In January 1964, police in Guanajuato freed eleven women from a property belonging to the González Valenzuela sisters near San Francisco del Rincón. Within days, two of the sisters, Delfina and María, were under arrest; a third, Luisa, gave herself up in Guadalajara a month later. That October a judge in San Francisco del Rincón sentenced Delfina and María to 40 years in prison and Luisa to 27, for crimes that included aggravated homicide, kidnapping, criminal association and procuring.
The case became one of the most widely covered crimes in twentieth-century Mexico. The weekly Alarma! turned it into a running sensation and printed claims of hundreds of dead. Guinness World Records later listed Delfina and María as the most prolific murder partnership on record, with at least 90 victims. The court file tells a narrower story. Historian Fabiola Bailón Vásquez, who studied the file for a 2011 volume published by Mexico's Supreme Court, found that the legal proceedings record the deaths of eight women. Alejandro Lámbarry, a literary scholar who has written about the case and the novel it inspired, puts the number of bodies in the file at six. The press called the sisters Las Poquianchis, and that name has followed them into a novel, a film and a television series.
The sisters were born in El Salto, Jalisco, and grew up in San Francisco del Rincón, a town in western Guanajuato, according to Bailón. Their mother had twelve children, of whom four survived: Carmen, Delfina, María and Luisa. Bailón records that their father served as a juez de acordada, a rural constable, and later worked as a merchant. Other accounts describe him differently. A 2025 Excélsior article names him as Isidro Torres and their mother as Bernardina Valenzuela, and describes him as an authoritarian man who beat his wife and daughters; Uno TV called him a landowner who became municipal president of the family's town. Those versions do not agree with one another and do not cite records.
As young women, Delfina, María and Luisa worked in a textile mill, Bailón writes. Around 1938 Carmen and Delfina began running cantinas. A 2014 thesis by Irma Mariana Paz Ornelas, a psychology graduate of the Universidad Salesiana, also dates the first cantina, in El Salto, to 1938.
The sisters' names vary across accounts. Bailón, writing from the court record, calls the second sister María. The 2014 thesis gives her name as María de Jesús and says she was born Manuela; Guinness World Records also calls her María de Jesús. The thesis and Uno TV give Luisa the further name Eva. Some articles add "María" before Delfina's, Carmen's and Luisa's names.
Bailón traces the start of the trade to about 1935, when a woman known as La Cucha, who supplied brothels, offered to sell Delfina several young women. Delfina set up three rooms in El Salto. In 1941 she moved to San Juan de los Lagos, in Jalisco, and opened a house of assignation there; a mayor rented her two premises and gave her a license to sell alcohol. María later opened her own house in San Francisco del Rincón. In the household, Carmen ran the kitchen and kept a notebook of the debts owed by the women who lived in the houses, and Luisa handled the cash. Years later Carmen died, Bailón writes, and Luisa began showing films.
The 2014 thesis says the sisters also ran a house in León, Guanajuato, founded in March 1950. Excélsior, in a 2025 retrospective, said the sisters expanded into Guanajuato in 1954, and another Excélsior piece listed houses in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and in León, San Francisco del Rincón and Purísima del Rincón in Guanajuato. In Bailón's account, Delfina and María ran their houses for about twenty years, with some fifty women in all passing through.
Young women usually reached the houses through female go-betweens who won their trust with promises of work, Bailón writes, and some were sold to the sisters. A 2026 article in Revista Criminalia, by Leandro Eduardo Astrain Bañuelos and Rubén Díaz López, says the sisters drew on very poor rural families, who were told their daughters would find domestic work in the cities. La Crónica de Hoy reported in 2022 that some of the girls were 12, 13 or 14 when they were taken from their homes.
Once in the houses, the women were bound to them by debt. Bailón describes a system in which the sisters supplied food, clothing and lodging and recorded what each woman owed, so that leaving became nearly impossible. The Criminalia article compares the arrangement to a tienda de raya, the old hacienda company store, in which goods were sold at inflated prices. Bailón also describes ties of patronage running the other way: small loans, posts as house managers and godparent relationships offered in return for loyalty. Those ties broke down, she writes, once the sisters could no longer support the women.
The houses ran in the open for years because officials allowed them to. Bailón writes that the sisters arranged health permits through a doctor and settled payments, taxes and fines with municipal authorities, and that officials used the houses as clients without paying. One official found María a house; a mayor rented premises to Delfina. The 2014 thesis lists prosecutors, doctors, police, municipal presidents, army officers and people close to the governor among those said to have been involved, and says soldiers protected the houses. The Criminalia authors write that politicians frequented the houses and were said to take bribes in money and in sexual favors. La Crónica reported that the sisters had the protection of local police and authorities.
Four soldiers were among those later charged in the case. When the sisters' defense lawyer asked at trial that the officials who had protected them be punished, Bailón writes, only a former state attorney general testified, and he denied the accusations.
Mexico had moved away from regulated prostitution decades earlier. Bailón explains that the Penal Code of 1940 extended the crime of lenocinio to anyone who ran or sustained a brothel, which in her reading abolished brothel prostitution nationwide. Guanajuato did not enforce those measures until 1962. La Crónica dates the state's ban to 1961 and credits it to Governor Torres Landa. From that point, Bailón argues, the González sisters went from being matrons of a tolerated trade to criminals.
The 2014 thesis says the houses in León and San Francisco del Rincón were closed in 1962. The women were moved to Delfina's house in Guadalajara, Bailón writes, but a conflict with the authorities there led to the closing of the last house. Before that, Delfina's son was killed in a shootout with police in which a sergeant was wounded. The thesis dates his death to 1963 and says Delfina afterward fired shots at the cantina where it happened. Accounts of his death differ: Elisa Robledo, who interviewed people in the case for a 1980 book, placed it outside the brothel, and the novelist Jorge Ibargüengoitia questioned whether there had been a shootout at all.
With the houses shut, the women had no income. Delfina left Guadalajara, Bailón writes, and María stayed with the women, who lived in hiding first in the closed house in Guanajuato and then on a ranch the family owned near San Francisco del Rincón. As money ran out, their rations were cut. Bailón writes that some of the women died in this period and others were killed, and that accounts of how they died differ.
The victims named in the testimony of surviving women, according to Bailón, included women known as Santa, Graciela, María Rosa, María, Flor, Ernestina, Bertha and Irma. Their ages, surnames and home towns are not given in her account.
Later retellings add allegations that are not part of the court record as Bailón and Lámbarry describe it. Excélsior and Uno TV, writing in 2025, reported claims that women who fell ill, aged or became pregnant were killed, and that infants born in the houses were killed. The Criminalia article says the investigation turned up evidence of abortions. Excélsior noted that stories of satanic rituals circulated and were never proven.
The case opened with a missing-person report. Bailón writes that the authorities acted on a complaint of disappearance filed by relatives of one of the victims. La Crónica gives a fuller sequence: a mother reported her 13-year-old daughter missing in Guadalajara, the Guanajuato judicial police received similar reports, and a young woman who escaped from the ranch went to the police in León, Guanajuato, and gave the statement that led them to the sisters. Excélsior and Uno TV also describe an escape and a report to the police in León. Alarma! credited the discovery to Miguel Ángel Mota, a commander of the Guanajuato judicial police, according to Bailón and La Crónica.
According to Bailón, eleven women were found and freed on Monday, January 13, 1964, and Delfina and María were arrested shortly afterward. Other accounts give slightly different dates. The 2014 thesis says the sisters were arrested in León on January 12, 1964. La Crónica says police reached the ranch on January 12, arrested Delfina and María there, and found fifteen women and two children.
Luisa was not with her sisters. She surrendered to the authorities in Guadalajara on February 8, 1964, Bailón writes, after threats that she would be lynched. La Crónica reported that two women in Mexico City who were said to have supplied young women to the ranch, for 500 pesos each, were also arrested. Robledo later argued that Luisa had been living in another city during the period of the deaths.
The Ministerio Público, the prosecutor's office, asked the court to authorize searches of the closed houses, and a judge, Timoteo Lozano, granted them, Bailón writes. Deaths came to light in the San Francisco del Rincón area in January and February 1964.
From that point the figures diverge. Alarma! wrote that the authorities had found hundreds of bodies of women and children; Bailón calls the claim exaggerated. La Crónica reported that the press of the time documented four bodies at the ranch, that reporters covering the case spoke of thirty, and that later estimates ran to 90 or 150. The figure of about 80 women, 11 men and several fetuses, repeated in many retellings, appears in the 2014 thesis, whose author writes that she could not verify it. The Criminalia authors note that the León police identified at least eight people.
In the legal proceedings, Bailón writes, only the deaths of eight women are set out. Lámbarry, writing in the Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica in 2021, says the file recorded six bodies and that it was impossible to tell from it how many people had died or who they were, because the names changed across three versions of the record. He adds that an anonymous witness claimed many more deaths, and that reporters who checked the claim found nothing to support it.
On Monday, January 20, 1964, Delfina and María gave their preparatory statements before Judge Lozano, according to Bailón. Each blamed the other. They admitted that several of the women had died and said the deaths were accidents. They denied kidnapping or tormenting any of the women. The 2014 thesis dates the statements to January 16 and says the court issued its formal order of imprisonment, the auto de formal prisión, on January 21, 1964.
The defense started at a disadvantage. The 2014 thesis says a court-appointed public defender was assigned because the private lawyer the sisters asked for did not arrive, and that the defender asked no questions during the proceedings. The Criminalia article makes the same point: the accused were without counsel when their first statements were taken.
Lámbarry adds that a notarial act recorded some of the women saying they had stayed in the house of their own free will, and he argues that the compensation offered to the women may have changed what they later said. Robledo found that many people in the case changed their statements out of fear or under pressure.
The case grew well beyond the three sisters. Bailón counts eighteen accused in all: the three sisters; five women who had lived in the houses; four drivers and servants; and four soldiers. Face-to-face confrontations between defendants and witnesses, known as careos, continued until August 1964.
On October 15, 1964, the judge in San Francisco del Rincón sentenced Delfina and María to 40 years in prison and Luisa to 27 years, according to Bailón. The crimes listed in the sentence included homicidio calificado (aggravated homicide), plagio or kidnapping, criminal association, lenocinio, injuries, corruption of minors, threats, concealment and violation of the burial laws, among others. The accomplices received sentences of between six and 35 years each. The court also imposed a fine of 840,120 pesos as reparation for the harm done. The 2014 thesis describes the compensation instead as 700,000 dollars.
The proceedings lasted about nine months, Bailón writes; the 2014 thesis calls it one of the shortest trials in the country's history. María complained that the judge had acted in haste, without investigating thoroughly and without summoning the houses' clients. Lámbarry records that the sisters' court-appointed lawyer called the sentence too small.
Accounts written for a general audience simplify the outcome. Excélsior and Uno TV in 2025 gave the charges as homicide, lenocinio and kidnapping, with Excélsior adding further charges. La Crónica reported in 2022 that all four sisters were sentenced to 40 years and served their terms in Irapuato. Bailón, Lámbarry and Excélsior's second 2025 article give three sentences: 40 years each for Delfina and María and 27 years for Luisa.
The Second Collegiate Criminal Chamber of Guanajuato's state court upheld the first-instance sentence on July 30, 1966, Bailón writes. In July 1968 the sisters filed a direct amparo, the Mexican constitutional appeal, before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. The court ruled on November 21, 1974. It granted Delfina and María protection only on the charge of clandestine burial, on what it called grounds of a technical order, and left their sentences unchanged. For Luisa, a majority of three justices ordered that a new sentence be issued in her favor.
On May 15, 1981, the Monterrey newspaper El Porvenir reported that one of the sisters had won a reduction of her sentence from 27 years to 23, according to Bailón. The 2014 thesis, by contrast, says the 1968 amparo was never resolved.
La Crónica reported that the sisters served their sentences in Irapuato, Guanajuato. Delfina died in prison in 1968. The 2014 thesis gives the date as October 17, 1968, and Uno TV also places her death in prison in 1968. La Crónica reported that one of the sisters died in prison after a bucket of cement mix fell on her head, and that another died of cancer, without saying which sister was which.
In later years, Bailón writes, Luisa lost her mental faculties. The 2014 thesis says Luisa died on November 21, 1984; Uno TV also reports her death in prison in 1984. Several of the accomplices completed their sentences.
María was the only sister to leave prison. Uno TV reported in 2025 that she was released and died around the mid-1990s. The 2014 thesis says her fate is unknown. Lámbarry, for his part, wrote in 2019 that two of the sisters died before they could be released and that the youngest served her sentence and then disappeared into anonymity.
Carmen played no part in the 1964 case. Bailón places her death years before it, while the business was still running. Excélsior in 2025 wrote that she died before the trial, and Uno TV reported that she died of cancer in 1949.
The case made the weekly Alarma!. Its reporter on the story was Jesús Sánchez Hermosillo, Bailón writes. Its first article, in January 1964, described Delfina as "la arpía mayor", the chief harpy, sitting on the floor beside her dog, and its first headline on the case, according to the 2014 thesis, read "Muerte a las 'Poquianchis'!" (Death to the Poquianchis!). Bailón shows how its headlines condemned the sisters before any sentence, and how its later pieces dwelt on the "regeneration" of the freed women. It praised Judge Lozano as an upright man of recognized integrity.
The magazine's sales figures are given differently from one account to the next. Bailón cites a print run of 140,000 copies a week, and a figure of 333,000 that the magazine cited in an editorial as proof of public support. The 2014 thesis says circulation rose from about 140,000 copies on January 25, 1964, to 535,000 by March 24. La Crónica says a series on the case sold more than half a million copies, and Lámbarry, in 2019, gives a rise from 140,000 to five million.
Daily papers followed. Bailón names El Porvenir and El Informador, which in her reading reproduced the language of the court in a sensational tone. Lámbarry quotes El Heraldo of León calling the sisters "las diabólicas", and Excélsior, looking back in 2025, recalled its own headlines calling them satanic and diabolical. Lámbarry describes Alarma! as mixing facts with rumor, and the 2014 thesis argues that the coverage influenced the trial.
Jorge Ibargüengoitia, a novelist and playwright born in Guanajuato in 1928, turned to the case in 1964. Lámbarry, who studied his manuscripts and letters, writes that Ibargüengoitia obtained the court file that year, reportedly through the family of the writer Margarita Villaseñor, and had it for no more than ten hours. In March and April 1965 he drafted an unpublished chronicle of the case, using the file, the press coverage and his own visits to the places involved. He set out to expose sensational journalism and a corrupt, hypocritical society.
He abandoned the chronicle. Around 1970 he tried again and discarded about 150 pages; in 1974 he renamed the sisters the Baladro sisters and moved the story to a fictional town he called Cuévano. He finished the novel, Las muertas, on November 25, 1976, and Joaquín Mortiz published it in 1977. Ibargüengoitia concluded from the file that the newspapers' version was exaggerated and false, Lámbarry writes, and in an interview he said the story showed "la corrupción de un sistema", the corruption of a system. Bailón notes that the novel questions the irregularities of the trial. Ibargüengoitia died in a plane crash near Madrid in 1983, Mexico News Daily recalled in 2025.
Felipe Cazals's film Las Poquianchis appeared in 1976, produced by Conacine, with a cast of more than forty. Uno TV names Diana Bracho and María Rojo among its actors. Bailón writes that it reproduced scenes and photographs from Alarma!, put the reporter on screen as a character, and joined the case to the story of a peasant family whose daughters are handed to a procurer. She counts its departures from the record: five months of trial instead of nine, four deaths instead of eight, and a charge of trafficking in women that does not appear in the file. Ibargüengoitia turned down Cazals's invitation to write the screenplay, Lámbarry writes.
Elisa Robledo's Yo, la Poquianchis, published in 1980, was built on interviews with the accused, their defense lawyer, the chief of police in León and the inspector general, taken seventeen years after the events. Robledo set out, in her words, to give a more impartial version, and she argued that the press had demonized the sisters while still holding them responsible. Bailón lists the points where Robledo's account departs from the court record: the role of local authorities, closer and more reciprocal relations between the sisters and the women, Luisa's absence in another city, the timing of two disappearances, the circumstances of the death of Delfina's son, the count of the dead, and the shifting statements of witnesses under pressure.
Interest returned in 2025, when Netflix released Las muertas, a six-episode series directed by Luis Estrada and based on Ibargüengoitia's novel, on September 10. Uno TV listed Paulina Gaitán, Arcelia Ramírez, Joaquín Cosío and Alfonso Herrera in the cast. The series prompted a wave of articles in Mexico and abroad, many repeating the figure of 91 dead.
Scholars have kept returning to the case for what it shows about the law. Bailón calls it an extreme example of the consequences of abolishing organized prostitution in Mexico, and argues that the central question is less whether the sisters committed the crimes than how the legal instruments were used. The Criminalia authors argue that the press condemned the accused before trial, in breach of the presumption of innocence, and compare the case with the Supreme Court's later ruling for Florence Cassez. The 2014 thesis notes that the sisters were included in a 2010 exhibition on serial killers, and argues that they do not fit the definition used by the American investigator Robert Ressler.
The number of dead. The court file records eight dead women, according to Bailón, or six bodies, according to Lámbarry. Guinness World Records says Delfina and María are known to have murdered at least 90 people. Excélsior wrote of at least 91 confirmed murders, and Uno TV of 91 victims confirmed by judicial records. Neither cited the records. Figures of 150 and more appear in later articles without sources.
The arrest date. January 12, 13 and 14, 1964 all appear in different accounts. Bailón dates the freeing of the women to January 13 and the arrests to shortly afterward.
The sentences. Bailón, Lámbarry, Excélsior and Mexico News Daily give 40 years each for Delfina and María and 27 years for Luisa. La Crónica's report that all four sisters received 40 years conflicts with the reports that Carmen died before the case.
The appeal. Bailón describes a Supreme Court ruling on November 21, 1974; the 2014 thesis says the 1968 amparo was never resolved.
The father. He is described as a rural constable and merchant (Bailón), an authoritarian bailiff (Excélsior) and a landowner and municipal president (Uno TV).
The infants and the rituals. Claims that infants were killed rest on later reporting and on Alarma!, whose claims of hundreds of bodies of women and children Bailón calls exaggerated. Claims of satanic rituals were never proven, Excélsior noted.
About 1935: a supplier known as La Cucha offers to sell young women to Delfina, according to Bailón.
About 1938: Carmen and Delfina run cantinas; the first is in El Salto, Jalisco.
1941: Delfina opens a house in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, with a license from the mayor.
March 1950: a house in León, Guanajuato, opens, according to a 2014 thesis.
1962: Guanajuato enforces the ban on organized prostitution; the houses are closed (La Crónica dates the ban to 1961).
1963: Delfina's son is killed in a shootout with police, according to the 2014 thesis.
1962 to January 1964: the women live in hiding in Guanajuato; several die.
January 13, 1964: police free eleven women (other accounts: January 12).
January 1964: Delfina and María are arrested.
January 20, 1964: Delfina and María give preparatory statements before Judge Timoteo Lozano.
January 21, 1964: formal order of imprisonment, according to the 2014 thesis.
February 8, 1964: Luisa surrenders in Guadalajara.
January and February 1964: deaths come to light near San Francisco del Rincón.
August 1964: confrontations between defendants and witnesses end.
October 15, 1964: Delfina and María sentenced to 40 years, Luisa to 27; accomplices to 6 to 35 years.
March and April 1965: Jorge Ibargüengoitia drafts a chronicle of the case.
July 30, 1966: Guanajuato appeals chamber upholds the sentence.
July 1968: the sisters file a direct amparo with the Supreme Court.
1968: Delfina dies in prison (October 17, according to the 2014 thesis).
November 21, 1974: Supreme Court grants partial amparo; new sentence ordered for Luisa.
1976: Felipe Cazals's film Las Poquianchis is released.
1977: Ibargüengoitia's novel Las muertas is published.
1980: Elisa Robledo's Yo, la Poquianchis is published.
May 15, 1981: El Porvenir reports one sister's sentence cut from 27 to 23 years.
1984: Luisa dies in prison (November 21, according to the 2014 thesis).
Mid-1990s: María reported to have died after her release.
September 10, 2025: Netflix releases Luis Estrada's series Las muertas.