Juan Díaz de Garayo was a farm laborer from the province of Álava, in the Basque Country of northern Spain, who lived and worked for decades in and around Vitoria without drawing much attention. In September 1879, on two consecutive days, two women were killed on roads near the city. Garayo was arrested on September 21, 1879, and after several days of silence he confessed not only to those two killings but to four earlier ones, committed between 1870 and 1872, and to several attacks on women who survived. The court sentenced him to death twice, for the two 1879 killings only. He was executed by garrote in Vitoria on May 11, 1881.
The case is remembered in Spain for two reasons. The first is the name. Spanish folklore already had a "sacamantecas," a figure said to steal human fat, used to frighten children. The press and the public attached the name to Garayo, and he became the best-known bearer of it. The second is the courtroom fight over his sanity. Eleven doctors in Vitoria, led by Ramón Apraiz, examined him for months and found him responsible for his acts. José María Esquerdo, a Madrid alienist, argued that he was a "moral idiot" who should go to an asylum. The court sided with the Vitoria doctors, and historians of Spanish psychiatry and criminology still cite the case as an early test of how far medical evidence should shape a criminal verdict.
The index of the Diocesan Historical Archive of Vitoria records the baptism of Juan Díaz de Garayo Ruiz de Argandoña under the date October 17, 1821, in the parish of San Pedro in Eguílaz, a village in the eastern part of Álava. His parents were Nicolás Díaz de Garayo and Norberta Ruiz de Argandoña. One later article gives his birth date as October 16, 1821; most sources give October 17, and the archive entry does not say whether its date is that of birth or of baptism.
His family was poor. He was sent out to work young, and he spent his youth and early adulthood as a servant, farmhand, shepherd and charcoal burner in villages of the plain around Vitoria, Gasteiz Hoy reported in 2026, before settling in the city itself. He never learned to read or write as a free man. Ramón Apraiz, who examined him in prison, later described him as a poor, illiterate farmer who had suffered many misfortunes.
The picture of his family that survives comes mostly from the doctors who argued over his sanity, and it was shaped by that argument. Accounts drawn from the trial describe his father as a short-tempered heavy drinker and his mother as severely nervous. A sister, Florentina, appears in the record as well; the press of the time wrote about her in harsh terms. These descriptions were part of an effort by some alienists to show an inherited taint, and the Cuaderno de Cultura Científica, a science outreach journal of the University of the Basque Country, has noted that they reflect the prejudices of the period as much as the facts.
On November 25, 1850, Garayo married Antonia López de Berrostigueta Arrieta in the parish of San Vicente Mártir in Vitoria, according to the diocesan archive. She was a widow, and older and better off than he was. People in Vitoria knew her as "la Zurrumbona," and Garayo took the matching nickname "Zurrumbón," which stayed with him for the rest of his life; local people knew him by it long after the press began to use "Sacamantecas." The marriage lasted until her death in 1863. They had five children, of whom three survived. Later writers described these years as the calmest of his life.
He married Juana Salazar Salazar on February 7, 1864, again at San Vicente Mártir. COPE, the Spanish broadcaster, described the second marriage as unhappy and the wife as a violent drinker; Garayo later said that in these years he began to visit prostitutes, and he blamed that habit for what he became. The diocesan burial index records Juana Salazar's death on May 16, 1871, in the same parish.
On June 26, 1872, he married Agustina Ruiz de Loizaga Murga at San Vicente Mártir. She died in 1876; COPE described the circumstances as suspicious. No source shows that Garayo had any part in the death of any of his wives, and the Cuaderno de Cultura Científica states that he did not. On May 7, 1877, he married his fourth wife, Juana Ybisate (also written Ibisate) Zuazo, at the parish of Santa María in Vitoria. She outlived him.
The four earlier killings are known almost entirely from Garayo's own confession and from accounts written after his arrest. They were never tried. What follows is what he admitted and what later sources report, not what a court found.
On April 2, 1870, a woman known in Vitoria as "La Valdegoviesa" was killed beside the Errekatxiki stream (also written Recachiqui) on the outskirts of the city. Garayo told investigators that he had paid her for sex and that they argued over the price; he strangled her and left her in the water. Her body was found the next day. There were no leads, and the case was shelved.
The second victim was a poor widow known as "La Riojana," who begged for a living. She too was strangled after a dispute over payment, in Garayo's account. The Cuaderno de Cultura Científica dates her death to 1871; a 2016 study in the journal Neurosciences and History by the neurologist S. Giménez-Roldán places both of the first two killings in 1870.
In August 1872 two more victims died. One was a 13-year-old servant girl who had been sent on an errand and was walking on a road outside Vitoria. Garayo assaulted and strangled her. This killing, COPE reported, was the one that made Vitoria treat the rumors of a killer on the roads as a real threat. The other was a young woman who, like the first two, sold sex.
The killings then stopped for seven years, but the attacks did not. In 1873 Garayo attacked a young woman near the old powder magazine, the Polvorín Viejo, on the edge of the city; she screamed, soldiers on guard there came running, and he fled. In June 1874 he attacked an elderly beggar, who also escaped when others arrived. Both women survived. Neither reported him, and he was not identified.
On November 1, 1878, he attacked a woman who ran a mill near Vitoria. She fought him off and reported him, and this time he was caught and punished: he served about two months in prison. No one connected him at that stage with the earlier deaths. She survived and is not named here.
In August 1879, on the road toward Castile, he attacked another elderly woman who escaped and fled home. His fourth wife, Juana Ibisate, then paid the woman 20 pesetas to keep quiet. The Asociación Galega de Saúde Mental account of the case reports the payment and says Ibisate later told the constable who was investigating the September killings about it, which helped lead to Garayo's arrest.
Garayo was not the only threat to women in Álava in these years. Ander Gondra Aguirre, the historian who curated a 2017 exhibition on the case at the Fundación Sancho el Sabio in Vitoria, wrote in its catalog that at least sixteen killings of women were counted in Vitoria during the 1870s. Only six were ever attributed to Garayo. People at the time suspected imitators. A particularly brutal killing on the road to Mendiola in January 1878 set off a rumor across the province that the killer was a "sacauntos," someone who took organs and fat to sell. That killing was never formally linked to Garayo.
On September 7, 1879, María Dolores García de Cortázar, 25, was killed near the charcoal kilns of Ordumbre, in the district of Zaitegui, north of Vitoria. Garayo had fallen into conversation with her on the road. When she refused his advances, he stabbed her. Her body was hidden in a wooded area, Confilegal reported in 2025.
The next morning, September 8, 1879, Manuela Audícana, 52, was walking home to the village of Nafarrete from a fair in Vitoria, where she had bought groceries. Garayo walked with her along the road toward Araca and then attacked and killed her. He mutilated her body. In his later statements he said he had done this on purpose, so that people would believe the legendary sacamantecas had struck, "so that nobody would think of me," in Gondra's paraphrase of the record. The court of first instance in Vitoria would later treat her death as robbery and murder; the printed judgments of that court in the case are catalogued under the title of a case "for the robbery and murder of Manuela Audícana."
The two deaths, a day apart, revived the fear that had gripped Vitoria in 1872.
Pío Fernández de Pinedo, a municipal constable (alguacil) in Vitoria, had been following leads for days: descriptions from witnesses, the earlier attacks and the evidence of the women who had survived. Gondra's catalog says the four failed attacks of earlier years gave him much of what he needed. COPE described the arrest as following a chance encounter in Vitoria. On September 21, 1879, Pinedo arrested Garayo in the center of the city.
A popular version of the story, repeated for more than a century, has a girl recognizing Garayo in the street and shouting "Sacamantecas!" until a crowd seized him. The Cuaderno de Cultura Científica rejects this account: the arrest was police work by Pinedo, based on the survivors' descriptions.
At first Garayo denied everything and for several days refused to make any statement. COPE put his silence at about 15 days. Gondra wrote that the prison governor and a keeper eventually wore him down, "and perhaps some other, more expeditious method," a reminder that interrogation in 1879 was not gentle. In the end he began to talk after appeals to his religious feeling and to repentance.
He then confessed to the two September killings, to the four earlier killings and to the failed attacks. He told investigators that the Devil was responsible. Confilegal, drawing on a 2014 history of the Supreme Court's celebrated cases, reported that he confessed to five earlier killings rather than four and that the authorities officially attributed seven killings and four attempts to him; the other accounts give six killings in all.
Garayo was charged with six killings but was tried only for the last two, Gondra's catalog states. The four earlier killings, which rested mainly on his confession, were not pursued to a verdict. The case was heard by the court of first instance of Vitoria, whose judgments in the Garayo cases were later printed in Vitoria as a pamphlet of rulings in celebrated cases ("causas de celebridad notoria"). In November 1879 the court sentenced him to death for each of the two killings of September 1879.
His defense lawyer argued that Garayo could not be held criminally responsible because he had acted under irresistible impulses. The appeal went to the Audiencia of Burgos, the higher court for the region, and from there to the Supreme Court in Madrid. The defense pointed to procedural defects and contradictions in the case. The Supreme Court upheld both death sentences, ruling that the facts were proven and that weighing the medical evidence was a matter for the Audiencia, Confilegal reported, citing the Supreme Court's own history of its celebrated cases.
The real contest was over Garayo's mind. The court ordered a group of local doctors to examine him. Eleven physicians of Vitoria took part, led by Ramón Apraiz, a hygienist who had studied under the legal medicine pioneer Pedro Mata. They observed the prisoner over the first months of 1880. Their conclusion, as Apraiz later put it, was that "Juan Díaz de Garayo is not an imbecile and has no monomania at all," either when he killed or afterward. He had normal intellect and acted with free will. Apraiz rejected the claims that Garayo's head or body were abnormal, and he played down the stories of a degenerate family. Sources differ on the size of the group: Gondra and Confilegal give eleven doctors, the Giménez-Roldán study speaks of Apraiz and eleven others, and the Cuaderno de Cultura Científica says ten.
The Vitoria doctors did not want Garayo executed. If it had been up to them, Apraiz said, they would have asked strongly for the death penalty to be commuted, though they also opposed sending him to an asylum. Apraiz set out the group's findings in lectures at the Ateneo of Vitoria in February 1881 under the title "Garayo 'El Sacamantecas': ¿Es cuerdo o es loco?" ("Is he sane or mad?"), later printed in Vitoria. He argued there were two Garayos: the brute of the public imagination and the real man, who was sane.
On the other side stood José María Esquerdo, a leading Madrid alienist. Esquerdo obtained permission from the Audiencia of Burgos to act as an expert and traveled to Vitoria to examine the prisoner. He described Garayo's face, jaw, gait and skull in unflattering detail, called his head deformed, traced a family history of madness and drink, and concluded that Garayo was an "idiota moral," a moral idiot, suffering from what the psychiatry of the day called "monomanía genésica," a sexual monomania. Under Article 8 of the Penal Code, which exempted the insane and "imbeciles" from criminal responsibility, the crimes could not in his view be imputed to him, and he belonged in an asylum. The court rejected his report.
Esquerdo took the argument to the public. His lecture series "Locos que no lo parecen" ("Madmen who do not seem so") at the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid began in March 1880, and its sessions of January and February 1881 were devoted to Garayo, then under sentence of death; the town council of Villajoyosa, Esquerdo's birthplace, says these drew the largest audiences of the series. The physician Ángel Pulido reported on them in El Siglo Médico in February 1881, and the Garayo lectures were published that year as a book. Esquerdo warned against confusing madness with crime, and he closed with an appeal that the insane always have a family in humanity that cares for them.
Historians treat the Garayo case as one of the first great Spanish trials in which psychiatrists fought openly in court over a defendant's responsibility. A 2007 article in the Revista de Historia de la Psicología called Esquerdo's report on the "Sacamantecas" the most significant of the psychiatric expert reports on famous criminals of the period and said it set a new model for the forensic expert in court. The CSIC historian Ricardo Campos has written that Esquerdo, in the Garayo lectures, set out degenerationist ideas for the first time, together with elements of Cesare Lombroso's theory of the born criminal, leaning on heredity and on measurements of Garayo's body and skull. Esquerdo went on to argue, in this case and in later ones, that the courts had made a judicial error.
The courts, for their part, held to classical legal principles. In a 2003 essay in the Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Juan Nebreda Torres cited the case as an early precedent in which judges sentenced a defendant to death without regard to medical reports diagnosing a form of epileptoid madness. The criminologist Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós later made Garayo one of the subjects of his book Figuras delincuentes, where, according to a 2023 study by José Manuel Ríos Corbacho of the University of Granada, he presented him through the Lombrosian figure of the born criminal. The case reached literature too: Benito Pérez Galdós used the nickname "Sacamantecas" for a character in his novel Lo prohibido, and a 1972 study in Anales Galdosianos linked a detail of another Galdós character to Esquerdo's description of Garayo's roving eye.
Modern writers are more skeptical of all the experts. In his 2016 study of skull and face readings in Spanish court reports, Giménez-Roldán judged the cranial diagnoses of the period arbitrary and of little scientific value, made by eye and mixing features that could not all coexist.
Garayo spent about a year and a half in the prison at Vitoria. In February 1880 the journalist Francisco de Asís Pacheco visited it and began a series of reports for the Madrid newspaper El Liberal, describing it as a prison that held some of the most brutal criminals in Spain, Garayo among them. Gondra's catalog gathers the stories that came out of the prison. Garayo stayed calm under pressure. He learned to dress and shave in shackles. He took an interest in learning to read. He would recount his crimes to visitors in exchange for alms. The Vitoria press followed the case closely from opposing political camps: the republican El Anunciador Vitoriano and the Carlist El Gorbea both covered it.
The day before his execution, his sister Florentina came to see him. Her words to him were recorded as "You did it, and you will pay for it"; the Giménez-Roldán study, which says she was drunk, gives a slightly different wording. Degenerationist writers later seized on the remark.
At eight in the morning on May 11, 1881, Garayo was taken in a covered cart to the scaffold at the Polvorín Viejo in Vitoria and executed by garrote vil, the strangling device then used for executions in Spain. The death certificate cited by Giménez-Roldán gives the time as 8:30 a.m. Newspapers estimated the crowd at about 10,000 people. Afterward the crowd pressed toward the scaffold and cavalry had to disperse it. The body was left on display until late in the afternoon. The day after the execution, El Anunciador Vitoriano published a lament against the death penalty.
Sources disagree on who carried out the execution. The Cuaderno de Cultura Científica says the most widely repeated version names Gregorio Mayoral of Burgos, while others name Lorenzo Huertas. The record leaves the question open.
The autopsy took place on May 12, 1881, at the cemetery of Santa Isabel in Vitoria. About forty people attended: Vitoria doctors, alienists from Esquerdo's circle and journalists. The Cuaderno de Cultura Científica lists ten military doctors, six alienists, a pharmacist and about a dozen journalists. The alienists hoped the body would prove a link between the shape of the skull and the crimes, a link the court had refused to accept.
Esquerdo described a small, flattened cerebellum, a reduced and discolored rhomboid body, unusually large Pacchionian granulations and a somewhat exaggerated external occipital crest. He took these as confirmation that Garayo had been mad. La Vanguardia quoted him as saying that "the criminal has ceased to be one; the corpse has solved the problem." Giménez-Roldán's modern verdict is that Esquerdo read these details as proof of insanity arbitrarily.
The body was meant to go to Garayo's widow, but she could not take it, and it was buried in a common grave at Santa Isabel. The skull apparently was not buried with it. According to a 1929 article by Ricardo Apraiz, Ramón Apraiz kept it at his home for the rest of his life, and after his death the people who handled his papers had it buried. Some who saw it compared it to the skull of a Neanderthal. Samples of brain tissue that Apraiz promised to send to the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid apparently never arrived. COPE reported in 2025 that the skull has never been found.
The sacamantecas was a folk figure long before Garayo. Under that name and others, such as el Coco, el Tío Saín, el Hombre del saco and el Sacauntos (Gantzeru in Bizkaia), Spanish and Basque tradition told of a man who killed women and children to take their fat for soaps and ointments. Parents used him to make children come home early. The Galician tailor Manuel Blanco Romasanta had been called by the same name earlier in the century.
Garayo did not take anyone's fat. He did not perform any ritual, and the stories of rendered fat and ointments do not appear in the trial record, Confilegal noted. By his own account he used the legend as cover when he mutilated his last victim. Ficción y realidad terminaban por fundirse, Gondra wrote: fiction and reality ended by merging. The nickname that he had hoped would point away from him became his name in print.
The legend went on without him. About a week after the execution a crowd in Pamplona chased a stranger, shouting "Sakamantekas!", until guards escorted him to safety. In October 1881 families near Hernani kept their children indoors after a reported struggle between a stranger and a nine-year-old girl. In 1882 a children's show called "Un nuevo Sacamantecas" was staged in Madrid. In 1892 the Bilbao newspaper El Nervión complained that people saw a sacamantecas on every corner.
Separating the man from the legend has been a theme of recent work in Vitoria. Gondra's 2017 exhibition was built around that question. In September 2026 the researchers Isabel Mellén and Enrique Echazarra led a public session at Arkabia, Vitoria's archive center, on how the story has been told and on the biases in the documentary sources, with a film shot in Vitoria in 1979 about the case that the Fundación Sancho el Sabio had recovered.
The Vitoria writer Ricardo Becerro de Bengoa published "El Sacamantecas: su retrato y sus crímenes," a 58-page account of the case, printed in Vitoria. It included a photograph of Garayo and was, Gondra noted, the first book published in Vitoria with photographic illustrations. Esquerdo's Garayo lectures were printed in 1881, and Apraiz's lectures were also printed in Vitoria. These three works remain the main early sources for the case. Later books include Aitxus Iñarra Garcia's Basque-language study of the case (2005).
Fiction has returned to Garayo often. A novel, El alma del Sacamantecas by Olga Fernández Txasko, appeared in 2025. In 2026 the director David Pérez Sañudo released the film Sacamantecas (in English, The Harvester), with Antonio de la Torre as Garayo, Patricia López Arnaiz as a fictional victim's sister, and Josean Bengoetxea as the constable Pío Pinedo. It screened out of competition in the Official Selection of the 74th San Sebastian International Film Festival in September 2026 and opened in Spanish cinemas on November 6, 2026. The film says it is based on real events but builds its own story around the invented sister. A graphic novel based on it was announced by Planeta Cómic for November 2026.
Proven by final judgment: the killings of María Dolores García de Cortázar and Manuela Audícana in September 1879, for which Garayo received two death sentences, upheld on appeal and by the Supreme Court. The Audícana case was tried as robbery and murder.
Confessed, never tried: the four killings of 1870 to 1872 and the four failed attacks. They rest mainly on Garayo's own statements and on the accounts written after his arrest.
Never linked to him: most of the at least sixteen killings of women in Vitoria in the 1870s, including the January 1878 killing on the road to Mendiola that started the "sacauntos" rumor.
Details that vary between sources: his birth date (October 16 or 17, 1821); the year of the second killing (1870 or 1871); the total he confessed to (six killings in most sources, seven in Confilegal's); the number of Vitoria doctors (ten, eleven or twelve); the time of the execution (8:00 or 8:30 a.m.); and the executioner (Gregorio Mayoral or Lorenzo Huertas). The Cuaderno de Cultura Científica dates the arrest to 1880; Gondra's catalog and other sources give September 21, 1879, which fits the November 1879 sentence. The story that a shouting girl caused his arrest is rejected by modern accounts. The idea that he took his victims' fat comes from the folk legend, not from the record.
October 17, 1821: baptismal record of Juan Díaz de Garayo Ruiz de Argandoña, parish of San Pedro, Eguílaz, Álava.
Youth: works as a servant, farmhand, shepherd and charcoal burner in villages around Vitoria.
November 25, 1850: marries Antonia López de Berrostigueta, a widow, in Vitoria; becomes known as "Zurrumbón."
1863: his first wife dies.
February 7, 1864: marries Juana Salazar.
April 2, 1870: the killing of "La Valdegoviesa" by the Errekatxiki stream.
1871 (1870 in one study): the killing of "La Riojana."
May 16, 1871: Juana Salazar's death recorded in the parish index.
June 26, 1872: marries Agustina Ruiz de Loizaga.
August 1872: a 13-year-old servant girl and a young woman are killed near Vitoria.
1873 and June 1874: failed attacks on two women, who escape.
1876: his third wife dies.
May 7, 1877: marries Juana Ybisate.
January 1878: a killing on the road to Mendiola, never linked to him, sets off the "sacauntos" rumor.
November 1, 1878: attacks a miller near Vitoria; serves about two months in prison.
August 1879: attacks an elderly woman on the road toward Castile; his wife pays her 20 pesetas to keep quiet.
September 7, 1879: María Dolores García de Cortázar is killed near Zaitegui.
September 8, 1879: Manuela Audícana is killed on the road toward Araca.
September 21, 1879: arrested in Vitoria by Pío Fernández de Pinedo; later confesses.
November 1879: two death sentences.
Early 1880: eleven Vitoria doctors led by Ramón Apraiz observe him and find him sane.
February 1880: Francisco de Asís Pacheco's prison reports begin in El Liberal.
March 1880: Esquerdo begins his lecture series "Locos que no lo parecen" in Madrid.
1880 to 1881: appeals to the Audiencia of Burgos and the Supreme Court fail.
January and February 1881: Esquerdo's lectures on Garayo; Apraiz lectures at the Ateneo of Vitoria in February.
May 11, 1881: executed by garrote vil at the Polvorín Viejo, Vitoria.
May 12, 1881: autopsy at Santa Isabel cemetery; burial in a common grave.
1881: Esquerdo's lectures on Garayo published; Becerro de Bengoa's and Apraiz's accounts also printed in Vitoria.
1929: Ricardo Apraiz writes that Ramón Apraiz kept the skull until his death.
2017: exhibition "Autopsia de una ciudad: la Vitoria del Sacamantecas," Fundación Sancho el Sabio.
September 2026: the film Sacamantecas screens at the San Sebastian festival; public session at Arkabia on the sources.
November 6, 2026: the film opens in Spanish cinemas.