On June 4, 2004, a fifteen-year-old girl named Sandra Gonzalez Ballesteros died in Melilla, the Spanish city on the North African coast, and her twelve-year-old brother, Antonio, was taken to hospital the same day, poisoned. The autopsy on Sandra showed she had been poisoned too. Three days after her death, on June 7, police arrested their mother, Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla, known as Paqui. Antonio survived, after eight months of recovery.
Ballesteros was born in Valencia in 1969 and moved to Melilla a few years later. She married Antonio Gonzalez Barribino, and their first daughter, Florinda, was born in 1990. That year, by her own later account, she was suffering from postpartum depression and wanted out of her marriage; instead of leaving, she decided to kill her family and go back to Valencia. She poisoned Florinda, five months old, with Colme, a medicine containing calcium cyanamide that is prescribed to make alcoholics sick if they drink. The death drew no suspicion. She decided to wait before killing the rest.
Fourteen years later, having met a number of men online, she decided to go through with it and join one of them, a man in Tenerife. On January 12, 2004, her husband, forty-one, died after she gave him Colme with the sedatives zolpidem and bromazepam. On June 4 she gave the same mixture to Sandra and to Antonio.
At first she confessed to poisoning her husband and the two older children, and denied any part in Florinda's death. She said she had dosed her husband with Colme until he died because he drank and abused her, physically and above all psychologically, and that she had given the medicine to Sandra and Antonio so that they would not suffer from their father's loss. After a few days in prison she confessed that she had killed Florinda too, and the 1990 death was reopened.
The trial opened on September 21, 2005, before a jury of the Malaga provincial court sitting in Melilla, and those who watched remembered her face as impassive throughout. On September 26 she was convicted of murdering Sandra with treachery and cruelty, of murdering her husband and Florinda with treachery, and of attempting to murder Antonio, and sentenced to eighty-four years. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence on appeal.
Spanish law in force in 2004 capped the time actually served, and life imprisonment subject to review did not yet exist, so her release could come well short of the nominal term. By 2024, twenty years after the killings, she was fifty-five and serving her sentence in a prison far from Melilla.