Known popularly as the Ice-Lady, Goidsargi Estibaliz Carranza Zabala was 36 when something in her snapped, and she shot and killed her ex-husband while he was sitting at his computer in 2008.

Holger Holz was her first victim.  He had refused to move out of their home after their divorce.

According to the memoir, she then used the sound of the ice-cream making machines in her ice-cream parlour to drown out the sounds of the chainsaw, as she cut off his head and dismembered his body, storing the body parts in flower pots in her basement.

Two years later, after apparently getting away with murder, Carranza also murdered her new boyfriend while he was sleeping.  Manfred Hinterberger was an ice-cream machine salesman some 20 years her senior, whom she described as drunk and abusive.

Before killing him, she took shooting lessons as well as a course in mixing concrete at a local hardware store. She shot him as he slept after a drunken argument in November 2010 with the same Beretta she had used to dispatch her first husband.

"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," the Spanish-Mexican Carranza told the court.

In the morning she "asked him to forgive me for what I had done". She then proceeded to dispose of the body.

A third boyfriend got her pregnant in 2011, and she was looking forward to a happy future when workmen stumbled across the remains in the basement, and called the police.

Goidsargi Estibaliz Carranza Zabala. Photo: APA

Getting wind of her imminent arrest, Carranza high-tailed it across the Alps to Italy in a 480 km (300 mile) taxi ride, where she was arrested a few days later in the home of a street musician.

At her trial in 2012 chief prosecutor Petra Freh said Carranza's crimes were horrific and that she was a "highly dangerous woman ready to do anything".

A police psychiatrist at the trial said it was highly likely that she would kill again, if the opportunity arose.  

A psychiatric report commissioned by the court said that Carranza, now in a unit for the "mentally abnormal", was dangerous and was like a "princess… who just wants to be 'rescued' by a man".

The son she bore while in custody is now being cared for by her parents in Barcelona.

This week, she released a memoir entitled My Two Lives, The True Story of the Ice Lady, co-written with journalist Martina Prewein.  Any proceeds from the memoir will go to the families of her victims, according to the book's publisher.

"I killed two men, whom I once loved," Carranza writes in the book. "There is no way of glossing this over, I robbed two mothers of their sons. I believed I had to serve men, no matter how they behaved."

She said she had simply been unable to break up with her lover, Manfred Hinterberger.

"I couldn't say no. I couldn't do it, I couldn't get free of him."

She said she made them into "monsters and finally they made me a beast".

She is likely to remain in a secure facility for the criminally insane for the rest of her life.

For more on the story, including additional pictures, check out Murderpedia.