In the quiet town of Correggio, Italy, during the late 1930s, Leonarda Cianciulli looked like a normal shopkeeper and mother. Everyone in her neighborhood liked her, and she ran a small shop where people would stop by to visit. But behind this normal life, she was planning something horrible that would shock the whole country. Cianciulli had a really hard life from the beginning. Born in 1894, she grew up in a home where her parents treated her badly.
As per Wikipedia, she tried to kill herself twice when she was young. She married a man named Raffaele Pansardi in 1917, but her mother did not want her to marry him and reportedly put a curse on their marriage. The couple went through many bad times, and their home was destroyed in an earthquake in 1930. But the worst thing that happened was losing so many children. She got pregnant seventeen times, but three babies died before they were born and ten more died when they were young. Only four of her children lived.
Losing so many children made Cianciulli very scared for the ones who were still alive. Things got worse when a fortune teller told her that all her children would die young. Another fortune teller looked at her hands and said she would end up in prison and a mental hospital. When her favorite son Giuseppe had to join the army for World War II in 1939, Cianciulli thought the only way to keep him safe was to kill people as sacrifices. And that’s what she did and turned their bodies into soap and teacakes.
She actually gave the soap to her neighbors
Her first victim was a woman named Faustina Setti. Setti came to Cianciulli asking for help to find a husband. Cianciulli told her she found a good man for her in another town and got Setti to write postcards that would be sent later. When Setti came to visit one last time, Cianciulli killed her with an axe. She cut up the body and boiled the pieces in a chemical called caustic soda.
Later, she said she took the blood, dried it out, and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, eggs, and butter to make tea cakes. She gave these cakes to people who came to visit, and she even ate them with her son Giuseppe.
Having lost ten children in their infancy and suffering numerous miscarriages, Leonarda Cianciulli developed a pathological and superstitious fear for her four surviving children. Her terror escalated when her eldest and favorite son, Giuseppe, was drafted to fight for the… pic.twitter.com/q5js9fKPIr
— Allen Sircy (@ATOAllen) October 10, 2025
The second victim was Francesca Soavi. Cianciulli told her she found a job for her at a school. She killed Soavi on September 5, 1940, the same way she killed Setti. The third victim was Virginia Cacioppo, who used to be an opera singer. This time, Cianciulli did something different. She turned Cacioppo’s body into soap. In her statement to police, she said the woman had fat, white flesh, and after boiling it with cologne, she made nice creamy soap. She gave bars of this soap to her neighbors and people she knew.
Cacioppo’s sister-in-law started asking questions when the singer went missing. She told police she saw Cacioppo go into Cianciulli’s house. The police started looking into it and arrested Cianciulli. At first, she would not admit to anything. But when the police thought her son Giuseppe might have helped her, she told them everything about all three murders to prove he was innocent.
Il #15ottobre 1970 nel manicomio di Pozzuoli muore #LeonardaCianciulli detta la Saponificatrice di Correggio, per aver ucciso tra il 1939 e il 1941 3 donne, poi sciolte nella soda caustica. Sosteneva che sua madre in punto di morte le aveva augurato una vita piena di sofferenze. pic.twitter.com/UviNmqi5fD
— Mario Bianchi #fuckPutin&Trump&Netanyahu(@mariobianchi18) October 15, 2025
At her trial in 1946, Cianciulli did not feel sorry at all for what she did. She even told the prosecutor when he got details wrong about her crimes. The court found her guilty and gave her thirty years in prison plus three years in a mental hospital. She died in the mental hospital in 1970 from a brain problem. While Cianciulli’s case is one of the strangest in crime history, shocking true crime cases you have probably never heard of keep coming up, showing us just how dark and twisted some people can be. Today, things from her crimes, like the pot she used to boil her victims, are on display at the Criminological Museum in Rome.
