Murder, Mystery & Makeup - Giulia Tofana Killed Over 600 Men With Her Poisonous Makeup

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Hi Friends! Today I wanted to talk about Giulia Tofana and her product Aqua Tofana. I found this story to be fascinating, intriguing, INTERESTTTINGGG. I wonder if it’s true or not? I guess you can decide on that one.  Thank you for coming on by and hanging out with me today. I love and appreciate you so much and I can’t say thank you enough for all the love and support you are constantly throwing my way. It truly means more than you know. Love you so much and please be safe out there! Hope to be seeing you very soon x o Bailey Sarian Watch the original video here and don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube @BaileySarian! Tik Tok : https://bit.ly/3e3jL9v Instagram : http://bit.ly/2nbO4PR Facebook : http://bit.ly/2mdZtK6 Twitter : http://bit.ly/2yT4BLV Pinterest : http://bit.ly/2mVpXnY Youtube : http://bit.ly/1HGw3Og Snapchat : https://bit.ly/3cC0V9d Discord: https://discord.gg/BaileySarian

Hi my beautiful friends, how are you today? My name is Bailey Sarian and today is Monday, which means it's Murder, Mystery and Makeup Monday! If you are new here, hi! Every Monday I sit down and I talk about a true crime story that's been heavy on my... That wasn't a good one. Heavy on my... Okay, we got it.

Noggin. And I do my makeup at the same time. If you're interested in true crime and you like makeup, I would highly suggest you hit that subscribe button. Anyways, today I want to talk about a story that I've been working on for like a year, which makes it sound like I'm gonna have like some grand storyline, right?

No. You see, this case, there's not that much information about this woman, but it's too interesting and it's too fitting to not talk about it. The case of Julia Tofana. Have you heard of her? Well, let me tell you, this chick is crazy. So she is the most successful serial killer

whose name you've probably never heard of. Let's welcome to the stage, Giulia Tofana. I'm sorry, that setup was like I was announcing her. Okay, yes, she's the most successful serial killer. That like is never talked about. Giulia killed hundreds of men in the 17th century, in Italy, when she turned her makeup business into a poison factory. Did I tell you it was fitting?

Cause it kind of is. Well, no, cause I'm not killing people. Nevermind. Giulia was selling a deadly concoction called aqua tofana, which was thought to have been laced with arsenic, lead and belladonna, which I didn't quite understand what belladonna was. She doesn't know anything, oh my God.

I know. The belladonna berry juice was used historically in Italy. You see the women use just a drop of it in each of their eyes to dilate their pupils. And what this would do is give their eyes like this luminous, striking appearance. So they say. Lead and arsenic were common ingredients for facial powders at the time,

and it would lighten the skin. You know, this was again during the Renaissance when nobody knew any better, okay? They found dilated pupils to be highly attractive, which, you know, nowadays when you see someone with dilated pupils, you're like, are you okay? No, okay. Now again, this took place during the Renaissance.

So arranged marriages was still a thing, definitely, okay. Women were often forced into just marriages by their families without having any say whatsoever. Once married, men had complete control over their wives, over women, and just, these women were left completely powerless. They had no say, no control, and they just had to sit there and take it. Husbands would often beat their wives

and not face any type of consequence or punishment for that, and would just subject them to all sorts of cruel treatments. Again, they couldn't do a damn thing. So that sucks. It was a world, it was a time when men just ruled over their own families, and even the most aristocratic of daughters were often, were just seen as items to be auctioned off into loveless marriage. Like it didn't matter if you came from money or anything,

everybody, every woman was just an item, an accessory, just there. Divorce definitely was not a thing yet. You would never think to just leave your husband. You wouldn't even bring it up. So don't even think about it. Sit there, look pretty, smile and be a wife. Sounds awful.

So what do you do when you're in these loveless, unhappy, abusive marriages that you literally like cannot get out of? What's your only option? Well, some would say murder. So who was this Julia Tofana? Well, one of history's most prolific serial killers still remains a mystery.

Yeah, you heard that right. Okay, look, there's no portraits of her. Information about her is very sparse. There was an image going around a portrait of a young woman. She was holding, I think it was like a unicorn. And many had said that this was Julia, that this was a portrait of her.

It was proven, in fact, that it wasn't her, and there are no portraits, or no known surviving portraits of Julia at all. She's seriously like a big mystery. I tried looking. I've tried, okay? I was looking, couldn't find much. I mean, it was a long time ago, what do I expect?

Giulia Tofana was possibly the daughter of a woman named Theofania de Damo. Did I nail it? She was executed in July of 1633, and she was executed because she actually murdered her husband. Now, Giulia was described as being very beautiful, and she spent a lot of her time with apothecaries,

which are people who prepared and sold medicines and or drugs. But she spent a lot of time hanging out with them and learning how to make her own concoctions, how to make her own medicines, how to make her own drugs. Julia found a lot of interest in this, and she was good at it too. She would ask a lot of questions and she started mixing her own potions.

Now, some say that Julia learned to make her own poison, but then some say that she actually learned how to make poison from her mother, the Ofania, who also made poison and she passed on the recipe to her daughter before she was executed. But some heavily believed that Julia actually just learned how to make it herself. Regardless, a clear, harmless looking liquid,

a small four to six drops were, quote, "'Sufficient to destroy a man,' end quote, is what Julia made. It was named aqua tofana." Aqua tofana, aqua tofana, aquaatofana. Aquatofana, Aquatofana, Aquatofana. Sounds bougie. So this product, it would appear to be like a typical women's cosmetic product

or even a religious healing oil that no husband or no person would suspect of being deadly poison. And this poison was in Julia's possession and she began to sell it. And also her daughter also helped make and sell it as well. I'm sure you all know this, like fragrance commercials, God, they're the worst.

It's like, what is going on? They never make sense. They're always so sexual and just ridiculous. They never just make sense, right? Anyways, what I'm getting at is aqua tofana sounds like something that would be like those damn Johnny Depp commercials where he's like just being weird out in the desert

and they're selling a fragrance. That's what it reminds me of. Not the point though. So first, Julia actually disguised aqua tofana as a powdered makeup. Woman would like, or could set it on the counter on their dressing tables next to their lotions and their beauty related products without raising any type of suspicion, you know,

like what the hell is that? Her second disguise was even more ingenious. She sold Aqua Tofana hidden in small vials. The vial claimed to be mana of St. Nicholas of Bari, a special healing ointment that looked like a devotional object. You're probably asking, well, why is she doing this in the first place?

Because Julia was sympathetic towards like low status women and most often sold her poison to women who were trapped in difficult and abusive marriages. She just really wanted to help. She became known as a friend to the troubled wife and due to word of mouth, she was well known amongst the fellow ladies. Aqua Tofana provided a quick,

discreet solution to their problems. Now, to be fair, she did sell her concoction to men as well, but mostly a lot of her customers were just women, mainly women, and these women would buy it from Julia and then give it to their husbands. It was their only way out, apparently. Now this product, Aquatofana, it was popular because it was almost impossible to detect

and it was a slow it was almost impossible to detect and it was a slow action poison that had two key benefits. It made the symptoms it produced and its victims resemble those of like, I don't know, an advancing disease, like a flu. Also it kind of made it look like it was a death from natural causes. And because it killed slowly, most of the men would put their affairs in order or even write a will.

Most of the people during this time were deeply religious. And I'm laughing because look, most of the people were deeply religious. I'm not laughing at that, that's great. Because like this was a slow working poison, it gave the men time to repent his sins, which was highly believed to guarantee their entry into heaven,

which also made the wives feel better, like, oh, well at least he repented his sins, so now he's gonna like go to heaven when he dies. So kind of like made, you know, the women just feel better. And plus they wrote a will. Now Aqua Te Fon, if I say it one more time, this product was also colorless, tasteless, and she made it a liquid versus the powder.

That way it was easy for women to mix it in with their water or their wine during meals. A lot of the times also they would eat like soup and they would just put a couple of drops right in there. Now, the symptoms would actually go unnoticed. The first small dosage would produce cold-like symptoms, and by the third dose, the victim would feel very ill, be throwing up, dehydration, diarrhea,

and a burning sensation in their stomach. And then by the fourth dosage, it would kill the victim. So women would just add a little drop of it into a meal or their drink, and just a tiny bit, and just do it one day at a time. Some women would do a shit ton at once, and they would get very ill and die. Women in Italy during that time had only three ways to make a living. They got married, they begged, or they prostituted themselves.

Now I know the word prostitute is kind of frowned upon. It's not, we call it sex workers now, but back then it was considered prostitution. So I'm gonna say prostituted themselves. Women would often die in childbirth due to complications. A lot of the times women would have tribes of children, I mean tons of kids. There was one woman, she was like super powerful

and she was on her eighth kid and she died of complications. She came from a very wealthy family. I wanna say her name, but I know I'm gonna say it wrong. She came from a very powerful family at that time, and they were very, very wealthy, so you would think like even the wealthy people could afford to take care of their women,

and they did not. They often just died after trying to give birth, or giving birth. Women, again, were beaten and mistreated, and just powerless. And, well, some women just straight up hated their husbands. And a lot of women just feared childbirth because I mean, they could die.

Look, their lives seem to just not be that great. I think we can all agree on that. And they weren't listened to, they weren't heard. And if you're getting beat all the time, it's much better to be considered a widow, which was like kind of frowned upon. It's a way better option than dying. That's for sure.

I think we can all agree on that, but you shouldn't murder people, Bailey. You can't say that. I'm not saying that. So Julia's, her clients were very protective of her and her clients would only recommend Julia if they knew it was somebody that could be trusted and someone that was a good friend

and nobody would ever, you know, send someone Julia's way if they knew like this person shady or whatever. So it was again, all word of mouth. They were really protective of her because if authorities found out what Julia was doing, what she was selling, not only would she be murdered, but also her client list would go down with her.

So everybody was very quiet about what was going on. It was like, everyone's just little secret. Now in order to sell this product, Julia really just needed a front. So what she did was she opened up her own like cosmetics counter, but not really, because it was just, she was selling her own cosmetics to women in Southern Italy.

Some women would just come to her looking for cosmetics, but most of her clients would be interested in Aqua Tofana. And if there were any suspicion going on about what Giul Julia was doing, she could easily be like, what are you talking about? I'm selling cosmetics, obviously. And this seemed to work for her

because she was doing this for almost 50 years. Yeah, 50 years. Everyone kept their mouth shut, which is surprising. I'm not saying that women can't keep their mouths shut, but come on, I mean, you would think someone would say something, right? They were good. They were loyal. Now, poison was women's weapon of choice when they wanted to murder someone in medieval and early modern Europe. Historian Annette Drew-Behr has argued that Renaissance plays featured women applying face paint on stage

to reference women's false and poisonous nature. Is that what I'm doing? So Giulia Tofano wasn't the only woman associated with poisoning people in the Renaissance, not by a long shot. Giulia and her daughter though, operated very quietly, obviously, they went on for like 50 years, in Italy. So they ended up moving to Naples and then to Rome,

where she continued her booming business. There was like a journal written about this time. And in this journal, they said that, again, it was administered in wine or tea or some other liquid. The husband would feel weak and then feel ill and that they would call a medical man. And after the second dose of the poison, this weakness became more pronounced.

The beautiful wife would express a lot of anxiety over her husband's illness and a lot of stress. And rarely would she be under suspicion because of how she was acting. A lot of the women would be coached on how to act when giving the husbands this poison, how to do it. So again, they would put it in the husband's food. They would do one drop a day, just very slowly.

And then when the doctor would come over, the doctor would see the husband and be like, well, you have a very simple illness. Let's give you this medicine that will make you feel a hundred times better. And then the doctor would be called back again a couple of days later, because now the husband is doing worse.

The medicine man would be just completely puzzled, like what the hell is going on? I gave you some, it's a simple illness, I gave you some medicine, like you should be doing way, way better. And it would leave the doctors just really confused, like what's going on, what did you take, whatever. So they would give them more medication.

And the next thing you know, the victim would be dead. Julia would make sure to tell her clients what to do after the fact. So she would say, like, you need to act a certain way. You need to act like you're filled with anxiety and stress and sad and everything, right? Put on a show, do it. And then she said, most of all, like, after they die,

you need to demand a post-mortem examination, which would result to nothing. They could never trace a thing. And then the widow would 100% be seen as innocent and nobody could blame her. And Julia made sure that all of her clients followed through with this, that way none of them would be under suspicion

that they killed the husband. And it was smart. This was again, very long ago, and they couldn't trace arsenic or any of that in the body. So just always left everyone confused as to what was going on. At this time they thought it was just the flu. Everyone was getting the flu and dying. Wild times, right?

Because people would stub their toe and die. So I mean, it was a pretty solid plan. Now it may sound like Julia was just handing out her product like nothing, right? Left and right, here you take it, you take it. No, she was very, very selective with whom she sold Aquatovana to. She made sure that any new clients she took were vouched for.

She got like background checks on them, pretty much like asking who recommended them. And then she would go and check with that person. Hey, is this person legit? She was doing her homework to protect herself, to cover her ass. Shit, must I explain more? And then Julia did a little bit of a rebranding.

On the bottle, she actually included directions on how to use it. Now this was to cover her ass again, because on the bottle, it would say a little step-by-step on how to use it, which would make it seem more like a cosmetic product, like use one to two drops on the face at night. So Julia started putting this little label on there

or even giving the women a little card and these women would make sure to leave it on there or leave the card nearby again to just make sure and prove that this is a beauty product, this is a cosmetic product, this isn't anything else. Like one to two drops at night, leave me alone, you know? And then if the husbands died and these women got questioned even more intensely,

then they could be like, look, there's directions on it. I've been using it like so, it wasn't me. And because Aqua Tofana had Belladonna in it, which was in a lot of beauty products, again, that would just further prove that it was indeed a cosmetic product. Belladonna makes my eyes nice and big for you. But good things cannot last forever, Julia.

You know, I don't know, look, real talk, I don't know if she's the good guy or the bad guy here, and I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for that because of course murder is awful and never, like nobody, no, just don't do it. Murder, just don't do it. Again, this is during a time when women had no other choice. They couldn't get divorced.

They were gonna die in childbirth. They were gonna be beaten and lived miserable, awful lives. What else were they supposed to do? Julia is the one over here who just has like a heart of gold and wanted to help these women get out. Do you blame them? And I know that sounds awful, but it's, I mean, think about it. Nowadays, you have so many options to get out of a marriage and whatnot,

so you shouldn't murder anybody. But this, again, they didn't have any options. They were gonna die. While men got to go just do their thing and jack off. Did they jack off? Maybe. Anyways, like I was saying, in the 1650s though, it all came crashing down over a bowl of soup. Yes, that's right, a bowl of soup.

Dammit. A lady went to Julia to purchase Aqua, Aqua Tavana. She was new. Julia did her part. She did her little background check on this lady, made sure that she's legit and she's, you know, she's not gonna rat her out or anything. She's not a cop.

But this lady, she bought the product and she takes it home. She's gonna use it on her husband. She wants out of her marriage and she needs to get away from this man. So this woman, she ends up preparing her husband dinner and they're having a nice warm bowl of soup and she takes just two drops and puts it right into her husband's soup.

She calls him over, honey, oh my God, soup's ready. And her husband comes over, sits down. He demands for some wine as well. And she's like, okay, yeah. So she goes and she gets some wine. He sits down. Now this lady, I mean, good for her. She obviously is a good person.

She sees her husband reaching for the soup and he's going to slurp it, whatever. He takes a couple of slurps and she ends up yelling at him to stop. And she pretty much gets slapped in the face with guilt and regret. So she yells at her husband to stop eating, to put it down. Put it down, ah!

And she just kind of freaks out. And she didn't say why to her husband, she's just yelling at him to put down the soup, to stop eating it. Of course, her husband's like, why do you want me to stop eating the soup? It's kind of weird. It's said that he holds her down and he beats her

and he demands that she tells him what's in the soup. Like he has a feeling that there's something in the soup. What's it? You better tell me what's going on with this soup. She confesses. She said that she put poison in it. No, it's over baby, it's over. So this husband is upset for a good reason,

she just tried to kill him, and he ends up dragging her down to the authorities in Rome. And authorities hook this lady up to some kind of torture device to get out any information she had. So, it's not looking good for her. It's a little unclear if this woman was killed or not. I'm going to say she probably was, just based off of their track record.

So she confesses to everything. Word got out that somebody had confessed and it got back to Julia. Now, Julia was warned. She was like, hey, look, soup, it happened. This lady confessed, you need to make a run for it. You need to get out of here because need to make a run for it. You need to get out of here

because they're gonna come looking for you. So, Juliana starts to panic. She knows her fate. She's gonna die. Julia's gonna die. You's gonna die, Julia, I'm sorry. Julia ends up packing her stuff and she goes looking for somewhere to stay

and she ends up going to a church and she asked the church for sanctuary and they granted it to her. Her plan was to stay there until she could make her escape. Not sure where she was planning to escape, but Julia's just laying low at this church. So people are talking though. Now people got word about what this woman said over there

at her arrest thing and her questioning and now rumors are starting. People are talking, okay? And somehow there was a major rumor going around that Giulia had poisoned the water supply throughout Rome. You know how rumors go. It's one big game of telephone. Starts off with one thing and it ends completely

out of control, overblown. She didn't do that. She didn't poison the water supply throughout Rome, but everyone believed that she did. So of course, people are livid and they want Julia dead. Okay? They want her removed. Word also got out that Julia was actually hiding out

at a church. A lot of people kind of got together. I pictured just a mob of people with like steak knives. No, I'm sorry. What are those things called? The forks? Nevermind. Mob of people get together and they storm into the church

demanding for Julia. And they are telling this church, you need to hand her over, give her to us. We're burning this place down. Of course the church is like, sorry, girl, we gotta give you over, you know? So the church handed over Julia to the authorities. They brought her in for questioning,

but really, I guess they just tortured her until she confessed to what she had been doing. So Julia ended up confessing to killing over what she averaged at 600 men between 1633 and 1651. And it was believed that the number was even higher. Authorities also got her to name some of her clients. Not all of them, obviously, because she said she couldn't remember a lot of them, but she did could like give out names.

July 1659, Julia was executed along with her daughter and three employees. Yeah, remember her daughter? Sorry, I kind of like didn't really mention her much because again, there really wasn't much information about her, but she did have some employees and sadly they all went down with her, which I kind of like just lightly talked about 600 men.

That's a lot of goddamn men. That's, that's, wow. Here's the thing, nobody really knows, okay? This story is said to be true because there is like journals written about it from that era. Again, like there's no paintings of her. There's no portraits of her.

There's like nothing to prove that she was a real person, really. so what if this is all just BS? Tofana, I want tofana. So Giulia, three of her employees and her daughter were all killed and they were killed in Rome's Campo dei Fiori. It's a square that was called the Field of Flowers because it had been kept in open field

for a long time in ancient Rome, but eventually been paved over open field for a long time in ancient Rome, but eventually been paved over and made into a square. It would become a very popular location for hanging people and burning them at the stake. I looked it up. There's a lot of Airbnbs now. I could get an Airbnb next to this square

where tons of people were hung, murdered, burned at the stake, and I could get an Airbnb there. Isn't that nuts? That's wild, come on. History's nuts. Sadly though, okay, so look, they were all murdered. Julia's body was thrown over the wall into the church that had offered her sanctuary

as a big FU. Now, some of her clients did indeed also get punished. After her confession, a number of clients tried to play dumb and claim that their Aqua Tofana was simply for cosmetic purposes and they had no idea, just no idea that you could kill someone with it. I had no clue, what? That's wild.

It was hard to determine, okay, who was like an actual client and who was actually thinking this was a cosmetic product. But some of the clients, they were also executed outright while others were bricked into the dungeons of the Palace of Holy Office. Now it said there were several others who were connected. I mean, obviously if there are 600 victims,

then there's a lot of people involved, but a lot of them just got away. It's also possible that the number of victims was exaggerated by Julia because she was being tortured when she was being investigated. And you know, people will just say whatever you want to make the torture stop. So a lot of people also believe that she could have just

been saying this number to make the authorities happy. Maybe they kept questioning her and pushing her for a bigger number and once they were satisfied with the number that she gave them, they were like, okay, yeah, that sounds good. 600, you're dead. Some believe that Julia was completely innocent, that she might well have simply been a woman

dabbling in cosmetics at the time, and she was selling cosmetics, but during that time there was a literal witch hunt was sweeping through Europe, and women doing anything was suspish, and a lot of women were just being killed for anything and everything. So there are people out there who believe

that Julia actually wasn't responsible for all of this. And they killed an innocent woman. Plot twist, am I right? So long after Julia's death, the legend of Aqua Tofana continued. In 1791, you know the composer Mozart? Have you heard of him? So he fell seriously ill.

He became convinced that he had been poisoned and days before his death, he said, quote, "'I will not last much longer. "'I am sure that I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea that someone has given me aqua tofana, end quote. Yeah, yeah, he said it, uh-huh. Historians believe that he actually died of a fever

from syphilis or from having eaten undercooked pork. So it was a bit of a stretch, but it's possible. His paranoia shared by many who took ill in those days was testimony to continuing terror inspired by Julia Tofana. Tofana, why did I say it like that? I don't know. So that's the story of Julia Tofana and her deli concoction, Aqua Tofana. This one really sparked my interest

because it's just fascinating. I don't know, we've got history, we've got Mozart, we have poison that looks like something from Alice in Wonderland, possibly a lot of victims, and you never hear about her. I don't know, I just found it to be very, very fascinating. I was about to say, I think it's a cool story, but I mean, that's a lot of victims, Bailey. That's not very cool. Like, very fascinating. I was about to say, I think it's a cool story, but I mean, that's a lot of victims, Bailey.

That's not very cool. Like, shut up. Let me know who you want me to talk about next week. Other than that, I hope you have a wonderful day today. You make good choices. And please, please, please be safe out there. Don't poison anybody because nowadays you can get out of marriages and whatnot.

There's no reason to murder people, okay? Jeez. I'll be seeing you guys later. Bye. Aquatofana, aquatofana. Sorry, it's just really addicting. Aquatofana, aquatofana, aquatofana. Bye.