The Legend of Enriqueta Martí: The Vampire of the Raval

by

Enriqueta Martí Ripollés is the subject of one of the most widely recounted urban legends. Known as one of the most infamous serial killers in Spain’s history, she was labelled “the Vampire of Barcelona” and the “Vampire of the Raval” by the press once the scandalous story of her horrific crimes came to light. There was a play, a movie, a graphic novel and even a musical made about her; a former Barcelona detective went so far as to write a book about her. In it, he claims that Martí practiced witchcraft and ate the flesh of her victims in an attempt to achieve immortality, and that she sold children’s blood mixed into elixirs that supposedly reversed the effects of aging and cured tuberculosis. 

However, as with other examples of notorious and supposedly bloodthirsty women—for example, the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory—there is debate as to whether Martí actually committed the acts that were attributed to her, or if they were invented by a society intolerant of women who didn’t conform to society’s norms.

One version of the story is that Martí, despondent after the death of her 10-month-old son, also suffered from one or more undiagnosed mental illnesses, and that while she definitely abducted one little girl—Teresita Guitart, who survived her captivity—she was not a murderess. Instead, she was a convenient scapegoat for a recent rash of child disappearances in the city. The other, more generally-accepted (and sensational) version of the story, is grisly in the extreme; it paints her as a deranged pedophile, witch and serial murderess. 

Martí's Early Life

Born in Sant Feliu de Llobregat in either 1868 or 1871—there are conflicting reports regarding her exact date of birth—little is known about her younger years, except that she moved from the countryside to Barcelona in search of work as a teenager. Martí tried her hand at nannying and housekeeping for wealthy families, but for reasons unknown, the work didn’t suit her. She turned instead to prostitution, making her living in a high-class brothel. 

When she was in her early thirties, she married an unsuccessful painter named Juan Pujaló, with whom she scraped out a living doing a variety of odd jobs: he painted the occasional portrait, she sold antiques and offered her services as a “healer.” When she was arrested years later, the title of “healer” was transformed into “witch” and “witch doctor” by the tabloids. 

She and her husband separated, reconciled, and separated again approximately half a dozen times. No one bothered to record Martí’s side of the story at the time, but according to Pujaló, the separations were caused by his wife’s unpredictable character and repeated infidelities, as well as her habit of continuing to frequent houses of prostitution and other unsavory locals. They never had any children, and had been separated for five years when Martí was arrested in 1912.

From Prostitute to Brothel Madam

It was said that Martí opened her own brothel, which she ran out of her apartment on Minerva Street. It catered to Barcelona’s wealthiest citizens, and was known for indulging even the most perverse sexual preferences, for which wealthy men were willing to pay outrageous sums of money. Martí’s brothel is said to have specialized in clients who requested young girls and boys, ranging in age from five to 16 years old. 

Martí was believed to have lured children to her home by offering sweets, then imprisoning them. She was said to have dressed in rags, wandering the poorest areas of the city, looking for potential prey. Orphaned children and the children of prostitutes or beggars were unlikely to be missed. And poverty-stricken families wouldn’t have had the resources to create an outcry, and were often wary of law enforcement. 

Her work as a procuress of young sex workers took her from the most disenfranchised neighborhoods to places frequently by Barcelona’s upper crust: she attended social and cultural events at the Liceu opera house and the Casino de la Rabassada in order to privately approach potential clients. Her stealthy operations continued for a number of years, until she was arrested in 1909 on charges of pimping children; however, her police file was “lost” and she was released from jail with no charges. Rumors flew that an unknown powerful individual, and a client of Martí, helped make this first case against her disappear, for fear of having his reputation ruined.

The Abduction of Teresita Guitart Congost

Meanwhile, there were increasing rumors going around the city that someone was kidnapping children right out from under their parents’ noses—most of the city’s residents, including the police, treated the stories as simple gossip. Parents used the stories as a way to frighten kids into respecting curfews and not straying too far from home. But when a five-year-old girl from a well-known bourgeois family went missing in February of 1912, the authorities started to take these rumors more seriously. 

The little girl vanished from the doorstep of her family home, distracted by Martí while walking from her mother’s side to the door, while her father waited inside. The mother had stopped to talk to a neighbor and assumed that Teresita went inside—but upon entering the house herself a few minutes later, she discovered that her daughter was missing.

Manuel Portella Valladares was Barcelona’s civil governor at the time. Until Teresita went missing, he had tried hard to convince the press and the populace that the kidnapping rumors were false, apparently in an attempt to prevent hysteria. However, this new development forced him to pay closer attention, as the middle and upper classes were in an uproar, fearing for their children’s safety. For two weeks, the police searched the city and its surroundings, finding no trace of the girl nor any idea as to what might have happened to her. 

One day, one of Martí’s neighbors—a woman named Claudina Elías—saw a child in Martí’s apartment when she happened to look through her window. According to Elias, the child’s hair had been shaved, the clothes were in rags, and he or she looked sad and afraid. She confided in a friend, a woman who ran a mattress store on the same street. The second woman claimed to have seen a child’s face looking out of one of Martí’s windows, and called the police. 

The police gained access to Martí’s home using the ruse of a sanitation inspection—they claimed that someone had filed an anonymous complaint that she was raising chickens in her apartment. This led to the rescue of Martí’s two young captives, one of whom was Teresita.

Blood, Bones, and a List of Names 

When the policemen entered the apartment, they found two girls with their hair cut extremely short: one, initially claiming to be named Felicidad, turned out to be Teresita. Martí claimed to have found her wandering the streets, alone and hungry. The other girl said her name was Angelita, and Martí claimed that she was her daughter. The girls both claimed they were offered sweet treats by Martí on the street, but then had a black cloth thrown over their faces, and taken to her apartment. Their hair was cut, they were given new names, and were told to call Martí “mama.” They were told to be quiet, and never to go near the windows.

When no trace was found of the other child that had been glimpsed by the neighboring women, the police questioned Martí and the girls about it. Martí said she had no idea what the police were talking about, but Teresita reportedly said that there had also been a little boy; however, Martí had “laid Pepito on the table in the kitchen and killed him with a knife.” 

The salon of the apartment was found to be filled with relatively expensive furniture, as well as glamorous clothing and wigs—including child-size outfits and adornments—that contrasted with the ruinous state of the kitchen and the rooms in which Angelita and Teresita had been discovered. The police theorized that the salon was where Marti entertained her clients. There were also lists of what appeared to be clients’ names, as well as indecipherable letters written in code, and a book in which Martí had written down the recipes for her tonics, salves and other supposedly healing “treatments.”

When questioned, Martí claimed that the list—which contained names of many of Barcelona’s elite—was not a list of clients, but merely referred to wealthy acquaintances who were inclined to give her charity when she wasn’t able to make ends meet. The rumors surrounding whose names were on that list, and what was the true nature of their association with Martí, would whisper through Barcelona society for years to come. 

The search of her home on Poniente Street (now called Joaquín Costa) also allegedly revealed dozens of jars containing what appeared to be human fat and blood—Martí admitted that she used these ingredients for various salves and potions—as well as a bag containing children’s clothing, human bones and a bloody boning knife. Searches of her previous residences—apartments in the streets of Picalqués, Tallers and Jocs Florals—were said to contain parts of an additional dozen or so bodies hidden behind false walls and in storage spaces. In spite of the limited forensic methods of the time, the police were sure that this evidence made Martí’s guilt crystal clear. However, while she admitted to being a prostitute herself, she never admitted to procuring children for that purpose. Martí also admitted to using children’s body parts as ingredients in her “potions,” but insisted that they had been dead already—she never confessed to murder.

She never gave a reason for having kidnapped Teresita. Her lawyer argued that the impulse came from her despair at being unable to have children, compounded with mental and emotional instability. The origin of the other girl, Angelita, was never discovered—she didn’t remember her original name or where she was from by the time the police found her. Martí first claimed that the girl was her daughter, which was refuted by her ex-husband. Later, she said that she had stolen the girl from her sister-in-law immediately after birth, telling the mother that the child had been stillborn and then spiriting it away. 

She was incarcerated in Reina Amalia women’s prison, where she tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide by cutting her wrists with a sharpened wooden knife. This act caused an outcry from the citizens of Barcelona, who wanted Martí held accountable at a public trial. However, just over a year later, she died in prison. 

As with the details surrounding the year of her birth, as well as the stories of the crimes she was accused of, conflicting tales exist as to the cause of her death. Some reports state that she died of uterine cancer, which is the official cause cited on her death certificate. Others say she was attacked by her fellow inmates, and either beaten to death or lynched. The possible motivations for her being attacked were also myriad: Was it an attack by women who, though convicted criminals themselves, were also mothers and despised Martí for her crimes? Or were her attackers paid by some of her former clients, to make absolutely sure that she would never betray their confidence? 

No one will ever know. Enriqueta Martí Ripollés was buried in a mass grave on Montjuïc mountain in 1913, and the rest of the world believed the case of the missing children to be closed for good.

Was She, or Wasn’t She?

Just a few days after Martí’s arrest, a brothel where a number of children were prostituted was discovered in the Barcelona neighborhood of El Raval, and while the brothel was disbanded, the story of where those children came from never came to light. 

Was Martí really a serial killer? Or was she a convenient patsy to explain away the frequent child disappearances at a time when children of poor families were often kidnapped and put to work not only in brothels, but also trafficked to textile factories in Spain and glass factories in France? Were the local police and government officials taking advantage of the situation to divert attention from the scandalous cases of child sexual abuse perpetrated by members of Barcelona’s glorious golden upper class? Was it easier to blame everything on one strange woman who was surrounded by circumstantial evidence than to confront the deep social inequities and social unrest that brewed in the city’s marginalized population? 

The 2020 film by Lluís Danés asserts that Martí was likely the scapegoat for a conspiracy to cover up a pedophilia ring amongst the city’s upper classes. Her history of mental problems combined with her low social position, her scandal-ridden life as a former prostitute, her estranged husband’s descriptions of her nefarious behavior, and her reputation as a so-called “witch doctor” made it easy to accept that she was capable of bizarre and heinous acts. 

Several researchers have also come to the conclusion that there is no evidence to back up the dark legends surrounding her. One of these is writer Jordi Corominas, who suggests alternative explanations for the bones and other human body parts that were found in her possession. He writes that they likely were stolen from a graveyard, either by Martí herself or with the help of accomplices. The human bones that the police found in the initial raid on Martí’s house were later proven to belong to an unknown individual in his or her mid-twenties, and some of the bones were partially burned. As possession of certain human bones was thought to be good luck or useful for healing according to certain folk medicine traditions, it’s possible that Martí—raised in a rural environment, fascinated by healing but without any formal education—acquired them for that purpose, and did not murder whoever they belonged to. 

Writer Elsa Plaza, author of Desmontando el caso de la vampira del Raval, Misoginia y clasismo en la Barcelona modernista (Debunking the Raval Vampire Case, Misogyny and Classism in Modernist Barcelona) asserts that it’s likely that Angelita really was Martí’s niece by her husband's sister, María Pujaló, and that the baby was stolen away by Martí as she’d claimed. She writes that the bloodstained clothes found her in home could be attributed to Martí herself, who suffered from severe hemorrhages due to untreated uterine cancer. At the core of her writing is the question: How was it possible that a kidnapping led to accusations of serial crimes, without a single body being found? Plaza points out that Martí's story is one that has been shaped, told and retold by men—the oral and written reports of male policemen, male judges, male journalists, male politicians and male clients who were desperate not to be named—who were unlikely to have considered possible alternative explanations for the “evidence” at hand. 

This paints a different picture of Enriqueta Martí Ripollés: A woman with an undiagnosed mental condition living in extreme poverty who kidnapped her niece and another child in a wrong-headed attempt to feel maternal love. An uneducated person who used animal parts and bones from graveyards to concoct gruesome “medicines” according to the folk wisdom of the time. A sex worker who was overtly shunned by polite society, yet covertly sought after by wealthy men for the use of her body. A woman suffering from cancer, with no family except an estranged husband. 

Whichever version of the story you choose to believe, the truth as to whether or not the “Vampire of the Raval” committed the crimes she was accused of was buried with her.