Enriqueta Martí: Vampire, Serial Killer, Sack Lady

Enriqueta Martí, source unknown.

Following up on my popular Sack Man post, I introduce to you, readers, Enriqueta Martí, an early 20th century Catalan child abductor, pimp, hack witch doctor. She's also the most (in)famous lady Sack Man Sack Lady in Spain and--judging from the mind-boggling number of internet search engine results--cyberspace. She's inspired the worst kind of screamy, unintelligible hardcore music posted to YouTube, countless creepy "tribute" blog posts,* entries in a dozen cheapo paperbacks on serial killers, a handful of well-written and well-researched newspaper articles, and a movie (to be released sometime this year) with a pretty schlocky trailer. 

And, yes, she even has her own facebook page.**

A full profile is only a Google search away, so I won't get into the details. *** A quick caveat: If you want to be able to fall asleep tonight without special aids, I recommend avoiding an image search as quite a few scary postmortem photos pop up on the first page of results. What I find especially compelling about this Sack Lady case, and what I aim to focus on here, are: the nature of the monster, and the socio-political climate of her time and place--or rather, the outside forces contributing to the intense amount of popular interest in her macabre case. 

I admit that the distinction of Sack Lady is what originally drew my attention to Enriqueta Martí's story. And, as already illustrated, I'm clearly not the only one. There's something that sets female serial killers (or, female killers in general) apart from their male counterparts: a whole other set of anxieties and fears that trace back directly to the Monstrous Feminine. But I digress... since this post in its original form was already much too long to hold the attention of the casual blog reader, I've decided to break it up into two or three installments. 

Read the second isntallment, "Enriqueta Martí: The Nature of the Monster," here. 

Read the third installment, "Enriqueta Martí: Her Time and Place," here. 

*Oh my god, I'm toeing a fine line here, I know... 

**The page (its contents are excerpted directly from her wikipedia page) has 28 "Likes". I came close to clicking the "Like" button myself but refrained at the last minute because, really, who am I? Some kind of creep?

***Pedro Costa's 2006 article in El País is, I think, especially good.