Manuel Blanco Romasanta
So far, we have been examining werewolf cases from the Early Modern period. However, werewolves have been (allegedly) active in more recent times. Manuel Blanco Romasanta (1809-63) is Spain’s first documented serial killer, known as the Werewolf of Allariz, who gave the defense of lycanthropy at his trial. He was originally named Manuela, for it was thought that he was a girl. As an adult, Romasanta worked as a tailor, and is said by some to have been less than 5 feet in height. He married, but his wife died in 1833, and Romasanta became a traveling salesman.
His work took him across Galicia and through Portugal, and often he would drum up trade by acting as a guide for travelers crossing the mountains. His first murder seems to have taken place in 1844 when he killed a constable attempting to collect a debt Romasanta owed to a supplier. He fled and was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. Romasanta obtained a false passport and lived in a small village in Galicia, where he worked as a cook and weaver, becoming very friendly with the women of the village, and was considered effeminate by local men.
Whilst living in the region, Romasanta continued to act as a guide for those wishing to cross the mountains, and it was at this time that his serial-killing (or lycanthropic) career began. He would kill women and children who hired him deep in the mountains, and forge letters from the victims to their families so that their deaths went unnoticed for as long as possible. Suspicions grew when he began selling the victims’ clothes and soap rumored to be made of human fat. Finally, the suspicions brought a formal allegation in 1852, and Romasanta was arrested in Nombela, Toledo.
At his trial, Romasanta admitted to 13 murders, but gave the defense of lycanthropy. He said that he first turned into a wolf after coming across a pair of the creatures in the mountains. Examined by doctors according to the principles of phrenology (the long-discredited identification of character traits through skull measurements), he was declared a liar. Romasanta was convicted of 9 murders, and sentenced to death, but died in prison, either shot by a guard or succumbing to cancer. It has been theorized that the famine in Galicia at the time rendered him insane through lack of nourishment.