On December 26, 1940, Albertina Fanti and her brothers went to the carabinieri at Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia, to report that their sister-in-law, Virginia Cacioppo, had not been seen since November 30. The marshal, Federico Scagliarini, gave the report no weight. A few days later the family went to the police headquarters at Reggio Emilia, where the questore, Federico Serrao, took the widow's sudden departure more seriously. Mrs. Fanti produced the numbers of bank bonds worth more than 30,000 lire, and said the last place she had seen Cacioppo go was the house of a neighbor, Leonarda Cianciulli.
Cianciulli was born at Montella, in Irpinia, the daughter of Emilia Marano and Mariano Cianciulli, on November 14, 1893, by Italian accounts, or on April 14, 1894. She wrote later that her mother hated her because she had never wanted her born. She twice tried to kill herself as a girl and was convicted of theft and fraud against elderly and illiterate people while still young. In 1917 she married Raffaele Pansardi, a registry clerk, against her mother's wishes; her mother had meant her for another man, and Cianciulli said she cursed the marriage. The couple moved in 1921 to his hometown of Lauria, where she was imprisoned for fraud in 1927, then to Lacedonia, and after the Irpinia earthquake of 1930 destroyed their home, to Correggio. There she opened a small shop and was popular and well regarded in the neighborhood.
She had seventeen pregnancies. Three ended in miscarriage and ten more of her children died young, and she guarded the four who were left with a fierce anxiety. A fortune teller had told her that she would marry and have children and that all of them would die young; a Romani palm reader, she said, told her that in her right hand she saw prison and in her left a criminal asylum. She studied magic, palmistry, astrology and spells, she wrote, in order to learn how to undo them. In 1939 she learned that her eldest and favorite son, Giuseppe, was to join the army as Italy prepared for war, and she decided that his safety required human sacrifice.
The first was Ermelinda Faustina Setti, a single woman of about seventy who had come to her for help finding a husband. Cianciulli told her she had found a suitable man in Pola, told her to keep it secret, and had her write letters and postcards to relatives and friends to be mailed on her arrival, saying all was well. When Setti came for a last visit, Cianciulli killed her with an axe, dragged the body into a closet and cut it into nine parts, catching the blood in a basin. In her statement she said she put the pieces in a pot with seven kilos of caustic soda bought for making soap, stirred until they dissolved into a thick, dark mush, and emptied it into a septic tank; the blood she let coagulate, dried in the oven, ground, and mixed with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, eggs and margarine into crunchy tea cakes, which she served to the women who visited her and ate with Giuseppe. By some accounts she took Setti's savings of 30,000 lire.
Francesca Clementina Soavi, fifty-five, a kindergarten teacher, was promised a post at a girls' school in Piacenza and persuaded to write postcards to her friends about her plans. On September 5, 1940, she came to say goodbye, and Cianciulli gave her drugged wine and killed her with the axe. She disposed of the body the same way and is said to have taken 3,000 lire. The family's maid, Nella Barigazzi, said later that Giuseppe got rid of Soavi's head; Cianciulli denied that he had any part in it.
Virginia Cacioppo, fifty-nine, born at Reggio Emilia on June 17, 1881, was a widow and a former soprano who had studied at the Milan Conservatory and made her debut in Carmen at the Teatro Valli in Reggio Emilia in July 1904. Cianciulli promised her work as secretary to a theatrical impresario in Florence and swore her to secrecy. She died on November 30, 1940, by Italian accounts; some English-language accounts give September 30. This time, Cianciulli said, she made soap from the body, adding a bottle of cologne, and gave the bars to neighbors and acquaintances, and the cakes were better too. She is said to have taken 50,000 lire, jewelry and bonds from Cacioppo, and she sold all three women's clothes and shoes.
She did not confess until suspicion fell on Giuseppe, and then gave detailed accounts to clear him. At her trial in Reggio Emilia in 1946 she was unrepentant, corrected the prosecutor on details and offered to show the court how quickly she could take a body apart; the offer was not accepted. She said she had given the copper ladle she used to skim the fat from the pot to her country, which needed metal in the last days of the war. She was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison and three in a criminal asylum. A memoir published under her name, Confessions of an Embittered Soul, runs to hundreds of handwritten pages and was written in the judicial psychiatric hospital at Aversa, although its authenticity has been doubted and some believe her lawyers wrote it; she had only three years of schooling. In it she wrote that she had killed not out of hatred or greed but only out of a mother's love. She died of cerebral apoplexy in the women's criminal asylum at Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970. The pot in which the bodies were boiled is among the items from the case in the Criminological Museum in Rome.