Enriqueta Martí preyed on children from Barcelona’s poorest districts in the years before the First World War, abducting them under false pretences and disposing of their remains in ways that left families without answers for months or years.
Her case exposed the gaps in early twentieth-century child protection in a rapidly growing city where many working families had little recourse when a child vanished. Contemporary accounts describe a woman who presented herself as a nurse or healer, gaining the trust of parents who could not afford proper medical care. The disappearances clustered in areas such as the Raval and Poble Sec, where overcrowding and poverty made supervision difficult.
Martí’s methods relied on deception rather than force in most instances. She offered to take children for treatment or to find them work as servants, then failed to return them. Police later recovered clothing, bones and personal items from her successive flats, confirming that several missing children had been brought to those addresses.
Background
Enriqueta Martí was born in 1868 in a village near Barcelona. She moved to the city as a young woman and worked intermittently as a domestic servant and occasional midwife. By the early 1900s she had acquired a reputation among some residents as someone who could supply folk remedies or arrange discreet adoptions.
Records show she changed addresses frequently, often leaving unpaid rent. Neighbours recalled seeing her with different children over the years, yet no formal complaints reached the authorities until the scale of the disappearances became impossible to ignore. The city’s rapid industrial growth had outstripped its social services, leaving many families without official channels to report missing children promptly.
The Crimes
Between 1909 and 1912, at least four children aged between three and nine were taken from their homes or the streets after encounters with Martí. In each case she approached the family with offers of help. The children were never seen alive again.
Investigators later established that she kept the victims in small rooms before killing them. Post-mortem examinations of recovered remains indicated death by strangulation or blunt force. Bones had been boiled and the fat rendered, apparently for use in salves she sold to clients seeking cures for tuberculosis or rheumatism.
Victim Identification
Police matched items found in her final apartment to specific missing children. A girl’s dress, a boy’s cap and several pairs of shoes were identified by parents. The identifications provided the first concrete links between the disappearances and Martí.
Investigation
The case gained momentum after a neighbour reported hearing a child crying in Martí’s building on Calle Poniente. Officers entered the flat and discovered a child locked in a cupboard. The girl, Teresita Guitart, was malnourished but alive. Her testimony described other children who had been brought to the flat and later removed.
Further searches uncovered human remains hidden in pots and under floorboards. Forensic examination at the time was rudimentary, yet the presence of multiple sets of small bones confirmed that more than one victim had been present. Detectives traced Martí’s movements through pawn tickets and pharmacy receipts, building a timeline of her activities across several districts.
Arrest and Proceedings
Martí was arrested in February 1912. She initially denied involvement, then offered partial confessions that implicated no one else. Newspapers of the period reported intense public interest, with crowds gathering outside the courthouse during preliminary hearings.
She was charged with multiple counts of murder and abduction. Before the case reached full trial she died in prison in 1913. Official records list the cause as natural illness, though contemporary speculation about suicide or neglect circulated without confirmation.
Legacy
The Martí case prompted limited reforms in Barcelona’s child welfare system, including stricter registration of private nurses and midwives. It also highlighted the vulnerability of children in families without stable housing or income.
Modern historians view the episode as an early example of how urban poverty and weak oversight enabled serial predation. No evidence supports later sensational claims of widespread cannibalism; the documented pattern centres on abduction, killing and the commercial use of remains.
Conclusion
Enriqueta Martí’s crimes remain a stark illustration of how easily children could disappear in an overcrowded city before systematic child protection existed. The recovery of Teresita Guitart and the subsequent identification of other victims stand as the clearest record of what occurred.
Got thoughts? Drop them below!
For more articles visit us at https://dyerbolical.com.
Join the discussion on X at
Follow all our pages via our X list at
https://x.com/i/lists/1645435624403468289
Visit our Immortalis horror fiction universe at https://immortalishorror.com