page_title: Juan Díaz de Garayo
section_title: The Sacamantecas nickname
hierarchical_section_title: Juan Díaz de Garayo / The Sacamantecas nickname
caption_attribution_description: English: „Der Mann mit dem Sack“ (The man with the sack), woodcut by Abraham Bach, Sr. Deutsch: Abraham Bach d. Ä.: „Der Mann mit dem Sack“ (barocker Holzschnitt), heute im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg.
context_page_description: Juan Díaz de Garayo y Ruiz de Argandoña, also known as "The Sacamantecas", was a Spanish serial killer active near Vitoria, Álava, who strangled five women and a 13-year-old girl, and attacked four other women during two different periods, 1870 to 1874 and 1878 to 1879. A lust-motivated serial killer, Garayo first killed prostitutes after hiring and sleeping with them consensually, but grew more disorganized and violent as time went on, attacking, raping and murdering women that he saw walking alone in the country. His last two victims, murdered in consecutive days, were also stabbed, and the second was disembowelled.
  Garayo's persona and crimes were the subject of El Sacamantecas, an 1881 monograph written by Ricardo Becerro de Bengoa, who visited Garayo while he was in prison awaiting execution.
context_section_description: In Spanish folklore, the Sacamantecas (Spanish for "Fat Extractor") is a bogeyman-type character, often conflated with the child-targeting sack man, that abducts people to extract their body fat and sell it. Juan Díaz de Garayo was called The Sacamantecas upon his arrest and conviction, and today is sometimes referred to as "the real" Sacamantecas, but he wasn't the origin of this legendary character, as it predates him, nor did he ever extract the body fat of his victims.
  The idea that the murders were the work of a Sacamantecas was actually a popular rumor that began prior to Garayo's arrest, when there was no known culprit. Garayo himself heard of this rumor, and his disembowelment of the last victim was a deliberate attempt to promote it. In the legends, the Sacamantecas were wandering traders, always outsiders, while Garayo was a local farmer. Through this attempt to "confirm" the Sacamantecas rumor, Garayo tried to throw suspicion off himself and the real reason of the murders, his sexual impulses.
  Though only Garayo came to be known as "The" Sacamantecas, other serial killers and child murderers in 19th and early 20th century Spain were claimed to be sacamantecas as well, such as Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Enriqueta Martí i Ripollés and the 1910 murderers of the Sierra de Gádor.
caption: Representation of a sack man.
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