When Women Kill E-Book

Alia Trabucco Zerán

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 297

Beschreibung

Novelist Alia Trabucco Zerán has long been fascinated not only with the root causes of violence against women, but by those women who have violently rejected the domestic and passive roles they were meant by their culture to inhabit.Choosing as her subject four iconic homicides perpetrated by Chilean women in the twentieth century, she spent years researching this brilliant work of narrative nonfiction detailing not only the troubling tales of the murders themselves, but the story of how society, the media and men in power reacted to these killings, painting their perpetrators as witches, hysterics, or femmes fatales . . . That is, either evil or out of control.Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel and Teresa Alfaro all committed murder. Their crimes not only led to substantial court decisions, but gave rise to multiple novels, poems, short stories, paintings, plays, songs and films, produced and reproduced throughout the last century. In When Women Kill, we are provided with timelines of events leading up to and following their killings, their apprehension by the authorities, their trials and their representation in the media throughout and following the judicial process. Running in parallel with this often horrifying testimony are the diaries kept by Trabucco Zerán while she worked on her research, addressing the obstacles and dilemmas she encountered as she tackled this discomfiting yet necessary project.

Leseprobe

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And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Alia Trabucco Zerán 2019 Translation copyright © Sophie Hughes, 2022

All rights reserved.

The rights of Alia Trabucco Zerán to be identified as the author of this work and of Sophie Hughes to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

Originally published in 2019 as Las homicidas by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A., Santiago de Chile.

First edition in English, 2022, And Other Stories.

ISBN: 9781913505264 eBook ISBN: 9781913505271

Editor: Lizzie Davis; Copy-editor: Fraser Crichton; Proofreader: Bryan Karetnyk; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Typefaces: Albertan Pro and Linotype Syntax; Cover Design: Tom Etherington.

With thanks to Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Josefina Guilisasti, Zig Zag and Cuarto Propio for the images used in this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

To Paula

As far as they’re concerned, a woman is wild if she has a mind of her own.

CHRISTA WOLFMedea: A Modern Retelling, translated by John Cullen

It’s funny, gentlemen of the jury, one would even say that you have already judged me.

MARGUERITE YOURCENARClytemnestra, or Crime, translated by Dori Katz

Contents

Prologue: Outside the LawA Death for Her Heart: CORINA ROJASUnder Wrath’s Sway: ROSA FAÚNDEZApproaching Silence: CAROLINA GEELPart of the Family: TERESA ALFAROEpilogue: The Theater of PunishmentAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyNote on the Title by Sophie Hughes

‌Prologue

Outside the Law

“Women who kill,” I reply, time and again, when people ask me what my book is about. “I’m researching cases of women who kill.” And each time, as if part of a script, the same scene plays out in front of me. Men and women alike furrow their brows, wince, and then nod their heads in approval of my decision to tackle such a pressing, awful, and all-too-common problem in Latin America. It’s my turn: the moment when I must correct their mistake, word by word, and watch as their understanding becomes disapproval and suspicion. Where they should have heard the words “women killers,” a strange mental lapse made them hear the opposite: “women who have been killed.”

Once I got over my surprise at this repeated misunderstanding, it actually helped me to realize something fundamental: it’s easier for people to imagine a dead woman than a woman prepared to kill. And it didn’t matter if I said “murderous women” or “violent women.” By the same slip—more cultural than auditory—the disturbing image of an armed woman was superseded by another, inoffensive one: that of a defenseless woman, six feet under, herself murdered or the victim of violence. “Woman” and “killer” were true antonyms, it seemed—words that, when spoken together, proved unhearable, unthinkable, either causing selective deafness or conjuring the most terrifying flights of fancy: witches, Medea, vampires, femmes fatales.

Incidentally, this mental slip doesn’t happen when we mention “men who kill.” The invisible gender laws operate covertly and constantly, guiding the script of violence toward the same ending. When a man kills, he does not cast doubt on his masculinity, irrespective of his motives or victims, his weapons or circumstances. For a man, the possibility of his violent act is always in the air and even helps confirm his status as a “real man.” A woman who kills, on the other hand, is twice outside the law: outside both the codified laws and the cultural laws that define and regulate femininity. And it is this double transgression, this twofold rebellion, that triggers that telling slip of the ear. Writing this book, reassessing these emblematic cases of female killers, would mean precisely retraining that ear. Only then can the reverberations of their gunshots be heard.

But what made me want to write this book at all? What drove me to lurk in dusty archives, to be repeatedly met with looks of suspicion and fear? Today, as feminists take to the streets to decry the sweeping scale of gender-based violence, the question “why write now about women who kill?” isn’t a trivial one. Some will believe this publication to be an error of judgment, an unnecessary departure just as we slowly begin to shape a fragile awareness of the primary victims of machismo. There will also be readers who search these pages for a false equivalence between the systematic violence suffered by women and another, statistically exceptional kind. I don’t intend to oblige those readers. My aim is not to minimize the alarming recurrence of femicide, or, much less, to endorse killing as a weapon in the feminist struggle. Women who kill are the exception and it’s better that they remain that way. Why, then, focus on female offenders? What interested me in women who kill?

It’s never easy to pick apart the driving impulse behind a book. Interest, pigheadedness, morbid curiosity, desire, and a rebellious streak are all there in the background when I think about the earliest stages of writing When Women Kill. To this, I could also add an intuition and an anecdote. The former was a suspicion that steered me from the very start, but that only now, at the end of a long and winding journey, can I state with any conviction: remembering “bad” women is also a task of feminism. And I don’t mean reclaiming wrongly persecuted figures like the witches Silvia Federici rescues from the stakes, or the killjoys Sara Ahmed vindicates as both the most disruptive and the most necessary members at the family dinner table. I’m speaking, rather, of the genuine wrongdoers, proven killers, almost irredeemable beings who are, at the same time, essential to a feminism intent on expanding accepted ideas of what men and women should feel, to include men who no longer base their masculinity on violence and women who are able to express rage without being seen as somehow less human.

The pressure on women to be perfect mothers, exemplary daughters and wives, and successful professionals has reached unsustainable levels. Virginia Woolf’s angel in the house looms overhead, hurling her ruthless demands at us, both inside and outside the home. In today’s world, resisting her call and questioning her intentions is a matter of survival; we must ask the angel why we have to remain sacrificial and passive, silent and servile, and what is so bad about expressing our anger and frustration. Woolf treacherously proposes to kill her. I propose that the angel go mano a mano with the women killers. I propose that, confronted with the angel’s penetrating gaze, we recover all the antiheroines: the crooks, the convicts, and even those women who picked up a gun, aimed it at their victims, and shot them at point-blank range. In the face of the angel’s vexing demands, I propose we rescue a handful of women killers: strange women who are the antitheses of feminist figures like Simone de Beauvoir or Amanda Labarca, Flora Tristan or Mary Wollstonecraft, but who enable us to see what happens when we fail to meet the expectations that hang, like an invisible guillotine blade, above our heads. Their crimes, while disturbing, are a privileged window from which to observe how the very meaning of womanhood has changed over time. Their contradictions and failures act as a mirror, reflecting back typically “un-feminine” emotions. And that is why remembering these women, retracing their movements and reconstructing their trials and crime scenes, is so vital for feminism. To see ourselves in them, to see them in us and to speak their names without fear: Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel, and Teresa Alfaro.

There are many reasons I chose to focus on these four women: the weapons they used for their respective killings, which targeted children and adults alike; the public impact of their crimes; their surprising sentences; and the fact that, between them, they inspired novels, songs, poems, plays, dance performances, and films. I could have included other women. Female serial killers like the North American Aileen Wuornos, immortalized in the feature film Monster, or the cruel Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, etched in our memories thanks to the writings of Valentine Penrose and Alejandra Pizarnik. Or even Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, better known as La Quintrala and dubbed “Chile’s perverse mother” by the critic Alicia Muñoz, accused of poisoning her father, ordering her lover’s assassination, and torturing and murdering numerous slaves during the colonial era. Or I could have focused on María del Pilar Pérez, whose serial crimes earned her the nickname “the new Quintrala” in Chile just a decade ago. I chose, however, to take a less trodden path. I wanted to focus on everyday women, on professionals, the working class, aristocrats, and domestic employees whose crimes, despite taking place in twentieth-century Chile, would allow me to see beyond the country’s narrow borders and the specifics of each individual case.

The crimes committed by Rojas, Faúndez, Geel, and Alfaro sparked the most extreme reactions within Chilean society: indignation, incredulity, astonishment, terror, and even a telling silence. Could such bloody murders really have been committed by women? Did they owe their homicidal violence to advances in feminism? Would women, on achieving the all-feared equality, start killing as liberally as men? Iconic in Chilean criminal history, these murders also took place at key moments for feminism. Or perhaps the reverse is true: each feminist milestone came with its own exemplary murder, crimes used as excuses to put the insubordinate woman in her place. It’s no accident that Corina Rojas’s case, which took place in 1916, coincided with the emergence of the first wave of feminism; or that the case of the news vendor Rosa Faúndez was used in 1923 to question the deadly consequences of incorporating women into the world of work; or that the crime committed in 1955 by the writer María Carolina Geel became an excuse to discuss the perils of feminism after women in Chile won the full right to vote; or that the series of murders committed by the domestic servant María Teresa Alfaro and uncovered in 1963 took place in the decade of women’s sexual liberation. As the Argentine intellectual Josefina Ludmer lucidly notes, these legal cases and the subsequent representation of them by the press and in the arts coincide with the explosion of women into public life, and help to relieve—be it via punishment or pardon—the anxieties brought on by impending changes to the structures of male power.

My job became harder as the research went on. My four protagonists were slowly losing their mythical halos and transforming into flesh-and-blood people. At times they seemed rebellious, at others submissive. First talkative, then cagey. Cold, and then passionate. These women killers plunged me into roiling waters, and I had no choice but to learn how to swim. This undertaking stretched on for several years, during which time, first and foremost, I had to train myself in the art of suspicion. I had to doubt the word of lawyers and doctors, question the sensationalism of reporters, take novel plots with a pinch of salt, and slowly learn that a question is often a veiled accusation. Only by doubting the emissaries of the law—often judges, but also artists and creators—would I be able, with a little luck, to hear the killers’ own voices. And their voices—those of Corina and Rosa, Teresa and Carolina—had been lost among others far more strident: verdicts, song lyrics, pages of long-forgotten archives.

Raking up these archives was a bigger challenge than I had anticipated. One particular episode of my improvised role as detective exemplifies the kinds of hurdles I had to overcome. One day in January 2015, with the fierce summer sun beating down on me, I headed to the Santiago court archives to see for myself if anything remained of the women’s case files. I’d been told at the national library, where I’d managed to dig out some old newspapers, that it was unlikely, that I shouldn’t waste my time in that crumbling building run by hostile, half-asleep functionaries. But I suspected that a lot of case files must still be there and that, with a little patience, I would find what I was looking for. Almost three hours I waited for the archivist to see me, and when he did appear, dragging his feet out of his gloomy office, I was immediately able to confirm a nagging suspicion. I explained to him in detail what I needed. I smiled. I even cracked the odd joke to try to win him over. But, squinting his eyes, he asked me how he could “be sure, absolutely sure” that I wasn’t searching for a different type of document altogether: files containing delicate information about times best left in the past. “What times would those be?” I asked. He didn’t deem it necessary to reply.

Delving into the past is a dangerous undertaking in a country founded on a pact of silence—a pact that fostered impunity and fear, that favored forgetting over remembering and that, decades after the end of the dictatorship, was now embodied in this guardian of the national archives. I always knew the military and police were in on the pact, but I had been blind to its destructive effect on wider society. And even though the following pages aren’t strictly about that pact of silence, even though they explore other hidden recesses of our history, they also reveal and subsequently shatter another secret that forms part of a frightened, amnesic country. Chile tried to forget Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel, and Teresa Alfaro. It tried to make them disappear behind tales of love, passion, and jealousy, to hide them behind witch masks, Quintrala masks, Medea masks. Masks that, in these pages, I want to remove for good.

As for the anecdote that helps explain why I wanted to write this book, it’s really more of a confession. No one in my family has ever been at the center of a bloody crime. I’m the sort of person who covers her eyes if a dead body appears on television. And the closest I’ve ever been to a gun is when I gave my father an old Trabuco (with only one c) as a gift, in a nod to our surname. Yet despite the gulf between my life and the lives of the women in this book, between my dead and theirs, their convictions and my own, here I am, sitting in front of a manuscript that describes in minute and vivid detail the blade of a dagger, the specific effect of a poison, the sound of a gun blast. And the question remains: why?

A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I think I fantasized about defending human rights and how I—at the ripe old age of seven—would find a way to put wicked murderers behind bars. I don’t remember having had any real doubts about this professional choice, and when the doubts did eventually start to creep up on me, it was already too late: sitting in the back row of a huge lecture hall in the University of Chile, I was yawning away, listening to a professor talk to us about the importance of legal deadlines in procedural law. I got through these classes—and worse ones—more out of stubbornness than any real desire to be there, and arrived, breathless, at the end of my degree. My last requirements were to complete a professional internship and swear before the Supreme Court that I would undertake my profession honorably.

It was March when I made my way up to the legal aid services building. I climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the door to an office. Two long tables pushed together served as a shared desk where dozens of lawyers attended to their new clients. The secretary waved me in, checked my name, and handed me a mountain of files. In passing, as if it were nothing, she added, “One of your appeals expires tomorrow.” I didn’t know what to say. I clumsily made my way to the one free space, a chair facing a huge window, and collapsed into it.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I made myself a flask of coffee and painstakingly wrote the legal appeal I would have to present the following morning. Early the next day, I went back to the office, left the draft of my appeal on the head lawyer’s desk, and waited for him to sign it so I could run it over as quickly as possible to the court. Half an hour later, a brusque voice called out my last name. I jumped up out of my chair and hurried over to the lawyer’s desk. A diploma hung on the wall above his head and dozens of legal case deadlines were marked up on a calendar. With his forefinger, he reached out and tapped the document that had kept me awake all night. Then, shaking his head but without even looking up, he shot back his verdict: “We’re not here to write literature.” Entire lines had been crossed out in red pen, all the adjectives deleted and my words replaced with others that sounded to my ears like the screeching of hundreds of nails on a chalkboard: “I hereby appeal,” “We kindly request Your Honor,” “If it please the Court.” They were the words of the law. And I was to commit its terms of reverence to memory if I wanted to join the select company of lawyers.

The following six months went by painfully slowly, but finally the last day of my internship as a law student arrived. All that remained was a ritual—one that for many marks the beginning of their career, but for me marked its longed-for end. I remember I put on a red jacket, and into one of its pockets I slipped a ticket for that very day to somewhere far, far away. But I remember even more vividly my joy when I held up my hand and, standing before a bench of judges, surrounded by portraits of distinguished lawyers, I responded I do, I do, I do, while inside I promised myself that I would never, ever, set foot in a courtroom again.

I kept that promise for almost a decade, only breaking it the day I began researching for this book. I returned to the courts of justice feeling jumpy, convinced that I was going to fall into some kind of trap. But this time, instead of submitting to its rules and rituals, I saw it in an entirely new light: as a tragic stage on which the most miserable dramas play out and the most dramatic fates are decided. I saw the bench and the judge, the defense lawyers and the army of court clerks, blindfolded Lady Justice and her crooked scales. And only in that new light—or, you might say, that new shade—could I see beyond the criminal profiles of these four women. For the first time, I saw them clearly and I understood that they—like Medea and Lady Macbeth, like Medusa and La Quintrala—existed at an interstice: between myth and reality, the past and the present, the law and literature. I would call them “las homicidas,” taking their final convictions of homicide (homo, “man”; caedere, “to kill”)—that unspeakable, unthinkable crime for a woman—and prefixing it with the feminine definitive article “las”: “homicidal women.” I would revisit the lives and crimes of these women who killed. I would create both fictions and realities around them. I would write with violence about violence, with love about love, and with fear about fear. I would write this book to counter that lawyer’s red pen and all the red pens that have defined the narrow confines of the law for all women, and for too long.

‌A Death for Her Heart

Corina Rojas

Just before midnight on Friday, January 21, 1916, a ten-year-old boy came rushing breathlessly into a police station in the center of Santiago. When asked what had happened, the boy explained, sobbing, that his father, David Díaz Muñoz, was lying dead on his bed at home. The detectives jumped to their feet and ran to the child’s house. There they found a woman draped over the bloody corpse, crying inconsolably: twenty-seven-year-old Corina Rojas.

That is how this episode is described in the police report from the time. Its tattered pages also relate how, on the evening of the crime, the family had enjoyed a lively dinner party with a group of friends. After their friends left, past eleven at night, David Díaz went up to his bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep. Meanwhile, Rojas, accompanied by one of her domestic staff, freshened up in the bathroom. Only on returning to the bedroom did she find her sixty-two-year-old husband lying on the bed, stabbed in the heart.

“Horrific crime in Santiago” read El Mercurio’s headline the following day. Yet it was Las Últimas Noticias, a sensationalist rag, that immortalized this iconic murder on its front page: “The astonishing crime on Calle Lord Cochrane.” A hematoma in the victim’s temple and a stab wound to his chest meant detectives could rule out suicide and arrest their first suspects: the three domestic employees and the dinner guests. One by one, however, they were released. Meanwhile, protected from the rumor mill, the widow remained at home: pale, uncommunicative, and suffering from fainting fits, according to the papers. But new information began to flood in: “strange goings-on for a respectable society,” El Mercurio hinted, while Las Últimas Noticias spoke of “an attack against the noble sentiments that form the very basis of the home.”

Both newspapers alluded in their articles to an “intimate friendship” between Corina Rojas and her piano teacher, Jorge Sangts—a relationship to all appearances irrelevant to the police investigation, but which aroused the judge’s suspicion. In a move that would have the reporters all abuzz, the magistrate decided to arrest and isolate Sangts and Rojas. And after their arrest came more activity, avidly picked up by the press: at the guesthouse where Jorge Sangts was living at the time, they seized several love letters and the keys to none other than the house at 338 Calle Lord Cochrane. On top of these findings, the police received two anonymous notes that hinted at the possibility of a paid killing. The notes mentioned two new parties: Alberto Duarte, a thirty-one-year-old coachman, and an eighty-three-year-old empanada vendor named Rosa Cisternas.

With Jorge Sangts, Corina Rojas, Alberto Duarte, and Rosa Cisternas in police custody, the investigation quickly came to an end and the newspapers went public with the following story: Corina Rojas had been married to David Díaz Muñoz for twelve years when she committed her crime. According to her own statements, it was a “loveless marriage.” Rojas felt alone and unhappy, the victim of a miserly and unfaithful husband. Her economic dependency on him and the illegality of divorce at the time had kept her trapped in a life of domestic chores and interminable matrimonial spats that impaired her already fragile health and even more fragile patience.

With no apparent way out, Rojas meets Jorge Sangts, a man not much older than her, who introduces himself as a piano and language teacher. Rojas decides to take him on as her tutor, and between private lessons and long evening walks, the couple strikes up a friendship that quickly develops into a love affair. After several months of secret encounters and distracted music lessons, the connection between them intensifies, as does their anguish at, in their own words, not being free. In the early twentieth century, there was only one condition that could afford them their coveted freedom: widowhood.

With the intention of bringing about Díaz Muñoz’s death and realizing their dream of being together, Rojas and young Sangts pay a visit to a house of three supposed witches. These strangers offer the couple potions and teach them strange spells, but nothing works: their incense and concoctions keep David Díaz Muñoz in very good health, while Jorge Sangts becomes increasingly bent on changing his status of lover. He cannot bear that Rojas remains married to another, and he gives her an ultimatum: it’s either her husband or him. In desperation, Rojas begs him to give it one last shot. She tells Sangts she has heard rumors of a woman who might be able to fix their problem, and one hot January afternoon she proposes they pay a visit to the notorious witch Rosa Cisternas, whose powers would guarantee a swift solution.

In a small house on the outskirts of the city, a lowly old lady with a hunched back receives them in her home. Clearly not in good health herself, she is nonetheless hugely persuasive. Rosa Cisternas calmly listens to Rojas’s story and prescribes her countless remedies and spells. Only after several failed attempts and at the infelicitous wife’s insistence does she propose the most reliable and efficient solution: the crime must be committed by hand. It is Cisternas who then contacts the coachman, Alberto Duarte, and together they agree on a plan and a cash fee.

Some weeks pass until January 21, 1916. Rojas goes back to Rosa Cisternas’s house that morning, upset about yet another argument with her husband. She tells Cisternas she can’t go on like this a minute longer, that she wants to be free as soon as possible, and that she’s willing to do anything. And “anything,” from the mouth of Corina Rojas, includes killing. The witch Cisternas looks at her carefully. She understands the urgency and resolves to put an end to the wife’s suffering once and for all.

At seven that evening, to the din of a dinner party in full flow, Duarte reaches Calle Lord Cochrane and waits patiently for his signal. The house is a typical upper-class Santiago home: high ceilings, a long hallway, wooden floors, and a small garden. Beside the window, the streetlamp is not yet lit, and from inside he can make out the sound of laughter, the merry clinking of glasses and notes from the piano that Rojas is playing for her guests’ entertainment. Then, suddenly, the music stops. The front door opens a fraction. Alberto Duarte enters the house and is led by Rojas to the study next to the master bedroom, where he hides behind some heavy drapes.

There he waits for four hours. Every so often, Rojas checks that the hitman is still hidden and urges him, between offering him swigs of vermouth, to take courage, to remain calm. Just before midnight, the guests finally bid their farewells and Corina Rojas and her husband head up to their bedroom. He unbuttons his shirt, takes off his trousers, and insists on having sexual relations. Shortly afterward, Rojas leaves the room. Unlike other nights, she goes to the bathroom in the company of Victoria Granifo, her most trusted maid. She will be both Rojas’s alibi and the hitman’s signal. Once he can see that the husband is alone, Duarte comes out of his hiding place and enters the couple’s room. Waiting for him there, under the foot of the bed, is an unloaded rifle. A violent blow to the left temple wakes Díaz Muñoz, but Alberto Duarte is also carrying a dagger that he thrusts ruthlessly into his victim. There is no screaming. No resistance. No suggestion that a crime has just been committed. The murderer flees the house and tosses the dagger into a ditch. Only then does Rojas return to the room. Her screams wake her eldest son and the boy makes a frenzied dash to notify the police.

[DIARY OF THE SEARCH]

The stark landscape multiplies in the mirrored windows of the new court building. In front of it, like a stubborn old relic, a huge red-brick building with an old sign tells me I have reached my destination. It’s the last remaining court from the old justice system and it’s my belief that somewhere inside this building I might find what I am looking for: the court ruling against Corina Rojas. I approach the counter and watch closely as a woman stirs her coffee. Every orbit of the cup with her spoon adds to the impression that she, like the court ruling, has been sitting here for a century. She doesn’t look up on hearing my question. She merely repeats the year: 1916? I nod. I explain that all those involved are now dead, that what I’m looking for is a historic, closed case. She shakes her head and loses interest. Ignoring my protests, she replies that I need power of attorney if I want to withdraw a file. In practice, this would require Rojas herself coming back to life and signing a piece of paper granting me access to the case—a case which, by the looks of things, is actually far from closed.

After being arrested as the two primary suspects, Corina Rojas and Jorge Sangts gave a string of highly inconsistent confessions and retractions. For the first few hours, Rojas denied having any connection at all to her piano teacher. She’d never met him, she said. She’d never taken music classes and she didn’t know a single word in any language other than Spanish. But in a well-prepared interrogation by the police, in which they confronted her with dozens of love letters written in her own hand, she was forced to retract her original statement. Rojas then admitted to her infidelity and claimed sole responsibility for the crime. She stated that her darling Jorge had had nothing to do with the murder and that the whole thing had been her idea from start to finish. Only after learning that her beloved Sangts hadn’t thought twice about pointing the finger at her would Rojas disclose the truth: they had planned the murder together, but she had done so purely out of love for Sangts. “Perhaps I was overambitious and loved too hard,” she admitted to the incredulous court officials.

The discovery of Rojas and Sangts’s personal relationship became a focal point of the investigation and the judge insisted on digging up each and every detail that might help him clarify the motive for the crime. His hypothesis seemed to hold: Rojas wanted to kill her husband in order to be with her lover who, in turn, wanted his relationship with Rojas to be exclusive. The police inquiry and confessions from both parties quickly confirmed their romance, but the investigation didn’t stop there. Instead, it would uncover all manner of intimate details: where the lovers had sexual relations, whether they had ever slept together in the marital home, whether Rojas had been intimate with her husband the night of the crime, whether she had ever had other lovers. Corina Rojas’s sexual behavior would be painstakingly picked apart throughout the proceedings, and would eventually be the defining feature of her trial: “The defendant cannot claim no prior offenses,” the sentence would rule, “given that, even before seeking the hand that would take her husband’s life—that is, before her part in the crime for which she is being prosecuted—Corina Rojas had already committed another offense: that of adultery.”

For the judge, Rojas’s infidelity is the most conclusive evidence of her guilt. The widow becomes a murder suspect only once her reputation as a woman and wife has been called into question. Her adulterous relationship spurred her homicidal behavior, the magistrate seems to say, and itself constitutes a prior offense that must be taken into consideration in the present trial.

As outmoded as his reasoning may seem, amazingly, it is not the stuff of distant history. Adultery as a crime was only removed from the Chilean criminal code in 1994, making the severe sanctions imposed at the beginning of the last century less surprising. Back then, the law punished “a married woman who lies with any man other than her husband” with up to five years in prison. If the same crime was committed by a man, however, it was a different story altogether. There had to be other factors at play for adulterous behavior on the part of a married man to be punishable. The crime even went by a different name: no longer “adultery,” but “cohabitation.” And for the husband to be convicted of this crime it was not enough that he lay with another woman; he had to keep “a concubine within the conjugal home, or outside it in scandal.” The maximum penalty in this case was 540 days in prison, as opposed to the five years stipulated for a woman for an ostensibly lesser offense. That said, if the same crime was committed by the wife, that is, if she kept a lover “in scandal” or “within the conjugal home,” the penalty increased to one of the harshest in the entire legal system: exile. Female adultery, in the most serious cases, was not only considered immoral, but treacherous against the nation. And any woman guilty of such a crime had to be banished from the country in order to restore the honor of the what literary scholar Doris Sommer calls the “great national family.”

But why was adultery a female crime? How did it come to be that the law penalized wives more harshly than husbands for the very same behavior? And moreover, why did Chile, up until 1953, absolve any husband who murdered his spouse if he caught her in a flagrant act of adultery? The answer points to an ingrained notion of honor that remains perversely prevalent today. Unlike female honor, which rests on a woman’s sexual behavior (either her sexual restraint or her absolute marital fidelity), male honor, in other words his standing as a true man, depends largely on women’s behavior. The wife, as the anthropologist Myriam Jimeno argues, represents a latent threat to the husband, because his reputation is dependent on her actions. This explains why fidelity was a duty the wife had to fulfill at all costs, and why, if she was caught in the act, the husband would not face punishment for killing her. And Corina Rojas knew this perfectly well. “Even when I failed my husband,” she would state, “I did not take my duties lightly. I was very careful to keep up appearances. Those who knew me never suspected a thing.” But her discretion lost all importance once the murder was uncovered. The adulterous-woman narrative would be central to the arguments of all involved.

In direct contradiction of his first testimony, Jorge Sangts explains to the members of the court that he “rejected Corina Rojas a long time ago,” that she was harassing him, not the other way around, and that “Rojas had other lovers at the time of the crime.” Sangts picks up the infidelity argument and, to make matters worse, makes out as if he himself had nothing to do with the adultery. And he doesn’t stop there. Intimating that Rojas regularly saw other men, he asks the court to consider “which organ is vulnerable to be struck by Corina Rojas’s ‘hysteria.’” Sangts’s use of the word organ is pointed when used in conjunction with hysteria, which originates from hystera, the Greek word for uterus. Sangts attempts to present a case of hysteria to the judge—a case of rampant female sexuality that allows him to frame Corina Rojas as the sole culprit of the crime. It’s a cunning tactic: repeatedly bringing up Rojas’s sexual transgression in order to reinforce her culpability and argue his own innocence.