Las Poquianchis: The True Story of the González Valenzuela Sisters
Updated: 5 days ago
In January 1964 a teenage girl slipped away from a ranch outside San Francisco del Rincón in Guanajuato and walked for hours until she reached the police in León. What she told them led officers to Rancho Loma del Ángel, to a group of starving young women and, eventually, to the graves in the yard. The women who owned the place were four sisters from Jalisco. The press called them Las Poquianchis, and Mexico’s never really stopped talking about them.
Sixty years on they’re still billed as the most prolific murder partnership on record, and Netflix has just turned them into a series. But the legend and the court file don’t always agree, and some of the most repeated details about the sisters don’t hold up. Here’s the story as far as it can actually be pinned down.
Quick Answers
• Who were they? Delfina, María de Jesús, María Luisa and Carmen González Valenzuela, sisters born in El Salto, Jalisco. Delfina, María de Jesús and María Luisa ran brothels in Jalisco and Guanajuato from the early 1940s (some accounts say 1945) until 1964. Carmen helped in the early years but seems to have died before the case broke.
• What did they do? They kidnapped, bought or tricked girls, many in their early teens, into forced prostitution. Women who died from beatings, starvation, illness or forced abortions were buried on their land.
• How many died? Guinness World Records credits them with at least 90 murders and some estimates go past 150, but the 1964 trial only recorded eight named dead women.
• How were they caught? A girl called Catalina Ortega escaped from Rancho Loma del Ángel in January 1964 and went to the police in León.
• What happened to them? Delfina and María de Jesús got 40 years each and María Luisa got 27. Delfina died in prison in 1968, María Luisa in 1984 and María de Jesús was eventually released.
• Why “Poquianchis”? It’s regional slang for an effeminate or cross-dressing man. It seems to have been the nickname of a previous owner of one of their bars, and it stuck.
Four Sisters From El Salto
The sisters were born in El Salto, an industrial town just outside Guadalajara, between about 1912 and 1924. Delfina was the eldest. Beyond that the sources don’t agree. Crime+Investigation’s dates make María de Jesús the youngest, while Infobae describes María Luisa as the baby of the family. Their mother, Bernardina Valenzuela, had twelve children and only these four girls survived. That detail comes from historian Fabiola Bailón Vásquez of El Colegio de México, who’s worked through the trial records and whose research underpins a lot of what follows.
Their father is a murkier figure. English-language accounts usually call him Isidro Torres, a local policeman, and Crime+Investigation says he locked his daughters in cells overnight and made them watch him torture prisoners. Mexican outlets describe a Porfirian-era officer with a drink problem and a violent streak, married to a deeply religious, controlling wife. Bailón’s reading of the court papers is less lurid. She has him working as a juez de acordada, a kind of rural lawman, first in Santa Ana Acatlán and then in San Francisco del Rincón, before going into trade.
Either way the family settled in San Francisco del Rincón, over the state line in Guanajuato, while the girls were small, and the three younger sisters went to work in a textile factory. The story that the family fled Jalisco after their father shot a man in an argument turns up in English retellings but not in the trial material, so it’s best taken with a pinch of salt.
From a Three-Room House to a Chain of Brothels
Delfina got into the trade first. Her original setup in El Salto was a modest three-room operation. In 1941, with the right permits in hand, she opened a licensed brothel in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, called El Guadalajara de Noche. María de Jesús ran her own place in San Francisco del Rincón, Carmen looked after the kitchen and the books, and María Luisa eventually drifted off and ended up showing films in Mexico City.
That’s worth stressing, because it shapes everything that came after. For a big chunk of this period running a brothel in Mexico wasn’t automatically a crime. Regulated prostitution had been the norm since the 19th century, the country only moved towards abolishing it with the penal code reforms of 1940, and individual states followed at their own pace. Women running vice businesses in plain sight wasn’t unique to Mexico either, as New York’s Marm Mandelbaum and the underworld women of the Gilded Age showed decades earlier.
The turning point came when Guanajuato’s governor, Juan José Torres Landa, banned prostitution in the state. La Crónica dates the ban to 1961, while Bailón says it was only enforced from 1962. It didn’t shut the sisters down. It pushed them underground. Their brothels were dressed up as “casas de citas” and guest houses, women were shuffled between properties and the last of the business ended up hidden away at a ranch called San Ángel, also known as Loma del Ángel, on the edge of San Francisco del Rincón.
Where the Name Las Poquianchis Came From
Nobody called them Las Poquianchis to begin with. In parts of central Mexico “poquianchi” was slang for an effeminate man or a man who dressed as a woman, in an era when Mexican police were rounding men up for exactly that. Several outlets, including La Razón, say the previous owner of a bar the sisters took over went by “la Poquianchi” and the name simply transferred to the new owners.
El Universal places that bar, La Barca de Oro, in León, while the court record mentions a brothel run by María de Jesús in San Francisco del Rincón called El Poquianchis. Whichever came first, by 1964 the nickname was everywhere, and it’s since become shorthand in the Mexican crime press for any woman who runs a brothel or forces girls into sex work.
How the Girls Were Taken
The victims were nearly always poor and young, and many were between 12 and 15 when they were taken. Some were snatched outright, some answered offers of work as maids or waitresses and some were sold by their own relatives. The sisters relied on procurers to keep the supply going. Two of them, Altagracia and Amalia Vargas, were later arrested in Mexico City and admitted acting as “proveedoras”, reportedly paid 500 pesos for each girl. A procuress named Josefina Gutiérrez, whose arrest and interrogation helped crack the case, is usually described as another.
Once inside, the girls were held by violence and debt. Food and clothes were charged against their earnings at whatever price the sisters fancied, so the debt never went down. One account says they were given five hard tortillas a day. Punishments included beatings and starvation, and Crime+Investigation describes a narrow board called the “cama real” (royal bed) on which girls were bound in barbed wire for days, though that detail only appears in that one English-language account.
Girls who fell pregnant were made to have abortions and babies who were born alive were killed and buried in the yard, the same cold arithmetic that drove Victorian baby farmers like Amelia Dyer. Women who got sick or tried to run were punished, sometimes fatally, and once a woman reached 25 she was considered too old to be worth keeping.
Clients weren’t always safe either. Several accounts say men who turned up flashing cash were robbed and killed. And the sisters didn’t do any of this alone. Their customers included police, soldiers and local officials, and a network of drivers, enforcers and older women who’d been through the system themselves helped keep the girls in line and get rid of bodies. Ámbito names Delfina’s lover and protector as Hermenegildo Zúñiga Maldonado, nicknamed El Capitán Águila Negra (Captain Black Eagle), and says he handled the burials, but his name doesn’t appear in the other sources used here.
The Escape That Brought It All Down
The end began in January 1964 with a cluster of separate complaints. In Guadalajara a woman named Petra Jiménez reported that her 13-year-old daughter, María, had gone missing, and around the same time Guanajuato’s judicial police took two similar reports. Then Catalina Ortega got out. She escaped from the ranch, walked for hours and told her story to police in León. Her account tied the missing girls together and pointed straight at the sisters.
Police reached Loma del Ángel on 12 or 13 January 1964, depending on which source you follow. La Crónica says they found 15 women and two children, malnourished and in a terrible state, while the court file records eleven women being freed on Monday 13 January. Delfina and María de Jesús were arrested on the spot, and one of the freed women told officers about the bodies buried behind the house.
News travelled fast. Around 2,000 people gathered outside the jail in San Francisco del Rincón demanding the sisters be handed over, and the authorities moved them to Irapuato rather than risk a lynching. Anyone who’s read about the 1919 Omaha courthouse riot will know how badly that sort of standoff could end. María Luisa, who’d been living away for years, handed herself in on 8 February 1964, reportedly because she was frightened of being lynched in Guadalajara.
Carmen is the odd one out. Bailón notes that she was never tried, Récord says she’d already died before the arrests and Ámbito puts her death as far back as 1949. English-language versions that have her dying of cancer in prison seem to have mixed her up with María Luisa, who did.
How Many People Did Las Poquianchis Really Kill?
This is where it gets messy. The figure you’ll see almost everywhere is 80 women, 11 men and several foetuses dug up at the ranch. Guinness World Records lists the sisters under “most prolific murder partnership” with at least 90 victims, dated to 1964. Plenty of retellings push the total to 150 or even 200.
The paperwork tells a smaller story. When Bailón went through the trial file she found eight dead women named in the statements, known only as Santa, Graciela, María Rosa, María, Flor, Ernestina, Bertha and Irma, and the court recorded eight deaths. La Crónica adds that the press first reported four bodies at the ranch before reporters started estimating thirty. The talk of hundreds of dead women and children came largely from Alarma!, the weekly crime tabloid that turned the case into a national sensation.
None of that proves the higher numbers wrong. Girls were moved between properties for the best part of two decades, many families never reported them missing and only some of the sisters’ land was ever searched. What it does mean is that nobody knows the real total, and anyone quoting a precise figure with total confidence is guessing.
Alarma! deserves some of the blame and some of the credit. Its January 1964 cover ran the headline “¡Eran infernales!” (“They were hellish!”) above a photo of one of the sisters. Its Guanajuato coverage was led by reporter Jesús Sánchez Hermosillo and the magazine claimed a circulation of around 140,000 a week, while La Crónica says its Poquianchis series sold more than half a million copies over the months it ran. Those grainy pictures of the sisters, guarded and glaring, are a big reason they’re remembered the way they are, much as the LAPD’s crime scene archive shaped how people pictured murder in Los Angeles.
The Trial and What Became of the Sisters
Delfina and María de Jesús gave their preliminary statements before Judge Timoteo Lozano on 20 January 1964. Nine months later, on 15 October 1964, the judge in San Francisco del Rincón passed sentence. The charge sheet ran long: aggravated homicide, kidnapping, criminal association, pimping, rape, assault, corruption of minors, threats, concealment and breaking burial laws. Their defence was jaw-dropping. The sisters argued the girls were ungrateful, since they’d supposedly rescued them from worse lives.
Delfina and María de Jesús got 40 years each, the maximum available, and María Luisa got 27. A string of accomplices got anything from six to 35 years, and the defendants were ordered to pay 840,120 pesos in damages. Soldiers, local police officers and drivers were among those prosecuted alongside them.
The sisters kept fighting. An appeals court in Guanajuato upheld the sentences in July 1966, and in 1968 they took their case to Mexico’s Supreme Court. When it finally ruled in November 1974 it struck out a couple of the lesser charges but left their prison terms intact. In 1981 María Luisa’s sentence was cut from 27 years to 23, by which point she’d lost her mental faculties.
As for how it ended for each of them:
• Delfina died in prison on 17 October 1968, aged 56, from a brain haemorrhage after a bucket of cement mix fell on her head during building work. The popular version says a builder dropped it while craning for a look at her, which makes a good story but isn’t backed up by the documented record.
• María Luisa died in her cell in Irapuato in November 1984. Ámbito gives liver cancer as the cause, while other versions have her ending her days in a psychiatric hospital.
• María de Jesús was the only one to walk out. She was released after serving much of her sentence and died a free woman, though accounts disagree on whether that was around 1990 or later.
• Carmen appears to have died before any of this, which is why she was never tried.
From Nota Roja to Netflix
The case was too big to stay in the tabloids. In 1976 Felipe Cazals released his film Las Poquianchis, now counted among his classics, which leaned hard on rural poverty and trafficking. A year later Jorge Ibargüengoitia, a novelist from Guanajuato, published Las muertas (The Dead Girls), a pitch-black comedy written like a police report. He renamed the sisters Arcángela and Serafina Baladro and opened with a note saying some of the events were real but every character was invented. He didn’t live to see how well it would last. He died in a plane crash near Madrid in 1983.
Elisa Robledo’s book Yo, la Poquianchis followed around 1980, built on interviews with the accused. Bailón’s argument is that the case split into two stories. In Alarma! and Cazals’s film the girls are the victims of monstrous sisters. Ibargüengoitia and Robledo were more interested in the corrupt, hypocritical system that let the whole thing run for years and then dumped all the blame on four women. Both things can be true at once.
Luis Estrada, the director of La dictadura perfecta and El infierno, finally brought Ibargüengoitia’s novel to the screen as Las muertas, a six-part Netflix series that premiered on 10 September 2025. It’s set in the fictional town of Mezcala and stars Arcelia Ramírez as Arcángela and Paulina Gaitán as Serafina, with Joaquín Cosío as a bent army captain who protects them for bribes. It’s darkly funny in a way the real case never was, but it’s sent a whole new audience off looking for the women behind it.
What sticks after reading the court material isn’t the body count, which will never be settled. It’s how long it all went on. Girls vanished from towns across central Mexico for the best part of two decades while police and soldiers drank in the sisters’ bars, and in the end it took one teenager walking out on her own to finish it. Female killers turn up in every country’s crime history, from Baba Anujka in Serbia to Aileen Wuornos in Florida, but few cases show as clearly what happens when everyone who could have stopped something decides it isn’t their problem.
Further Reading
If you want the case through Ibargüengoitia’s eyes, The Dead Girls is the place to start. The Picador Classic edition comes with an introduction by Colm Tóibín, and it’s a short, savage read that makes more sense of the Netflix series than any episode guide.
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