The Ice Cream Killer: The Chilling Story of a Woman Desperate for Motherhood (6 photos)

Estibaliz Carranza is known today as one of the most cold-blooded female killers in recent history. Dubbed the “Ice Cream Killer,” her delicate, unassuming appearance concealed a chillingly calculating murderer. Yet behind the bloodshed lay a single, all-consuming obsession: Carranza’s desperate dream of becoming a mother.





The Ice Cream Lady

Estibaliz Carranza ran a small ice cream parlor in Austria. An attractive young woman, she seemed the picture of innocence as neighborhood kids stopped by for vanilla cones. But while her business flourished, her romantic life was a complete disaster.



Her first victim was her ex-husband, Holger Holz, whom she killed in 2008. Two years later, she took the life of her new partner. Carranza shot both men in the back of the head before dismembering their corpses with a chainsaw. At trial, she claimed her former husband had been “lazy and aggressive,” refusing to move out after their marriage fell apart.

Things appeared to run smoothly with her next boyfriend, Manfred Hinterberger—until he took a mistress. After carving up his body, Carranza headed straight to a salon for a manicure, having broken a nail during the gruesome chore.

She dismembered both bodies and hid the remains in the cellar of her parlor, where the loud hum of the ice cream machines drowned out the scream of her chainsaw. Carranza packed the body parts into small freezers and containers filled with concrete, surrounding the makeshift tombs with dozens of air fresheners to mask the smell of decay.





For three years, she managed to cover her tracks—until maintenance workers stumbled upon the remains of Holz and Hinterberger by chance. Not waiting around for handcuffs, Carranza hopped in a taxi and fled to Italy, taking refuge in a town roughly 300 miles from Vienna. Police eventually tracked her down living with a street musician, apparently head over heels in love. She was also pregnant, discovering the news on the day of her arrest.

“They Turned Me into a Monster”

Carranza confessed to both murders. In her memoir, she wrote that the men were “beasts who turned me into a monster as well.” A forensic psychiatrist testified that Carranza suffered from severe psychological abnormalities and a profound personality disorder, warning that she remained extremely dangerous and would undoubtedly kill again. Carranza, however, saw herself as a “princess” waiting to be saved by Prince Charming.



Found guilty, Carranza was sentenced to life behind bars. In 2012, she gave birth to a baby boy while held in a secure psychiatric facility. Custody was initially granted to her parents and later handed over to the child’s father.

Just two months after giving birth, Carranza married the baby's father. She described her new husband as “very gentle, the complete opposite of a macho man—someone who would never put me in that kind of situation.”

Carranza was later transferred to an all-male prison after Austrian authorities concluded she was too dangerous for a women’s facility. In 2017, she was relocated to a high-security center housing 91 male inmates alongside her.

My Two Lives: The True Story of the Ice Cream Lady



Carranza maintains that she had only one goal in mind: she wanted children, and nothing else mattered. When her ex-husband refused to sleep with her and began ridiculing her looks, all she could think was, “How am I supposed to get pregnant now?”

While behind bars, Carranza teamed up with journalist Martina Prewein to pen a memoir. Titled “My Two Lives: The True Story of the Ice Cream Lady,” the book opens at the moment she learned she was expecting, with the rest of her dark story told in flashbacks.



Carranza did not receive any royalties from the book, out of respect for the victims’ grieving families.