By Dave Andrusko
Maria Rodriquez
A 29-year-old woman has confessed to murdering a eight-month pregnant woman with a kitchen knife and using the same knife to try to remove her baby, who was dead, the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported today.
Maria Rodriguez will be charged with two counts of murder, police told reporter Jenny Awford.
The video confession, the text of which the Daily Mail reprinted in full, is so violent and so graphic it will not be recounted in any detail.
Suffice it to say that in her confession Rodriguez told police that she first beat Nadia Avila unconscious “after luring her to her home in Tepic with a promise of free baby clothes.”
Rodriquez told police, “I had a delayed period and I checked my blood but the results were negative. I was obsessed with having a baby and all my family thought I was pregnant. But this was a lie and I did not know how to get out of it. I thought there was nothing I could say, but when I saw her I thought about this idea.”
Ms Avila with her husband Juan Hernandez
Rodriquez said she had seen Nadia Avila several times when Avila was taking her son to school.
‘We started to talk and I asked her how long she was pregnant and what the baby will be, if it was a girl or a boy, and she told me she was going to have the baby in just days, and it came to my mind to do it,” Rodriquez said. “When I saw her stomach it came to mind to do this, how I could manage to end the lie. And it came to my mind to steal her baby in order to continue the lie.”
After killing Ms. Avila, Rodriguez said she “took” the baby but the baby was dead. She called for an ambulance and paramedics wanted to take them both to the hospital. (According to Awford, Rodriquez wanted the baby taken to the hospital so she could tell her family the baby “had arrived stillborn.”)
“They were immediately suspicious of her story but she would not let them into the house where her victim’s body was,” a police spokesman told Awford.
“Rodriguez fled when medics insisted on examining her but was arrested after her victim’s husband Juan Hernandez reported her missing,” Awford reported. “Police connected the disappearance to the suspicious birth and tracked down Rodriguez who had gone into hiding.”