Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira

Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (April 23, 1879 – December 28, 1955) was a Spanish anti-theist, socialist, eugenicist, and feminist. She conceived her daughter Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira as part of a eugenicist scientific experiment and murdered her when she was 18 years old. Aurora was sentenced to 26 years in prison, and died of cancer while imprisoned at the Ciempozuelos mental asylum.

Biography

Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira was born in 1879, at her family home on Magdalena street, in Ferrol, A Coruña, Spain, to Francisco Rodríguez Arriola (b. 1833) and Anna Carballeira Lopes. Her family and the environment she grew up in have been described as upper-class.

After Carballeira's sister Josefa gave birth to a son, Pepito Arriola, she left him in the care of Carballeira (who was then sixteen years old). Carballeira educated him until he became a child prodigy. Josefa then took him to Madrid, where he had enormous success as a musician.

Pepito's success strengthened Carballeira's reformist and eugenicist ideals and led her, in addition to her concerns for women's rights, to decide to raise a perfect woman to prove the virtues of eugenics. She wanted a father who could never claim paternity of the future baby, so she conceived the child with a military priest in Lleida named Alberto Pallás. Carballeira had three sexual encounters with Pallás as a "physiological collaborator". After discovering that she was pregnant, Carballeira moved to Madrid to give her daughter the life she had planned for her.

The experiment initially met Carballeira's expectations, and Hildegart became an international celebrity. However, the freedom in which Hildegart was brought up led her to choose differing political commitments and she attempted to gain independence from her mother. Aurora was unwilling to forego control over her daughter's life, and was also affected by paranoid delusions that there was an international conspiracy to ruin the "perfect" result of her eugenicist experiment. As a result, she killed Hildegart on June 9, 1933, shooting her four times while the teenager was asleep. Carballeira's own explanation for the murder was, "The sculptor, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in his work, destroys it."

Carballeira never regretted murdering Hildegart and repeatedly said that she would do it again. Carballeira was sentenced to 26 years in prison, serving most of it in the Ciempozuelos mental asylum.

Until her medical records were found in 1977, Carballeira was believed to have become one of the "disappeared" during the Spanish Civil War, but she actually died of cancer in the Ciempozuelos psychiatric facility on December 28, 1955. She was buried in a mass grave.