‘Cold-blooded’ ice cream lady in Austrian murder trial

[wpgmappity id=”828″]

VIENNA – A woman described as “singularly cold-blooded” went on trial in Austria Monday accused of murdering two men and setting their sawn-up body parts in concrete in the cellar of her ice cream parlor.

Dubbed the “trial of the year” in Austrian media, Goidsargi Estibaliz Carranza Zabala, who has joint Spanish-Mexican citizenship, is charged with shooting dead her husband in 2008 and in 2010 her new partner.

Prosecutors allege she then sliced up the bodies of Holger Holz and Manfred Hinterberger with a chain saw and concealed the pieces in concrete that she mixed in the cellar under her “Schleckeria” shop in Vienna.

The gruesome remains were discovered by chance during maintenance work in June 2011. After going on the run to Italy, Carranza was captured several days afterwards and later extradited.

When arrested, Carranza was two-months pregnant by another man, whom she married in prison in March this year. The baby was born in January but the boy was immediately taken away from her and is now reportedly being looked after Carranza’s parents in Barcelona.

A psychiatric report commissioned by the court said that Carranza, now in a unit for the “mentally abnormal”, was dangerous and was like a “princess … who just wants to be ‘rescued’ by a man”.

“She intends to confess. She has already told the court-appointed expert everything that she did, as she also did when she was arrested by the Italian police,” Werner Tomanek, one of her defence lawyers, told AFP.