ON February 10, 1912, Teresita Guitart, a five-year-old daughter of a family of bakers, disappeared.
She seemed to have vanished into the middle of nowhere.
For two weeks, people searched for her in every nook and cranny, until a neighbour thought she remembered something.
According to her story, she had seen a small head through a window.
She notified the police, and the officers identified the house as Enriqueta’s. Enriqueta was a 43-year-old woman with a troubled past.
She had arrived in Barcelona as a teenager. The poverty in which she found herself led her to work as a maid, prostitute, healer, and, allegedly, also a pimp who supplied minors to men with money.
After a few years wandering around the city, she met an artist with an eccentric lifestyle.
With him, she went on to have a son who, a few months after birth, would die of malnutrition.
That trauma affected her so deeply that her behaviour would begin to twist even further.
She wandered through the criminal underworld of Barcelona, dressed in rags, dirty, and often surrounded by small children whom, it is said, she passed off as her own.
At night, she would bring out her best clothes, put on a wig and makeup, and go drinking and dancing among the men of Barcelona’s upper class.
Rumours spread around the city that she was a healer and ran a prostitution establishment specialising in children.
Once the agents entered her home, the stories about her would take on increasingly macabre forms.
Among her belongings, they found bones, containers with disturbing concoctions, and a notebook listing high-level contacts.
Clients, possibly?
Many surnames were those of influential families in Catalan society at the time.
A luxuriously decorated living room, children’s dresses, and containers that allegedly contained human fat, hair, skeletons, and herbs were uncovered.
But then two girls appeared.
One was, in fact, Teresita, the same girl they had been searching for.
She showed no signs of abuse, but she was wearing old clothes and had a shaved head.
Enriqueta said she’d found her on the street and explained that the other was her daughter, Angelita.
It would later be discovered that she was a niece Enriqueta was taking care of.
The girls eventually revealed that other minors had passed through the house.
Enriqueta, under pressure, would point the officers to other nearby homes to investigate.
Searches were carried out, and the police would find more human remains hidden behind false ceilings and walls.
In a garden, the remains of children aged 3, 6, and 8 were turned up. This was clearly evidence of a murderous paedophile ring.
Enriqueta became known as the evil child-stealing witch.
The nickname “Vampire” would attach to her shortly afterward, when a rumour spread that she bit her own veins in an attempt to commit suicide.
It was said that she drank her own blood.
She was imprisoned in Barcelona. She died of an illness on 12 May 1913, one year and three months after her arrest.
In 2014, writer Jordi Corominas published the book Barcelona 1912. It challenges the official version and the sensationalist treatment of the case.
Enriqueta could have actually been used as a scapegoat to cover up crimes of child sexual abuse committed by members of Barcelona’s upper classes.
Names appearing in her famous notebook, which included prominent politicians, doctors, bankers, and businessmen, could have been clients of both child sexual services and buyers of homemade remedies prepared by Enriqueta as a healer.
After her death, no further official investigations were carried out, and Enriqueta remained the only pimp-witch known to have hidden children in her attic.
There were no further arrests.
No-one from that infamous notebook was ever brought to trial.
Enriqueta bore the full blame for what was perhaps the largest paedophilia network ever uncovered in Spain.
Enriqueta kidnapped Teresita. This is one of the few certainties in the case.
According to some hypotheses, the crime may have been commercially-motivated.
According to others, she may have simply been a lonely, deranged woman seeking solace in ointments and potions, who stumbled into the media spotlight of a case in which she wasn’t remotely involved.
100 years on, we will probably never know the truth.
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