The Dead Girls

When Judge Peralta was assigned to preside over the trial of “Serafina and Arcángela Baladro, et al.,” his first concern was to divide the nineteen suspects into two groups. Those who complained of mistreatment in their preliminary statements were considered victims and those who had nothing to complain about were presumed to be the guilty parties.

His second step was to have the innocent and guilty groups separated from each other. The six victims were taken from their cell to a room without bars that had been prepared for them in the courthouse building. It faced on the inside patio and was furnished with beds provided by various Christian families. These women were given permission to leave the building by the judge who reminded them of their duty to be available for all judicial acts. He also excused them from eating the food prepared by the jailer’s wife—which, by general agreement, was abominable—and money was collected by a group of Concepción citizens, headed by the mayor, to pay a woman who ran a lunchroom in the market to send in breakfast and the midday meal for six each day in dinner pails. The public was concerned about the health of the women, who had declared in their statements that they had not had enough to eat in over a year.

“Just you wait until our influential friends find out what you are doing to us and you’ll see who is right,” Arcángela said when the marshal read out the accusations against them that appeared in the official record.

Two days passed. No influential friends came forward and the Baladros were unable even to communicate with licenciado Rendón. When this became evident, three of the girls who had made no complaints requested permission from the judge to add to their statements that when they began to work for the Baladro sisters they had been hoodwinked with respect to what the job entailed (two of them came to the Molino Street house under the impression that they were going to be servants and the third thought it was a match factory), that they had been under age, had stayed on against their wills (ten, twelve, and fifteen years, respectively), and had never received payment for their services.

The day they made these emendations to their statements, the three women were taken out of their cell and treated as victims from then on.

At first, the Baladros refused to make any statement without consulting their attorney. But, time passed and licenciado Rendón never appeared, so, finally, they had no choice but to submit to preliminary questioning without counsel:

Q: How do you account for the presence of three corpses in the yard of your house?

Q: Several of the female employees complain that you were starving them. They say that all you gave them to eat was one tortilla and five beans each. What do you have to say to that?

A: It is a lie. We gave them the same as people eat all over. Even vermicelli soup.

Four days after the apprehension, columnists wrote in various newspapers that the Baladros were so influential in the state of Plan de Abajo that it would be impossible to convict them. In reply to this allegation, Judge Peralta placed a temporary embargo on all properties belonging to the sisters “for the purpose of protecting the means of compensating the victims.”

A photograph of her appeared in the newspapers, her hands gripping the bars as though she wanted to break them, over a caption that read: “Responsible for six deaths and all she thinks about is her property.”

Since the Baladros’ lawyer showed no signs of putting in an appearance, Judge Peralta appointed licenciado Gedeón Céspedes to defend them.

The licenciado was interviewed by the press after having met with the defendants. “Don’t get me wrong,” he told the reporters, “the only reason I am defending these women is because I have to. It is my duty as a public defense counsellor, but I have no sympathy for them. On the contrary, I believe they deserve to get death, a penalty which I regret to say does not exist in the state of Plan de Abajo.”

“. . . that they forbade her to leave the house; that they gave her hardly anything to eat; and that one time when she and three of the girls did something the señoras did not like, the four of them were locked up in a room and then Serafina came in and said to the declarant, ‘Here is the stick. Take it and beat them with it. And you better hit hard because if I see that you don’t, I will hit you myself.’ ” (She exhibits bruises.)

“. . . that he saw señora Arcángela Baladro unwrap a package that was on the table. It was the rifle; that the aforementioned then said the following words: ‘I am leaving you this rifle to defend yourself with in case somebody tries to steal the cows’ . . . and that the same señora Baladro said to him on another occasion: ‘I am putting these four girls in your charge. Keep a close watch on them. If you catch any one of them trying to get away, shoot her with the rifle I left you to guard the cows with.’ That is why the declarant says he was only obeying orders when he shot.”

“. . . that while the declarant was washing clothes in the laundry tubs together with some of the other girls, she saw Captain Bedoya come into the yard and walk to the back wall unbuttoning his trousers with the idea of urinating when he stopped short and stood there looking at the tub under the lemon tree. ‘What’s that?’ he asked them and they answered, ‘It’s Blanca,’ which put him into a bad temper and he said to señora Serafina, ‘Tell Ticho to carry Blanca out to the garbage dump at the edge of town and leave her there for the dogs to eat.’ ”

“. . . that she saw Captain Bedoya cut switches off a bush in the yard and hit them against the palm of his hand to see which hurt the most . . .”

“. . . that when she was waiting on the table she heard the captain say to señora Serafina: ‘These women you got here are no good anymore, their meat is all flabby. The only way they might interest somebody is in tacos with mole sauce . . .’ ”

“. . . that she hasn’t the slightest doubt that Captain Bedoya was Serafina Baladro’s man and that he sometimes slept with her since on various occasions that the declarant waited on table in the dining room she saw the said captain taking off his belt after supper . . .”

“. . . that in the mornings the captain had an egg for breakfast which those who were in the kitchen would see being carried out.”

These statements and others like them constituted the evidence on which Judge Peralta charged Captain Bedoya with complicity in the crimes and having been the brain behind them.

“. . . that when they reached Los Pirules farm, one of the girls, named Rosa X, took very sick and that the declarant saw that the woman whose nickname was the Skeleton came over to the said Rosa and said to her, ‘I’ll make you some tea’; that later she put water to boil on the brazier and threw various ingredients into the pot but that she did not know what they were; that she saw the aforementioned Skeleton pour the tea into a mug and serve it to the sick girl who died a few hours later and was buried in a hole that the person known as Ticho dug in the ground.”

“. . . that she—the Skeleton—was permitted to go out on the street but we were not, and that she made the meals but we were not even allowed to light the fire . . .”

“. . . that she—the Skeleton—was the one who gave Blanca the Coca-Cola to drink that killed her . . .”

The record contains no reference to the attempt by the four women to bury the Skeleton alive in the old outhouse.

“. . . that when they were going to be moved from San Pedro de las Corrientes to Concepción, the declarant and another woman were sitting in the car next to the driver whose nickname is Ladder, who opened the door on their side and said, ‘You can fit in here, Captain.’ And the captain sat down squeezing the women and making them feel as though they were going to smother; that, on the same occasion the declarant said, ‘I feel like my bones are going to break,’ but nobody paid any attention . . .”

The foregoing paragraph indicates that Ladder broke the traffic laws of the state of Plan de Abajo on two counts: transportation of passengers under conditions dangerous to health, and transportation of prostitutes within the territory of a state in which prostitution is illegal. Simón Corona’s statement (see Chapter II) cast suspicion on him of having transported corpses.

On the fifth day of the trial, Aurora Bautista requested the judge for permission to change her statement as follows: Where it says “they made up the accounts each month and deducted the expenses from what she earned, but during the last year they neither kept accounts nor gave her anything . . .” to read “they made up accounts every month but never gave her anything . . .”

Where it says “She was nineteen years old when she came to work in the Molino Street house” to read “She does not remember exactly how old she was, but she thinks she was sixteen years of age.”

She also requests—the record says—to add the following: “that she saw the sisters Serafina and Arcángela Baladro push the two women who fell off the balcony on September 14.”

The first report of the case of the Baladro sisters appeared on page 8 of the Abajo Sun in the “News from Concepción” section. When it came out that the three bodies discovered were of young women and that they were found in a brothel, the story was spread over the front pages of all the papers in the country. On the third day, an avid public was informed of the discovery of three more bodies at Los Pirules farm.

Concepción became jammed with reporters, photographers, and sensation seekers. At the time he reconstructed the crimes, Judge Peralta counted 119 persons in the courtroom who had no good reason to be there. The confrontation between Serafina Baladro and Aurora Bautista, at which the two women exchanged insults and called each other liar, was held under the lenses of twenty-three cameras. At the photographers’ request, the victims—nine by that time—posed kneeling on the floor of the little patio next to the kitchen with their arms outstretched at their sides, holding stones similar to the ones gathered by Captain Bedoya.

The newspapermen and the public in general hoped that more bodies would turn up. This fascination influenced evaluation of the events. For instance, Simón Corona’s statement in which he declared that he helped the Baladro sisters transport a body to the mountain in 1960 gave rise to the belief that the Baladro sisters had devoted themselves for years to murdering women and throwing their bodies by roadsides or burying them in a corner of their yard. The victims wracked their memories and came up with such testimony as this, which appeared in the newspapers: “I recall a woman by the name of Patricia who worked in the México Lindo for a few days and then disappeared and nobody ever heard anything of her again . . .” and so on. The authorities of San Pedro de las Corrientes ordered the floor of the México Lindo torn up to see if there were any bodies buried there; nothing was found. More than thirty letters were received at the Abajo Sun from mothers who had lost touch with one or more of their daughters whom they had reason to suspect were in houses of prostitution and asking the editor of the paper to please let them know if any of the corpses or living victims looked like the girl in the enclosed photograph.

Chief Cueto made a final attempt to uncover other bodies. He took five of the defendants, Captain Bedoya, Ladder, Teófilo Pinto, Ticho, and Brave Nicolás, out of prison and brought them under escort to the Casino del Danzón. He led them all into the cabaret, handed each a pick and shovel, and ordered them to dig up the floor, with a warning that work would not be stopped until a body was found. (His purpose in giving this order—Chief Cueto explained to the reporters—was to induce one of the defendants to confess where a body was buried instead of digging indefinitely in a spot where he knew there was nothing.) Since none of the accused confessed, the five dug for three full days, first in the cabaret—leaving the hole that may be seen to this day—then in the yard, and finally in the plowed field at Los Pirules farm in a spot picked at random by the chief.

Judge Peralta found “Serafina and Arcángela Baladro, et al.” guilty on the following counts: first-degree murder; negligent homicide; illegal deprivation of freedom; physical and moral mistreatment; illegal possession of firearms; illegal carrying of idem; threats with idem; corruption of minors; pandering; deprivation of earnings of a third party; deceitful representation; illegal occupancy of attached property; illegal burial; violation of federal and state traffic laws; and concealment of assets.

The judge, therefore, passed sentence, as follows: Serafina and Arcángela Baladro, thirty-five years’ imprisonment, for multiple crimes; Captain Bedoya, twenty-five years’ imprisonment, for complicity and instigation of idem; the Skeleton, twenty years imprisonment, for first-degree murder (of Rosa X) and for negligent homicide (of Blanca X); Teófilo Pinto, twenty years for two first-degree homicides; Eulalia Baladro, his wife, fifteen years for taking the rifle off the wall and handing it to her husband; Ticho, twelve years, for illegal burial and complicity in multiple crimes; Ladder, six years for violation of traffic laws and complicity in the crimes, and so on.

Judge Peralta ordered that the attached properties of the Baladro sisters be sold in sufficient quantity to satisfy the compensations that he himself calculated. An example follows:

Calculation of compensation of Blanca X:
For back pay due (for ten years’ work at the rate of 300 pesos per month, the minimum wage)	36,000.00 pesos
For accrued interest	18,000.00 pesos
For death of the worker	10,000.00 pesos
	64,000.00 pesos

This amount was deposited with the court at the disposal of any person able to substantiate his claim to being her legitimate heir. (It has remained unclaimed.)

There was a turkey-in-mole-sauce fiesta in the courthouse patio on the day the nine surviving victims received their compensations from Judge Peralta. The women were photographed first being handed their checks, then, eating, and, finally, kneeling in the Concepción church thanking God for having made it possible for them to get out of their predicament alive. By the time they were finished praying, the photographers had left. The women said goodbye to one another in the atrium and each went her way. Dusk was falling. Nothing was ever heard of any of them again.