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Austria's 'ice lady' to get round-the-clock psychiatric care

The Local Austria
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Austria's 'ice lady' to get round-the-clock psychiatric care
Photo: edition a./YouTube screengrab

A woman dubbed the 'ice lady' for the calculated way in which she killed her ex-husband and lover is being moved from a women’s prison to an all-male psychiatric hospital in the state of Upper Austria.

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Estibaliz Carranza (a Spanish and Mexican citizen) was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for the murders of her former-spouse Holger Holz in 2008 and ice-cream machine salesman Manfred Hinterberger two years later.

She shot both men in the back of the head at close range, cut up their bodies and froze them in a deep-freeze refrigerator before later interring them in concrete under the cellar of her ice-cream parlour in Vienna. The remains were found by chance when maintenance work was being done in the building.

During Carranza’s trial, the judge said that her confession and her state of 'considerable psychological damage' were mitigating factors, but her careful planning and her behaviour after the murders counted against her.

Court psychiatrist Heidi Kastner, who spent more than 30 hours with Carranza before the trial, said the murderer had a "grave, comprehensive, multi-faceted personality disorder" and was at considerable risk of killing again if she did not have therapy.

Carranza’s lawyer Rudolf Mayer (who also defended the notorious Josef Fritzl) said that she has made great progress after having therapy and that the “final healing” now needs to take place at the state-of-the-art psychiatric hospital in Asten, Upper Austria. The prison currently contains 91 men - with 13 more female inmates soon set to follow in her footsteps.

Prisoners are allowed free movement within the centre, which boasts single and double rooms and allows inmates to cook their own meals together. There is also a lounge area with a TV. 
 
Carranza will be cared for by psychiatrists and psychologists. She was recently reexamined by Kastner, but the report is still pending.
 
Carranza released her memoirs ‘My Two Lives, The True Story of the Ice Lady' in 2014 with the publishing company edition a, and then did a three-month online internship with the company. Carranza studied distance learning courses in Business Education, is to intern with them for three months.

In her memoirs, which she did not get paid for, Carranza wrote that she does not want understanding or a pardon but that she made her lovers into “monsters and finally they made me a beast”.





 

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