Luísa de Jesus
Luísa de Jesus, known as the Foundling Wheel Killer and Luiza de Jesus, was a Portuguese delivery worker, baby farmer, fraudster and serial killer who smothered at least 33 infants in Coimbra from the 1760s until 1772. While she confessed to only 28 of these, she was convicted on all counts, sentenced to death and ultimately executed, becoming the last woman to be executed in the country's history. She is also considered the deadliest serial killer in Portuguese crime history.
Biography
Luísa de Jesus, spelt Luiza at the time, was born on 10 December 1748, in Figueira de Lorvão, a locality that was part of the municipality of Coimbra in the 18th century but which has been within Penacova municipality since the 19th century, the daughter of small-time farmers Manoel and Marianna Rodrigues. In the parish registers, there is only one entry that corresponds to the data mentioned by the judges: "On the eighteenth day of December of one thousand seven hundred and forty-eight, in this church of Figueira, Father João Baptista Barreto baptised and placed the holy oils on Luiza, born on the tenth day of the same month and year, from the first marriage of Manoel Roiz and his wife Mariana Roiz, from Gavinhos ". Roiz is short for Rodrigues, the surname of the father and mother that appears in the judgement, and no law obliged them to give it to their children. In fact, until the 19th century, people could change their names throughout their lives. That's why Luísa used the surname Jesus, which didn't come from her parents, her grandparents or her husband Manuel Gomes. Little is known of her personal life, aside from the fact that she suffered no childhood abuse, and as an adult, she was married and would sometimes earn money from transporting goods from town to town, transporting parcels from the city of Coimbra to Gavinhos, a village of millers and farmers, or to the entire parish of Figueira do Lorvão.Luísa de Jesus eventually hatched a money-making criminal scheme involving a foundling wheel in Coimbra: at the time, these devices were used by mothers to abandon their children at local charities, in the hopes that a good samaritan of means would take them instead. The prospective adoptive parents could then be awarded a 600 réis subsidy, a cradle and half a meter of thick cotton fabric for their generosity. Deciding to take advantage of this, de Jesus, using either her real name or that of her clients as a delivery worker, would adopt children at Coimbra's Foundling Wheel House as often as possible, but would then kill them by either smothering or strangling them. After successfully killing her victims, she would bury them either in shallow graves at the top of Monte Arroio, located at a close distance from Coimbra's Foundling Wheel House, under her house, also in Coimbra, or would stuff their bodies in clay pots. In total, she embezzled around 20,000 réis, the equivalent of six months' salary for a cook or a year's salary for a kitchen girl at the Royal Hospital of Caldas in Caldas da Rainha. The proceeds of the theft of subsidies may, however, have been shared with someone else.
Initially, nobody noted anything suspicious about the rate at which she adopted multiple children until 1 April 1772, when a worker at Coimbra's Foundling Wheel House, Angélica Maria, accidentally stumbled upon a shallow grave in Monte Arroio, containing the corpse of a baby with strangulation marks around its neck. She reported the finding to the authorities, who immediately started investigating, eventually discovering that the child had been adopted by de Jesus under her real name. She was subsequently taken for interrogation, where she immediately confessed that she had killed two newborns on April 6.
Upon hearing her confessions, the authorities searched de Jesus' home, where they unearthed a makeshift graveyard containing the bodies of 18 more infants, with 13 more discovered during excavations on Monte Arroio, for a total of 33 bodies found. Some of the infants' bodies had been dismembered or decapitated, but this was determined to be from decomposition. Upon inspecting adoption records, it was discovered that de Jesus had adopted a total of 34 babies, but she refused to divulge what had happened to the missing 34th baby and its body was never located.
As a result, de Jesus was charged with 33 counts of murder. Two employees at the local charity house were also indicted for criminal negligence in relation to the adoption procedures, but both were released in October of that year. In an attempt to escape prosecution, de Jesus' attorneys claimed as she was under 25 years of age, she was considered a minor under the law and thus ineligible for the death penalty. However, the group of judges, which included Pina Manique, rebuked that claim, exclaiming that if she was old enough to commit such atrocious crimes, then she would be judged as an adult. As a result, de Jesus was sentenced to death and ordered to pay approximately 20,000 réis to the state.