Feeling of indignation that causes irritation. Desire or desire for revenge.
Anger is the fourth of the seven deadly sins and the story chosen to illustrate it will surely cause the reader the same pain as the one he is feeling right now as he writes it. Francisca González Navarro, the Paquita, murdered her two sons, Adrián Leroy and Francisco Miguel, aged four and six, with the sole purpose of inflicting all the pain possible on their father. Like Medea, who took her revenge on Jason by causing him the worst damage, Paquita used her children as mere instruments of her evil.
On January 19, 2002, the Civil Guard was alerted to the murder of two children in a house at number 13 Los Montesinos street, in the Murcia town of Santomera. In the master bedroom, the officers found the bodies of the two minors on the bed. Both had injuries to their mouths and visible marks on their necks. Tangled on the floor, they picked up the cable from a phone charger which they later confirmed was used to strangle them.
Paquita and her eldest son, 14-year-old José Carlos, were also in the house, and at first he assured that he had not heard anything and that it was his mother who woke him up because they had killed their brothers.
The attitude of that woman attracted attention. She barely moved from the kitchen, where she was drinking coffee and smoking one cigarette after another, oblivious to the pain that was growing around her. At some point he insisted on going up to his room, but to change his clothes.
Father was not at home. A truck driver by profession, José Ruiz was heading to England when the Civil Guard located him in France and asked him to return.
That evening, the mother declared to the command that someone she defined as “an Ecuadorian” broke into the house by breaking the glass of a window. He gained access to the bedroom where she slept with the younger children, sprayed her with a spray that left her unconscious until she woke up in the morning, when she discovered her children dead and that jewelry and money were missing from the house.
The civil guards began working at the crime scene, but nothing they found matched the woman’s story. In the toilet, they had broken a radiocassette and smashed and thrown a tape into the toilet, which they tried to make disappear by pulling the chain.
On her cheek, Paquita had a scratch that she claimed had been made by the assailant, although a few minutes earlier she had said she was wearing leather gloves.
The father managed to get home in the morning. He had no enemies, he assured investigators, and no score to settle with anyone capable of doing such a thing to him. As they could, hugging each other, the couple led the mass farewell funeral. Paquita this time was dejected, broken, staggering and supported by her husband behind the two small white coffins with their children.
At that time the Civil Guard no longer had doubts about the mother’s authorship, but they waited for her to be able to bury the children. That same afternoon, Paquita was arrested to the astonishment of her husband, who took some time to recover and understand what was happening.
Paquita didn’t mind testifying, but to make sure she barely remembered anything that had happened that morning at her house. She said that maybe the assailant was a figment of her imagination, but that she couldn’t be sure either, because she had been drinking alcohol and taking cocaine for hours to manage the unsustainable situation she suffered with her husband. He singled him out as responsible for the tragedy. She accused him of being an abuser, who had nearly killed her several times, of being a pervert who had dragged her into the world of cocaine and depraved sex.
In the office next door, the older son changed the version and explained that that night his mother insisted that he change the batteries in the walkman he slept with at full volume. At around two in the morning he heard a window being smashed. But first he was awakened by the screams of his brothers. He confessed to hearing the children calling his name, asking him for help. It seemed to him that they said they were drowning. But he thought it would be another fight from his mother and chose to turn the music up even higher, turn over and continue to sleep.
At the trial held the following year, it was proven that the woman first attacked the eldest son, the six-year-old. That while covering his mouth with one hand, with the other he knotted the cable of the charger around his neck and pulled while the boy struggled until he scratched his mother’s face. In the same way he later killed the youngest. He did the laundry and simulated the robbery scene.
At 9 in the morning he woke the eldest and asked him to warn his uncles that someone had killed his brothers, but first he had to go to a bar and bring him tobacco.
The investigation determined that the woman had an obsessive and sickly jealous relationship with her husband. He could make up to 200 calls a day to monitor his movements, or hire a taxi driver to follow him around the clock.
The couple argued on the morning the father saw the children alive for the last time, before leaving for England in the lorry. La Paquita reprimanded him for his infidelities and gave him a warning: “I will hurt you so much that you will never forget it”. In the last message the man sent her, he threatened her: “The more you touch my butt, I’ll put you in a sanatorium”. And she responded with a: “Now it’s time to dance, I’m turning off my cell phone.”
Paquita appeared at the trial cold and unchanging. Not even the report of the coroners in which they detailed the autopsy of the children altered her. At that moment he let out a loud yawn, followed by a low voice request to his lawyer not to forget to tell his sister to bring him some yellow shoes.
The contents of the cassette tape that Paquita tried to make disappear in the bathroom were never known. When asked about it, he said he did not remember. The journalist Ricardo Fernández of La Verdad de Múrcia is convinced that the killer recorded the sound of her children’s death so that their father would never be able to forget that moment.
The woman was sentenced to 40 years in prison, of which she served 18 uninterrupted. Then he got the third degree. Her last lawyer, Melecio Castaño, who died last year, assured that Paquita had accepted what she had done and had the right to rebuild her life.
