Juan Díaz de Garayo: The doctors searched his skull for what no one had seen on the roads

On the outskirts of Vitoria, several women are found strangled. That, according to its official synopsis, is how Sacamantecas (international title: The Harvester) begins. David Pérez Sañudo’s film screened out of competition in the Official Section of the 74th San Sebastián Film Festival and opens in Spanish theaters on November 6, 2026. It is Álava at the close of the Third Carlist War. Ángela Berrosteguieta (Patricia López Arnaiz), the sister of one of the victims, arrives in the city determined to prove that the killer is Juan Díaz de Garayo (Antonio de la Torre), an illiterate farmer. Meanwhile Pío Pinedo, head of the town constables, investigates with few resources and with authorities who would rather keep the killings quiet. Garayo was real. He was born in Eguílaz, near Salvatierra, in 1821, and was executed by garrote in Vitoria on May 11, 1881. He is often described as Spain’s first documented serial killer, a title disputed by the Galician Manuel Blanco Romasanta, tried in the 1850s. This case file does not preview the film. It reads the history, and in particular the question that obsessed the doctors of his day: whether the crime could be seen in his body.

// The theoryCrime written on the body

In 1876 the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso published Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente). His thesis founded the positivist school: some offenders do not choose crime but are born with it, as an atavism, a throwback to primitive man. That nature would betray itself in physical stigmata: asymmetries of the skull, large jaws, handle-shaped ears, insensitivity to pain. The idea clashed head-on with the classical school, which judged free acts. For positivism, the offender had to be studied, not just the deed, and punishment had to be measured by his dangerousness. In the third edition, in 1884, Lombroso ended up identifying the born criminal with the “moral madman.” In Spain his ideas were arriving just then, carried by physicians and penal scholars who blended them with degeneration theory and with Gall’s older phrenology.

// The subjectTen years on the roads of Álava

The crimes fall into two waves: from 1870 to 1872 and, after a pause marked by failed attacks, in 1878 and 1879. The victims were poor women walking alone on the roads and open ground around Vitoria. According to the sources, several were sex workers, and one was a thirteen-year-old girl in domestic service. Garayo strangled them, often after sexually assaulting them. The figures do not fully agree. The most repeated count gives six murders, five women and the girl, plus at least four women who managed to escape, but other authors say “at least six,” and the dates vary from one reconstruction to another. The first key moment is his arrest. Most sources place it on September 21, 1879, days after the last two killings, when the constable Pío Fernández de Pinedo recognized him on a street in Vitoria. Some, however, date it to 1880, even though the first sentence was handed down in November 1879. According to reconstructions of the case, he confessed after several days of questioning, and he was sentenced to death. The second moment is the dispute over his mind. The defense pleaded insanity. The Vitoria doctors found him responsible, while the alienist José María Esquerdo devoted to his case, in Madrid, the lectures he published in 1881 as Madmen Who Don’t Seem So (Locos que no lo parecen). According to Esquerdo, Garayo’s skull, brain and family pointed to a sick man, a moral imbecile, who belonged in an asylum and not on the garrote. The higher courts upheld the sentence. The third moment is the execution, on May 11, 1881. That year the Vitoria writer Ricardo Becerro de Bengoa, who had visited him in prison, published El Sacamantecas: su retrato y sus crímenes (The Sacamantecas: His Portrait and His Crimes). According to the chronicles, doctors from both camps attended the autopsy, and Esquerdo proclaimed that the brain proved him right.

// The crackMadmen who don’t seem so

The crack lies in the title Esquerdo chose. The born-criminal theory promises that the offender can be recognized at a glance, yet Garayo spent almost ten years among neighbors, wives and women who crossed paths with him on the roads without anyone seeing anything in him. The stigmata appeared afterward. Once he was arrested, his portrait became evidence, and every feature was read in light of what he was already known to have done. It is the bias Charles Goring demonstrated in 1913: comparing thousands of prisoners with people who had never offended, he found no criminal physical type. Moreover, the same body yielded two verdicts. For the Vitoria doctors, it belonged to a responsible man. For Esquerdo, to a sick one. The body decided nothing. Each expert found in it the theory he had brought along.

It is also worth separating history from legend and from fiction. The “sacamantecas,” literally the “fat-extractor,” was a bogeyman older than Garayo, the man who stole human fat, and there is no record that he ever extracted any. The legend absorbed him later. The film, for its part, sets the story at the end of the Carlist War (1872-1876), whereas the historical crimes run from 1870 to 1879. Its protagonist, Ángela Berrosteguieta, is a character in the film: the sources consulted do not record her as a historical figure. There is something else Lombroso’s lens does not look at: the women. The victims were poor women walking alone between villages, and at least the first of the crimes was closed without leads. Searching his skull for the crime left out the question of why those lives counted for so little in the investigation.