In the spring of 1772 the city of Coimbra learned that babies taken from its foundling wheel had been dying in the hands of a woman who had been trusted to carry them to their nurses. Luísa de Jesus, a carrier in her early twenties, had collected dozens of infants from the foundling house run by the Misericórdia, the city's great Catholic charity, and had taken for each one the payment the house advanced for a child's care. The babies never reached a nurse. Searches in April 1772 accounted for 33 of them. The house's own records showed that 34 had been handed to her.
The judges of the Casa da Suplicação in Lisbon, the kingdom's highest court, sentenced her to death in a decision dated July 1, 1772. She was executed in Lisbon the same year. The historian Maria Antónia Lopes of the University of Coimbra, who has studied every woman sentenced to death in Portugal from 1693 to the abolition of the death penalty, identifies her as the last woman executed in the country and her sentence as the harshest given to any woman in the series she studied.
The victims were newborn foundlings. Their mothers had left them anonymously, and their names are not recorded in any published account of the case. What can be said of them is what the foundling system recorded of every child it received: that each was taken in at the wheel, baptized as a foundling, and entrusted to a woman who said she would see the child nursed.
Portugal, like much of Catholic Europe, dealt with abandoned infants through the roda dos expostos, the foundling wheel, a revolving cylinder set into the wall of a charitable house through which a baby could be passed inside without the person leaving it being seen. In Coimbra the wheel and the children who came through it were in the care of the Misericórdia from 1708 until 1839, Lopes writes in her study of foundling care in the Coimbra region, published in the Brazilian journal Caderno Espaço Feminino in 2013. The city council was legally responsible for foundlings and long delayed taking the service over; the transfer was made only in May 1839.
The house was run by a woman, the rodeira, under the supervision of the Misericórdia's officers. The post was filled by public competition, and several women usually applied for it. The numbers the house handled rose steadily through the century. In the first years of the 1700s the wheel received fewer than fifty children a year. In the 1750s, Lopes calculates from the baptisms, it averaged about 125 a year; between 1770 and 1778, the decade in which the case broke, it received more than 200 a year; by the 1790s the figure was 263, and in the first decade of the nineteenth century 363.
The house did not raise most of the children itself. Until 1785 it had no resident wet nurses; nearly every child was placed with a nurse outside, an ama externa, who took the baby home and nursed it there at the house's expense. Almost all of these women, Lopes writes, were rural and poor, most of them peasants and most of them married. The pay was set at 500 réis a month in 1710, a sum the Misericórdia itself admitted was too little to attract nurses, and raised to 600 réis a month in 1721. The charity tried to add privileges, among them exemption from military service for a nurse's husband and sons, and they did not bring enough women forward. The wages were also paid late, when they were paid at all: Lopes describes the Roda's failure to meet its salary obligations as constant across generations, and by 1750 its debt to nurses already exceeded ten million réis.
Many of the nurses lived far from the city. Lopes describes women who came to Coimbra in small groups, staying away from home overnight, to collect a child or to draw their pay. The system depended on that traffic between the villages and the wheel, and on trust: the house handed a child, a cradle and an advance to a woman who said she would nurse it, and it had few means of following what happened next.
For many children, what happened next was death. In 1813 Filipe de Araújo e Castro concluded that three-quarters of all foundlings died, Lopes records. In 1832 the Misericórdia itself warned that the house risked becoming "a cemetery rather than an asylum for unfortunate innocents." The deaths of infants in the foundling system were so common that a run of them, on its own, would not have marked out any one woman.
The mothers who used the wheel were, for the most part, poor. A priest's certificate of 1827 that Lopes quotes explains one abandonment in a single phrase: the mother had left the boy "because of her poverty." Some single mothers left their own child at the wheel and then took in a foundling as a paid nurse; others came back for a child days or months later. The parish clergy, Lopes notes, generally did not condemn poor single mothers for abandoning their children.
According to Lopes's account of the case, which follows the chronicle of the Coimbra friar Cláudio da Conceição, the house paid 600 réis in advance for each child's upkeep, together with a measure of baize cloth and a cradle. The Coimbra city council's 2022 account describes the same payment and the same layette, a cradle and half a metre of heavy cloth, given with each child the house placed. Correio da Manhã, in Carlos Anjos's 2015 survey of Portuguese serial killers, describes the payment as the 600 réis given to anyone who collected a child, and names it, with the layette, as the motive.
Luísa de Jesus was not a nurse. The city council describes her as a woman of the common people who worked in Coimbra as a recoveira, a carrier paid by the job to move goods. Correio da Manhã's 2026 feature says she had worked from childhood as an almocreve, travelling between villages to buy and sell goods, at a time when children commonly began to work at seven or eight. The council's account says she began to collect babies from the wheel in the course of that work.
What she did, as the sources describe it, relied on the foundling house's trust. She went to the wheel and asked for children on behalf of other women, who she said would nurse them; Lopes describes her as a woman who "went to fetch them in the name of others" ("ia buscá-los em nome de outras"). The city council account says she gave the house the names of real people, or of people she invented, and collected infants in their names. Correio da Manhã (2015) describes the same use of false names. The children she collected never reached the women whose names she gave. The sources do not record when this began or over how long a period it went on.
Little is recorded about her life before 1772, and the accounts disagree on basic points. Correio da Manhã's 2026 feature, by Paulo Sargento, Manuel Maria Rodrigues and Carlos Anjos, cites a baptism record giving her birth as December 10, 1748, at Figueira de Lorvão, in the municipality of Penacova northeast of Coimbra. It names her parents as Manoel and Mariana Rodrigues, first cousins of Galician origin and of low social class. The Coimbra city council also gives 1748 and Figueira de Lorvão, and Sábado, in a 2017 article by Pedro Jorge Castro, places her birth at Figueira de Lorvão, Penacova. Penacova Actual, the local news site, says she was born at Figueira de Lorvão and lived at Gavinhos. Correio da Manhã's 2015 account gives Coimbra and 1750, and Lopes, working from the friar's chronicle, describes her as a young woman of 22 who had been born and raised in the city.
Her age in 1772 is given as 22 by Lopes, by Correio da Manhã (2015) and by Sábado, which also describes her as married. The city council calls her 24 when the case came to light. Correio da Manhã (2026) says she married very young, to Manuel Gomes, of whom it records only that he disappeared early from her life. None of the sources describes children of her own.
The case came to light in early April 1772. According to the Coimbra city council's account, a worker at the foundling house named Angélica Maria found the body of a baby at Montarroio, the slope below the upper town where the foundling house stood, and its clothing matched that of a child Luísa de Jesus had collected from the house only days before. Lopes records that she was denounced in April 1772 and that a scandal broke out in the city.
She was arrested and questioned, and the search widened. By April 19, 1772, the city council records, 15 infants had been found; that day she admitted killing nine of them and continued to deny the other six. Lopes gives the same figure of 15 found at the Alto de Montarroio. A search connected with her house accounted for 18 more, the council's account says. Together that made 33. Of the 34 children the house's records showed as handed to her, 33 were found dead, Lopes writes. What became of the thirty-fourth is not recorded in any of the published accounts.
The investigation also turned on the people who had handed the children over. The rodeira had been negligent, Lopes writes: she had given the children to a woman who said she was collecting them for others and had never checked what became of them. On the order of the juiz do crime, the judge for criminal cases in Coimbra, the rodeira and a wet nurse who worked inside the house were held in the city's public jail from April 6 to October 7, 1772, when they were released under an alvará de soltura, a release order. The source for those dates is the register of prisoners entering the Coimbra jail for 1768 to 1779, now in the Arquivo Histórico Municipal de Coimbra. The city council's account says the two women were arrested for having let Luísa de Jesus collect children in other people's names without checking the names or the addresses she gave. No penalty against them beyond the six months in jail is recorded.
She eventually confessed to killing 28 of the children. Lopes gives the figure of 28 from the friar's chronicle; Penacova Actual and Correio da Manhã's 2015 account give the same number. The other five deaths among the 33 she did not admit, and the court held her responsible for all of them. The early admission recorded by the city council, nine killings acknowledged on April 19 while six were denied, is the only dated step in the confession that a strong source records.
The court and the historians treat the payments as the motive: each child brought her an advance of 600 réis and the goods that went with it. Lopes describes the case in those terms, as do the Coimbra city council and Correio da Manhã (2015). The judges' own words, as Sábado and Correio da Manhã (2026) quote them, were that no one could be found with a heart so perverse and corrupt, "e de que não haverá facilmente exemplo no presente século," of which there would not easily be another example in the present century.
The case was not decided in Coimbra. Lopes notes that Coimbra lay within the jurisdiction of the Relação do Porto, the high court of the north, and not of the court in Lisbon; even so, Luísa de Jesus was tried and executed in Lisbon. The Lusa news agency, in a 2021 report printed by Observador, states that in 1772 she was tried and sentenced to death by the Casa da Suplicação de Lisboa, and the Coimbra city council quotes the sentence's closing line, "Lisboa, 1 de Julho de 1772." The council's account describes the case as without precedent in the kingdom and says it was judged by the intendant Pina Manique, Diogo Inácio de Pina Manique, later the most powerful police official in Portugal; Lopes's chapter does not name the judges. None of the sources explains why the case went to Lisbon.
Her defence argued that she was a minor. Under the law of the time a woman came of age at 25, and her lawyers contended that she could not be put to death. According to the city council's account, the judges rejected the argument, reasoning that someone old enough to commit such crimes was old enough to be tried for them, and the decision was unanimous.
The sentence was death. Lopes writes that of all the women in her series Luísa de Jesus received the most severe sentence, one of the very few in which penalties beyond the death itself were imposed. The sentence also ordered that no memory of her should remain. Lopes notes that in the cases where the timing is known, the condemned confessed and took communion on the day of sentencing and were executed soon afterwards.
Lopes states that the last woman executed in Portugal was put to death in Lisbon, although she lived in Coimbra. Her chapter gives July 1, 1772, as the date of the sentence and 1772 as the year of the execution. Correio da Manhã's 2015 account gives July 1, 1772, as the date of the execution itself, at the age of 22. None of the sources names the place in Lisbon where the sentence was carried out.
The contrast with the other women in Lopes's series is the point she draws out. Almost all of them, she writes, died by the ordinary form of execution, without the additional penalties of Luísa de Jesus's sentence, the "natural death" of the Ordenações, the kingdom's law code. Correio da Manhã (2015) calls part of her sentence without precedent in the execution of a woman.
Luísa de Jesus was not the only woman executed in Portugal that year. Lopes's chapter, which draws for 1772 on the friar's Gabinete histórico, records two other cases. Isabel Xavier Clesse was sentenced on March 28, 1772, for trying to kill her husband, and executed three days later in the Praça da Alegria in Lisbon. Maria Joaquina, an enslaved woman, was convicted with a freedwoman, Teresa de Jesus, and a man, Manuel Joaquim, of killing her master, João da Fonseca, in Lisbon in September 1771; she was sentenced on May 9, 1772, and executed three days later. Lopes notes serious doubts about the evidence in that case, which rested on a 13-year-old witness who later retracted.
The three cases fell within the Pombal period that Lopes marks out, and her figures show that the share of women among those executed rose under his administration: 12.5 percent of executions between 1755 and 1772, against 5.3 percent between 1693 and 1754. After 1772, no woman was executed in Portugal again.
Lopes's study is built mainly on a manuscript kept by the religious brothers who accompanied the condemned in Lisbon, the Lembranças dos que foram a justiçar, which runs from August 1693 to September 1754 and covers the sentences of the Casa da Suplicação; she extends it with a series published by Henriques Secco in 1880, with other published lists, and, for 1772, with the friar's chronicle. On that basis she counts 444 executions for civil crimes in Portugal between 1693 and 1800, of which 28 were of women, an average of about four executions a year. Most of the women executed had killed or tried to kill their husbands; others had killed a newborn of their own, or, in the case of enslaved women, a master; two were executed for theft in the 1760s, and five were among those condemned after the Porto riots of 1757.
Luísa de Jesus, Lopes concludes, "foi a última mulher executada em Portugal, mas não a última condenada à morte": she was the last woman executed in Portugal, but not the last sentenced to death. That was Isabel de Roxas e Lemos, condemned for treason in March 1811 after following the French army during the third French invasion. She had fled, the sentence was never carried out, and the Relação de Lisboa acquitted her on May 12, 1821. Portugal abolished the death penalty for political crimes in 1852, after it had ceased in practice in 1834, and for civil crimes in 1867, after the last execution on the mainland in 1846; the military death penalty survived until 1911, Lopes writes. Sábado's 2017 article on the women Portugal sentenced to death was published on July 1, 2017, the 150th anniversary of the 1867 abolition, and opened with Luísa de Jesus.
The description of her as the last woman executed in Portugal is repeated by the Lusa news agency (2021), Correio da Manhã (2015 and 2026), Penacova Actual and the Coimbra city council. Lopes's chapter is the scholarly basis for it.
Lopes points out that the case left no trace in the archive of the Misericórdia of Coimbra, the institution whose foundling house had handed the children over: "este caso não transparece nem pela mais leve insinuação no acervo do Arquivo da Misericórdia de Coimbra," she writes, the case does not appear by the slightest hint in the Misericórdia's archive. Historians, she observes, can know only what the producers of documents allowed to survive. Her account rests on three kinds of record: the chronicle of Fr. Cláudio da Conceição, a friar born in 1732 who described the cases of 1771 and 1772 in volume 17 of his Gabinete histórico, printed in Lisbon by the Impressão Régia in 1831; the Coimbra jail register of 1768 to 1779; and repeated retellings in the Coimbra newspaper O Conimbricense in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Modern writers have given her a label the eighteenth century did not have. Carlos Anjos, in his 2015 survey for Correio da Manhã, opened with her: "o primeiro serial killer português terá sido uma mulher," the first Portuguese serial killer will have been a woman. He hedged the claim throughout, noting that historians are divided on whether Portugal has had serial killers at all and that, in his view, it has had a few. Observador included her in the introduction to a 2019 survey of serial killers. Correio da Manhã's 2026 feature on the case, published in its Sunday magazine, was written by Anjos, now president of the Comissão de Proteção de Vítimas de Crimes, with the commentator Paulo Sargento and the internal security auditor Manuel Maria Rodrigues.
Rute de Carvalho Serra, a jurist who works in external public audit at Portugal's Tribunal de Contas, the Court of Auditors, and who had spent eighteen years in public administration, including eight in senior posts at the food and economic safety authority, published the historical novel A Assassina da Roda (The Foundling Wheel Killer) with Guerra e Paz in 2020. Penacova Actual reports that the book was presented in Penacova on March 7, 2020, with the author, the academic David de Almeida and the deputy mayor João Azadinho, and a reconstruction by the local theatre group Partículas Soltas.
The novel became a play. Luiza de Jesus: A Assassina da Roda, adapted by Serra and directed and performed by the actress Maria Henrique, with music by Hugo Aristides, opened in the Sala Estúdio of the Teatro da Trindade in Lisbon on April 29, 2021, and ran to May 30, Lusa and Penacova Actual reported. It was co-produced by the theatre and INATEL, and Lusa described it as based on true events.
In 2021 RTP, the Portuguese public broadcaster, produced a 55-minute documentary, Luiza de Jesus: A Macabra História da Maior Serial Killer Portuguesa, directed by Ricardo Clara Couto from a script by Fátima Morais and narrated by the actress Maria do Céu Guerra. It brought together the historians Maria Antónia Lopes, Maria Seoane Dovigo and Aurélie Delahaye, the criminologist Tânia Konvalina-Simas, the journalist Anabela Natário, Serra and Maria Henrique, a panel RTP noted was made up entirely of women. RTP2 broadcast it again on February 27, 2025.
Coimbra itself has begun to mark the story. On International Women's Day, March 8, 2022, the city council held a walking tour of four women who marked the city's history, led by two councillors, Ana Bastos and Ana Cortez Vaz. The other three were the poet Amélia Janny, the businesswoman and theatre manager Judite Mendes de Abreu and the eighteenth-century moneylender Sebastiana da Luz. Ana Cortez Vaz told the story of Luísa de Jesus at Montarroio, where the foundling house stood. In 2026 the provisional program of the seventeenth international congress on the history of madness at the University of Coimbra listed a paper titled "Luiza de Jesus, from executioner to executed."
Established by the sentence and the historical record: she was convicted of killing 33 foundling infants, sentenced to death on July 1, 1772, by the Casa da Suplicação in Lisbon, and executed in Lisbon in 1772.
Confessed: 28 deaths. The other five were attributed to her by the court. The city council records nine admitted on April 19, 1772, when 15 had been found.
Unresolved: the thirty-fourth child recorded as handed to her. None of the sources says what happened to that child.
Date of execution: July 1, 1772, is well sourced as the date of the sentence. Correio da Manhã (2015) gives the same date for the execution; Lopes gives only the year, and notes that execution generally followed sentence closely.
Place of execution: Lisbon (Lopes, 2015). No source names the square.
Birth, birthplace and age: born December 10, 1748, at Figueira de Lorvão (Correio da Manhã, 2026, citing a baptism record; the city council gives 1748); Figueira de Lorvão, Penacova (Sábado; Penacova Actual, which adds Gavinhos as her home); born and raised in Coimbra (Lopes); born in Coimbra in 1750 (Correio da Manhã, 2015). Her age in 1772 is given as 22 by most sources and as 24 by the city council.
The judge: Pina Manique is named by the city council; Lopes does not name the judges.
Jurisdiction: Coimbra fell under the Relação do Porto (Lopes), yet the case was decided by the Casa da Suplicação in Lisbon (Lusa; Lopes). No source explains why.
Motive: the court, the historians and the press treat the payments as the motive.
The staff: Lopes's 2013 study says the Coimbra house had no resident wet nurses until 1785, but her 2015 chapter, from the jail register, records an internal nurse jailed in 1772. The two statements are given as she gives them.
1708: The Misericórdia of Coimbra takes charge of the city's foundlings (Lopes, 2013).
1710: Outside nurses' pay set at 500 réis a month (Lopes, 2013).
1721: Nurses' pay raised to 600 réis a month (Lopes, 2013).
December 10, 1748: Luísa de Jesus born at Figueira de Lorvão, according to a baptism record cited by Correio da Manhã (2026); other accounts give 1750.
1750s: The Coimbra wheel receives about 125 foundlings a year (Lopes, 2013).
1770 to 1778: The wheel receives more than 200 foundlings a year (Lopes, 2013).
Before April 1772: She collects 34 infants from the foundling house in the names of other women and receives the advance for each (Lopes; Coimbra city council).
March 28, 1772: Isabel Xavier Clesse sentenced in Lisbon; executed three days later (Lopes, 2015).
Early April 1772: A foundling house worker finds a baby's body at Montarroio; Luísa de Jesus is arrested (Coimbra city council).
April 6, 1772: The rodeira and a wet nurse of the foundling house enter the Coimbra jail (Lopes, 2015).
April 19, 1772: With 15 found, she admits killing nine (Coimbra city council).
April 1772: 33 children are accounted for in all; she later confesses to 28 (Lopes; Coimbra city council).
May 9, 1772: Maria Joaquina sentenced in Lisbon; executed three days later (Lopes, 2015).
July 1, 1772: The Casa da Suplicação in Lisbon sentences her to death (Coimbra city council; Lusa; Lopes).
1772: Executed in Lisbon (Lopes); Correio da Manhã (2015) dates the execution to July 1.
October 7, 1772: The rodeira and the wet nurse are released (Lopes, 2015).
1785: The Coimbra foundling house admits resident wet nurses (Lopes, 2013).
March 1811: Isabel de Roxas e Lemos sentenced to death for treason; never executed; acquitted May 12, 1821 (Lopes, 2015).
1813: Filipe de Araújo e Castro finds that three-quarters of foundlings die (Lopes, 2013).
1831: Fr. Cláudio da Conceição's Gabinete histórico, volume 17, published in Lisbon (Lopes, 2015).
May 1839: The Coimbra city council takes over the foundling service (Lopes, 2013).
1852: Death penalty abolished for political crimes (Lopes, 2015).
1867: Death penalty abolished for civil crimes (Lopes, 2015).
February 9, 2015: Correio da Manhã calls her the first Portuguese serial killer.
2015: Lopes's chapter on women sentenced to death in Portugal is published by Coimbra University Press.
July 1, 2017: Sábado's article on the women Portugal sentenced to death, on the 150th anniversary of abolition.
2020: Rute de Carvalho Serra's novel A Assassina da Roda is published; presented in Penacova on March 7, 2020 (Penacova Actual).
April 29 to May 30, 2021: The play Luiza de Jesus: A Assassina da Roda runs at the Teatro da Trindade, Lisbon (Lusa; Penacova Actual).
2021: RTP produces the documentary Luiza de Jesus: A Macabra História da Maior Serial Killer Portuguesa.
March 8, 2022: Coimbra city council tells her story at Montarroio on a Women's Day walking tour.
February 27, 2025: RTP2 broadcasts the documentary again.
July 26, 2026: Correio da Manhã's Sunday magazine publishes a feature on the case.