In the first weeks of January 1964 a woman named Catalina Ortega went to the police in Guanajuato about her missing daughter. At around the same time police picked up a procuress, Josefina Gutiérrez, on suspicion of kidnapping young girls in the region, and under questioning she named the women she supplied: the González Valenzuela sisters, who ran brothels in and around San Francisco del Rincón. On January 14, 1964, the sisters were taken to their ranch outside the town, Rancho El Ángel, sometimes called Loma del Ángel, and the police began to dig. They found the remains of eighty women, eleven men and several fetuses.
There were four sisters: María Delfina, born in 1912; María del Carmen; María Luisa; and María de Jesús, the youngest, born in 1924. They were born in El Salto de Juanacatlán, in Jalisco, to Isidro Torres, a policeman, and Bernardina Valenzuela, and later accounts describe a strict father who forbade his daughters makeup and boys. Delfina and María de Jesús became the brothel keepers, and Mexican newspapers called the four Las Poquianchis. Delfina's son, known as El Tepocate, helped control the women in the houses.
The business ran on deception. The sisters, through procuresses like Gutiérrez, placed advertisements offering young women work as maids. Those who came were taken to the brothels and held. Many were forced to take heroin or cocaine. Women who fell ill, were injured by the work, lost their looks or stopped pleasing customers were killed or left to die, and so were babies born in the houses. Men who arrived with money sometimes did not leave. The houses operated for years under the protection of payments to local officials and police. Asked afterward about the deaths, one sister reportedly said, "The food didn't agree with them."
The end came in stages. El Tepocate was killed in a bar fight; Delfina tried to shoot the man who killed him and missed, and when local officials moved to arrest her she fled to Guadalajara. Police raided María de Jesús's brothel, but she and the women escaped that night to a house the sisters owned in San Francisco del Rincón, where the women were kept for eight months in conditions so harsh that many died of starvation and disease. On January 6, 1964, under growing police pressure, the sisters moved the survivors to the ranch. Eight days later they were under arrest.
They were tried in 1964, and each was sentenced to forty years in prison; one account says the sentences came in 1968 and covered only a handful of killings in each jurisdiction, with forty years the maximum Mexican law allowed. Guinness World Records later called them the most prolific murder partnership. Estimates of their victims run past 150, and some past 200, though the count that rests on recovered remains is ninety-one.
Delfina went mad in prison, fearing she would be murdered. On October 17, 1968, workers repairing the roof above her cell in the Irapuato jail leaned over to look at her and dropped a bucket of cement onto her head, killing her. María Luisa died alone in her cell there on November 19, 1984, and was not found until the next day. Carmen died of cancer; one account dates her death to 1949, years before the arrests. María de Jesús, the only one to be freed, left prison and dropped out of public view; she is reported to have died in 1990.
The case has never left Mexico's imagination. Jorge Ibargüengoitia based his 1977 novel Las muertas on it, and it has been filmed more than once. What stayed in the argument was less the number of bodies than the years of protection that let the houses run.