VIENNA (Reuters) – A former ice cream parlour owner confessed in court yesterday to shooting, sawing up and freezing both her ex-husband and her lover, and burying them under the cellar of her store in Vienna.
Estibaliz Carranza, a 34-year-old Mexican-Spanish woman dubbed the “Ice Lady” by Austrian media, told a court that both men had “demeaned” her; her ex-husband by yelling at her and making fun of her poor German, her lover by being unfaithful.
In both cases, she said she had shot her victim with a .22 calibre Beretta pistol, chopped up the body with a chain saw, put it in a freezer at the parlour, and eventually buried it downstairs in the cellar, the Austria Press Agency reported.
Prosecutor Petra Freh described the defendant, who appeared before a packed court wearing a grey dress and flanked by prison guards and her celebrity defence lawyer Rudolf Mayer, as “ice-cold” and a “ticking time bomb”.
“It’s clear that the defendant has two faces,” Freh said, warning that Carranza could kill again.
Carranza told the court the nature of her husband, Holger Holz, had completely changed after their wedding, and that matters had got worse when they were evicted from their apartment and moved into the ice cream shop, and Holz joined the Hare Krishna movement.
“He slept until 10 o’clock and came at 11 o’clock. We had no ice cream. He did nothing. He didn’t want to get a grip,” she said.
Even after she started a relationship with ice cream machine salesman Manfred Hinterberger and divorced Holz, he refused to move out, she told the court yesterday.
One Sunday, after an argument about the issue, she said she had shot Holz twice in the back of the head and once in the temple as he sat at his computer.
Mayer, who unsuccessfully defended Austria’s most notorious living criminal Josef Fritzl in 2009, said the psychiatrist’s report on Carranza showed that her danger to society could be reduced “to zero” with proper treatment.
