VIENNA - A former ice cream parlor owner confessed in court on Monday 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 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. Prosecutor Petra Freh described the defendant, who appeared before a packed court wearing a grey dress and flanked by prison guards and her celebrity defense lawyer Rudolf Mayer, as "ice-cold" and a "ticking time bomb". 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.
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 on Monday.
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 , said the psychiatrist's report on Carranza showed that her danger to society could be reduced "to zero" with proper treatment. He warned the jury not to be influenced by negative portrayals in the Austrian media, which have had a field day with the story of the Hispanic immigrant and her many lovers.
Fritzl was sentenced to life imprisonment for incarcerating his daughter in the basement of his family home for 24 years, during which he physically assaulted and raped her, fathering seven children. Hinterberger left Carranza shortly after her divorce but turned up on the doorstep of the salon with a suitcase a year and a half later after being thrown out by his girlfriend.
