When Women Kill

Prologue

OUTSIDE THE LAW

Women who kill, I reply, time and again, when people ask me what my book is about. I’m researching cases of women who kill. And each time, as if part of a script, the same scene plays out in front of me. Men and women alike furrow their brows, wince, and then nod their heads in approval of my decision to tackle such a pressing, awful, and all-too-common problem in Latin America. It’s my turn: the moment when I must correct their mistake, word by word, and watch as their understanding becomes disapproval and suspicion. Where they should have heard the words women killers, a strange mental lapse made them hear the opposite: women who have been killed.

Once I got over my surprise at this repeated misunderstanding, it actually helped me to realize something fundamental: it’s easier for people to imagine a dead woman than a woman prepared to kill. And it didn’t matter if I said murderous women or violent women. By the same slip—more cultural than auditory—the disturbing image of an armed woman was superseded by another, inoffensive one: that of a defenseless woman, six feet under—herself murdered or the victim of violence. Woman and killer were true antonyms, it seemed—words that, when spoken together, proved unhearable, unthinkable, either causing selective deafness or conjuring the most terrifying flights of fancy: witches, Medea, vampires, femmes fatales.

Incidentally, this mental slip doesn’t happen when we mention men who kill. The invisible gender laws operate covertly and constantly, guiding the script of violence toward the same ending. When a man kills, he does not cast doubt on his masculinity, irrespective of his motives or victims, his weapons or circumstances. For a man, the possibility of his violent act is always in the air and even helps confirm his status as a real man. A woman who kills, on the other hand, is twice outside the law: outside both the codified laws and the cultural laws that define and regulate femininity. And it is this double transgression, this twofold rebellion, that triggers that telling slip of the ear. Writing this book, reassessing these emblematic cases of female killers would mean precisely retraining that ear. Only then can the reverberations of their gunshots be heard.

But what made me want to write this book at all? What drove me to lurk in dusty archives, to be repeatedly met with looks of suspicion and fear? Today, as feminists take to the streets to decry the sweeping scale of gender-based violence, the question "why write now about women who kill?" isn’t a trivial one. Some will believe this publication to be an error of judgement, an unnecessary departure just as we slowly begin to shape a fragile awareness of the primary victims of machismo. There will also be readers who search these pages for a false equivalence between the systematic violence suffered by women and another, statistically exceptional kind. I don’t intend to oblige those readers. My aim is not to minimize the alarming recurrence of femicide, or, much less, to endorse killing as a weapon in the feminist struggle. Women who kill are the exception and it’s better that they remain that way. Why, then, focus on female offenders? What interested me in women who kill?

It’s never easy to pick apart the driving impulse behind a book. Interest, pigheadedness, morbid curiosity, desire, and a rebellious streak are all there in the background when I think about the earliest stages of writing When Women Kill. To this, I could also add an intuition and an anecdote. The former was a suspicion that steered me from the very start, but that only now, at the end of a long and winding journey, can I state with any conviction: remembering bad women is also a task of feminism. And I don’t mean reclaiming wrongly persecuted figures like the witches Silvia Federici rescues from the stakes, or the killjoys Sara Ahmed vindicates as both the most disruptive and the most necessary members at the family dinner table. I’m speaking, rather, of the genuine wrongdoers, proven killers, almost irredeemable beings who are, at the same time, essential to a feminism intent on expanding accepted ideas of what men and women should feel, to include men who no longer base their masculinity on violence and women who are able to express rage without being seen as somehow less human.

The pressure on women to be perfect mothers, exemplary daughters and wives, and successful professionals has reached unsustainable levels. Virginia Woolf’s angel in the house looms overhead, hurling her ruthless demands at us, both inside and outside the home. In today’s world, resisting her call and questioning her intentions is a matter of survival; we must ask the angel why we have to remain sacrificial and passive, silent and servile, and what is so bad about expressing our anger and frustration. Woolf treacherously proposes to kill her. I propose that the angel go mano a mano with the women killers. I propose that, confronted with the angel’s penetrating gaze, we recover all the anti-heroines: the crooks, the convicts, and even those women who picked up a gun, aimed it at their victims, and shot them at point-blank range. In the face of the angel’s vexing demands, I propose we rescue a handful of women killers: strange women who are the antitheses of feminist figures like Simone de Beauvoir or Amanda Labarca, Flora Tristan or Mary Wollstonecraft, but who enable us to see what happens when we fail to meet the expectations that hang, like an invisible guillotine blade, above our heads. Their crimes, while disturbing, are a privileged window from which to observe how the very meaning of womanhood has changed over time. Their contradictions and failures act as a mirror, reflecting back typically un-feminine emotions. And that is why remembering these women, retracing their movements and reconstructing their trials and crime scenes is so vital for feminism. To see ourselves in them, to see them in us and to speak their names without fear: Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, María Carolina Geel, and María Teresa Alfaro.

There are many reasons I chose to focus on these four women: the weapons they used for their respective killings, which targeted children and adults alike; the public impact of their crimes; their surprising sentences; and the fact that, between them, they inspired novels, songs, poems, plays, dance performances, and films. I could have included other women. Female serial killers like the North American Aileen Wuornos, immortalized in the feature film Monster, or the cruel Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, etched in our memories thanks to the writings of Valentine Penrose and Alejandra Pizarnik. Or even Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, better known as La Quintrala and dubbed Chile’s perverse mother by the critic Alicia Muñoz, accused of poisoning her father, ordering her lover’s assassination, and torturing and murdering numerous slaves during the colonial era. Or I could have focused on María del Pilar Pérez, whose serial crimes earned her the nickname the new Quintrala in Chile just a decade ago. I chose, however, to take a less trodden path. I wanted to focus on everyday women, on professionals, the working class, aristocrats, and domestic employees whose crimes, despite taking place in twentieth-century Chile, would allow me to see beyond the country’s narrow borders and the specifics of each individual case.

The crimes committed by Rojas, Faúndez, Geel, and Alfaro sparked the most extreme reactions within Chilean society: indignation, incredulity, astonishment, terror, and even a telling silence. Could such bloody murders really have been committed by women? Did they owe their homicidal violence to advances in feminism? Would women, on achieving the all-feared equality, start killing as liberally as men? Iconic in Chilean criminal history, these murders also took place at key moments for feminism. Or perhaps the reverse is true: each feminist milestone came with its own exemplary murder, crimes used as excuses to put the insubordinate woman in her place. It’s no accident that Corina Rojas’s case, which took place in 1916, coincided with the emergence of the first wave of feminism; or that the case of the news vendor Rosa Faúndez was used in 1923 to question the deadly consequences of incorporating women into the world of work; or that the crime committed in 1955 by the writer María Carolina Geel became an excuse to discuss the perils of feminism after women in Chile won the full right to vote; or that the series of murders committed by the domestic servant María Teresa Alfaro and uncovered in 1963 took place in the decade of women’s sexual liberation. As the Argentine intellectual Josefina Ludmer lucidly notes, these legal cases and the subsequent representation of them by the press and in the arts coincide with the explosion of women into public life, and help to relieve—be it via punishment or pardon—the anxieties brought on by impending changes to the structures of male power.

My job became harder as the research went on. My four protagonists were slowly losing their mythical halos and transforming into flesh-and-blood people. At times they seemed rebellious, at others submissive. First talkative, then cagey. Cold, and then passionate. These women killers plunged me into roiling waters, and I had no choice but to learn how to swim. This undertaking stretched on for several years, during which time, first and foremost, I had to train myself in the art of suspicion. I had to doubt the word of lawyers and doctors, question the sensationalism of reporters, take novel plots with a pinch of salt, and slowly learn that a question is often a veiled accusation. Only by doubting the emissaries of the law—often judges, but also artists and creators—would I be able, with a little luck, to hear the killers’ own voices. And their voices— those of Corina and Rosa, Teresa and Carolina—had been lost among others far more strident: verdicts, song lyrics, pages of long-forgotten archives.

Raking up these archives was a bigger challenge than I had anticipated. One particular episode as part of my improvised role as detective exemplifies the kinds of hurdles I had to overcome. One day in January 2015, with the fierce summer sun beating down on me, I headed to the Santiago court archives to see for myself if anything remained of the women’s case files. I’d been told at the national library, where I’d managed to dig out some old newspapers, that it was unlikely, that I shouldn’t waste my time in that crumbling building run by hostile, half-asleep functionaries. But I suspected that a lot of case files must still be there and that, with a little patience, I would find what I was looking for. Almost three hours I waited for the archivist to see me, and when he did appear, dragging his feet out of his gloomy office, I was immediately able to confirm a nagging suspicion. I explained to him in detail what I needed. I smiled. I even cracked the odd joke to try to win him over. But, squinting his eyes, he asked me how he could be sure, absolutely sure that I wasn’t searching for a different type of document altogether: files containing delicate information about times best left in the past. What times would those be? I asked. He didn’t deem it necessary to reply.

Delving into the past is a dangerous undertaking in a country founded on a pact of silence—a pact that fostered impunity and fear, that favored forgetting over remembering and that, decades after the end of the dictatorship, was now embodied in this guardian of the national archives. I always knew the military and police were in on the pact, but I had been blind to its destructive effect on wider society. And even though the following pages aren’t strictly about that pact of silence, even though they explore other hidden recesses of our history, they also reveal and subsequently shatter another secret that forms part of a frightened, amnesic country. Chile tried to forget Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel, and Teresa Alfaro. It tried to make them disappear behind tales of love, passion, and jealousy, to hide them behind witch masks, Quintrala masks, Medea masks. Masks that, in these pages, I want to remove for good.

As for the anecdote that helps explain why I wanted to write this book, it’s really more of a confession. None of my family has ever been at the center of a bloody crime. I’m the sort of person who covers her eyes if a dead body appears on television. And the closest I’ve ever been to a gun is when I gave my father an old Trabuco (with only one c) as a gift, in a nod to our surname. Yet despite the gulf between my life and the lives of the women in this book, between my dead and theirs, their convictions and my own, here I am, sitting in front of a manuscript that describes in minute and vivid detail the blade of a dagger, the specific effect of a poison, the sound of a gun blast. And the question remains: why?

A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I think I fantasized about defending human rights and how I—at the ripe old age of seven— would find a way to put wicked murderers behind bars. I don’t remember having had any real doubts about this professional choice, and when the doubts did eventually start to creep up on me, it was already too late: sitting in the back row of a huge lecture hall in the University of Chile, I was yawning away, listening to a professor talk to us about the importance of legal deadlines in procedural law. I got through these classes—and worse ones—more out of stubbornness than any real desire to be there, and arrived, breathless, at the end of my degree. My last requirements were to complete a professional internship and swear before the Supreme Court that I would undertake my profession honorably.

It was March when I made my way up to the legal aid services building. I climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the door to an office. Two long tables pushed together served as a shared desk where dozens of lawyers attended to their new clients. The secretary waved me in, checked my name, and handed me a mountain of files. In passing, as if it were nothing, she added, One of your appeals expires tomorrow. I didn’t know what to say. I clumsily made my way to the one free space, a chair facing a huge window, and collapsed into it.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I made myself a flask of coffee and painstakingly wrote the legal appeal I would have to present the following morning. Early the next day, I went back to the office, left the draft of my appeal on the head lawyer’s desk, and waited for him to sign it so I could run it over as quickly as possible to the court. Half an hour later, a brusque voice called out my last name. I jumped up out of my chair and hurried over to the lawyer’s desk. A diploma hung on the wall above his head and dozens of legal case deadlines were marked up on a calendar. With his forefinger, he reached out and tapped the document that had kept me awake all night. Then, shaking his head but without even looking up, he shot back his verdict: We’re not here to write literature. Entire lines had been crossed out in red pen, all the adjectives deleted and my words replaced with others that sounded to my ears like the screeching of hundreds of nails on a chalkboard: I hereby appeal, We kindly request Your Honor, If it please the Court. They were the words of the law. And I was to commit its terms of reverence to memory if I wanted to join the select company of lawyers.

The following six months went by painfully slowly, but finally the last day of my internship as a law student arrived. All that remained was a ritual—one that for many marks the beginning of their career, but for me marked its longed-for end. I remember I put on a red jacket, and into one of its pockets I slipped a ticket for that very day to somewhere far, far away. But I remember even more vividly my joy when I held up my hand and, standing before a bench of judges, surrounded by portraits of distinguished lawyers, I responded I do, I do, I do, while inside I promised myself that I would never, ever, set foot in a courtroom again.

I kept that promise for almost a decade, only breaking it the day I began researching for this book. I returned to the courts of justice feeling jumpy, convinced that I was going to fall into some kind of trap. But this time, instead of