Between July 1992 and March 1993, three women were found dead on the northern fringes of Lisbon. Each had been strangled and cut open, and organs had been removed. The scenes held no fingerprints, no hair, no footprints and no blood but the victims’ own. The coroner called it the perfect crime.

Maria Valentina, Maria Fernanda and Maria João worked the roads around half-built suburbs, abandoned builders’ huts and railway sidings. They knew what was hunting them. They kept working anyway, because rent doesn’t wait for a manhunt.

The FBI flew in with a theory linking the murders to a string of killings in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Then the killings stopped, and the case went cold.

Nineteen years later, a young man auditioned for a Portuguese reality show with a secret: “I know who the Lisbon Ripper is.” It was his own father. A confession followed, and then a single palm print on a milk carton changed everything.

This week on Euro Noir: the women behind the nickname, the killer who left nothing behind, and the confession that fell apart.

Contains graphic descriptions of violence.

Content warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence, dismemberment and the disposal of bodies.

Correggio, northern Italy, 1939. Faustina Setti climbs three flights of stairs to say goodbye to a friend. She has sold her belongings and told nobody where she is going, because the friend has found her a husband in a distant city. She never arrives.

Over the next year, two more women follow her up those stairs: a teacher chasing a new job, and a retired opera singer hoping for a second act. All three vanish. The woman behind it is Leonarda Cianciulli, a small, well-liked shopkeeper and fortune teller, famous across Italy as the Soap Maker of Correggio.

By her own account, she killed them to buy her eldest son’s life. She said human sacrifice would keep him safe from the war, and that she dissolved the bodies in caustic soda, made soap from one of them and baked the blood of the others into tea cakes for her visitors.

Show Notes and Sources: https://euronoir.blogspot.com/2026/10/euro-noir-podcast-show-notes-sweetest.html

In Paris in 1933, an eighteen-year-old girl fed her parents a lethal dose of sleeping powder, told them it was medicine from their doctor, and went dancing. Her father died. Her mother survived by spitting half of it out. What followed was a manhunt, a trial that gripped a nation, and an accusation so shocking the newspapers of the day refused to print the word for it. The surrealists rushed a book of poems to her defence. Three heads of state would eventually pardon her. Nobody has ever proven whether she was telling the truth.

This is the case of Violette Nozière: a story about class, family, and who gets believed.

Show Notes: https://euronoir.blogspot.com/2026/10/euro-noir-podcast-show-notes-family.html

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