Delfina and María de Jesús González
The "Poquianchis" is the name by which a female group of Mexican serial killers active between 1945 and 1964 was known,[1] mainly in the city of San Francisco del Rincón, Guanajuato, Mexico; They buried the bodies of their victims in the city of Purísima del Rincón, Guanajuato, Mexico. The group was made up of the four sisters of the González Valenzuela family: [2]
Delfina González Valenzuela (b. 1912, El Salto, Jalisco - d. October 17, 1968, Irapuato, Guanajuato) was the eldest of the sisters and the leader of the group. María del Carmen González Valenzuela (1911 - 1949) María Luisa "Eva" González Valenzuela (1917 - d. November 19, 1984, Irapuato, Guanajuato). María de Jesús González Valenzuela (b. January 1, 1924 - d. mid-1990s) was the youngest of the sisters.
The four women owned several brothels in Guanajuato and Jalisco. Their victims were mostly women who were deprived of their freedom to work as prostitutes, although they also murdered clients and babies of the enslaved women.[3] The confirmed number of victims is 91, but it is believed that they could killing more than 150 people,[4] making them the most prolific serial killers recorded in Mexican history.
Biography
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The police picked up a woman named Josefina Gutiérrez, a procuress, on suspicion of kidnapping young girls in the Guanajuato city area, and during questioning, she implicated the González sisters. Police officers searched the sisters' property near the city of San Francisco del Rincón and found the bodies of eighty women, eleven men, and several fetuses. Investigations revealed that the sisters' criminal operation recruited prostitutes through deceptive help-wanted ads for housemaids.[1] Many of the girls were force-fed heroin or cocaine.[citation needed] The sisters killed the prostitutes when they became too ill, damaged by repeated sexual activity, lost their looks, or stopped pleasing the customers.[1]
They would also kill customers who showed up with large amounts of cash. When asked for an explanation for the deaths, one of the sisters reportedly said, "The food didn't sit well with them." Tried in 1964, the González sisters were each sentenced to forty years in prison. In prison, Delfina died due to an accident where a construction worker heard her and tried to catch a glimpse at the serial murderer before accidentally dumping cement on her head, and María finished her sentence and dropped out of sight after her release. Although they are often cited as the killers, there were two other sisters who helped in their crimes, Carmen and María Luisa. Carmen died of cancer whilst still in prison; María Luisa went mad because she feared that she would be killed by angry protesters.
The sisters and their crimes were dramatized in the Felipe Cazals film Las Poquianchis (1976) and the Jorge Ibargüengoitia novel Las Muertas (1977).[2]
See also
References
- ^ a b Holmes, Ronald M. and Stephen T., ed. (1998). Contemporary Perspectives on Serial Murder. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. pp. 51–52. ISBN 9780761914211.
- ^ Berg, Charles Ramírez (2010). Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. pp. 194–195. ISBN 9780292791923.
Bibliography
- Peter Vronsky: Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters, Berkley Books, New York (2007), p. 440
External links
- "World's Worst Killers". BBC News. 1999-10-30. Retrieved 2006-10-12.