In the 19th century, Manuel Blanco Romasanta became famous for arguing that he turned into a werewolf to end the lives of his victims.
The misadventures of Romasanta, the self-proclaimed Galician werewolf, have many lights and an infinity of shadows. Today we know about his life thanks to the version that he declared in front of the courts that tried him between 1852 and 1853.
And that is the problem: that this recognized murderer put forward such bizarre theories on the stand as that he transformed into a werewolf to finish off his victims or that he attacked in the company of other beings as supernatural as himself. His words surrounded the case with a halo of mystery that, even today, generates some mistrust about the veracity of his actions. But it is undeniable that, beyond the 'bi bidis, babies, bus' of the sorceress of Cinderella, his was the story of a criminal who shook Spain.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta came into the world, as confirmed to the judge, in the Regueiro village, located in Ourense, on November 18, 1809. A blond and delicate baby, in his birth certificate he was noted as Manuela... According to logic, because so much her parents, like the priest, believed she was a girl until she was eight years old.
This is one of the many enigmas that still surround the Galician werewolf. A mystery that the head of Forensic Anthropology at the Institute of Legal Medicine of Galicia, Fernando Serrulla, tried to shed light on in 2012, with a study that confirmed that our protagonist who suffered from syndrome ("hermaphroditism", according to classical scholars) that made him exaggeratedly secrete male hormones and caused him episodes of recurrent aggression.
Initial Doubts
Sweet, withdrawn, and with hobbies, at that time, more typical of a woman, Manuel studied as a child the vicissitudes of soap making and sewing. He also became a great connoisseur of the Galician forests, key information for his future as a murderer. Nor can one deny him his ability to learn to read and write, something that was unusual in rural areas of Spain. After an adolescence of which little is known, he married Francisca Gómez, a little older than him, in 1831. His love story lasted only three years when the woman died suddenly. The coup made Romasanta abandon the parish where he had contained the beast within him and give himself up to life as a peddler and peddling trinkets in Galicia and Portugal, with which he had flirted before.
As the doctors who studied him during the trial made clear, he was a handsome man: "Blanco's physiognomy is not repugnant at all, and without characteristic feature: already sweet and shy look, now fierce and haughty, and forcedly serene." Although it is impossible to know what he was like when he had twenty summers since we only have the physical description that the experts made of him throughout the process when he was 45 years old. He was then "five feet short of an inch in height," had a "light brown complexion, light brown eye, black hair, and beard, semi-bald on the back of the head" and displayed "flourishing health."
For the umpteenth time, the controversy around Romasanta is born at this point. Most historians agree that when his wife died, he became known as 'O home do unto' (the tallow man) or 'Sacamantecas'. The reason was that he was dedicated to collecting tallow to sell in Portugal, where it was used to make strange ointments that, according to tradition, were capable of curing all kinds of ills. In the 50s, the newspaper 'the Balearic already made reference to the fact that he had earned this nickname, 'el del unto', according to 'public voice'. Years later, when his crimes became known, it didn't take long for the idea that he took that raw material from his victims to spread...
Weird Crimes
The next chapter in this disconcerting story must be found in 1843 when Romasanta was again recorded. This time in León, the last stop of a life of transhumance with fat instead of beasts. The chronicles narrate that that year he left the region persecuted by the bailiff Vicente Fernández, who tried to collect a debt that he had with a Galician business. When the agent's body was found lifeless, he charged Manuel, then an anonymous street vendor. In his favor, it would have to be said that there was little evidence against him, but that was of no use to him. He was sentenced in absentia to a decade in prison and had to flee, once again, to save his freedom. This time, to the parish of Rebordechau-Bilar de Barrio, in his beloved Galicia.
In Rebordechau it was where the beast sprouted. And he did it after the image of a kind and dedicated person that Romasanta spread among the neighbors. She sewed together with the old women of the town, he offered to help with any daily task, and, in exchange for a few coins, he was always willing to accompany women who wanted to cross the woods and seek a new life in Santander. He promised to mediate most of them to get them a good job with some local rich man eager for domestic service. As determined in the 'Cause filed in the court of first instance of Allariz against Manuel Blanco Romasanta' (prepared by the lawyer who defended him in 1852), it was during one of these trips that he perpetrated his first murder in 1846. The victims would have been Manuela García Blanco, 45, and her daughter Petronila.
They would have been followed, within four years, by Benita García and her little Francisco; Antonia Rúa and her little girl Pilgrim and, finally, Josefa García and José. María Dolores, 12 years old and the eldest daughter of Manuela García, was his last murder. A loose end with which he wanted to end. Romasanta's maxim, however, was not to arouse suspicion. For this reason, he delivered false letters to the family of the deceased in which he insisted on how well life was in Santander. Since he was a fool he didn't have a hair, Manuel also used to charm the girls so that they would sell him all their goods before leaving. Once in the woods, and after the obligatory murder, he kept the money from the deceased.
The final point of his Machiavellian plan was explained by the newspaper 'El Balear' in a news item published in 1853: "Many of the clothes of the murdered persons were sold by the prisoner to various individuals and indeed almost all of them appeared." This last point was the one that condemned him. The gossip about the disappearance, together with the suspicions about the sale of his clothes, forced him to leave Rebordechau in a hurry to Toledo in 1852 with a false passport and under the new name of Antonio Gómez. But, in this case, justice caught up with him thanks to a "denunciation made by three Galicians, in which they stated that another countryman of theirs who was with them in the harvest was the one who was attributed the murders" perpetrated in the mountains of San Mamed and Couso.
Romasanta was hunted down by the authorities and forced to confess his real name after finding enough evidence in his new house. Among them, as explained in the case, "a wallet that was found. a bull from the Crusade of the year 51, with the name of Manuel Blanco." Faced with the evidence, the murderer had to admit reality. He said his name was Manuel Blanco y Romasanta, a native of Rigueiro, in his opinion from the Allariz party, without a fixed neighborhood or residence, due to the kind of life he had dedicated himself to from the age of thirteen in this part, for what he will state; of widowed status, street vendor trade, and 42 years of age, "confirmed the official document. The calendar was on August 25, 1852.
