Page 111 - VERITAS Vol.2 Issue 2
P. 111
evidence available.
The two children (either two boys, or a boy and a girl, named Pon-
ciano and Feliza aged 6 and 4) were killed in their home, possibly
by blunt force trauma or having their throats cut.
It was said that Rojas was either unmarried or separated from her
husband whose surname may have been de Caraballo, as she is
sometimes called Francisca Rojas de Caraballo. She either found
the children, or was found with them with a superficial cut to her
own neck and she quickly blamed a local man, Pedro Velasquez,
who she said had killed her offspring either because she rejected his
advances, or because she prevented him from taking the children to
give to their father.
He was arrested and interrogated and some secondary sources even
claim he was locked in a room overnight with the children’s bodies
to try to force a confession, but he refused to budge. Furthermore,
it soon emerged that he had an alibi. Progress was only made in the
case when an outside detective was brought in.
This was either a Croatian immigrant named Juan Vucetich, who
was then pioneering the use of fingerprints for identification, or
one of his associates named Edward Alvarez. When the new detec-
tive went to look at the murder scene, despite it being several days
old, he noticed a bloody fingerprint on the doorway of the room in
which the children had been found. This double child murder now
took a shocking twist. He had the piece of wood cut out and the
fingerprint examined and when it was compared to the prints of the
children’s mother (who said that she had not touched the bodies
and so couldn’t have had their blood on her), it was a match.
When confronted with the evidence, Francisca broke down and ad-
mitted that she had killed her own children and faked her injuries
because her lover did not want to marry a woman who already had
children (this is another reason I think she was unmarried, or sepa-
rated, despite what some of the secondary sources claim).
102
Veritas Volume: 2, Issue: 2
