In the summer of 2006, women in their seventies, eighties and nineties who lived alone in Barcelona were told by the Catalan police to be on their guard. Within about a month, three of them had died and several others had been attacked. The person responsible turned out to be a cook in her late forties with no criminal record. Remedios Sánchez Sánchez was arrested in a gaming hall, tried at the Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona in 2008, and sentenced to 144 years in prison for three murders and a series of other offenses.
The case returned to the news in October 2025. While serving her sentence at Teixeiro prison in A Coruña, in Galicia, she had been granted prison leaves. A 91-year-old woman died in A Coruña on October 3, 2025, and five days later Sánchez was arrested inside the prison as a suspect. In March 2026 the matter was still a judicial investigation for homicide. It has produced no charge and no trial.
Remedios Sánchez Sánchez was born in 1957 in a small parish of Boimorto, in the province of A Coruña in Galicia, one of eleven children, according to Diario de Santiago. Like many Galicians of her generation she moved to Catalonia. She had two children. In Barcelona she worked as a cook in a Galician restaurant in the upper part of the city, and colleagues and customers knew her as Reme, the Galician woman who made the potato omelets.
She lived alone. A gambling habit, centered on bingo halls and slot machines, had left her with large debts, and the debts had already caused trouble in her family. When the attacks began she was 48. She had no previous criminal record, a fact that the journalist Mayka Navarro, who covered the case, later called exceptional: Sánchez began at an age when most violent offenders have long since come to police attention. That is the journalist's view and not a court finding.
The attacks fell within roughly four weeks in June and July 2006, in Barcelona and in Mataró, the coastal city north of it. The victims were elderly women living by themselves. Three died.
Pepita Cervantes, 83, was the first. She died on June 10, 2006. Police at first treated her death as a violent robbery, but several details did not fit that reading, and it was only as other cases accumulated that officers saw a pattern. Adelaida, 96, died on June 28, 2006. María, 76, died on July 1, 2006, the last killing before the arrest. Infobae lists a woman who survived an attack about eight days after the first death, and El Ideal Gallego describes her account as the turning point in the inquiry: she described her attacker as a middle-aged woman, which overturned police assumptions that they were looking for a man.
Several other women were attacked and survived. Reports give differing totals, from four or five to seven, depending on what is counted as an attempt. The survivors' descriptions of the woman became the backbone of the profile that investigators built.
The Mossos d'Esquadra, Catalonia's police force, led the inquiry. Reports differ on the size of the deployment; El Debate speaks of more than 300 officers and Crónica Global of more than 200. The operation was directed by Josep Lluís Trapero, then head of the force's criminal investigation command. As the number of cases grew, the police issued a public warning, and the alarm among older residents of Barcelona was unlike anything the city had known.
Witnesses and security cameras gave the first image of the suspect. The decisive lead came from gambling venues. A record from a bingo hall pointed to a woman who matched the profile, and a witness identified her as Remedios Sánchez.
She was arrested about 26 days after the first attack, in a gaming hall in the Eixample area of Barcelona, where she was playing a slot machine. Trapero was present, along with a colleague, Josep de Monteys. Betevé says Trapero made the arrest himself inside the hall. Police searched her home and recovered jewelry, watches, bank books and cash that belonged to the dead women. Television viewers saw her briefly as she was led away, and the cold, expressionless face in those images is the one most people still associate with the case.
The trial took place at the Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona in 2008. Sánchez did not confess. At the hearing she appeared 30 kilograms lighter than at her arrest and carefully groomed, and she offered an account in which a tenant named Mari, or Mery, was responsible. The survivors identified her as the woman who had attacked them. Psychiatrists who examined her found no mental disorder, normal intelligence and full awareness of her actions, so she was held fully responsible.
The court convicted her of three murders, five attempted murders, seven robberies with violence and one theft. NacióDigital reports that she was acquitted on one further attempted-murder charge. The court described the crimes as deserving great social repudiation because the victims were elderly and especially vulnerable, El Debate recorded.
The sentence came in July 2008, on July 3 according to betevé; Infobae places it in June. Crónica Global breaks the sentence down this way: 19 years for each of the three murders, 13 years for each of four of the attempted murders, 7 years for the fifth, 4 years for each robbery with violence and a fine for the theft. The reports give the total as 144 years and either 5 months and 29 days (betevé) or 7 months (El Debate, Diario de Santiago). The court also ordered compensation to the families of the dead, in amounts that Infobae puts between 19,000 and 120,000 euros.
Spanish law caps the time a prisoner can actually serve, in practice well below the nominal total, a point Cadena 3 raised when the case reappeared in 2025.
Sánchez spent her first ten years in the women's unit at Brians, where, according to Navarro in an interview with 3Cat, she was considered an exemplary inmate. She was later moved to Teixeiro, in A Coruña, where she was reported to be cold and distant and to form no personal ties. Over the years she was classified in the second degree of the Spanish prison system and was granted prison leaves, some of them supervised through religious organizations, after a long period without disciplinary sanctions and a favorable psychological assessment by the prison. She was 69 in October 2025.
Bernat-Noel Tiffon, a forensic psychologist who had not examined her, described her to Crónica Global as showing narcissistic, histrionic and antisocial traits, and judged the risk of reoffending to be high. This is an outside professional opinion, not a finding in her case.
On October 3, 2025, a 91-year-old woman who lived alone in A Coruña died. The first assumption was a natural death. Her relatives raised concerns, a court ordered a further forensic examination, and it concluded that the death was violent. Police reported finding a fingerprint matching Sánchez, who was out on a prison leave that day, and cameras in the area were said to show her.
On October 8, 2025, the National Police arrested her at Teixeiro prison, where she had returned at the end of her leave. A court in A Coruña, the Juzgado de Instrucción número 6, took the case. She was summoned as a suspect, and on December 2, 2025 she was brought from prison and invoked her right not to testify. The judge did not request additional precautionary measures because she was already in prison. At that hearing the case was partly under secrecy of the proceedings.
Diari Catalunya reported on March 10, 2026 that investigators had put together more evidence: fingerprints, camera footage in which clothing and jewelry matched items seized from her cell, and forensic findings said to support the police theory. No formal charge or trial date has been made public. Under Spanish law, an investigated person is presumed innocent until a court rules, and no ruling has been reported.
In March 2026 Sánchez was reported to be at Teixeiro prison, serving the sentence imposed in 2008 and the subject of the A Coruña investigation. A further conviction would be added to the 2008 judgment; no court has made such a finding.
Final and proven by the 2008 judgment: the murders of three women in Barcelona in June and July 2006, five attempted murders, seven robberies with violence and a theft.
Alleged, not tried: the October 2025 death of a 91-year-old woman in A Coruña. The case is under investigation for homicide. Sánchez has not been convicted of it and has invoked her right to remain silent. One Argentine outlet, Cadena 3, wrote that she was accused of burglary and murder; the Spanish court coverage describes her only as investigated for homicide.
Differences in the reports: the total of attempted murders (from four to seven) and the survivors counted; the sentence total (5 months 29 days or 7 months beyond 144 years); the month of sentencing (June or July 2008); the number of officers deployed; and Sánchez's defense, in which the person to blame was a tenant called Mari or Mery.
1957: Remedios Sánchez Sánchez is born in Boimorto, A Coruña province.
June 10, 2006: Pepita Cervantes, 83, dies in Barcelona.
About eight days later: a woman attacked in Barcelona survives and describes her attacker.
June 28, 2006: Adelaida, 96, dies in Barcelona.
July 1, 2006: María, 76, dies in Barcelona.
About 26 days after the first attack: Sánchez is arrested in a gaming hall in Barcelona.
2008: trial at the Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona; she is convicted in July and sentenced to 144 years.
After sentencing: held first at Brians prison, later at Teixeiro, A Coruña.
October 3, 2025: a 91-year-old woman dies in A Coruña during Sánchez's prison leave.
October 8, 2025: Sánchez is arrested at Teixeiro prison as a suspect.
December 2, 2025: she appears before the Juzgado de Instrucción número 6 of A Coruña and declines to testify.
March 10, 2026: report of further evidence in the A Coruña investigation; no charge reported.