the frightening story of Felicitas Sánchez Aguillón, “the crusher of little angels”

A pipe covered in fetus and the skull of a child was just the tip of the iceberg in the spooky story that had the Mexican as the protagonist Felicitas Sánchez Aguillon. The case dates back to the 1940s in Mexico City, and the press of the time nicknamed the woman as “The Crusher of Little Angels”, “L’Ogresa” and “The Colonia Roma Quarter” (name of the district where you lived).

Felicitas has been accused of murdering more than 50 children, performing countless clandestine abortions and selling newborn babies. His crimes were revealed on April 8, 1941. That day, the owner of the business who was on the first floor of the building she lived in called a plumber because the pipes were clogged. To get to where the problem was, they had to lift the warehouse floor and access the sewers. The shock of finding out what was causing the obstruction was absolute. The plumber found “A huge plug of rotting human flesh, gauze and bloody cottons and even a small human skull ”, as reconstructed by the Mexican newspaper Press in his police coverage during those years.

The only suspect was Sánchez Aguilón. The woman had studied nursing and worked as a midwife at home and in a business she owned, which she named “La Quebrada”. Immediately, the trader notified the police and on the same day they knocked on the door of his house – which was on the third floor of the same building – located at Calle Salamanca n ° 9. The woman was not there, but they also entered her home. The surprise was greater when they found more items in her bedroom that directly implicated her in the crimes: needles, baby clothes, a human skull, candles and dozens of pictures of children. Somehow Felicitas knew that Justice was on his trail and the same day she ran away.

Murder of over 50 children

The investigation of the case fell into the hands of detective José Acosta Suárez. Information gathered by Suárez indicated that “la Ogresa” had murdered more than 50 children using different methods: sometimes by inducing abortions, other times by strangling the babies. Even the finds inside the pipes of his building showed that he also had killed newborns by slaughtering them and got rid of them by throwing them in the toilet.

On some occasions he would stay with the little ones, promising mothers that he would relocate them to good families so that they could have a decent education. “What’s impressive is that in the end he didn’t do that. True, some of them were sold, but those who survived were fed rotten meat and rotten food. Those who did not die from infections, gastrointestinal problems or colds, were sold. But the condition of these little ones was sub-human “, they tell in the series “Witnesses to the Crime”, which reconstructs history.

The journalist from La Prensa newspaper who provided the cover (her name is unknown, as the notes were not signed at the time) was responsible for gathering information from the suspect, starting with the investigations of all her relatives . The first to give him details was Don Francisco Páez, the owner of the store who had reported the problem with the pipes. The man said he often saw “encopetadas ladies” entering the third floor, as upper-class women in Mexico were called. “I saw them here, half chubby, with disheveled and sad faces, and when they leave here they magically come out thin and with a happy smile that they can’t with them,” Páez said. .

When asked who the woman answering the third floor door was, the grocer continued: “Her name is Felicitas Sánchez Aguillón, no one wants her here, she is a very horrible person, very unpleasant to deal with. ” Another neighbor of the building physically described the midwife: “She looks like a witch, with bulging eyes, fat, ugly, disgusting”. And Don Páez’s wife said: “Her eyes are almost out of their sockets and just looking she instills terror, but she visits the wealthiest homes in La Roma” (a bourgeois neighborhood in Mexico City).

The last comment refers to the nurse’s modus operandi: not only did she provide her services at home, but she also went home to perform abortions or receive newborns to get rid of them. Most of his clients were young Mexican high society girls. The chroniclers of the time said they had the feeling of being “in front of a toad” when they saw Felicitas, it was his ugliness. The 1940s press placed particular emphasis on the midwife’s physical appearance throughout the coverage of her case.

The confession of the first accomplice and his arrest

Felicitas Sánchez Aguillón was able to work for years without being discovered thanks to his main accomplice: the plumber Salvador Martínez. The woman often hired him to unclog his pipes, often blocked by fetal remains. In exchange for his silence, Felicitas gave him large sums of money.

On April 11, 1941, just three days after the discovery in the warehouse, Martínez testified against him before the Mexican public prosecutor. He confessed that the midwife called him to find out about the pipes and that he did not report what he had seen before because Felicitas had threatened him. “She told me that if I didn’t cooperate and went with the gossip to the police, she would say and maintain that I was an accomplice,” he said.

On the same day, the woman was arrested while trying to escape to Veracruz who was then her current partner, Alberto “Beto” Sánchez Rebollar. The file specifies that she was charged with the crimes of “criminal conspiracy, abortion, violation of burial laws, clinical and medical responsibility”.

From prison, the woman defended herself and assured that she had never killed anyone. He admitted that he had cared for many women who came to his house with heavy bleeding and pain. He also said, according to the official document, “that all he did was help these women by providing them with their services, so he did social work with his obstetrician job, and eventually threw away fetuses in the toilet “.

In his statement, Sánchez Aguillón said that many children were stillborn and that “obviously he had to get rid of them”. He confessed that on several occasions it was his partner who threw the bodies into crates. Finally, he admits only one murder: “A woman told me that she had dreamed that her son was going to be born very ugly, that she would please do an operation to throw him out. Indeed, this creature was a monster: it had the face of an animal, instead with horrible eye sockets and a sort of cone on its head. At birth, the child did not cry, but sniffed. I asked my partner to throw him in the canal, and he tied a string around his neck. “

While behind bars, the woman repeated loud and clear: “i don’t deserve to be here”. Determined to do whatever it takes to get out of prison, she threatened to confess who all the women she had cared for, most of whom were the daughters of powerful and wealthy people. His warning was enough for a judge to authorize your Release under the payment of 600 pesos deposit.

His death

Once released, Felicitas wanted to reintegrate into society with her business. Journalistic records from the time indicate that “Ogresa” was widely rejected and despised by the people. On the night of June 16, 1941, the woman got up, went to the kitchen of her house, and began to write letters. Then he took a bottle of nembutal (a sedative) and he drank everything to kill himself. Her second husband, “Beto” Sánchez Rebollar, is the one who found her dead on the ground.

The midwife left three posthumous letters: one addressed to her first lawyer (who apparently was cheating her), another to her new lawyer referring mainly to land she owned, and a third letter to Beto, in which she said goodbye to him in a rather cold tone. I just said, “Goodbye Beto.” In the same letter, another sentence read: “Don Carlos beat me, I can no longer”, in reference to her first husband, Carlos Conte.

The La Prensa reporter who covered the case wrote in the suicide news: “Felicitas accepted a pious death that she did not foresee for her victims.

Sell ​​your own children

Sánchez Aguillón had a childhood marked by contempt for his own mother. Those who analyze his case conclude that hatred and rejection of children she was marked by what she herself had endured. As a child, she displayed sadistic attitudes towards animals, kill and poison them for fun.

In her youth, she married a man named Carlos Conte, with whom she had twins. As the couple lived in austere conditions, the midwife convinced her husband that it was better to sell the girls. And they do it like that. After a few days, the man repented and asked Felicitas to tell him to whom she had given her daughters. The refusal in her response was the cause of the marriage breakdown.

Years later, the woman remarried. With her second husband, Alberto “Beto” Sánchez Rebollar, she had another daughter. The few records from the time indicate that the girl was abandoned in an orphanage. This woman’s rejection of motherhood was clear, although one thing is certain: She saved her biological daughters, because she took them away from her.

The story of Felicitas Sanchez Aguillón could be reconstructed thanks to the archives of the red-note newspaper La Prensa and the investigation of Roberto Coria, Guadalupe Gutiérrez and Abel Cobos captured in the audio series “Witnesses to the crime”. Also, the writer Norma Lazo recapitulated the actions of the midwife in the book Sin Clemencia. The Crimes That Shocked Mexico, published in 2007.