WHEN WOMEN KILL

A Chilean author reconstructs the details of four significant 20th-century murders orchestrated by Chilean women.

Trabucco Zerán begins with the case of Corina Rojas, an upper-class housewife who hired a man named Alberto Duarte to kill her husband, David Díaz Muñoz, to escape a “loveless marriage” in which she felt like the “victim of a miserly and unfaithful husband.” The author continues with the case of news vendor Rosa Faúndez Cavieres, who murdered her husband, Efraín Santander, and then carved his corpse into multiple pieces in a futile attempt to hide the body. Next is María Carolina Geel, who shot her lover in broad daylight at the Hotel Crillón. Trabucco Zerán ends with María Teresa Alfaro, a live-in nanny who murdered her employer’s children and mother. The cases occurred in 1916, 1923, 1955, and 1963, respectively, spanning the 20th century. Rather than further sensationalizing these crimes, the author uses these women’s action—and, perhaps more importantly, the public reaction to their stories—to reflect on society’s shifting attitudes about gender, anger, violence, and the law. “Their crimes, while disturbing, are a privileged window from which to observe how the very meaning of womanhood has changed over time,” she writes. “Their contradictions and failures act as a mirror, reflecting back typically ‘un-feminine’ emotions.” Interspersed with cogent feminist analyses of the crimes and the public and media reactions of the time, Trabucco Zerán includes diary entries describing her personal experience with the research, infusing the book with a fascinating memoirlike quality and rendering the narrative voice both personal and relatable: “I had to doubt the word of lawyers and doctors, question the sensationalism of reporters, take novel plots with a pinch of salt, and slowly learn that a question is often a veiled accusation.” Throughout, the language is both precise and evocative, and the author’s evaluation of the various circumstances is readable, trenchant, and intersectional.

A formally inventive, lyrical, feminist analysis of Chile’s famous female murderers.