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1913: Captain Manuel Sanchez Lopez

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On this date in 1913, Spanish Captain Manuel Sanchez Lopez was shot for a scandalous affair of incest and murder.

You’ll need Spanish for most sources on this tawdry tale. Our principal was a vicious lowlife of long repute, having driven his wife away by dint of his ungovernable affection for cheap brothels, gambling dens, and drunken brawls.

His oldest daughter, María Luisa Sanchez Noguerol, would be his semi-willing accomplice in the crime that ended Captain Sanchez’s life, but she had for many years before that been his victim: not only of the blows the father meted out to all his children, but also to his sexual attentions.

Captain Sanchez forced this daughter into prostitution to support his own degeneracy but he had a larger score in mind when he encouraged her to accept an assignation with a wealthy widower, Rodrigo Garcia Jalon. At this rendezvous, the father — who probably would have been better advised to content himself with the rents of blackmail or robbery — sprang from concealment and fatally bludgeoned the gentleman with a hammer.

Father and daughter desperately dismembered the body in hopes of concealing the crime but another of Manuel Sanchez’s oft-thrashed children denounced them to the police, to the very great delight of scandal-mongering newspapers throughout Europe. Everything was rumored: that the father had once or twice impregnated his own progeny, that they had pulled the seduction/murder trick several times before.


The discovery of the victim’s remains.

The father had the privilege of shooting instead of a garrote, thanks to his military rank. The daughter received a long prison sentence.

On this day..