Excessive eating or drinking, and disordered appetite for food and drink.
The throat is the fifth of the seven deadly sins and already in this seventh line I take the opportunity to apologize for what follows. Mixing in the same story a murder with the throat already indicates that we are dealing with an unclassifiable character. This time, the protagonist is Alberto Sánchez, who was 26 years old when he killed, quartered and fed his mother for two weeks. Some parts of the body he froze in caps, others he cooked and some, like the heart, he ate raw.
As complicated as it is to understand rationally, Alberto Sánchez was not sick when he ate his mother, he knew perfectly well what he was doing. During the trial, he tried to make the jury believe that he remembered nothing of the events of those days, but the court took note of the statements of the young man after he was arrested and of his reaction to the pair of national policemen who On February 21, 2019, they went to the home of their mother, María Soledad Gómez, 69 years old, at number 50 Navacerrada Street in the Guindalera neighborhood of Madrid. A friend had reported her disappearance and the agent Ezequiel Gil, who knew the woman, went to the house with his colleague.
On the way, Ezequiel and his pair caught up. Not only did they know the woman, but also the little son, who had been involved in countless incidents. The father died in 2008 and since then, Alberto, who was only 15 years old, regularly consumed hashish and marijuana. He had become very violent and had several restraining orders from his mother, although she always opened the door for him in the end. The cops were convinced it was going to be another family brawl.
They entered the building and managed to get Alberto to open the door for them, in the face of the shouted threat that the fire brigade would be called to demolish it. “Where is your mother? Why doesn’t he come out or hear her?”, they asked insistently to the young man, who had already been handcuffed and was lying in the corridor. “She’s dead,” he answered, while Koke, the family dog, ran nervously from end to end of the house.
Ezequiel began to go through the rooms in search of the woman. On the bed in the main room was a bag placed on some tablecloths. Above, a plucked head of hair. Right next to it was the boss. His jaw had been ripped out.
The policeman opened and closed his eyes to try to understand that image. He couldn’t articulate a single sound. His eyes darted to the dog carrier that was in a corner. He didn’t touch it. Two hands, severed at the elbows, and a hip protruded. He held his breath and got as close as he could in front of her to confirm that it was María Soledad.
It was not the time to think or understand anything that had happened there. They requested reinforcements for the station and locked Koke in the balcony. Members of the scientific police and the homicide squad were on their way.
The agent continued. There was a large knife in the bathroom and traces of blood on the shower tray. The kitchen was right next door. Open to the living room, with a bar that separates the two rooms. The worst, if possible, was to come.
The ceramic hob was full of pots and pans with meat. Ezequiel uncovered a pot and the smell made him pull back. “I started to get nervous.” Alberto had been cooking for his mother.
On the kitchen counter was a plate next to a fork piercing a heart, with a piece missing. The policeman hesitated to continue watching. There was a piece of gnawed rib left in the pan. Each new image was more terrible. He headed into the living room. On the table, in a piece of wood was a leg. The rest of the body was located in corks and bags distributed between the refrigerator and the freezer. Others, in the oven. The neighbor on the landing stated that afternoon how she had seen Alberto leave a bag that the porter took down to the garbage room. Inside were the intestines, the brain, scraps of skin and bits of fat. On the way to the police station, the detainee told the police, without anyone asking him, that he had suffocated his mother after a fight and that since he didn’t know what to do with her “I ate her up little by little and I also gave some to Koke”. “I had never seen such a brutal scene. It is the first documented case of cannibalism in Spain. I think we were not prepared for so much horror when we entered that house”, said the police officer in charge of the inspection.
The young man agreed to testify at the police station. He explained the same thing that he had spontaneously explained to the officers who were taking him to the car. When they asked him if he regretted anything, he said “no”, that his mother didn’t like him. They also questioned him about the ten bottles of urine he kept in the living room and he explained that he recycled his urine so as not to waste water unnecessarily in the bathroom. no logic
Alberto was calm. Everything had happened very quickly. A policeman warned that his mouth was covered. Surely no one wanted to confirm what they suspected. The coroner collected a sample that later confirmed that those remains belonged to his mother’s blood.
Already in prison, a few days after his arrest, a forensic psychiatrist had a long conversation with the young man in which he assured him that he did not feel bad about anything he had done. “It seemed a waste to throw away or bury that meat, I didn’t want to bury it like they did with my father. In addition, many African tribes practice cannibalism. If you think about it, eating it was much more reasonable, it wasn’t disrespectful.”
Alberto Sánchez was sentenced to 15 years and five months in prison. Since then he has written a letter to his mother’s best friend saying that he regrets what he did and that he missed her from time to time.
Police officers recalled a handwritten sign in his room that read: “Nothing is thrown away here.”
