On February 17, 1912, a woman named Claudia Elías looked across at the first-floor flat at 29 Carrer de Ponent in Barcelona's Raval, now Carrer de Joaquín Costa, and saw a girl with cropped hair at the window whom she had never seen before. She asked the neighbor if the child was hers. The neighbor, Enriqueta Martí, shut the window without a word. For a week Barcelona had been searching for Teresita Guitart Congost, five years old, missing since February 10, and the city was angry at how little the authorities had done about its missing children. Elías told a mattress maker down the street; he told a municipal officer, José Asens, who passed it to the police. On February 27 two officers went to the flat on the pretext of a complaint about chickens, and found Teresita there with another girl, called Angelita.
Teresita's account was plain. Martí had taken her by the hand with a promise of sweets, thrown a black cloth over her and brought her to the flat. She cut the child's hair, renamed her Felicidad, told her she no longer had parents and must call her Mama, and fed her potatoes and stale bread. She pinched rather than beat. Teresita was not allowed near the windows or into several of the rooms. That much of the case has never been in doubt. Almost everything else about Enriqueta Martí has been.
She was born in Sant Feliu de Llobregat in 1868 and came to Barcelona young, working as a maid and a nanny and then, by most accounts, in prostitution. In 1895 she married Juan Pujaló, a painter; they separated and reconciled about six times, and by 1912 they had been apart for five years. In 1909, during the Tragic Week, she was arrested at a flat on Carrer Minerva with a young man from a wealthy family and accused of running a brothel that offered children. She was never tried over it.
What the Barcelona press made of her after February 1912 is the story most people know. The papers reported that the police had found human bones in the flat, some of them burned, a sack of bloodstained clothing and a boning knife, and a locked room of jars holding fat, blood, hair and powdered bone, the raw material, they said, for ointments and potions sold to rich clients as cures for tuberculosis. Remains were reported in the walls and gardens of other places she had lived. Angelita was said to have seen her kill a little boy called Pepito on the kitchen table. A list of names found in the flat was rumored to be a roster of wealthy clients, and the authorities, afraid of riots, put out word that it was only a list of people she had begged from. Crowds gathered outside the court wanting to lynch her. The press called her the Vampire of the Raval and the Vampire of Barcelona.
Much of that did not survive scrutiny even at the time. The first forensic report said the bones were children's. According to later press coverage retold by those who have gone back over the case, a second examination by medical professors and forensic doctors concluded that nearly all of them were animal bones; a skull said to be a small child's was a ram's, the hair was a rabbit's, and a single human bone came from someone in their twenties. The writer Jordi Corominas, going back through the newspapers of 1912 for his book Barcelona 1912, found that the official account stopped at a certain point and that later retellings distorted it. He traced one famous interview in which she supposedly confessed everything and found that the reporter had presented it as a dream. Corominas's view is that she was an unbalanced woman marked by the death of her ten-month-old son, and that this is why she took Teresita.
The historian Elsa Plaza, whose Desmontando el caso de la Vampira del Raval came out in 2014, went further, through the court files and the city records. On her reading Martí killed no child at all. Her surname was Ripoll, not Ripollés. Angelita was the daughter of Pujaló's widowed sister, born after her father's death. Martí was poor, sold antiques, ran an herbalist's with her husband, and worked as a healer of the kind the working poor went to because they could not afford doctors. "The only certain thing," Plaza has said, "is that Enriqueta kidnapped Teresita for reasons we will never know." She and Corominas both argue that a city which had just uncovered a child brothel in the same district needed someone to carry the blame, and found her.
She never came to trial. In the Reina Amalia women's prison she tried to cut her wrists with a wooden knife, and the prison let the press know it had taken steps to stop her trying again. She died there on May 12, 1913, fifteen months after her arrest. The legend says she was lynched by other inmates, perhaps paid by clients who wanted her silenced; her death certificate gives uterine cancer. She was buried in a common grave in the Southwest Cemetery on Montjuïc.
Mothers in the Raval went on warning their children that Enriqueta would come for them if they misbehaved, and the story has since filled novels, plays, films and a musical. The kidnapping of Teresita Guitart is the one crime that the record supports. The murders are an accusation that was never tried and that the best modern research rejects.