In June 2004 a 15-year-old girl named Sandra died in a hospital in Melilla, the Spanish city on the north coast of Africa, and her 12-year-old brother was admitted with the same kind of poisoning. Within days police arrested their mother, Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla, a homemaker known as Paqui. She confessed to giving drugs to her husband, Antonio González, who had died that January, and to the two children. Later that month she admitted that she had also killed a baby daughter, Florinda, in 1990.
In September 2005 the provincial court of Málaga, sitting in Melilla, convicted her of three murders and one attempted murder and sentenced her to 84 years in prison. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence on appeal. Her son survived after a long recovery. At trial she said she had wanted to spare her children suffering. The Supreme Court, upholding the sentence, described her conduct as an abuse of her role as mother and wife.
Ballesteros came from the Valencia region of mainland Spain. The Catalan public broadcaster 3Cat described her in 2004 as a woman from the Valencian Country, and MelillaHoy, the Melilla daily, called her Valencian-born. The Argentine news agency Noticias Argentinas, in a 2023 retrospective, reported that she was born in Valencia in 1969, grew up with four siblings in a household marked by frequent conflict, and left home when she came of age. Reports of her age vary slightly: 3Cat gave it as 37 in June 2004, Diario de León as 36 at her sentencing in September 2005, and MelillaHoy as 55 in June 2024.
She married Antonio González, and the couple settled in Melilla. El Español, the Madrid news site, reported in a 2019 feature that they married in 1987 and that he was her first and only partner. He worked for the state at the border with Morocco; Diario de León described him in 2004 as a state civil servant posted at the frontier, and El Español as a customs official. Noticias Argentinas reported that the couple had three children within about five years: Florinda, Sandra and a son.
To neighbors the household looked ordinary. El Español described Ballesteros as a homemaker who was comfortable with computers, and as a mother whose loss of her first baby had drawn sympathy from the people around her.
The couple's first daughter, Florinda, died in 1990 as a baby. 3Cat and Diario de León gave her age as five months; El Español and Noticias Argentinas gave it as six months. At the time her death raised no suspicion. Noticias Argentinas reported that it was attributed to a diabetic coma, and El Español wrote that neighbors pitied the young mother for her loss.
The death was looked at again only after Ballesteros, already in custody for the 2004 deaths, admitted that she had killed Florinda too. 3Cat reported that in her first statements she had denied any part in the baby's death, and that she later acknowledged it. According to Noticias Argentinas, she attributed that killing to postpartum depression. The court later convicted her of Florinda's murder.
By 2003 the marriage had lasted about 17 years, and two children remained at home: Sandra and her younger brother. According to El Español, Ballesteros spent long hours in internet chat rooms, where she used the nickname "Fogosa" and had several admirers at once. In the summer of 2003 she was writing to a man from Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and told him that her marriage had lost its excitement.
El Español reported that she traveled to Tenerife in December 2003 to meet him in person, that he proposed marriage, and that she accepted. She told him she was a widow whose husband and daughter had died in a traffic accident. Noticias Argentinas reported that investigators later found she had been in contact with at least three men and was engaged to one of them, and that she had told them the same story of a fatal road accident.
Back in Melilla, she told the man in Tenerife that she had affairs to settle first, including the sale of her house. The relationship moved from online messages to telephone calls. El Español described a call in which her son walked in and called her "mamá", and she explained the child away as the son of a friend. The wedding plans were put off again and again.
Antonio González's health had been failing through the second half of 2003. Diario de León, reporting the sentence in 2005, wrote that the poisoning of her husband ran from August 2003 until his death in January 2004. In October 2003 he was admitted to the intensive care unit of the local hospital in Melilla; El Español reported that he turned 42 there, on October 6, and was later sent home still weak.
About a month later, according to El Español, the whole household except Ballesteros was taken to hospital with signs of poisoning. Diario de León reported in 2004 that, days before her husband's death, everyone in the home but her had been admitted to the Hospital Comarcal of Melilla with serious intoxication. She blamed a recent fumigation of the house, and the explanation was accepted.
Antonio González died in January 2004. El Español and Noticias Argentinas give the date as January 12, 2004; Diario de León, writing in June 2004, gave it as January 7. His death was recorded as natural. El Español reported that the official cause was a heart attack, and Diario de León described it at the time as a sudden death. 3Cat gave his age as 42.
Diario de León reported in 2005 that about a month after the funeral Ballesteros went to Tenerife again to visit the man she had met online, and that they talked about getting married.
The two children did not recover after their father's death. Neighbors told Diario de León in June 2004 that for months, and especially after the father died, the children had looked sickly and painfully thin. Sandra's school was told that she was away with gastroenteritis and depression.
El Español described a local shopkeeper who noticed, the day after the father's death, that the boy was pale and shaking, and asked why he had not been taken to a doctor. Ballesteros said he was upset about his father. Friends who came to see Sandra were turned away at the door and told she was resting. When people asked why the children were not receiving medical care, Noticias Argentinas reported, she made excuses.
The alarm was finally raised by relatives. El Español reported that the children's grandmother insisted on seeing Sandra, found her gravely ill, and refused to accept her daughter-in-law's explanation that a doctor had already been called. She contacted the children's uncle, who came to the house and called an ambulance himself. Noticias Argentinas also credited the uncle with summoning help, and said a police investigation began from that point.
Sandra was admitted to hospital on June 4, 2004, and died the same day. She was 15. Doctors found signs of poisoning that were unusual in someone her age and reported the case to the courts; Diario de León wrote that she had arrived in very poor condition and that an autopsy was ordered. Samples were sent to Spain's National Institute of Toxicology in Madrid for analysis.
Her younger brother was admitted with similar but less severe symptoms. Noticias Argentinas dated his admission to June 5. Tests confirmed that he too had been drugged. By the time of Ballesteros's committal to prison he was still being treated at the Hospital Comarcal for the same poisoning that had killed his sister, Diario de León reported.
The autopsy on Sandra and the later exhumation of her father's body found the same drug, according to Noticias Argentinas. Police also searched the family home.
Police arrested Ballesteros within days of Sandra's death. Noticias Argentinas dated the arrest to June 6, 2004; El Español placed it on June 7, three days after Sandra died. El Español wrote that the arrest came in time to save her son, who still needed months of hospital care. Around the same time, El Español reported, the man in Tenerife ended the relationship because she had stopped answering his calls.
Ballesteros spent two days at the provincial police headquarters in Melilla. Diario de León reported on June 10, 2004, that there she confessed to giving a pharmaceutical product to her husband and their two children. She told police that her husband was an alcoholic who mistreated her and had threatened to leave her. The confession came five days after Sandra's death and seven months after her husband's, the paper noted, and investigators believed she had been carrying out her plan for at least two years.
Noticias Argentinas reported that she told police she had drugged the children to keep them calm, and that she also admitted killing her husband, blaming his mistreatment of her. Her account of the motive changed over time. At trial, El Español reported, she said she had wanted to kill her children out of compassion: in her account they were suffering terribly and wanted to be with their father, and she had helped them go.
She was taken to Melilla prison on the order of the city's Court of First Instance and Instruction number 5. Diario de León reported that she arrived dressed in black with her face covered, and that she gave evidence before the investigating judge for about three hours. 3Cat dated her entry into Melilla prison to June 9, 2004. Late that month she was moved to the prison at Alhaurín de la Torre, in Málaga province, 3Cat reported on June 28, 2004.
By then her son had been discharged from hospital after about two weeks, according to 3Cat. Other reports describe a much longer recovery: El Español wrote that he needed months of hospital treatment, and Noticias Argentinas reported that the court's compensation award covered injuries that took eight months to heal.
The investigation also went back over the husband's death. Diario de León reported in June 2004 that investigators were considering exhuming his body to test it, and Noticias Argentinas later reported that the exhumation found the drug. Florinda's death in 1990 became part of the case after Ballesteros admitted it, and she was later convicted of that killing as well.
The trial began on September 21, 2005, before the Audiencia Provincial de Málaga sitting in Melilla. MelillaHoy's Mustafa Hamed, who attended parts of the hearing, recalled in 2024 that she showed no remorse or sense of guilt for any of the deaths at any stage of the proceedings.
Psychiatric experts gave evidence on her state of mind. According to El Español, they found no personality disorder and no psychotic illness, and concluded that she had full use of her mental faculties during the roughly 14 years over which the crimes were committed. Noticias Argentinas likewise reported that court-appointed experts found her of sound mind.
In her testimony, Noticias Argentinas reported, she said she had not wanted them to suffer, and she described her husband and children as obstacles to a new life with the man who knew her online as "Fogosa".
The prosecution asked for 79 years at the start and raised its request to 84 years in its final submissions, Diario de León reported.
On September 26, 2005, the court sentenced Ballesteros to 84 years in prison, the term the prosecutor had requested. Diario de León reported the sentence the next day. Noticias Argentinas reported the terms for each count:
25 years for the murder, with other charges, of Sandra;
20 years for the murder, with other charges, of Florinda;
20 years for the murder of her husband, with the aggravating circumstance of treachery;
19 years for the attempted murder, with other charges, of her son, with loss of parental authority over him.
El Español summarized the judgment as four parricide offenses, three completed poisonings and one attempt, with the aggravating circumstances of treachery, cruelty and the family relationship. She was ordered to pay compensation to her son: Noticias Argentinas reported 180,000 euros for his sister's death, 200,000 euros for his father's death and 11,390 euros for his own injuries, and MelillaHoy put the total awarded to him for the deaths of his father and sisters at more than 500,000 euros.
Ballesteros appealed to the Supreme Court in Madrid. MelillaHoy reported that the Supreme Court upheld the 84-year sentence. In its judgment, according to MelillaHoy, the high court found that she had abused her position as mother and wife and that her persistence in causing the deaths was objectively inhuman.
Ballesteros was held in custody from June 2004. In June 2024, on the twentieth anniversary of the case, MelillaHoy reported that she was 55 and serving her sentence in a prison far from Melilla. The paper noted that she had been jailed before Spain introduced its reviewable permanent prison sentence, and its writer suggested that her release might not be far off.
The son was 12 when he was poisoned, according to most reports; MelillaHoy, writing in 2024, gave his age as 14. He was the only member of the household to survive the poisonings apart from his mother. The court stripped her of parental authority over him and ordered her to compensate him for the deaths of his father and sisters and for his own injuries. El Español wrote in 2019 that he had been left without his father and his sisters, and so, in effect, without his mother as well.
Ballesteros was convicted of three killings and one attempt. Other deaths in her family have drawn questions that no court has examined.
El Español reported in 2019 that she was suspected of possible involvement in the unexplained deaths of her parents. Noticias Argentinas reported that her father died in the year she came of age, reportedly of a heart attack, that her mother died in 2001, also of a reported heart attack, and that her siblings died young. Investigators considered exhuming the remains of her parents and siblings, the agency reported, but dropped the idea because traces of poison would be hard to find after so many years. She was not charged in any of those deaths, and no court has attributed them to her.
Accounts of the case disagree on several details. Her husband's death is dated January 7, 2004, by Diario de León and January 12, 2004, by El Español and Noticias Argentinas. Her arrest is dated June 6 by Noticias Argentinas and June 7 by El Español. Florinda's age at death is given as five months by 3Cat and Diario de León and as six months by El Español and Noticias Argentinas. The son's age is given as 12 in reports from 2004 and 2005 and as 14 in MelillaHoy's 2024 article. The length of his hospital stay is given as about two weeks by 3Cat in June 2004 and as months by El Español.
1987: Ballesteros marries Antonio González, according to El Español; the couple settle in Melilla.
1990: Their first daughter, Florinda, dies as a baby; the death is put down to natural causes.
Summer 2003: Ballesteros is in contact online with a man from Tenerife.
August 2003: Start of the poisoning of her husband, as reported from the 2005 judgment.
October 2003: Her husband is admitted to intensive care in Melilla.
November to December 2003: The household is hospitalized for poisoning, which she blames on a fumigation; she travels to Tenerife and accepts a marriage proposal.
January 2004: Antonio González dies in Melilla (January 7 or January 12, by different reports); the death is recorded as natural.
June 4, 2004: Sandra, 15, dies in hospital; her brother is admitted with poisoning.
June 6 or 7, 2004: Ballesteros is arrested in Melilla; she confesses to the poisonings of her husband and the two children.
June 9, 2004: She is committed to Melilla prison.
June 2004: She admits killing Florinda in 1990; she is moved to the prison at Alhaurín de la Torre.
September 21, 2005: Trial opens before the Audiencia Provincial de Málaga in Melilla.
September 26, 2005: Convicted of the murders of her husband and two daughters and the attempted murder of her son; sentenced to 84 years.
After 2005: The Supreme Court upholds the sentence.
June 30, 2024: MelillaHoy reports she is serving her sentence in a prison far from Melilla.