Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain

Most of the time, to be a serial killer is to be a solo act. Which makes sense. Ed Gein, Jack the Ripper, and John Wayne Gacy are not exactly the kind of people whose urges were universal, definitely not with their brothers or sisters.

However, the world has been going on for a while, and eventually, there was going to be a number of people thrown together with a shared enthusiasm for killing people in cold blood. You can insert your jokes about any government in the world here, but the four women who make up the infamous Las Poquianchis went one step further. Not only did they all have a… shall we say lax attitude towards the sanctity of life, they all knew each other from birth.

That’s right, the serial killer group with the highest body count in recorded history were all sisters.

Namely, they were the González Valenzuela sisters of Jalisco, Mexico. María Delfina was the oldest, followed by María del Carmen, then María Luisa. María de Jesús was the youngest, born in 1924 and 12 years younger than her eldest sister. They were the daughters of Bernardina Valenzuela and Isidro Torres, an authoritarian policeman who took his tyrannical nature home with him. I know, a corrupt cop who treats his family like shit in the name of enforcing rules?! The mind boggles.

Even by the standards set by other cops, Isidro Torres was a bastard. A cruel man known to torture the people he captured, who would also punish his daughters with a night in the cells if they misbehaved. It was only a matter of time before Torres killed a man in a way that he couldn’t get away with, and after shooting a man during a heated argument, the family moved to Guanajuato, where they became destitute. Yet, the sisters did find a way to escape the abuse of their father by opening a bar together.

The only issue was that a bar is only as successful as the economy that surrounds it. With no money for miles around, the sisters got desperate. They went from selling booze to selling their bodies, which turned their fortunes around so much that they were able to open other cantinas that doubled as brothels in surrounding areas, which left the sisters with another issue. Who would staff them? The four of them could occupy one, two at a stretch, but their expansion demanded new girls.

Their methods were exposed in 1964, when police apprehended Josefina Gutiérrez in Leon, Mexico. Gutiérrez was a procuress. Someone who went around conning girls into the clutches of the sisters, who had clearly had enough of the life they were forcing on her. She sang like a canary, and the cops decided to investigate the ranch that she claimed the girls were being held at. Even for hardened police officers, though, this must have been a tough discovery.

What they found was indeed a collection of women and girls held against their will. People who had answered help-wanted adverts for maids were then kidnapped by the sisters. They were then force-fed cocaine and heroin, beaten into submission, and then put to work as prostitutes in the siters’ brothels. Somehow, though, it got worse. Not only did the police find a number of living girls there, but they also found over a hundred corpses on site. 80 girls, 11 men and a number of newborn babies.

This was only one of the several sites owned by the González Valenzuela sisters. Each of them was raided, and even more were found, leading to a body count of nearly 200 people.

The sisters were arrested, and during the investigation, the explanation for these murders was unearthed. When the girls who worked for them would get too old, sick, or unwilling to work for them, they would murder them and put the word out for a replacement. The same went for any rich clients who arrived at their bordellos. They would often order their deaths and rob them of everything they had. This went on for over a decade, and by the end of it, they were extremely rich.

All four sisters were given surprisingly lenient prison sentences. Yet only one of them served their term in full. María Delfina died in a freak accident in prison. María del Carmen died of cancer while inside. María Luisa was driven insane by facing judgment for her crimes before dying in 1984. Only the youngest, María de Jesús, saw out the full 40 years of her prison. Considering she had left her sisters ten years before they began branching out of Guanajuato, that’s a bleak form of justice.

However, she was only arrested because she flew back to Mexico to support them in court. No family tie should hold up after deeds that vile.