Leonarda Cianciulli (1984-1970), known as the “Soap maker of Correggio“, was a serial killer Italian that between 1939 and 1940 killed three womenand according to his confessions, he would have dissolved their bodies in the caustic soda to produce soap and their blood to prepare some sweets. The crimes were allegedly motivated by occult beliefs, convinced that the sacrifices humans could protect their children. His story, steeped in superstition And handlinghad great media resonance, but many details declared during her confessions were exaggerated by Leonarda to obtain psychiatric mitigating circumstances. Let’s retrace the life of Leonarda and let’s see the aspects chemists of the reaction of saponification. Leonarda Cianciulli died at the age of 77 in the mental asylum of Pozzuoli due to cerebral apoplexy.
The Story and Murders of Leonarda Cianciulli
Leonarda Cianciulli was born in Montellain Province of AvellinoIn the 1894. His youthful years were turbulent, at least according to his memoirs: he claimed to have attempted the suicide twice in his youth, and having had frequent conflicts with the mother which resulted in a break when he decided to to get married with Raffaele Pansardi, a land registry employee.
The couple suffered many bereavements: from their marriage in 1917, well 13 pregnancies they ended up in tragedy, between miscarriages and deaths at birth. The first successful pregnancy leads to the birth of Giuseppe, who will be followed by 3 other children to whom Leonarda will develop a very strong attachment.
The Pansardi moved from the Campania province to I correct, where Raffaele was transferred following the Vulture earthquake of 1930. Here Leonarda opened a small shop and created a new life: in the Emilian town nobody knew about his past with the justice in her native land, where she had stained herself with assaults and one fraud rib 10 months in prison.
In the 1939 Italy was headed towards the Second World War and, perhaps driven by worries economic or from fear for the life of her young son, Leonarda’s dark soul returned to the fore as never before.
There first victim of Cianciulli was Faustina Settia semi-illiterate widow looking for a new companion. Leonarda exploited the woman’s weaknesses, convincing her that a man from Pola (an Istrian city at the time in Italian territory) would be willing to marry her.
After having her sign farewell letters to acquaintances, sent later by her son Giuseppe, and left a proxy for the sale of her assets, Leonarda killed the woman with an axe: cutting up her body, she decided to use some caustic soda to liquefy the remains and then throw them into the sewer.
A year later it was the second victim’s turn, Francesca Soavi: another woman who dreamed of leaving Correggio, this time attracted by the possibility of being hired as a teacher in a college in Padua.
In this case too, Cianciulli offered to take care of her finances and post letters for acquaintances, then kill the old woman and get rid of the body with the same modus operandi. disappearance from the second victim, happened on September 5, 1940caused even less interest than the first: the whole of Italy looked elsewhere, since the June 10th the same year the declaration of war to France and England by the Fascist government.
To enter the unsavory “serial killers club”however, the victims must be at least 3. Leonarda reached the sad milestone after a couple of months, the November 30, 1940when he tricked and killed Virginia Cacioppo: a former soprano with a successful past, the elderly woman is enchanted by the possibility of working as a secretary for a theatre manager in Florence.
She too will end sectioned and boiled in caustic sodabut the woman’s fame and the stubbornness of a relative were fatal to Leonarda’s plans. Her sister-in-law Albertina Fanti reported the disappearance and, faced with the indifference of the police, she began to ask questions in the village, until the interest in the 3 cases led to the first investigations. After a few months, a voucher from Treasure of Cacioppo and collected by the local parish priest allowed them to trace Cianciulli and some more or less willing accomplices.
The confession of the murders and the “occult” motive
Leonarda initially denied any involvement, but when the investigations they touched the son (involved, for example, in sending letters) decided to confess all crimes, taking on all guilt. During the interrogations she added more and more details, until she told a story of maternal curses, black magic and “human sacrifices” necessary to save her few children from death.
Among the macabre details, Leonarda also said she had cooked and given as a gift sweets to which he added the dried blood of the victims; however, it is with the latest victim that Cianciulli will earn her macabre name. According to one of the many confessionsthanks to the “sweetness” and fatter build of the last victim, the murderer after having boiled in soda got a “creamy soap”which he donated to his neighbors.
These facts were not confirmed by the investigations: Nobody in the village he remembered having received soap as a gift, and the progressive enlargement of the facts told seemed more the result of fantasies of the woman or the attempt to gain the extenuating circumstance of mental infirmity. The strategy worked in part, since Cianciulli would die in a criminal asylum decades later.
Leonarda’s picturesque stories hit the press: despite a past as a manipulative swindler and the evident economic motive, ascertained by bank movements and sales of goods, even today articles and books support the thesis of the human sacrifices and of the “worried mother” from curses.
The saponification reaction
In principle, however, it would be possible to transform human remains into soap. saponification process it is in fact a reaction known and used for centuries, exploiting vegetable fats (oil) or animalsChemically, we are talking about a basic hydrolysis of an estera reaction that occurs in water with the addition of a base such assodium hydroxide NaOH (also commonly called “caustic soda”).
The reaction allows the bonds of the carboxylic “head” to be broken, characterised by the oxygen-carbon bonds present in fat molecules (in the example a triglyceridetypical animal fats). This makes the molecules charged negatively: The sodium No+released into water after the soda has dissolved, can form a R-COO salt– No+, Where R represents a chain composed of carbon and hydrogen.
Salt is easily soluble in the water because of the “head” electronically charged; the long tail R, it is instead similar to fat and grease Why nonpolar (without charges). In contact with dirt, soaps they form micellesa sort of “shell” that engulfs dirt to “dissolve” it in water and rinse it off fabrics or our bodies.
