Beautiful Esti Carranza seemed charming. But her smile hid a heart colder than ice cream….
With its twinkling fairy lights and snow-topped Christmas trees, the ice-cream parlour looked just like Santa's Grotto. And despite the cold, on December 24, 2010, the Schleckeria ice café in Vienna, Austria, was packed to the gunnels with families enjoying a festive treat.
As usual, the owner, 34-year-old Goidsargi Estibaliz Carranza - or Esti, as she was known - greeted her customers with a welcoming smile. But behind that smile, the long red hair and pretty features, Esti was hiding a deeply sinister secret.
Down in the basement, among the industrial ice cream tubs, lay several blocks of concrete. Entombed within them were the chopped-up remains of her husband and her lover.
So, how had this fragile beauty become embroiled in such wickedness?
Born in Mexico in 1978, Esti had spent most of her childhood in Spain, growing up harbouring thoughts of murdering her tyrannical father.
Moving to Berlin, Germany, in 2006, for an au pair position, she met Holger Holz, 32, whom she started dating, while she was working in another ice cream parlour. She regarded her boss as a user, who wouldn't even permit toilet breaks, admitting in her trial that she had researched ways of burning the place down, before deciding it 'was a silly idea.'
After a while, she and Holger relocated to the Meidling district of Vienna, Austria, where they bought the Schleckeria Ice Café. Holger ran their business affairs, while Esti made the ice cream and served customers. It was a perfect arrangement until they married a year later. It was then, Esti said, that Holger became 'a totally different person'. She told a friend that he often shouted abuse at her and ignored her repeated requests to have a baby, because he was a workaholic. When she tried to end the relationship, he refused to move out of their flat, and continued to work in the ice cream parlour. Even after Esti started seeing a new lover, Alex, and the couple had divorced, Holz still refused to leave her life completely.
'I was absolutely helpless,' she told a friend. 'I thought I would never get my life back.'
So, one night in 2008, Esti took a .22-calibre Beretta pistol from gun-mad Holger's weapons closet, where he kept several firearms, and crept up behind him while he worked on the computer. She shot him three times in the head at point blank range.
Later. she said, 'I never thought I would be able to go through with it. It was 3pm. There were children outside. It was nice weather, someone must have heard.'
For several days, Esti left Holger slumped in his chair. She wondered what to do next but still managed to smile as she served customers in the café.
Then, one day when she went down to the industrial freezers in the basement for fresh supplies, she got an idea.…
Taking a chainsaw Holger had kept in the store cupboard, Esti cut his body up into several pieces. Later she admitted, 'It was like something out of a horror movie. There was blood everywhere. I remember I could not get the smell of blood out of my memory - I could not get rid of the smell.'
Taking the body parts to the ice cream parlour, she then stored them in the freezer.
But her grisly crime wasn't complete…
Esti's next purchase was a cement mixer. Without any training, she managed to mix enough cement to encase Holger's body parts - switching on the ice cream maker to disguise the noise.
Shortly after killing Holger, Esti began dating ice cream machine maintenance man Manfred Hinterberger, 48, and quickly moved in with him. As with Holger, Manfred - who she claims tried to force her to have her breasts enlarged - made her feel controlled and stifled. She said: 'It is like suddenly having a plastic sack over your head stopping you breathing. You have to get it off and get out. In that moment when one feels so trapped, you just have to get free.'
Soon Esti began to suspect that Manfred was being unfaithful.
In November 2010 they went to a party where they both got drunk and Manfred flirted with another woman. Afterwards, back home, Esti confronted him. But Manfred refused to discuss it, and went to bed. At that point, Esti flipped.
Esti had been taking shooting lessons and even studied concrete mixing at college. She had also bought a new chainsaw and asked hardware store staff to show her how to use it.
By flirting with another woman in front of her, Manfred had wronged her and she was ready for revenge….Describing what happened next, she said: 'He turned his face to the wall and started snoring. I was so angry. I had the gun under the mattress. I took it out, loaded, and shot.'
In the morning, she cut up Manfred's body with the chainsaw, wrapped the pieces in plastic bags and drove them to the ice cream parlour. There she mixed up cement, this time expertly, and enclosed his remains in it.
Now, on Christmas Eve, a month later, she was serving customers in Schleckeria, as if nothing had happened. But her secret couldn't stay buried forever…
In June 2011, workmen doing routine plumbing work in the basement, made the gruesome discovery and called the police.
On June 7, realising she'd been rumbled, Esti, by now two months pregnant by a new lover, called a taxi, and ordered the driver to take her 600 miles, across the border to Italy. The driver noted her distress, and at their destination, he checked her into a hotel using his name, without knowing what was wrong.
But cops were on Esti's trail and she was soon arrested. She was extradited and charged with both murders.
Awaiting trial in January 2012, she gave birth to a baby boy, Roland, who was immediately placed in the care of her parents in Barcelona. Then, in March, she married her new lover in a prison service, saying: 'He is totally different. He is very gentle, the opposite of macho. He would not bring me into such a situation.'
Finally, in November this year, now dubbed the ‘Icy Lady' or the ’Ice Killer’, Esti appeared at a Vienna court. She admitted both murders, but Austrian law meant the court still needed to examine the evidence before accepting her guilty plea.
Prosecutor Petra Freh said of Esti - who was dressed demurely in a grey dress and spectacles - 'It's clear that the defendant has two faces.' She said in court she wore one - 'the face of a friendly neighbour, the sort of face that one would never imagine could be responsible for something so terrible.' But her second face was that of an 'ice cold, deadly and unscrupulous killer.'
Going on to describe Esti as a 'ticking time bomb,' the prosecutor added that the fact she'd only killed two men was perhaps by chance. 'Carranza is an ice cold and highly dangerous woman,’ she said.
Defending Esti, Rudolph Mayer, who represented dungeon rapist Joseph Fritzl, in 2009, described her methods, saying: 'First the honeymoon - then boom boom.' But he claimed that both Esti's husband and lover had been 'abusive' and said Esti was a very disturbed person who did not choose to be disturbed.
Then Esti admitted having murderous thoughts about her dad and her first boyfriend years earlier, when she'd lived in Spain. Describing how she sawed up her husband's body, she told the court how the blade had constantly caught on the metal frame of the chair - making sparks in the room.
Of Manfred's murder, she said: 'I know what I did was horrendous and wrong. I felt so miserable, like I couldn't go on. I would have ended it all but I didn't have the courage to kill myself.'
Throughout her testimony, jurors shook their heads as Esti remained completely emotionless. She explained: 'I am really trying to hold myself together. I feel that I should cry the whole time but it would simply mean "look at me - I am putting on a show."'
Psychiatrist Dr. Adelheid Kastner, who spent more than 30 hours questioning Esti in prison, said: 'She suffers from a personality disorder, she has serious mental and psychological abnormalities. It has to be feared that the woman could commit further acts without consequence.'
Adding that she believed Esti had a 'one in three' chance of murdering again, Dr Kastner told the court what Esti had said about killing the men. 'She felt herself to be a passenger in a car driven by someone else. She felt like she was sitting, terrorised, as they drove wildly on the road heading to a crash... She began to have thoughts of murder that slowly crystallised into reality.'
In her final statement, Esti said: 'I can't say anything other than that I am sorry.'
But the jury didn't believe she was sorry for a single second. They took just three hours to find Carranza guilty of the double murder and she was jailed for life in a secure psychiatric institute.
As the verdict was delivered, Esti’s face was emotionless, her gaze frosty. Then she was taken down to the cells, ready to spend the first of many Christmases behind bars. But then, you'd expect nothing less from a woman dubbed the Ice Killer.
END