Leonarda Ciancuilli: The Cannibal of Correggio

just before we get started with the episode today i do want to give a quick plug to a new channel that i'm doing called decoding the unknown it's all about solving some of history's greatest mysteries we look at a whole bunch of stuff like did a book predict the sinking of the titanic what really happened to the russian hikers in the diatolof pass and what happened to the mary celeste and because it's a channel from me we're not gonna just accept that oh it was ghosts yeah it's definitely ghost that's what's happening um no no no we're gonna try and really figure out what happened it's a casual laid-back show and i think if you like my stuff you'll probably enjoy it as well it's available on youtube there's probably a link below it's called decoding the unknown and now into today's video ah hello there welcome back to another episode of the casual criminalist ah as always i'm your host simon welcome welcome welcome today oh we're doing someone in italy so i'm gonna be absolutely butchering some italian pronunciations all throughout this episode you are so very welcome leonardo chianchi and sweeily si kreto i don't know the cannibal of courage oh uh oh my god cannibalism as well brilliant this one's gonna be an absolute laugh right between the pronunciations and the cannibalism isn't it what happens here is uh oh this one uh normally of course you hear me say canon it's written today's script but today's script is written by david occasional contributor to the casual criminalist his last one was excellent so he's contributed another just so uh callum's fingers are bleeding less which is which is nice he said that his his finger scabs are recovering nicely of course i'm going to read it and then jen afterwards is going to do some magic with the video and audio if you're like what the video what this is a podcast no it's also available on youtube yes you can check it out and if you're watching this on youtube and you're like i don't want to look at this guy's face i just want to see the i just want to listen to the audio version well it has a podcast as well you're welcome world yes let's jump into it it is the 17th of december 1939 in the small town of courageo nestled in the po river valley of northern italy great britain france and germany are already at war but mussolini has cynically kept italy neutral for the time being that's not going to last we know how this goes the entire nation of italy is on edge with millions of people even subbed about fascists not in favor of joining hitler's war and spilling italian blood for his conquest of poland yet war seems inevitable and it lingers on everybody's minds amelienda faustina seti fingers crossed david has included like a phonetic pronunciation guide but i can't even get those right so ah a sweet old deer aged 72 shuffles slowly up the corso carver just off the town center a lifelong spinster she has a square somewhat masculine face and that has long lost its vestiges of youth can we say spinster anymore i feel like that's probably something that the pc police are like uh uh unmarried lady is or sorry unmarried woman is uh the correct use not spinster but this woman i i get maybe she's gonna be a cannibal so maybe we're okay to call her a spinster let's see oh no this isn't her is it this is this is someone else this is probably one of the victims oh no senora seti arrives at the apartment building number 11. her friend senora narina pansardi lives on the third floor senora seti makes her way to the top of the stairs her friend kisses her on both cheeks and utters her inside they have some important business to discuss this feels like the most italian thing that has ever happened they're like come in my god i'm gonna stop because my italian accent's so bad but they're like come inside and have some biscotti yes this is what i imagine there's a guy uh super close to my office who runs like uh it's a shop that sells that delicious italian bread and he's always like bonjour that was like bonjourno and that's the extent of my italian and then i'm like yeah one for catching your bread please and he's like it's yeah and i'm like yeah i know i'm sorry i'm so sorry and then i enjoy the delicious focaccia bread it's a great time fascinating story from your life simon thank you so much but one of these women is not who she seems senora seti sits primly on an old but comfortable sofa her nose in the air while senora pansardi busies herself in the kitchen pansardi comes back wearing a cup of coffee and some biscuits for her friend as was her custom on the old woman's many visits senora pansardi aged only 46 miles through jagged teeth and a somewhat gnome-like face with an elongated bulbous nose she is a tiny woman standing only four foot eleven wow that is very small and weighing roughly 110 pounds the two women briefly discuss the prospect of war senora panzadi seems deeply concerned as she has three sons of military age senora seti single and childless does not seem concerned in the slightest she has big plans and she's leaving town seti had been coming to see panzadi for some years now as the latter was a respected town wise woman palm reader and astrologer definitely not someone who'd be respected by me because i don't know what a wise woman is but i know that a palm reader and astrologer is basically like a witch and not like in the let's burn them kind of which just like it's just nonsense it's obviously [ __ ] that is just just let's not do that you're just conning people out of their money i mean maybe they could also feel better because of it and you know because the placebo effect is real but we should just get rid of this stuff shouldn't we this time panzadi had outdone herself she found a husband for senora seti an older man living in poland in italian province bordering on yugoslavia on the coast of the adriatic sea tsunurasetti an incurable romantic who had sadly never found a husband was going there to meet him to avoid a scandal the two women had agreed to keep the arrangement secret for now senora said he was illiterate senora pansardi who had a third grade education had helped her compose letters to her friends explaining the situation as soon as senoraseti arrived in pola said he had also signed over a power of attorney to pinsardi so her friend could manage her assets until senora seti could bring them over and begin her new life with her husband senora said he took a sip of her coffee her heart racing with excitement what about to happen next a new life she was about to grasp at the late age of 72. then for some reason she began to feel drowsy she took another another sip of coffee to wake herself up uh oh the coffee isn't keeping you awake behind us in europe and sardi raised an axe holy we're on to axe murder and it is the top of page two this is going to be a wild one everybody she brought it down with surprising ferocity and struck her friend on the neck the blow nearly decapitated her with one stroke senora said his head now hung off the front of her torso by a thin layer of skin and sinew lovely david thanks i was i had this beautiful image painted in my mind of these two like elderly like italian women or one's elderly ones middle age like having some nice biscotti in their apartments and now now one of their their heads is hanging on by a little bit of skin and a tendon lovely senor pensadi rips that off a friend's body and threw it in the sink holy my dude meet leonardo chanculi it's nice that there's the pronunciation guide now it wasn't on the main title at the beginning so i screwed that up but now i know her name is chang cooley which is kind of a cool name leonardo chen cooley was born on april the 18th 1893 some sources say 1894 some people don't care me in montella a small village in southern italy her father mariano was a pleasant was a peasant cattle breeder i was like he's a pleasant cattle breeder that's nice it's good that he's pleasant we don't have an accurate record for our date of birth but we do know that her father was a pleasant cattle breeder no he was a peasant his wife sarafina was a widow with her two children from a previous marriage mariano and serafina went on to have three more children together it's rumored that seraphina was raped by a man possibly named salvatore de nolphi because i just want to say that salvatore but apparently in italian it's salvatore and the rape had gotten her pregnant with leonardo with it being italy in the 1890s and being very very catholic he goes without saying that abortion was very very illegal as such seraphina was forced to have leonardo and raise her as her own not the not that the devout seraphina would have contemplated anything to the contrary nevertheless seraphina allegedly hated the baby that was born out of neither love nor marriage as leonardo grew up her mother was verbally and physically abusive to the extreme leonardo was systematically treated worse by her mother than her other siblings this is a super crazy situation i mean like obviously it's not the kid's fault but can you imagine if you have like a couple of kids and then one of them is also like from a situation where you were raped that is gonna be so confusing and troubling and yeah obviously simon well done for stating the obvious you hero um but yeah that's intense that's really intense this is an intense episode there's axe murder and rape with four paragraphs into page two guys great she told leonardo that she had been brought into the world by the devil and that nothing but evil would come of her life it did not help that leolada was epileptic among the italian peasantry at the time there was a superstition that seizures were a sign of demonic possession thus in her mother's eyes leonardo was a foul ungodly little creature we do not know much about her adopted father's treatment of leonarda with her being the rape baby of another man but we do know that mariano chanculi bestowed upon his adopted daughter the name of nardina a short and diminutive form of leonarda which implies affection leonardo's name itself she inherited from mariano's father leonardo serafino hated her father-in-law preferred to call her narina leonardo's siblings wanting to please both parent parents simply called her ina criminal psychologists would later theorize that nardina and ronorina were representative of two sides of leonardo's split personalities the nardina side of her was gentler worked harder and suffered for her children the noreena side was more aggressive cruel and took ruthless action to defend them evidently leonardo was deeply troubled and a depressed young girl in a 700-page memoir melodramatically entitled confessions of an embedded soul which he later wrote while incarcerated leonardo claimed that she had tried to commit suicide multiple times in her youth there's a quote i tried twice to hang myself once they came in time to save me and the other time the rope broke my mother let me know that she was very sorry to see me alive oh my god holy sh again like it's another episode of the casual criminals where parents are a piece of [ __ ] and they [ __ ] up their children shocking once i swallowed two sticks with the intention of dying and ate some shards of glass nothing happened it is possible that these claims are a delusional lie since leonardo had tried to hang herself twice with these same outcomes while she was imprisoned awaiting trial in 1941. much of her memoirs are unreliable because if it hadn't become clear already leonardo chanculi was off her nut it wasn't exactly clear to me yet she just seems like a troubled young girl but uh i guess apparently spoiler alert she's off her nut her psychologist determined that severe childhood abuse from an overbearing mother led to narcissistic personality disorder with sadistic schizoid and paranoid tendencies that sounds very complicated and very bad a lack of motherly affection moreover led leonardo forming insecure attachments anti-social behaviors hostility toward other women and a feeling of inferiority when which she tried to mask with grandiose behavior and claims she presented herself to the world as a special person and related to other people by trying to dominate them it's always an attractive personality trait when it's like oh how am i going to make this person like me i'm going to dominate them i'm absolutely going to dominate the [ __ ] out of them oh no she tried to cultivate people's trust and took it as her due but she did not empathize with others she didn't view people as people but only as objects as prop pieces in the stage play of her own life interesting is it like i always found that interesting you know like you're the main character in your life but everyone else is the main character in all of their lives like mostly people listening it's just like i'm that podcast guy that you sometimes listen to or that youtube guy you sometimes watch and you all have your own like lives going on out there and i have mine i don't know where i'm going with this but it is weird isn't it do you think like there's everyone out there just all involved in their own stuff and here i am involved in mine and it's yeah it's just interesting isn't it [Music] the sign use of superstition there was another aspect to leonardo's psychosis among the fairly illiterate italian peasantry was a mixture of badly understood catholicism latent ancient roman paganism and more modern urban legends all mixed into a single incoherent belief system despite being a devoutly catholic nation much of the peasant religiosity took on a decidedly more magical element a belief in curses in witchcraft mixed with trash magazine level astrology and carnival grade fortune telling yeah this is weird i think like also back in the day when things were really you know when it was just you know life was a bit rough like italia italy in this time isn't oh my god everyone we're all a bit fascist hitler's doing all sorts of stuff are we gonna have to go to war our kid's gonna have to go to war all that kind of stuff and you're just you know you're more likely to be like oh yeah please i want to look at some astrology for some good news for the future i want to believe that witches and magic spells are real because life sucks it's like really poorer countries typically are more religious right because they're like oh i've got to pray for things to get better while all the rich countries are like pretty good getting fat right now everything's great to take one simple crude and cheap anecdote for the sake of an example county country priests were occasionally uneducated and could not properly speak latin at one point in catholic mass the priest was supposed to bless the bread quoting jesus and uttering the words this is my body in latin this is supposed to translate to hawkest enem corpus meun which some priests shortened to hawkest corpus where the theory goes the priest using flawed dog latin or the peasant crowds mishearing or both slowly led some countryside parishioners to think that the phrase was shouting hocus pocus before magically turning bread into the body of christ i mean i mean essentially that's that's what they're doing there isn't it because i mean that am i right thinking castles and they literally the it's a literal belief that that is that the bread is the body of christ it's not like representative of it it actually in the belief system that is christ's flesh which is crazy and also like the sort of that you'd see in a magic show so hocus pocus abracadabra kind of makes sense doesn't it by the late 17th century magicians were shouting into pull rabbits out of hats instead of a dead language used by tradition latin phrases began to take on the power of magical incantations for the peasantry just as they do in every shitty horror movie released in the last 70 years preach some horror movies are so there are good horror movies like the ring i think is one of the stat that uh ah god who was in that movie the super famous blonde lady i don't remember but that movie is scary that's one of the scariest like i remember seeing that i must have been like a teenager like early teens i remember watching that movie and then being scared of televisions like oh god what if i watch that ring thing then i'll die in seven days what if i wake up and it's on my tv in the night it was scary leonardo chanculi was a sucker for this sort of pseudo-religious magical hogwash when she was a young girl she has said to have visited a gypsy fortune teller who told her that she would marry and have children but that all her children would die oh my god savage random gypsy woman it's like why not just lie it's all nonsense anyway why not just be like you're gonna live a brilliantly happy life and all the fortunes of the world are gonna fall upon you rather than like yeah yeah i can have loads of kids and they're all gonna die i mean they're all gonna die eventually of course it's depressing um but like why not just lie she was also told that she would either wind up in prison or an insane asylum oh my god you savage apparently leonardo took this warning to heart but seeing as we only have her memoirs as evidence for this encounter it could quite likely just be one of leonardo's bold stories something to sex up the events of her life by making them seem fated in the stars in 1912 a 19 year old leonardo was arrested and convicted of theft her overall reputation in mondella was that of a local troublemaker yet in fairness growing up with a mother who literally called her devil spawn and treated her like trash well it couldn't have been easy in fact her mother's insults may well have made leonardo's criminal behavior a self-fulfilling prophecy yeah i mean while she definitely had some part in her daughter being a mega cup so yeah as we always say casual criminalist don't help your kids please come on it's not necessary nevertheless in 1917 at the age of 24 leonardo experienced a glimpse of happiness she met a man named raphael and the pronunciation guide here says ninja turtles familiar thank you panzadi who worked as a clerk in the registry office yet even this chance of a happy life was spoiled by her mother in prison leonardo wrote i met my husband and fell madly enough with him my mother opposed our marriage because she wanted to give me to her nephew oh it's like i've met this wonderful man yeah yeah i know how about how about how about instead instead of that instead of marrying that guy what about incest right yeah good huh i got married anyway and my mother flew through a curse on me seraphina chenguli thereafter served all severed all relations with her daughter while the exact nature of the curse if there was one that wasn't because curses aren't real is not known her mother's final rejection had a profoundly damaging impact on leonarda one that she would not shake for the rest of her life someone on twitter the other day was like simon uh i was listening to your podcast and it's like i don't care i've seen a ghost and i just tried no you haven't ghosts aren't real and it was people were like mostly simon's correct but then of course they do because they follow me on twitter i'm like extremely skeptical but uh people some people were like yeah yeah well how do you explain it i don't know i'm not even trying to explain it but it's not ghost is it and it's if it ever could be it's oh no another brilliant one was like uh simon wyman's if the paranormal is explained by science and i'd be like well great then it's real it's not paranormal anymore is it it's just normal and it great science rules simple i look forward to that happening if someone if science someone scientifically proves ghosts i'll be that that is seriously cool nice job as raphael and leonardo pansardy settled in montella for a long and happy marriage it's not going to be very happy because all of her children are going to die according to that crazy witch at the fair leonardo was arrested again in 1919 for threatening someone with a knife two years later the couple moved to raphael's hometown of lauria a small medieval town just above the toe of italy's boot here leonardo gained a reputation of a [ __ ] who would sleep with any man who showed her the slightest interest to ignore the authority and command of her husband and as a notorious con woman who posed as a spiritualist she began a fortune-telling racket to build people out of their hard-earned cash in 1927 leonardo was convicted for fraud after conning a local peasant woman out of two months wages and was fined and given 10 months in prison her defense attorney tried and failed to get her a plea of insanity during this same disreputable and turbulent period leonardo was trying to desperately have children of her 17 pregnancies three-ended miscarriages and a whopping 10 of her children died in infancy oh my god the pez the crazy witch doctor woman was right according to leonardo it was only through the magic exercise to buy a local witch that allowed her to grab children and protected them as they grew up in total leonardo's leonarda had four children who survived three boys and a girl and in leonardo's mind this was entirely due to mystical forces all right well her mind's entitled to think whatever she thinks i mean it's wrong but uh whatever who cares thus in addition to the abuse she suffered at the hand of her mother in childhood leonardo suffered a harsh downpour of trauma as she lost child after child in her twenties and thirties an already mentally unstable mind with a plethora of personality disorders was pushed closer and closer to the breaking point and to give herself some illusion of control she dug herself deeper and deeper into the occult as leonardo herself puts it quote i could not bear the loss of another child almost every night i dreamed of the small white coffins swallowed one after the other by the black earth for this i studied magic i read the books that talk about palm reading astrology spells hexes and spiritualism i wanted to learn everything about curses to be able to neutralize them while dabbling in astrology tarot cards and larping as witchy poo wiccans maybe a harmless enough pastime for bored housewives and moody teenagers this cocktail of superstition was the final nail in the coffin for leonardo's sanity she came to believe in increasingly bizarre things which in turn would lead her to commit some of the most heinous acts in order to protect protect her surviving children oh god is she eating people because she's crazy i mean of there's a statement are you eating people because you're crazy no no i'm totally sane i just love eating people of course if you're eating people you're crazy but is she eating people because she thinks it's going to be like part of some spell that's going to protect her children because that is so like no the witch of carrigeo once leonardo was released from prison she and raphael hastily moved to the tiny village of lachidonia also in southern italy for a fresh start now long afterwards on july 23 1930 an earthquake struck the region causing 1 400 deaths and obliterating the pensadi's home from there the family picked up sticks and headed north to the other side of the country to settle in corrigio leonardo's husband raphael got another job as a clerk in the corregio registry office earning a very modest wage that barely provided for his wife and family to supplement the family's income leonardo set up a fairly successful furniture and clothing business and as a as a sideline and of course she also offered palm reading and astrology to her more gullible customers it's like yeah yeah what are you here for yeah i need a new couch great uh you want any palm reading with that i need a little bit of astrology you interested in the taurus the the the the tangents of mars and mercury help you out with that no no just just the sofa thanks you crazy woman meanwhile leonardo's reputation in garigio evolved to be drastically different than that in previous towns she was respected among the townsfolk leonardo may have been considered eccentric in her beliefs and behaviors but she was also thought to be charming and mysterious she was a sage a wise woman with strange powers that were barely understood they're not real an image that leonardo did everything to encourage she was admired how she doted on her children she was well liked considered reliable and was trusted with the town folks personal secrets people frequently stopped by her place where she told them entertaining stories plied them with coffee and pastries and meant them as a pathetic year she broke the tedium of people's humdrum small town lives by giving them exciting prophecies about their futures she provided crackpot remedies and invoked gibberish spells which as far as the town folk and the placebo effect were concerned while they seem to work because the placebo effect is super powerful there's that famous study where they give people like the white pills and the red pills and the red pills don't do anything but still oh neither of them do anything but somehow the red pills are more effective in treating the condition and the condition wasn't like depression or like anxiety or something like that you know like a very a mental disorder uh it was like pneumonia and some other people on the red pills got better it's amazing placebo effect it's why people believe in witches and sh leonardo was also admired at crosstown for being an enthusiastic and devoted fascist brilliant but apparently raphael did not share the town's admiration for his wife he gradually fell into alcoholism to cope with with life married to this temperamental and often violent mad woman and after two decades of marriage he abandoned his wife altogether while i would never advocate her husband abandoning his family in this case it might be fair to say that this poor burger got out while the going was good meanwhile leonardo's four surviving children had grown up to fairly promising young people her eldest son was studying literature at the university of milan her second son was conscripted in the army her third son was just finishing up high school only her young daughter was still in childhood and was away being educated by local nuns now first i'm like ah husband what about the kids you can't just leave your crazy wife you've got to think about the kids and it seems okay well three of them left home and one of them is like a nun boarding school or whatever so okay okay less judgment for escaping the crazy lady now by and large after much tragedy and family turmoil and a number of criminal offences leonardo leonardo might have wound up spending the rest of her days as a relatively harmless village quack and petty con woman but then the war came now just before we continue with today's episode let me tell you about today's wonderful sponsor surf 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i'm in a cafe then i'll fire up surf shark you know if i'm doing some internet banking or whatever just for safety but the thing i really like is it allows me to get you know more streaming options for example netflix uh i live in prague in the czech republic and america has like by far the largest netflix collection so i'll fire it up um surf shark up or fire up netflix and it's like oh wow look at all these other options loads more movies but if you're in america and you're thinking simon why would i need this i already have the greatest netflix library in the world in america well i was on american netflix looking for tom cruise uh mission impossible movies and they weren't available but i turn off surf shark and they are available so you might be able to get stuff that you thought you'd be able to get this look it's really good you'll find a whole world of other content out there also surf shark's totally unlimited so you can watch as much as you want which is fantastic and of course there are no logs kept because you know vpns they shouldn't be keeping logs they should be not interested in what you're doing online in fact you know that's what they provide privacy they've also got great support a 30-day money-back guarantee if you don't like it you can get 83 off and four months for free through the link in the description below or you can use my code criminalist and let's get back to today's video body armor by blood ritual when the german army marched into poland in september 1939 many in europe thought that mussolini might declare war and join hitler immediately the two dictators had grown increasingly close in their goals over the past three years there were many similarities to their ideologies and how they governed their nations but mussolini never had an overwhelming sense of fondness or loyalty for hitler nor the nazi ideology that positioned italians as an inferior race surprise surprise the guy who thinks you're an inferior race is not your best friend brilliant and shocking so mussolini hung back waiting and watching only intending to strike at the allies should the germans look on the verge of victory then mussolini might quickly gobble up a few new possessions in africa and the mediterranean islands to the wider italian population however aided by harsh anti-british and anti-french propaganda it seemed like war could break out at any time this sends leonardo into a mental breakdown she had already lost ten children in infancy and three to miscarriages to her mind it was only her tireless exercise of spells and the occult that kept her remaining children safe i mean yes like isn't that is that confirmation bias where because something keeps happening you're like oh yeah it must keep happening or it sounds more like ocd you know where it's like oh yeah i've been doing these curses so nothing bad is going gonna happen because nothing bad has happened but i have to keep doing the curses or something bad will happen that's nonsense she's got like witch ocd but strangely she didn't seem to give much of a damn about them most of her concern was for her eldest son her absolute favorite he was studying in milan he might be vulnerable to army conscription leonardo felt certain that if he were to fight he would die according to leonardo's memoirs the premonition was reinforced by her nightmares she dreamt constantly of her abusive mother seraphina chanculi whom leonarda had last seen 22 years before her mother appeared to her night after night and told leonardo that her son would die unless leonardo committed a blood sacrifice in order to protect him you know typical mother advice on child-rearing at any rate recurrent nightmares and mounting anxiety for the first three months of the second world war clearly caused leonarda to have some sort of psychotic break given what came next sounds like she's already quite broken so this is just going to be i imagine it's going to be pretty intense leonardo wrote in her memoirs that she was also heavily influenced in her thinking by greco-roman mythology she bore in mind the story of thetis goddess of the sea who had dipped her son achilles in the river sticks to make him invincible though perhaps this reference was cooked up later to make the act of murder and desecration of a corpse sound more educated and palatable i mean making a desecration of a corpse more palatable don't know if that's really possible i mean i guess you could just be like well no it was an autopsy technically desecrating a corpse but also a totally valid medical thing so okay yeah why not which brings us back to december 17th 1939 and the final moments of emma linda faustina seti oh the woman being murdered by an axe oh we went back in time of course we did she was in there they were in that apartment having some biscuits and then we went back and explored this woman's whole horrible childhood blood biscuits the martyr was sipping the coffee i raised this quote by the way i didn't personally raise any axes i raised the axe i mean other than for dropping wood i think i worked like a thunderbolt i think my strength tripled otherwise i could not have done what i did leonardo brought the axe down on her friend's neck and nearly decapitated her with one stroke an impressive act for such a tiny middle-aged woman yeah although axes are pretty heavy like i'm like i'm not exactly the strongest man in the world uh an understatement but i can chop a big old block of wood in half with an axe cause an axe is heavy you put it on the chopping thing you swing the axe down boom splits in two easy leonardo then walked around the sofa to the front of the torso the top of which was at first pumping and then oozing blood she gripped the head with both hands and wrenched it free oh my god ah that's one of those i don't know like one of those uh nails on chalkboards like the the the idea the the the tendon and the skin kind of tearing off is why are we talking about this more it's just making me feel more unpleasant let's just move on she went to the kitchen and tossed it in the sink coming back into the sitting room leonardo grabbed the corpse and dragged it across the floor leaving a trail of blood on the old wooden beams until she reached a closet and shoved the body inside she lent signora seti's torso over a large basin and proceeded to make a series of small strategic cuts in the body to speed up the draining of the woman's blood while the sofa floors and hitting area already looked like someone had popped a water balloon filled with red paint there was roughly two or three liters of blood left in the body for future use uh i mean the future use there is in quotation marks i'm assuming this was from her creepy ass memoirs like why aren't you saving the butt but why are you saving the blood in the body what are you saving that for you weirdo leonardo went back into the kitchen i cut the head that i had laid in the sink but no blood came out evidently the blood left in tenuraseti's head that hadn't drained onto the floor of the sitting area had already seeped out into the sink leonardo went back to the closet the basin was nearly full with a large knife she cut into the body's flesh she broke the bones with a large hammer leonardo proceeded to cut off the body's arms and legs the legs she split in two at the knee to reduce their length and then she proceeded to cut out the woman's pelvis from the rest of the torso will it blend that is the question [Music] i just don't like this after a lifetime of experience dealing with fresh slabs of meat from the butcher when cooking for a family apparently it took leonardo no more than 12 minutes to fully dismember senora seti's corpse oh my god what are you up to that's insane just like just making quick work of it absolutely no no pause just like you know it'd be like me cutting up a chicken to put in the oven a bosh bosh you know using the cleaver easy does it but you know with a giant human body this is not nice at all i threw the pieces into a pot added seven kilograms of caustic soda which i had bought to make soap and stirred it all until the dissected body parts dissolved into a dark and sticky pulp with which i filled some buckets and i emptied into a nearby septic tank caustic soda otherwise known as lye is made of the chemical sodium hydroxide it is able to turn animal proteins into liquid it burns rather quickly through flesh that's seen in fight club where brad pitt throws a chemical on ed norton's hands and makes him hold it there as it disfigures his skin well yes that's caustic soda oh so really horrible stuff why can't you just buy this i feel like the benefit of selling caustic sodas and people can make homemade soap is outweighed by the negative of what it could be used to dispose of bodies and physically disfigure people as such it is often used to break down roadkill by animal disposal professionals and has been used by a number of murderers on corpses to speed up their decomposition again it's like pros and cons right should we sell it so we can decompose landfill yes does the ability to decompose bodies outweigh that benefit also yes or maybe we can just sell it and we can track all the people who are buying it and look if you it's like the uh the diesel and uh diesel and uh the fertilizer ammonium nitrate if you if you're buying large quantities of ammonium nitrate whoever your local fbi is or if you're american the fbi they're gonna be on to you they're gonna be like that guy just bought a lot of ammonium nitrate and he ain't a farmer so let's just figure out is he buying lots of is it diesel or petrol i really shouldn't be giving bomb making instructions on this podcast but i feel like this is a fairly commonly known one um in fact there was a there was a fiction book i read about this even i was a kid it was a kid's fiction book and it always stuck with me and i can't know the name of it but it was about it was about these australian teenagers who they're on some trip into the outback or whatever they're just camping and then they come back and australia's been invaded by some mystery force there was a bad movie made with this as well later and i watched and i was now this isn't as enjoyable as when i was a teenager but they make a giant bomb out of uh fertilizer and they use it to blow up this invading enemy it's a really good it's more than a book it's like a whole series i enjoyed the crap out of it when i was a kid i'm sure now i'd be a bit like i don't know whenever i watch tv shows with teenagers i'm like oh it's a bit cringe isn't it can't we watch a tv show with adults because i'm not a teenager anymore i just want to see adults doing stuff rather than teenage because all of their problems seem so small like this is what we worry about when we're kids oh oh i see oh what are we talking about i'm so lost we are on a massive tangent i'm so sorry uh it's also fairly easy to obtain without drawing suspicion oh yeah i'm saying we should track people who are buying caustic soda and if they're not roadkill disposal experts we should uh maybe just make sure they're not serial killers you know like fbi could get on that it's also fairly too easy to obtain without drawing suspicion when heated to 100 to 300 degrees celsius it can melt most human flesh into a thick dark soup damn david we are giving away tips on disposing of bodies today i'm gonna get in trouble so what are we doing well we're giving tips on how not to get caught and bomb making instructions and uh also how to dispose of bodies speaking of the fbi looking into people a late police testimony indicates that the neighbors were briefly aware of the foul smell coming from leonardo's apartment but they largely ignored it and it soon went away from there leonardo said about cleaning the blood off her clothes the kitchen counters and did her best aggressively aggressively scrubbing blood stains out of the wooden floors what she could not remove she covered up with rugs from her furniture business she then said about the task of reupholstering her sofa the bones she would later toss into a nearby canal when senora set his blood in the basement fully coagulated leonardo brought it into the kitchen why let such a thing go to waste uh uh oh god she's gonna eat it i forgot this episode it's called about being a cannibal she's gonna drink the blood or some crazy isn't she oh god and all i can think now about the uh about her like throwing the bones in the canal is all i can think about is the will it blends guy on youtube because i'm a terrible person although i'll show you use the corset so to turn it into a soup i wonder if those bones will blend you know the vita tech guy or whatever it's called he's got the blender and he's like you know he's really impressed with this blender and what it can blend like phones and and now i'm just thinking about whether it would grind oh god what is wrong with you fact boy come on i gathered the blood like it was jam she later wrote i dried it in the oven grounded and mixed it with flour sugar chocolate milk and eggs as well as a little margarine mixing everything together i made a large number of crunchy pasties pastries and served them to the ladies you came to visit but my son giuseppe and i ate them too oh my god it's not a roll doll novel isn't it evidently leonardo also gave out some of these pastries to the local children which no doubt made her very popular she thought that by eating the pastries the blood ritual would protect the children just as this gruesome act had protected the life of her own kids oh yeah i totally forgot she's doing this because she's delusional i mean obviously but that this sort of weird witchy [ __ ] is protecting her kids oh no as far as leonardo was concerned she later wrote she was simply dipping the neighborhood children into the river styx is this woman crazy enough to avoid prison i guess we will find out and by avoid prison i mean spend the rest of her life in a mental hospital additionally according to one confession leonardo made to the police a few weeks after her arrest she claimed to have used some of her friends meat for cooking as well uh let's i don't know david if the right word for a human's flesh is meat i think it's flesh her friend's flesh for cooking as well her friend's meat it just doesn't sound right roasting stewing and boiling the human flesh before consuming it but it is difficult to tell whether this confession is true nevertheless given leonardo seem perfectly happy to make blood biscuits eat them and then hand out the rest to the neighborhood it's not unreasonable to think that she would not let the rest of her friend go to waste a few days later leonardo sent her son giuseppe is that how you say that name giuseppe maybe it's giuseppe c gritto out of town to mail senora set his letters back to corregio to her various acquaintances in those letters said he explained that she had moved to pola where she planned to be married and had kept things secret in order to avoid a scandal of course there was no husband waiting for her impola this was all a lie concocted by leonarda yeah obviously and also the least bad thing she did and when you're lying to someone to get them to move to another town because there's a fake husband waiting for them that's a pretty bad thing to do but uh making biscuits out of their blood it's worse it's definitely worse meanwhile it'd be like yeah she's going to pre she's she's in court it's like what she accord for well murder cannibalism fraud meanwhile the cannibal of corregio pocketed thirty thousand lira of senoraseti savings which the old woman had been carrying with her in preparation for a move across the country whoa i don't know how much how much money is that oh okay this works out approximately 25 000 us dollars not a bad payout for a day's work no definitely not but also why oh i guess okay because she was moving to a new town isn't i feel like there's a more secure way to do that didn't they have checks in the past the cannibal strikes again given the grim nature of the events described above i'll wager that you groaned inwardly or outwardly when you saw the next title card i have to say i just read it as i do title cards because i don't usually comment on the title card so i just kind of tuned it out but it does say the cannibal strikes again so that's how brilliant let's she's up in her kill count but if leonardo had stopped at one blood sacrifice she certainly wouldn't be as notorious in criminal history moreover and perhaps more importantly if she had stopped at one victim it's likely she would have never been caught it is september 5th 1940 germany has knocked france out of the war and mussolini sensing an opportunity to sit at the peace table with minimal loss declared war on june 10th but the war was not going well for mussolini against the british in the egyptian desert or in ethiopia in fact it was an unmitigated disaster the italian army simply wasn't yet properly equipped to go to war and they were badly led by an incompetent officer corps whether these fortunes played a role in leonardo's decision-making or not the women had concluded that it was time to make another blood sacrifice francesca clementina so avi age 55 was a kindergarten teacher from a local school in korea she was single poor and without many people in the town to miss her like the first victim i feel like if you're a kindergarten teacher aren't you going to know all the other kindergarten teachers teachers none all the kids gonna be like where's mrs what was her name so harvey where'd she go oh sorry miss so are you where'd she go she's dead someone's gonna notice maybe this is where she gets caught uh like her first victim senora sawabi had been coming to leonardo for several years for guidance for sympathetic yeah for the occasional fortune telling and to be honest just plain old simple companionship she couldn't have chosen a worse person yeah i mean not only is she eating those blood biscuits but i get the feeling she's going to get murdered leonardo had lied to sawabi that she had found her a well-paying job at a girls boarding school in piacenza a city not far from guerilla in northern italy this would have provided the teacher with more stable income and psns as larger population might even offer the possibility of finally finding a husband of course there was no job in piercenzer it was all alive an experienced con woman leonardo had convinced sohavi to write postcards to friends and co-workers apologizing for leaving suddenly but to avoid making her final destination known until she was firmly in the job if that was me i'd be like mad suspicious i was like this seems very specific it sounds like the sort of thing i'd i'd write if i wanted people to if i really wanted to disappear permanently and no one ever found me you know these biscuits taste really weird in reality this would prevent anyone from knowing where to start should people begin looking for her senora sawavi also signed over a power of attorney so leonardo could handle her affairs back in corellia when she got settled leonardo wrote suavi gave the key to her house to mata ferrari no relation and told her to give it to me because she was leaving um yeah that's super intense and then i always i'd already be suspicious after after um you know writing those postcards about me essentially going missing and then she's like yeah i also want your house and uh your power of attorney yeah no not not any specific power of attorney just sweeping i want to conduct all of your legal affairs um i'd be extremely suspicious of that leonardo poured the doomed school mistress some wine and they clinked glasses in celebration of her opportunity and new life in the big city naturally the wine was drugged while senora sawavi fell into a stupor her eyes glazing over in a vision turning blurry leonardo struck her with the axe a familiar pattern played itself out decapitation head in the sink torso dragged to the closet blood drained in a large base in arms legs pelvis and torso dismembered with a large knife and a hammer legs split into all within 12 minutes these specific timings must be coming from her like creepy memoirs right that is incredibly fast flesh thrown into a pot and boiled with caustic soda when it became a foul-smelling soup poured into a septic tank for later disposal bones chucked into the nearby canal blood congealed into a jelly dried in the oven then ground into powder and baked into pastries to peep the neighborhood possibly prime cuts of meat reserved for roasting stewing or boiling for dinner cleanup performed bloodstained fabrics washed or replaced stubborn bloodstains on the wood floor covered with throw rugs foul smell briefly emitted from the apartment then senora sawabi was gone erased from the earth leonardo sent her sanjusep to piengenza to mail postcards to swabi's friends and acquaintances she meanwhile does this son know what's up because that's pretty suspicious that's pretty suspicious he's like and and also these biscuits taste weird she meanwhile at all i feel like a good merch item would be these biscuits taste weird like a t-shirt these biscuits taste weird oh god meanwhile she sold all of suavi's belongings and pocketed roughly three thousand layering cash only about two thousand five hundred dollars in modern us currency not the best payout for the effort expected expended but zuwabi was poor and leonarda a woman of modest means herself found that living in wartime she needed all the help that she could get but the school teacher hadn't kept her move to biengenza completely secret from everyone like leonardo had instructed she had told one of her neighbors when tsunura sowabi didn't turn up it biengenza and did not respond to her mail this raised few eyebrows but unfortunately it was wartime hundreds of people were dying every day and amid all that chaos and death who had time to worry about one impoverished and lonely teacher [Music] an italian soap opera on september 23 1940 a little over three weeks since the last murder virginia catch made her way up the course of carver to number 11 and walked up the stairs to the third floor where the cannibal of courageo was waiting for her senora cachopo was 59 and a retired soprano who had studied the milan conservatory and made her debut as a beautiful and talented opera singer in 1904. i don't think i'm telling dale's out of school when i say that italians love opera and virginia was once renowned and venerated nationwide performing for some of italy's top conductors as virginia aged however the singing job slowly dried up and went to younger more beautiful sopranos with fresher sounding voices and tantalizingly new reputations to drawing crowds as such senora kat choppo fell on harder times she settled in courageo with her sister but evidently felt wounded that her career had come to an end worse still she was unmarried and lacked that extra means of support as she stared down the gun barrel of retirement it was virginia's yearning for her glory days in the opera that leonardo exploited to the full in order to lure the ex soprano into the same vulnerable position that had killed the two other women there's a magical job waiting for you somewhere on the other side of italy where you're going to go and write postcards about being very generic about where you're going and not telling anyone and i'm definitely not going to kill you and those biscuits taste fine leonardo concocted some [ __ ] and bull story about how she had found virginia a job in florence she would be the secretary of a theater impresario which in the opera world is similar to the job of a hollywood producer involving the financing and organization of the actual shows it was a respectable position and being secretary to such a man kept virginia in the opera life kept her in money and was better than nothing to put a cherry on the cake leonardo said it was likely virginia could marry this man an idea that was even more tempting above all else leonardo instructed virginia to keep the job a secret why oh my god i guess this is the thing it's like obviously when we read this from a dispassionate perspective not just passionate that's the wrong word um from like a uh removed position where you're not emotionally invested in what's going on i mean other than being an observer but if you're in this woman's position of like relative desperation like she really wants her career back she doesn't have much money things are not going well when an offer comes along it can be really tempting to look uh like overlook all the things that are wrong with it and just be like yes please yes please i really need that and obviously that's why it's called exploitation isn't it the rest you could probably predict virginia catchappo came over on the day of a supposed departure for florence the hopeful x opera singer was drugged decapitated and dismembered her blood drained into a basin and leptin congealed all signs of a murder were cleaned up as best as possible but here's the thing you might not have expected when leonardo threw the pieces of virginia's corpse into the pot added the caustic soda and started to boil it for some reason she became enamored with the quality of the opera singer's flesh and decided to make soap out of it oh god i think we got another one to add to our list of rules for criminals don't make soap out of your victims not a good idea leonardo later wrote it notice it noticed not she but it oh wow okay it ended up in the pot like the other two its flesh was fat and white when it was dissolved i added a bottle of cologne and after a long boil creamy bars of soap resulted from it that gave some to neighbors and oh my god ah and acquaintances with regret i observed that the soap was not perfect because i had to add some ash to it it is true that senora cachopo with all due respect and rest her soul had gained a little extra weight in middle age so it is highly likely that leonardo was not completely deluded and indeed her fat would have made for decent soap oh my god we don't need to know that david no here phil i felt so creepy writing that sentence yes david i felt so creepy reading it do we have to furthermore senora kachopo's proclivity for self-indulgence left her blood sugar levels slightly more elevated than the other two women which is another thing leonardo observed the pastries were even better the woman was really sweet oh good god this is some skin crawling [ __ ] today god damn so this time the neighborhood children got to enjoy top quality pastries and some of the old ladies who visited leonardo's were gifted with fine smelling soap out of the goodness of their heart i can only imagine the shock those ladies must have felt when they learned they'd been washing themselves with a perfume chunk of fat sliced off an ex-opera singer leonardo's son giuseppe was duly sent out of town to send some misleading letters leonardo meanwhile managed to rob 50 000 lira off of uh virginia cat choppo's savings that is the equivalent to roughly 41 000 today that's a lot of money her biggest payday yet furthermore leonardo has sold kachopo's many belongings jewels furs dresses shoes and even some small bank bonds the problem was this if you murder a spinstro old lady of 72 who allegedly moves to poland to get married nobody really looks for her if you murder a single school teacher who gets another job in another city that disappears during the biggest war that the world has ever seen she might be overlooked but murder a former celebrity who is well known within the town well people are gonna start to talk excellence i just it's disappointing that we have to get to the stage of people starting to talk before this is solved rather than like i don't know crimes being solved earlier than gossip [Music] the investigation like senora sawavi virginia cachopo had not followed her murderous instructions to the letter she had told her sister that she was going to florence to work as a secretary for a theater impresario but luckily for leonardo virginia did not tell her sister who had set up this arrangement between october 1940 and the start of 1941 rumors flew across courageo it was quickly established that virginia cachopo had never made it to florence and was in fact missing with a bit of digging it was also established that the job the impresario and the theater itself did not exist virginia's sister senora albertinofanti immediately suspected leonardo abertina knew that the cannibal was friendly with all three women who had gone missing over the past year she knew that her sister had visited leonardo shortly before she disappeared and so senora albertina fanti did the sensible thing and went to the cops this will be the one story you hear all decade where the literally fascist police are actually the good guys you know it's a bad time when the uh the fascists are the good guys in the story but when their opponent is an insane cannibal it is a bit of a toss-up yeah insane cannibal or fascist police you can't decide i mean i mean you can in this story the fascists are the good guys like you said you'd never say that never say that you didn't see anything the police went round to number eleven gorsuch and questioned leonardo she flatly and angrily denied any involvement in virginia cacho's disappearance in fact leonardo became so belligerent and menacing that the police briefly had her arrested but there was nothing really tying leonardo to the opera singer's disappearance moreover she was a tiny woman of four foot 11 and 110 pounds how could she have brought down a heavyset woman like virginia and disposed to the body i don't know police maybe with a weapon like an axe surprise it's like of course i could kill i don't know like the rock of course i could if i had a gun or an axe and he wasn't looking any other time he'd absolutely destroy me because he's about seven times as big as me it's like of course what are you talking about although i do imagine if you just shot someone like the rock he'd just keep coming you know is it is it in that movie fast and furious he gets sean he just keeps coming just i find that entirely realistic police commissioner serrell then took up the case of looking for virginia cachopo and he appears to have been worth his souls sarah traced the serial numbers on a bank bond that belonged to the opera singer to a man who had recently cashed it a priest named adelmo fratini when questioned the police said that he had received it from a man named abilado spina belly during some petty commerce spina belly meanwhile was a friend of leonardo's and said that he received it from her in repayment of a debt cerrau initially suspected all three people were in cahoots along with leonardo's son giuseppe pansardi who had been identified sending virginia's letters from out of town the priest and spinner belly were quickly ruled out that love leonardo and her son as suspects in virginia katchopo's murder police tossed over leonardo's apartment and found blood stains under the rugs and furniture along with some of the personal effects of cachopo swabi and seti the police also found senora seti's dentures that is a bad sign there's blood on the floor and there's dentures in the cupboard that belong to a victim guilty guilty guilty judge simon has ruled that's enough for me take her to the gallows leonardo and giuseppe were arrested and charged in march 1941 or we could arrest and charge them stupid justice system leonardo was initially quite reticent during police investigations sarah first suspected the murders had been committed in order to rob the woman it was only when leonardo realized that her son giuseppe might go down for the three murders that she started to talk and once she did it didn't stop and boy howdy did she have a story to tell i was murdering people and turning them into biscuits to protect my children oh dear [Music] confessions of an embittered soul due to the crisis of the war the trial was delayed for five years during which time both leonardo and her son guseppe were held in prison that doesn't seem very fair guilty i mean i know obviously we know that i don't know if the sun was involved i mean he was involved somehow but did he know probably he probably deserves to go to prison for at least five years but it does seem a bit unfair to hold people in prison for quite so long when they haven't been declared guilty of anything maybe some house arrest i mean i know they're murderers but what if they weren't then they spend five years in prison as innocents that doesn't seem very fair during this time leonardo tried to commit suicide ranted and raved about her crimes and composed a 700-page memoir you know she's confessing to her crimes though she hasn't been declared guilty by a judge or jury or whatever they do in italy so i don't know that doesn't seem doesn't seem right her confessions of an embedded soul is not an easy source to find much less in full english translation since italian authorities never intended for it to be published or sold nor can it truly be trusted in all aspects given its author giuseppo was released after five years due to lack of evidence so yeah essentially that guy was in prison for five years even though there wasn't really any evidence against him so that doesn't seem fair and because of the confessions leonardo made in her memoir thoroughly and deliberately exculpating him to this day we do not know the extent to which giuseppe was aware of his mother's crimes and whether he participated in the murders or knowingly participated in acts of cannibalism he does not possess a past history and a rap sheet like his mother that would imply a disturbed mind so we're left to speculate what life with leonardo was like for all those years and whether it imparted any serious lasting damage on her children kind of how could it not she's how could it not they're going to be messed up in a little way maybe not into becoming criminals but they're probably going to be a little bit broken at the trial in june of 1946 the prosecution insisted that leonardo wasn't a maddened cannibal would have just killed their victor killed her victims to take their money leonardo insisted that she was making a blood tribute to protect her children one of her major arguments was the murder of senora sawavi the school teacher who yielded very little money it's also rumored that during the trial leonardo was secretly taken to the borg to demonstrate that she could indeed dismember a corpse in under 12 minutes holy who are they testing that on it's like you know when you donate your body to science and you realize that oh my god it's going to be used to like cure cancer or something like that you know that's what you think when you're donating your body to science but really they're taking you down to the morgue and they're having a serial killer see if you could be dissected in 12 minutes not really your body is used for useful things but it's also not like what you might think i think one of the big sources they go to medical schools but students to practice you know surgery and chopping up and stuff that medical students do that i don't really want to think about but there's definitely corpses that they use and i think that's what happens if you donate your body to science i'm donating all my organs so i don't think like i mean ideally i'd like to be frozen to be honest but i haven't set that up yet so right now if i died i would donate all my organs and then i guess my body wouldn't be much good for science but i think i don't know donating my organs feels like a more of a short-term win but i like the idea that my organs would be in someone else's body i find that pretty cool i mean not literally my i don't find the idea like oh how exciting my kidneys in someone else's body i mean that they get to have a relatively normal life because my kidneys inside their body that i like donate your organs become an organ donor leonardo's 700-page memoir was also taken as evidence but there had always been suspicion that leonardo cooked the whole thing up with her defence team in order to pursue an insanity verdict for one thing it seems dubious that leonardo with a third grade education could have written a 700-page memoir all by herself i don't know i feel like 700 page memoir seems more likely if you're bad at writing because if if you were good at writing you could keep it more succinct rather than crazy and rambling although as far as i can tell the italian and the sentence structure it's pretty shabby in the end the judge accepted the cannibal version of events and sentenced leonardo to three years in a lunatic asylum and thereafter to 30 years imprisonment but leonardo 11 never left the last house she spent the next quarter of a century there according to the nurses she occasionally made pastries in the kitchens but none of the other inmates dared eat them that definitely sounds like urban legends leonardo died of a brain hemorrhage age 77 on october 15 1970 may that rot in hell okay i have to say david that feels a little harsh because i think she is insane um the fact that she never got released from the mental hospital kind of implies that she got there spent three years there and they were like no no she is crazy or either she was putting on crazy for a very very long time i and the fact that she did kill that woman who just wasn't worth anything and yeah i i don't know i i don't feel like you can just like i feel that the mental insanity excuse does in a way morally exclupate her a little bit obviously it's not right to murder in order to protect your children but in a practical sense i mean i don't want to like admit to crimes but like would i kill people to save my children allegedly yes allegedly yes so if she genuinely believes that she is killing these people to protect her children that is kind of a moral excuse so while i'm not saying what she did was in any way correct or right or morally justified maybe it was in her own mind so i feel it's a bit hard to be like yeah may she rot in hell she is just mentally disturbed anyway uh there's more [Music] there's a twist okay the twist so on one hand you've got a psychopathic cram cr cannibal with a lifelong obsession with the occult during a blood ritual to protect her son's life spurred on by the ghostly apparition of her abusive mother she brutally murdered and consumed three women she made pastries of their congealed blood and in one case made super soap of the fat all of which she distributed to an unaware public and she laid down an account of these crimes in exhaustive detail with interesting commentary for true crime writers to pick part in a 700 page memoir that she wrote in prison on the other hand you've got the word of a notorious con woman for most of this despite the bloodstains and possessions of the three women found in leonardo's flat there is no evidence beyond the murderer's own testimony that she cooked the blood into biscuits or boiled fat into soap by the time of her trial five years after her arrest any pastries leonardo gave out had long since been excreted into the sewers and any bars of soap carved out of virginia katchopo's corpse would long since have gone swirling down the bathtub drain leonardo's criminal history shows theft threats of violence and fraud she also practiced for years as a huckster who made money as a palm reader and fortune teller for the more gullible people in her community oh yeah but again if she genuinely believed do people who do this genuinely genuinely believe that they're doing it though i don't think so i think they know they're conning you because they don't really hear voices i mean maybe they do in which case they need to be on medication or like you know the automatic writing or the senses and stuff they know they're conning you they definitely know because otherwise it wouldn't work there wouldn't be a good con there wouldn't be a it wouldn't be a good seance or whatever it's all a con so yeah no that very much morally speaks to her moral character um yeah now i'm coming around to the should she be rying in hell i don't know she seems pretty disturbed she had conned her way into the confidence of the housewives of courageo she was in short a practiced and inveterate liar it is possible that in her arrest and trial leonardo pulled off one of her greatest cons she convinced a court of law the wider italian public and generations of true crime readers of the most extraordinary and gruesome story that she was the cannibal of courageo when in fact she may have just been nothing more than an opportunistic murderer and a thief yeah but the second woman had no money you target someone who at least has money i'm sure there's plenty of old spinsters who have money rather than kindergarten teachers with nothing why would she do this well if the motive of the murders was money it would have been likely that her son giuseppe would not have gotten off the charges there is even subtext in leonardo's memoirs which may imply it was giuseppe who actually carried out the murders rather than a tiny middle-aged woman by claiming a horrendous dead of lifelong insanity and putrid cannibalism leonardo threw up a massive smoke screen that completely altered the focus of the trial and even though it wasn't a blood ritual this pack of lies was able to protect her son the only solid argument against this theory is the murder of francesca clementina sovie whose murder yielded less than a tenth of the money of the other two murders however it is possible that leonardo thought so he had more money we must also remember the context of leonardo being a fairly impoverished person with only a sideline in furniture and palm reading whose husband had abandoned her and in the latter two murders it was wartime and lots of people were suffering financially from that perspective 3000 lira isn't half bad furthermore it is possible that the smallness of the amount prompted the third more ambitious murder of the much wealthier virginia cat choppo which happened only three weeks later wow i didn't realize there was such a short time between the crimes so either leonardo was a deluded cannibal obsessed with the occult who would go down in history as italy's answer to hannibal lecter or she recognized the occult what it was a useful way to calm people into doing what she wanted yeah entirely possible i mean there's yeah there's no evidence against this david but there's also not a ton of evidence like for it i mean yeah they're just there's two potential stories and we can't really know which one is true because we can't see inside ahead and all the evidence is long gone i have to say i'm quite torn between them i do think she was pretty crazy but i also yeah she does have that history of being a con woman i have to say in this one i don't know i mean of course i don't know but i i can't even i don't even feel like i can take a particularly good guess and she ended her life pulling off the most massive con job of all she fooled a court got her son off murder charges and got to spend the rest of her life in an asylum rather than in prison or facing execution and she transformed herself into an infamous folk legend the last of which given her proclivity for narcissism probably appealed to her cannibal or con artist either way this places her firmly in the annals of criminal history i'll let you decide which story seems more plausible like i said i don't know personally having read through much of what she wrote i think the thieving cow was full of [ __ ] and okay yeah okay well there you go david's read a lot more about this in researching this piece so okay yeah i guess that would nudge me slightly towards uh being a con woman and just a terrible terrible human being and do you think that makes for an anti-climax at the end of this video just wait till you realize that that means you've been conned by a fortune teller who died 50 years ago console yourself that my calling her legend question is my way of spitting on the murderer's grave yes dismembered appendices number one there is some reason to believe that the plotline of fight club or tyler durden making luxury soaps from the discarded fatty store from liposuction clinics was inspired by leonardo's story number two leonardo chanchalooni's my official moniker as a serial killer is actually the soap maker of courage oh and given that she only made soap from one of her three victims i feel that people have missed the forest for the trees when naming her what about the cannibalism the blood biscuits the fact that according to leonardo she fed human blood to her friend's family and ate some herself possibly she also ate human flesh for dinner hence i've given this video what i feel to be a more appropriate title to fit fighter crimes the cannibal of courageo and hopefully you get some extra points for alliteration yeah i mean it is a nice title isn't it it's a good title and she was into the flesh eating thing was more number three it's quite likely that leonardo deserves the title of italy's first modern serial killer since the country was unified in 1871. the title of first modern italian serial killer regardless of gender belongs to another candidate however especially if we count the murders carried out by people in organized crime number four when researching the story of a con woman posing as a palm reader and fortune teller taking advantage of the naivety of three women and luring them to their deaths i kept thinking back to the lyrics from tim minchin's song storm which i'll leave you with today i don't know tim mentioned and i don't know the song storm but here we go so i'm not i'm not going to sing it obviously i don't mean to bore you but there's no such thing as an aura reading auras is like reading minds or tea leaves or star signs or meridian lines these people aren't applying a skill they're either lying or mentally ill i mean preach timmy that is spot on when it comes to the story of leonardo chiang julie either lying or mentally ill pretty much sums it up please stop paying these people good lord yes if you're thinking oh after this i'm going to go see my palm reader how about no how about you don't and you realize that it's all a bunch of hogwash nonsense this has been an episode of the casual criminalist i as always have been your host simon thank you david for putting this today guest author i mean simon regular guest author in addition to canon hope you're helping me get these episodes out more regularly which i know you guys like because i think i went a week without publishing one on youtube and people were like on my twitter like all over the show like simon where is it where's the guy come on give me the casual criminalist fact boy well if you feel that passionate about it please if you're listening to this as a podcast go over to wherever you get your podcasts and leave it a stellar review because you love it and i know you do hopefully please and if you're watching this on youtube use that like button make sure you're subscribed and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 251,029

Keywords: true crime

Id: ecTsHFZf4-Y

Length: 70min 39sec (4239 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021