed, initially he claimed four or five, but later on he finally settled on a number of approximately 8. Gillis told law enforcement, in detail, about the murders of Ann Bryan, Hardee Schmidt and Marilyn Nevils, three women they never suspected he killed.

82 year old Ann Bryan, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was his first victim. On March 20th 1994, she was sleeping in a nursing home, which was coincidentally directly across from the convenience store where Gillis worked.

She left her door open so her caregivers could come in and administer medicine without waking her up. Gillis entered her bedroom and then he tried to rape her, and because she started to fight back, he then stabbed her multiple times to silence her forever.

Gillis encountered 52 year old Hardee Schmidt in May 1999, while she was out jogging. He intentionally struck her with his vehicle and was going to knock her body down into a ditch. He went down, took a zip tie, put it around her neck, dragged her back into the vehicle using the zip tie around her neck, took her to an isolated location, and raped her repeatedly. Once he killed her he was going to put her body into the car and it was going to remain in the vehicle for several days. Long enough for Gillis’ girlfriend to notice the smell.

On October 30, 2000, Marilyn Nevils was walking down the street, and unfortunately for her, Gillis was there too. He engaged her in conversation, and offered her money. So very similar to what was seen with the other victims, and she got in the car.

He took her to a location, attempted to kill her, she fought back very violently. She got out and initially escaped, but unfortunately he was able to catch up to her, beat her over the head, and subsequently murdered her.

He took her body, tossed it into the car, then went to a car wash where he hosed her down. Then he took her back to his home where he showered with her. Then he realized he was in a rush he had to go somewhere, probably to meet Terry, so he put her in the car. Then he just dumped her body in a degrading way.

As cops continue to unravel the disgusting details of his crimes, they were shocked by the depths of Gillis’ depravity. He told detectives that he masturbated with the severed hands of one of his victims, Jonny Williams.

He also admitted to cannibalizing the bodies of Johnston & Williams. He actually took Williams back to his home and he started to dismember her on his kitchen floor and chopped up her body parts. He ended up cutting off her nipples and began to eat her flesh. He desired her legs.

In August 2007, Gillis pled guilty to the second-degree murder of Williams. He was sentenced to life in prison but still must face the music for crimes he committed in East Baton Rouge. In East Baton Rouge courthouse, on July 21st 2008, Gillis went on trial for the first-degree murder of Johnston. Prosecutors sought the death penalty.

The defense team was going to throw everything they could on the wall to see what stuck. They were going to claim that his father holding a gun to his head at one year old was a very traumatic thing. It changed his life and probably caused him to kill women. It was certainly significant that he suffered domestic violence in his childhood, but it didn’t excuse the behavior and it didn’t excuse his choices because the violence was premeditated.

On July 31st, 2008, Gillis was convicted of Johnston’s first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The reason he escaped the death penalty, was due to the fact that the jury deadlocked on the death penalty phase. In one final act of justice, Gillis received a third life sentence for the murder of Nevils.

Gillis without a doubt had a strong intense hatred for women. His favorite hobby was stalking, praying, and abducting and mutilating women. That is where when he feels more powerful, more dominant. Gilles is currently serving multiple life sentences at the infamous Louisiana State penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana.