In Madrid, following the demise of Francisco del Castillo, his widow caused a letter to be conveyed to a man who, in the eyes of the law, did not exist. She instructed her clerk to dispatch it to one “Taddeo Santifa.” The superscription aroused instant misgivings: why entrust to the post a missive intended for someone residing within the very same city, at an epoch when Madrid, as the chronicler observes, possessed no organized municipal delivery? The clerk, García, broke the seal. Its contents were brief: “My dear Vincent,” wrote María Vicenta de Mendieta, before exhorting him either to keep to his lodgings or to flee Madrid without delay. She assured him that suspicion had not yet fallen upon them, while noting that the inquiry was advancing apace and that a new magistrate had assumed direction of the proceedings. The note was signed simply: “M. V. M.” This very paper would enable the magistrates to bind the widow fast to the fugitive they sought. The affair has come down to us through a chapter of the Neue Pitaval, in its second edition of 1857, which largely condenses the case presented by the prosecution; the judicial particulars are accordingly drawn from that chronicle.
The origin of the crime dated back to December 9th, some months prior to the trial of 1798. Francisco del Castillo, an opulent merchant of Madrid, lived with María Vicenta; both came from families of the hidalguía. Castillo had traveled across Europe, notably residing in London, and was regarded as an enlightened, obliging, and universally esteemed gentleman. The arrival in 1796 of his godson and kinsman, Santiago San Juan, who had come to Madrid to read for the bar, was to overturn the peace of that household.
Castillo received San Juan with open-handed generosity: he welcomed him to his table, aided him in his affairs, and sustained him with his purse. An intimacy soon arose between the young man and María Vicenta. When the liaison became glaring, Castillo requested San Juan to restrict his visits to once a day, yet continued to admit him beneath his roof. The chronicle frequently casts this episode as a moral condemnation of the wife’s conduct. For the ends of the inquest, the pertinent facts were far more concrete: the paramour enjoyed free access to the dwelling, the husband was cognizant of the intrigue, and a mere curtailment of his visits had failed to sever it.
Towards the close of 1797, San Juan gave out that he was departing on commercial affairs for Valencia. Castillo advanced him the necessary funds. Yet San Juan never quitted Madrid: assuming an alias, he shifted from an inn to a tavern, while María visited him in secret to settle the details of the assassination. According to the prosecution’s narrative preserved by the chronicler, the two accomplices had no design of marrying once Castillo was dead. Their covenant rested upon a pecuniary reward. San Juan initially proposed that the homicide should be disguised as a common robbery; a few weeks later, on December 9th, Castillo’s indisposition seemed to offer the opportune moment to strike.
On that day, María Vicenta cleared the house of its male occupants under diverse pretexts. She likewise dismissed Antonio Castillo, a kinsman who wished to watch by the sickbed, and forbade the cashier from presenting commercial drafts for the master’s signature. That evening, under color of bringing her husband a draft of medicine, she left the street doors unbolted to afford San Juan entrance. She then withdrew to the chamber where the maids were at work. The serving-women later deposed that she was seized with trembling and sighed heavily—demeanors they deemed wholly unaccustomed. When a commotion arose within, the bedchamber door was found locked from the inside. María swooned away as they prepared to force the entrance. Neighbors and the watch at last broke into the room: Castillo lay murdered, run through with multiple stab wounds. The overturned lamp, the disordered garments, and the severed bell-pulls bore witness alike to a desperate struggle and to the assassin’s precaution against any cry for aid.
The scene at first suggested the work of thieves. The merchant’s bureau stood open, and two ounces of gold had been abstracted. Yet this theft failed to divert the investigation toward unknown footpads: according to the chronicle, it corresponded precisely to the earnest money promised to San Juan. The most material information came from Antonio Castillo. Examined by the magistrates, he set forth the domestic relations of the house and the occurrences of that fatal day. María, instantly placed under close arrest, at first denied all knowledge of the deed and pointed to no suspect. The authorities surmised that San Juan still lurked within the capital, yet could not lay hands upon him. Rumors initially attributed the crime to members of the Cinco Gremios Mayores, the powerful mercantile corporation with which Castillo traded; Antonio’s disclosures, however, recalled the magistrates’ attention strictly to the household and its intimates.
The letter superscribed to “Taddeo Santifa” furnished the palpable link. On the morning of December 15th, María had questioned one of her clerks as to what Antonio had declared; that evening, still uneasy over the deposition, she unbosomed her anxiety to García and entrusted him with the billet. Once García had delivered the paper to the examining magistrate, María attempted to snatch it back and tear it to shreds; she was thereupon subjected to the most rigorous custody. The authorities posted the missive at the post office and set two alguazils to watch for the claimant. San Juan indeed presented himself, but the officers were absent from their post at the precise moment he demanded the letter. The clerks hesitated to surrender it; he turned on his heel and departed, yet did not quit Madrid. He continued to frequent common inns, where he heard the patrons discussing the murder and the public fury, yet obstinately lingered. A porter who had conveyed his luggage recognized him at his last lodging. There the officers discovered the coat he had worn on the night of the crime, stowed away without the bloodstains noted by the chronicler ever having been washed clean.
Following his apprehension, San Juan and María Vicenta made separate and full confessions. The chronicler affirms that their statements tallied in every particular and corroborated the rest of the gathered proofs. The defense challenged their validity: the opening of the letter, the heavy irons loaded upon María, and the unrelenting pressure of the magistrates had, it was argued, rendered her admissions involuntary. Counsel further contended that the prisoner had acted under the thrall of an overwhelming passion that had unseated her reason. The proceedings were thus contested as much upon the legality of the methods by which the confessions were extracted as upon their substance.
The trial assumed the character of a great public drama owing to the intervention of the fiscal Meléndez Valdés, a celebrated poet of the age, who sustained the accusation before the supreme tribunal of Madrid. The chapter presents his oration as a landmark in the reform of Spanish forensic eloquence, though it does not transcribe the text in its entirety. The prosecutor dwelt upon the sacred obligations of matrimony and launched into an indictment of the moral degeneracy of the age. We may readily disentangle this moralizing rhetoric from the material evidence of the docket: San Juan’s familiar access to the house, his feigned journey to Valencia, the preparations of the day, the letter addressed under an assumed name, the recovered coat, and the concordant confessions. The advocates had pleaded irregularities of procedure and the impaired mental condition of the accused; the court held these arguments insufficient to diminish their criminal liability.
Both were condemned to death by the garrote—the mode of execution reserved for culprits of their rank—and their estates were confiscated to the Crown. The chronicle also portrays the ritual preceding the execution: three days of seclusion in the chapel of the condemned, the visits of relatives, and the masses requested by the prisoners. María left no debts behind her; San Juan left several, including one of eight hundred reales. These commercial inventories, published in the gazettes, accompanied the accounts of the prisoners’ last dispositions, though no dying speeches were preserved.
On April 23, 1798, an immense concourse of people from Madrid and the surrounding provinces assembled to witness their execution upon the Plaza Mayor. They were interred in the vaults of the Church of San Justo during the following night, and a requiem mass was sung for their souls on the morrow. The letter designed to keep them beyond the reach of justice had ultimately bound them together in a common indictment, and led them side by side to the same scaffold.