On April 8, 1941, the drain under the building at number 9 Calle Salamanca, in Mexico City's Colonia Roma, backed up again. Francisco Paez, who kept a small shop on the ground floor, had complained before and got nowhere with the building's manager, so he called in a plumber and bricklayers himself. They broke up the floor of the shop to reach the sewer and found it plugged with rotting flesh, blood-soaked gauze and cotton, and a small human skull. The papers also reported a pair of legs so decomposed that no one could say whether they had belonged to a fetus or a newborn. For months, people in the Roma had been finding fetal remains in the streets.
The drain led to a room in apartment 3 rented by Felicitas Sanchez Aguillon, a midwife who also appears in the records as Sanchez Neyra, and whom the police had crossed once before, around 1910. The woman who held the lease, out at work all day and home only to sleep, let the officers in and saw the room for the first time herself. They found an altar lit with candles, needles, baby clothes, photographs of children set about the place, and another human skull. Sanchez was not there, and she was not at a second address they searched. She was arrested three days later, on April 11, with two others: her partner, named in the accounts as Roberto or Alberto Covarrubias, and Salvador Martinez, a plumber who worked for her.
She was born in 1890 at Cerro Azul, in Veracruz, trained as a nurse in the port of Veracruz and went on to work as a midwife. She married Carlos Conde and had twin daughters. What became of them depends on the account: in one she talked her husband into giving the girls up and then refused to tell him where they had gone, in another the couple, short of money, sold them. Either way the marriage ended over it around 1910, the year she came to Mexico City and took the room on Calle Salamanca, where she would live until her death.
The practice she built there drew women of every class, some of them plainly well off, which struck reporters as strange for a rented room in that part of the Roma. Beneath the midwifery ran two illegal trades: abortions, which Mexican law prohibited, and the sale of infants to couples who wanted them. A second premises, at Guadalajara 69, served as a clandestine clinic and a place to hand babies over. The accusation, resting on the remains and on what her accomplices told the police, was that she killed the infants she could not sell and newborns delivered alive from failed abortions, poisoning, smothering or strangling them, then cut up the bodies and burned them or flushed them into the drains. The accomplices also described cruelty toward the children in her keeping: ice-cold baths, long stretches without food, nights on the floor.
The newspapers gave her one name after another: la Ogresa de la Colonia Roma, the Ogress of the Colonia Roma; la Descuartizadora, the Dismemberer; la Mujer Hiena, the Hyena Woman; and the one that has lasted, la Trituradora de Angelitos, the grinder of little angels. They put forty to fifty deaths on her, and later retellings push the figure past fifty and even past a hundred. No count was ever made, and not one child was ever identified.
What the courts did with her was far smaller. On April 26, 1941, she was formally charged with abortion, illegal burial of human remains, offenses against public health and clinical and medical responsibility, none of them treated as grave under the law of the day. Murder was not among them. On May 10 the eighth criminal judge set her bail at 600 pesos. Accounts differ on what followed, some saying she was kept in isolation in jail for her own safety until June, others that she paid and walked out. The remains from the drain, the only physical evidence behind the talk of murder, are said to have gone missing while the case was open. Many believed at the time that some of her clients came from wealthy or political families with reason to keep their names out of court, and the outcry over her release faded once police uncovered a ring of German agents working a radio transmitter in the same neighborhood.
On June 16, 1941, she died of an overdose of Nembutal, a barbiturate, in the home she shared with her partner. She left three letters. She was never tried, and what she did to the children was never put before a court. A third daughter, born to her and Covarrubias, was placed in state care; one account holds that he was later convicted for his part.