In the Museo Criminologico in Rome, among the relics of a century of Italian crime, are tools that belonged to a fortune teller from Correggio, a market town on the plain of Emilia-Romagna. Leonarda Cianciulli killed three women there in 1939 and 1940. The Italian press gave her the name that has outlived nearly everything else about her: la saponificatrice di Correggio, the Soap-Maker of Correggio. Most of what makes the story famous comes from her own mouth and pen, in nineteen interrogations, at her trial, and in a memoir of some eight hundred pages. The case shows how far a killer’s own account can be trusted, and how to tell when it can.
She was born in Montella, in the hill country of Irpinia in the province of Avellino, in 1893 or 1894; accounts differ, and Geopop gives 1894. According to Focus, she grew up among women who read palms and told fortunes, and who, as she later told it, predicted a life full of misfortune for her. She described herself as a child who believed every omen. In the memoir she later wrote, she said she tried to kill herself twice as a girl, convinced that her mother hated her.
The break with her mother came over her marriage. She refused a cousin her family favored and chose instead Raffaele Pansardi, a man from Potenza in Basilicata who worked as a clerk at the land registry office. They married in 1917. In her memoir she wrote that her mother cursed her on her wedding day. Focus records a version of the curse that she would carry for the rest of her life: that she would have children and see them all die. In some tellings it came from a Roma fortune teller, in others from her mother. She blamed it for the death of her first daughter, who died of the Spanish flu.
The arithmetic of her motherhood is the one point on which every account agrees in substance and differs in detail. By the count in Focus and Il Fatto Quotidiano, she was pregnant seventeen times. Three pregnancies ended in miscarriage, ten children died in infancy, and four survived. Geopop puts it slightly differently, with thirteen pregnancies ending in miscarriage or death soon after birth before her son Giuseppe was born and lived, followed by three more surviving children. Giuseppe was her favorite. In 1940 he was about twenty.
Her life in Irpinia was not only one of grief. She had a criminal record there. Geopop describes convictions for assault and fraud and ten months in prison; Il Fatto Quotidiano reports two convictions, for fraud and armed robbery, with time served in the prisons of Potenza. Nobody in Correggio would know about any of it.
In 1930 the Vulture earthquake struck the border of Campania and Basilicata and destroyed the family’s home. Pansardi obtained a transfer to the north, and the family, by the account in Focus, moved with their four children to Correggio, a town of about nineteen thousand people in the province of Reggio Emilia. Leonarda was in her mid-thirties. Il Fatto Quotidiano adds that she was also glad to leave the gossip of her home town behind.
In Correggio she rebuilt herself. She opened a small shop, dealt in second-hand clothes, and worked as a maga, a fortune teller who read palms and the stars and claimed she could lift the evil eye. She was remembered as eccentric. She was a fervent Fascist and well connected in the town. A police description from 1941 gives her height as about a meter and a half and her nicknames as Nardina and Norina. Her schooling had ended at the elementary grades. Pansardi eventually left the family for good. She remained, in the words of Focus, obsessively bound to her four children.
By the late 1930s war was coming. Giuseppe and a second son were declared fit for military service. She later said that she had seen her children die one after another and could not bear to lose the ones who had lived, and that a vision told her innocent lives would have to be given to keep them safe. That is her account. The investigators found something plainer.
The three women she killed were people she knew. Each lived alone or had lost the family that might have looked for her. Each wanted something a fortune teller could promise: a husband, a job, a way out of Correggio. And each had property that could be turned into money.
Faustina Setti was seventy-three, a widow who could barely read or write. She was lonely and wanted to marry again. Cianciulli told her she had found the right man, a well-off widower in Pola, then an Italian city on the Istrian coast. Setti was to leave quietly and tell no one until she was gone. Before she left, Cianciulli had her write letters and postcards to friends, to be sent after her departure to explain that she had gone to start a new life, and sign a power of attorney so that her property could be sold.
She disappeared shortly before Christmas 1939. Most accounts say Cianciulli killed her with an axe; Il Fatto Quotidiano says a hammer, and places the killing in the apartment at Via Cavour 11. By Cianciulli’s own description, she cut up the body and dissolved it in caustic soda, and poured what was left down the drain. Giuseppe posted the letters. No one came looking.
Francesca Clementina Soavi was about fifty-five. She had been a kindergarten teacher and had traded in cloth, and she wanted to leave Correggio. Cianciulli promised her a teaching post at a boarding school. The sources disagree about the city: Geopop says Padua, Il Fatto Quotidiano says Piacenza. The method was the same as before. Cianciulli offered to sell Soavi’s belongings for her and took charge of the money, and Soavi wrote postcards to be sent after she had gone.
She disappeared on September 5, 1940. By Cianciulli’s account, she was killed with an axe and the body treated as Setti’s had been. According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, Giuseppe traveled to Piacenza to mail the postcards so that they would carry the right postmark. Italy had declared war on France and Britain on June 10, and in the first autumn of the war a middle-aged woman leaving town for a job drew little attention.
Virginia Cacioppo was about fifty-nine. She had once sung soprano on the opera stage, with real success. In 1940, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano, she lost her husband, her son and her voice. Cianciulli offered her a new start in Florence: work as secretary to a theater impresario and, in one version, a wealthy widower waiting for her. Like the others, she was told to sell what she owned and to say nothing.
She did not keep the secret. She confided in a friend, and Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that this, in Cianciulli’s eyes, broke their pact. She was killed on November 30, 1940. Her property, including Treasury bonds, passed to Cianciulli. It was the third killing, and the first in which the victim had left someone behind who would not accept the story.
That person was Albertina Fanti, Cacioppo’s sister-in-law. She did not believe that Virginia had left for Florence without a word, and she went to the police. By Geopop’s account, they showed little interest, so she began asking questions around town herself and pointed out what the three missing women had in common: each had been close to the fortune teller before she vanished. Anonymous letters, dozens of them by one account, began to circulate with the same suspicion.
The police of Reggio Emilia opened an inquiry and, within a few months, began tracing the victims’ property. The key was money. One of Cacioppo’s Treasury bonds had been sold by Adelmo Frattini, the parish priest of San Prospero in Correggio. The priest said he had received the bonds from a local cheesemaker. The cheesemaker said he had received them from Cianciulli, along with cash and jewelry. The trail had led to a small network around her, people who had handled the victims’ goods, some of them, in Geopop’s phrase, more or less willingly.
Cianciulli was detained and taken to the questura, the provincial police headquarters, in 1941. She denied everything. Over the interrogations that followed, nineteen in all by the count in Barbara Bracco’s study of the case, she held out until the police detained Giuseppe, who had posted the letters and was suspected of being her accomplice. Then she confessed to all three killings and took the whole blame on herself. A search of the house turned up dentures and human remains that had been chemically altered. Focus reports that forensic examination of the cesspit found fragments of human bone changed by a process consistent with saponification, the reaction of fat with a strong alkali that produces soap.
Her confession grew with each telling. It began with blows to the head and bodies cut apart and boiled in caustic soda. It went on to curses, black magic and human sacrifice to save her sons from the front. In the version that made her name, she said she had turned the remains of the last victim into a creamy soap and given it to neighbors, and had dried the victims’ blood, mixed it into the dough of little cakes, and served them to the women of the town who came to visit.
At her trial she described the work in clinical terms: “I cut here, here and here: in less than twenty minutes it was all over, including the cleaning.” She asked to be allowed to demonstrate on a cadaver at the morgue in front of the judges. A widely repeated story says she did dismember a body in court; Focus calls that a myth with no confirmation in the official record.
In the criminal asylum at Aversa, at the request of the psychiatrist examining her, she wrote her memoir, more than eight hundred handwritten pages titled Confessioni di un’anima amareggiata, Confessions of an Embittered Soul. In it she described two selves: Nardina, the suffering mother, and Norina, the woman who acted. “I did not kill out of hatred or greed,” she wrote, “but only out of a mother’s love.” The historian Barbara Bracco, in her 2018 book on the case, suggests that the memoir’s details may have been shaped by what the psychiatrist wanted to find and by her own effort to clear her son.
Not all of it holds up. Nobody in the town remembered receiving any soap or cakes, and the Italian science site Geopop, reviewing the case in 2024, treated those details as fantasies or as an attempt to support an insanity defense. Two domestic servants did support parts of the soap-making account, by Bracco’s reading. The chemistry itself is possible: caustic soda breaks down body fat, and the bone fragments in the cesspit show that she used it. What remains unproven is everything that turned a disposal method into a ritual. The bank records and the sales of the victims’ goods point to a motive she never admitted: money. A 2024 report in Il Resto del Carlino, drawing on her prison file, noted that she changed her account several times, first offering human sacrifice and later political motives, while the case records point to simple robbery.
The war delayed her trial for five years. When it opened before the Corte d’Assise of Reggio Emilia in 1946, the country was emerging from Fascism and war, and the courtroom carried the politics of the moment. By Bracco’s account, one of the lawyers for the victims’ families had worked with the Fascist regime and another had served the Salò Republic, while a defense lawyer who had worked on the case had earlier gone into hiding after the Fascists condemned him to death in his absence. The Communist daily l’Unità and the Corriere dell’Emilia covered the hearings. L’Unità’s reporter, Giordani, wrote that personal political influence had helped people under strong suspicion go free. Cianciulli was the only person convicted.
The prosecution argued greed and a likely accomplice, and named the accomplice as her son. She held to the sacrifice and a dream in which, she said, her mother had told her what to do. In court she claimed the victims could be reborn through the fumes, and invoked the Nazi camps and the trials then under way at Nuremberg.
The psychiatric evidence divided the case. Filippo Saporito, a professor at the University of Rome and director of the criminal asylum at Aversa, diagnosed hysterical psychosis and found her wholly insane; he spoke of a “maternal elephantiasis,” a love for her children swollen out of all proportion. The investigating section of the Court of Appeal of Bologna had already rejected his view, accusing him of having been bewitched by her and holding her fully responsible. The trial court took a middle course. It found her only partly insane.
On July 20, 1946, the court convicted her of the three murders, of theft and of desecrating the dead, and sentenced her to thirty-three years: thirty in prison, preceded by three in a criminal asylum. Giuseppe was acquitted for insufficient evidence. When she heard, by the account in Il Fatto Quotidiano, she said, “Dio sia benedetto, viva la legge”: “God be blessed, long live the law.” A photograph from that day shows her embracing her son.
The sentence was meant to move her from the asylum to prison after three years. In practice, Focus notes, she entered the asylum system and never left. She was held first at the judicial asylum at Aversa, near Naples, and later at the women’s judicial asylum at Pozzuoli. In custody she swallowed nails and glass, which the newspapers of the day took as proof of a criminal’s stomach. She went on baking. A nun at Pozzuoli later recalled the cakes she made there, which no one, the nun said, ever dared to eat.
Her clinical file at Pozzuoli grew to about a thousand pages. It was kept for years by the prison administration’s Museo Criminologico in Rome and later transferred to the State Archive in Naples, where the Ferrara publisher Fausto Bassini, after some fifteen years of research, found two passport-style photographs dated July 8, 1970. They show an old woman with a deeply lined face who seems almost to smile. Bassini called her expression “paradoxically serene,” and contrasted it with 1946, when, he believed, she had feigned madness in court. By 1970, Il Resto del Carlino reported, the mental illness was real.
She died of a stroke at about two in the morning on October 15, 1970, at Pozzuoli, after nearly two days in a coma. She was seventy-six or seventy-seven. A fortune teller, she had once said, foretold that she would end her days in prison and an asylum.
The Museo Criminologico in Rome, run by the Italian prison administration, holds the tools described in her confession, and for years held her clinical file. In 2010 the Bologna criminologists Augusto Balloni, Roberta Bisi and Cecilia Monti edited a study of the case, Soda caustica, allume di rocca e pece greca (Caustic Soda, Rock Alum and Greek Pitch). In 2015 Carlo Lucarelli’s crime series Profondo Nero devoted its final episode to her, and Barbara Bracco’s history La saponificatrice di Correggio, subtitled Una favola nera, “a black fairy tale,” followed in 2018.
The subtitle fits. Read against the record, the story divides cleanly.
What the record supports: three women from Correggio, Faustina Setti, Francesca Soavi and Virginia Cacioppo, disappeared between December 1939 and November 1940. Each had been persuaded by Cianciulli to leave town, to write letters for later posting and to hand over control of her property. Their goods and bonds passed through her hands. Chemically altered human remains were found. She confessed, and a court convicted her at trial of three murders, theft and desecration of the dead.
What rests on her word alone: the curse, the vision, the human sacrifice, the soap given to neighbors and the cakes made with blood. No witness in the town confirmed receiving either. Some of the most repeated details, such as a dismemberment performed in the courtroom, have no basis in the record at all.
What is disputed: the weapon used on Setti, the city promised to Soavi, the exact count of her pregnancies, the year of her birth, and whether others who handled the stolen property knew more than they admitted.
• 1893 or 1894: Leonarda Cianciulli born in Montella, province of Avellino. • 1917: Marries Raffaele Pansardi. • 1930: The Vulture earthquake destroys the family home; the family moves to Correggio. • December 1939: Faustina Setti, seventy-three, disappears shortly before Christmas. • June 10, 1940: Italy enters the Second World War. • September 5, 1940: Francesca Soavi disappears. • November 30, 1940: Virginia Cacioppo is killed. • 1941: After inquiries pressed by Albertina Fanti and the tracing of Cacioppo’s bonds, Cianciulli is detained and, after her son’s arrest, confesses. • 1946: Trial before the Corte d’Assise of Reggio Emilia; on July 20 she is sentenced to thirty-three years and Giuseppe is acquitted. • 1946 to 1970: Held at the judicial asylums of Aversa and Pozzuoli. • July 8, 1970: The last known photographs are taken. • October 15, 1970: She dies of a stroke at Pozzuoli.
Cianciulli’s case raises a question that runs through the history of serial murder: what is a killer’s own account worth? Other cases show that it can be worth almost nothing, or a great deal, and that what decides it is whether anything outside the account agrees with it.
Henry Lee Lucas confessed to some six hundred murders after his arrest in Texas. Investigators from many states came to put their unsolved cases to him; at one point, an investigator for the Texas attorney general said, he was confessing to seventy or eighty killings a day by mail. Reporting by the journalist Hugh Aynesworth prompted an investigation by the attorney general’s office, whose 1986 report contained evidence that contradicted many of his confessions. By 1990 that investigator, Mike Feary, said the police were “pretty sure” Lucas had killed three people. Lucas had served fifteen years for killing his mother in Michigan in 1960 and had received life sentences in Texas for the 1982 killings of his common-law wife and an elderly woman in Ringgold. He was on death row for a Georgetown killing that many doubted he had committed.
Ottis Toole, who traveled with Lucas, also confessed to hundreds of killings, most of them false. The case most attached to his name is that of six-year-old Adam Walsh, taken from a Hollywood, Florida, shopping mall in 1981. Toole confessed and then retracted. The police lost the bloodstained carpet from his car, which could have been tested for DNA, and later lost the car itself. Toole died in prison in 1996, at forty-nine, while serving life sentences for unrelated murders. In December 2008 the Hollywood police closed the case on circumstantial evidence, named him as the killer, and apologized to the Walsh family for their mistakes. “Ottis Toole has continued to be our only real suspect,” Chief Chadwick Wagner said.
In Sweden, Sture Bergwall, who called himself Thomas Quick, confessed to more than thirty murders while held at the Säter psychiatric hospital and was convicted of eight, with no technical evidence linking him to any of them. He later said he had lied because he craved attention and was heavily medicated, and blamed the therapy and benzodiazepines he had been given for creating the Quick persona. All eight convictions were overturned, and in July 2013 prosecutors dropped the last case. Sweden’s attorney general, Anders Perklev, called it “a big failure for the justice system.”
A confession can also free the innocent. Before dawn on October 13, 1997, ten-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick was stabbed to death in his mother’s home in Lawrenceville, Illinois. His mother, Julie Rea, was charged three years later, convicted and sentenced to sixty-five years. In 2004 Tommy Lynn Sells, who was on death row in Texas, confessed to breaking into a house he took to be hers and killing a boy. At her retrial the jury heard his confession, and on July 26, 2006, they acquitted her. In 2010 an Illinois court granted her a certificate of innocence.
Measured against these cases, Cianciulli’s account sorts itself. The core of it was corroborated. Three named women were missing. Their property had passed through her hands. A bond belonging to one of them was traced to her. Her son had posted the letters. A court convicted her at trial. What her confession and memoir added was the part everyone remembers, the soap, the cakes and the maternal sacrifice, and that is the part nothing outside her own words confirms.