| Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira | |
| Birth Date: | April 23, 1879 |
| Birth Place: | Ferrol, A Coruña, Spain |
| Death Place: | Ciempozuelos, Spain |
| Known For: | Murdering her teenage daughter whom she conceived as a eugenics experiment |
Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (April 23, 1879 – December 28, 1955) was a Spanish woman who is remembered as the mother of Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, a girl she conceived as a scientific experiment and who, according to Aurora's wishes, was to represent the woman of the future.As Hildegart's fame as a child political activist grew, so too did Aurora's paranoid belief that an international conspiracy jeopardized the experiment. When Hildegart tried to gain independence at age 18, Aurora concluded the experiment was a failure and shot Hildegart dead.Aurora was tried for murder and institutionalized for the remainder of her life.
It is believed that Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira was born in 1879,[1] in her family home on Magdalena street, in Ferrol, A Coruña, Spain. Her parents were Francisco Rodríguez Arriola and Anna Carballeira Lopes. Her family and the environment she grew up in have been described as upper-class.[2]
Aurora did not receive a formal education. Instead, she became self-taught on subjects such as liberalism, progressivism, and utopian socialism through her father's abundant collection of written works.
When Aurora's sister Josefa had a son, Pepito Arriola, and left him in the care of Aurora (who was then sixteen years old), she educated him until he became a child prodigy. He was subsequently claimed by his mother and taken to Madrid, where he had enormous success as a musician. This fact strengthened Aurora's reformist and eugenic ideas, in addition to her concerns for women's rights, and led her to conceive the project of raising a woman in optimal conditions as an example of her ideas. She looked for a father who could never claim paternity of the future baby. The father is reported to be a Lleida military priest named Alberto Pallás, according to Professor María Rosa Cal Martínez, who established the identities with arguments. Aurora had three sexual encounters with Pallás[3] as a "physiological collaborator"; after becoming certain that she was pregnant, Aurora moved to Madrid to give her daughter the life she had prepared for her.
The experiment initially met Aurora's expectations, with Hildegart becoming an international celebrity. However, the freedom in which Hildegart was brought up led her to choose differing political commitments and to launch an attempt to gain independence from her mother. Aurora was unwilling to forego her 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 eugenic experiment. As a result, she killed Hildegart on June 9, 1933, shooting her four times while the teenager was asleep. Aurora's own explanation was, "The sculptor, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in his work, destroys it." (Spanish; Castilian: El escultor, tras descubrir la más mínima imperfección en su obra, la destruye).
Aurora never regretted murdering Hildegart and repeatedly said that she would do it again. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison, serving most of it in the Ciempozuelos psychiatric asylum.[4]
Until her medical records were found in 1977, Aurora 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.[5] She was buried in a mass grave.
