June 9, 2021 • 40 mins
Welcome to week two of SISTER MONTH. Today we’re traveling to the midcentury Dominican Republic, where three of the four Mirabal sisters are facing off against notorious dictator Rafael Trujillo. Who wins? That depends on whether or not you take the long view.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime? Loving you dear like guy do.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you. Hello, Hello, Hello,
Welcome to Criminal Broad's a true crime podcast about wild
(00:25):
women on the wrong side of the law. And welcome
to the second episode of Sister Month. It's System Month.
It's System Month. If anyone wants to quickly compose the
theme song for Sister Month, let me know and I'll
play it in the next episode. So last week we
met the Papa Sisters, the Gruesome Maids of nineteen thirties France,
(00:45):
who brutally, and I cannot emphasize that word enough brutally
murdered their mistresses. We're talking eyeballs being removed by human
fingers type murders. And then they became kind of like
symbols of a class revolution, even though they themselves didn't
really use that rhetoric. And then they were separated in prison,
(01:11):
and the one who was the more dominant one kind
of completely deteriorated and died young, and the other one
lived until this millennium two thousand, the two thousands. Today,
we're going to change tactics and we're going to talk
not about two sisters, but about four sisters hashtag never
enough sisters who have become national heroes instead of sort
(01:36):
of national symbols of gruesome violence like the Papa Sisters.
That being said, it took decades for these sisters to
get the recognition they deserved. So don't think it's easy,
because it's not. Thank you to the listener who suggested
this case and whose name I cannot find despite frantically
searching through my email, my Instagram messages. Listener, you remember
(02:00):
who you are. Please send me a note and I'll
thank you officially in the next episode. Sorry that this
keeps happening, guys, just like a little interesting perspective giving fact.
So right around the time when these today's sisters, the
Mirabell sisters, right around the time when they were all
being born, is when the Papa sisters were committing their
(02:21):
crimes in France. So that's where we are. Of course,
we're in ocean apart. We were in France last week.
We're going to be in the Dominican Republic this week.
We're going to spend most of our time in the
nineteen fifties early sixties. We're going to get a mini
crash course in Dominican Republic history that I hope I
do justice with, but am only scratching the surface here.
(02:43):
And so without further ado, let's go.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Let's meet our main characters.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Let's start with the dictator. His name was Raphael Trujillo.
He joined the army of the Dominican Republic as a
young man, and he trained with the US Marines. Within
ten years he was a general, and three years later,
in nineteen thirty, he was the man in charge. He
seized power, all of it in a military revolt against
(03:27):
the president. For the next thirty years, he ruled the
Dominican Republic with an iron fist. He sent his secret
police riding around the country in black Volkswagen beetles, spying
on citizens and slaughtering his opponents. He forced churches to
post signs that read God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth,
(03:48):
and then eventually he switched the order so that God
was an afterthought, Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven. He
had his soldiers slaughter twenty thousand Haitians, men, women, and
children because he saw them as culturally and racially inferior.
He liked to be driven around the city secretly so
(04:09):
that he could watch his people. He was always watching.
He would have people in other countries killed if they
opposed him. He couldn't stand to be opposed. He owned
five hundred pairs of shoes, two thousand suits and uniforms,
and ten thousand neckties. He and his family controlled over
sixty percent of their country's economy, but he presented himself
(04:32):
as the savior of the poor and exploited. He loved
drama and spectacle. He baptized thousands of children to make
sure their parents were in his debt. There were rumors
that he had demonic powers, and he loved women. His
thirty year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women.
(04:55):
One academic wrote, it wasn't just that he was married
three times and had numerous mistresses. It was far darker
than that. As another academic wrote, Truxillo's power was based
as much on the consumption of women through sexual conquest
as it was on the domination of enemies of the state.
He would send his men to search the countryside for
(05:17):
beautiful girls, young girls, schoolgirls, and his rapacious appetite was
so well known that families would hide their daughters when
he came through town. While some women wanted to be
noticed by him, he was, after all, the epitome of power,
and many people longed for power. Others feared and loathed
(05:38):
his attention. Families knew that if Truchillo noticed their daughters,
they would have to decide between turning their girls over
to him and refusing him. And refusing him might be
a death sentence. As a third academic wrote, there was
always so much to say about the Dictator. Every Dominican
family had a victim of Truchillo in its clas. Now
(06:14):
that we've met the dictator, let's meet the sisters. The
four Mirabal sisters grew up in a house without a
single picture of Trujillo. Most people in the Dominican Republic
had a picture of the Dictator in their household. It was,
shall we say, encouraged, but not the Mitabal girls. Their
names were Patria, Minerva, Maria, Theresa, and Dede. They were
(06:39):
born in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and they grew
up in a world ruled by the dictator. Their parents
were fairly wealthy farmers who owned land and ran a
general store, and could afford to send their girls to
a nearby Catholic boarding school, which was at the time
the best in the country. Their mother was strict about
keeping her place clean. She would never allow the girls
to get up with that making their bed. Their father
(07:02):
would carry his daughters on his shoulders as he walked
through their fields. All four of the girls were creative.
They liked gardening, pencil drawing, painting, and the Meatabals were
a family that loved their country. Patria, the oldest, was
born on Dominican Independence Day, which was why her parents
gave her her name. It meant homeland. So the four
(07:27):
sisters all went to the same school, and then their
lives diverged. Patria left boarding school at seventeen to get married.
Her husband was a farmer, and she took pride in
homemaking and caring for her garden. They had four children.
But don't be too distracted by this picture of domestic bliss,
because Patria would soon become politically radical. Her home, which
(07:48):
she was so fond of, would become a place where
people made bombs. After all, who would suspect a sweet
little wife and mother of four next was She also
dropped out of boarding school before graduation. At first she
returned home to help her dad work, and then she
got married herself. She had three kids, all sons. She
(08:11):
was the least political of the sisters, at least for now.
After de de came Minerva, the extroverted sister, the charismatic one.
At boarding school, Minevas started learning more about the dictator
whose photo was never allowed in her home. She started
rubbing elbows with her peers, who were distinctly anti Trujillo.
She graduated in nineteen forty six and returned home to
(08:33):
help out with the family business. But what she really
wanted to do, perhaps inspired by the things she'd learned
in school, was study law. Her parents wouldn't let her, though.
Some versions of her story say that her parents didn't
think a woman should be a lawyer, but other versions
say that her parents had a more serious reason for
saying no to law school. They were afraid. They were
(08:54):
afraid for their daughter's safety. They could see how political
she was getting, and they worried that by becoming a lawyer,
she would be putting a target on her back. And
the youngest of the sisters was Maria Teresa. She was
obsessed with her cool older sister, Minerva. Maria Teresa wore
her hair in one or two long braids, which she'd
(09:15):
later become famous for. As the youngest sister, she was
a little bit pampered, as is a younger sister's right,
but she had plenty of brains and she put them
to good use. After graduating from the same boarding school
as her sister's, she went on to study math and
then surveying, which is the science of making accurate measurements
of Earth's surfaces, at the University of Santo Domingo. She
(09:38):
left the school without graduating, though, and she married a man, who,
like her, hated their country's dictator. A year later, they
had a daughter, Maria. Teresa would only get to be
a mother for a single year. Let's take a quick
(10:11):
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(13:33):
In nineteen forty nine, Minerva, the third Midebal sister, was
twenty three, single and very pretty. This was a really
bad thing. By then, Truhio had been in power for
almost two decades. He'd come to power when Mineva was
only three, and he showed no signs of stopping any
of it, any of the killings, any of the obnoxious
(13:55):
tendency of naming things after himself, and any of his
insatiable appetite for young women. Trujillo liked to have fancy parties,
and when a girl caught his eye, he might invite
her to one of these parties. This was an invitation
in name only. There was no option to respectfully decline.
A party was never just a party when Truhillo was involved.
(14:17):
It was a hunting ground. And so when the Meddowall
family got an invitation to one of these parties, it
didn't really matter that they lived in a house that
had no portraits of the dictator in it. They had
to go, and so they got dressed up and they went.
The entire Midabal family was nervous that night. They knew
(14:39):
the Dictator had his eyes on Minerva, and they'd heard
rumors that Thruhillo had a habit of spiking his victim's drinks.
What would they do if he offered a drink to
their sister, Tell her not to drink it and risk jail,
slap it out of her hands and risk prison. The
party unspooled around them, all pomp and circumstance, just as
(15:00):
Trujillo liked it, and before long the inevitable happened. The
Dictator asked Minetva to dance. As they danced, they talked,
or at least the Dictator talked. He made his feelings
known towards her. We don't know exactly what he said,
but he made himself clear. He was propositioning her Minetva
(15:21):
was expected to smile and lower her eyelashes and agree
to do whatever he wanted to do. After all, he
held her life in his hands, he held her family's
lives in his hands. But Mineva said no. There are
lots of rumors about how exactly Minheva Mirabal denied Rafael Trujillo.
(15:44):
The most dramatic stories say that she slapped him across
the face, but her family denies this. Other accounts say
that she told him that her religious beliefs wouldn't let her,
you know, get into bed with him. The third version
of the story is that she told him that she
didn't agree with him politically, and that he responded, what
if I send my followers to get you. However it happened,
(16:07):
Minerva's rejection was obvious. There was no room for Trujillo
to console himself by thinking, oh, maybe she was just
being coy and the dictator couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Women never said no to him. As one of his
biographers writes, Trujillo felt annoyed at this peasant woman who
(16:27):
had refused to face the possibility of something many posh
women yearned to get in those years, a time of
intimacy with Trujillo, the man whom everyone in the country feared.
After the disastrous danced, the entire Midabal family tried to
leave the party as fast as possible. This was a mistake, though,
(16:49):
because nobody was supposed to leave a Truchillo party. Before
Truxillo did, his officers surrounded the family. They threw the
father in jail. Not long i that the dictator ominously
summoned both Minerva and her mother to the capital city
and kept them hostage in a hotel room for two months,
telling Minerva that if she became his mistress, then he'd
(17:11):
let her father go free. She refused. The time in
jail broke her father. As one academic writes, he emerged
a broken man and never regained his physical or mental health,
dying shortly after his release. Life would never be the
same for the Mirabals. Now that Truhillo was angry with them,
(17:33):
they were now being watched really, really closely. Friends had
to be careful when they talked to Minerva. One minute
they'd be exchanging pleasantries about the weather. The next they
might be whisked away in a black Volkswagen beetle to
be interviewed and maybe even tortured. What did she say
to you? What does she know? Trujillo's agents heard and
saw everything. At one party, Minerva wouldn't raise her glass
(17:57):
to the dictator. That got reported when Minetva insulted a
brand of car since it was the same brand that
the dictator drove, that got reported. Now, Mineedva probably knew
that she was being spied on. How could she not know?
And still she refused to make the most minor of concessions,
like toasting to a dictator who wasn't even in the room.
(18:22):
After three years of this, three years of walking on
razored eggshells, Minetva's family finally let her go to law school,
but surprise, surprise, Truchillo was waiting for her there. He
wouldn't let her register for her second year of law
school before jumping through a bunch of hoops, one of
which was a meeting with him. When she graduated. Despite
(18:43):
him Summa cum laude and one of the first female
lawyers in the country, he wouldn't give her her law license.
She couldn't practice. Instead, to make money, Minetva had to
take up sewing back in law school, Mindeva had met
a man named Manolo who thought and acted a lot
like her. They fell in love. They married. Like her,
(19:08):
he had difficulty finding a job in law, and so
he had to farm with his father to make ends meet.
She sewed, he farmed. They talked politics. The two of
them saw eye to eye. They saw that their beloved
country was being crushed under the thumb of a dangerous
petty man, and that they had to do something about it.
(19:42):
The Dominican Republic wasn't the only Caribbean country with a
dictator in those days. There was a dictator in Cuba too,
but his reign was about to end. On the very
last day of nineteen fifty eight, Fidel Castro and his
rebels overthrew the Cuban dictator and replaced his government. Five
hundred miles away in the Dominican Republic, people like the
(20:02):
Metabal sisters watched in awe. If Fidel could do it,
they thought, why couldn't they. As one of Trujillo's biographers wrote,
educated and well positioned youths, shamed and chagrined by their
parents nauseating surrender to Trujillo had quietly begun to rebel,
even as in Cuba, Fidel Castro came out of the
(20:23):
mountains to give them an example. Less than a week
after a rag tag Castro marched victoriously into Havana, Mineva
and Maria Theresa were at lunch with several of their friends,
and Minheva said, if in Cuba it has been possible
to bring down the dictatorship, then in our country, with
so many anti Trujillo youth, we can do the same.
(20:45):
The passion and awareness raised that day eventually coalesced into
an official movement. The young people called themselves the fourteenth
of June movement, named after a failed attempt on June
fourteenth of nineteen fifty nine to overthrow the dictator. Minetva
was one of the movement's leaders, and two of her sisters,
(21:05):
Patria and Maria Theresa, soon joined her along with her husbands.
There were hundreds of members across the country, many of
them the well educated children of Trujillo's own supporters. For safety,
the members of the movement operated in cells so that
no one knew everybody else's names in case they were
arrested and tortured for information. At Patria's cozy home, that
(21:29):
she was so proud of. She and her children built explosives,
and Minerva and Maria Theresa traveled around the country with
their husbands, making sure the movement's cells were organized and
looking for locations where they could organize arms drops, which
is when you have an ally drop weapons from the sky.
The girls used the code name Las mariposas the Butterflies. Later,
(21:54):
the head of Trujillo's secret police would explain that everyone
knew Minetva was the brains behind the ear operation. Minheva
Mirabal was the one who had taken the seed of
sedition to her family. He said she was sick with
radical leftism. It didn't take long for this movement to
start planning their ultimate goal, the assassination of the dictator.
(22:18):
They knew he was going to show up at a
cattle fair on January twenty first, nineteen sixty, and they
made plans to blow him up there, but Trujillo had
eyes and ears everywhere. The day before the assassination could
be carried out, his secret police descended on the movement.
Hundreds of them were arrested, including Maria Theresa, Minerva and
(22:39):
their husbands. Some of the male members of the movement
were tortured and some even died in prison. Meanwhile, the
dictator's pr team got to work telling papers that they
had intercepted nothing more than a quote simple communist plot,
hardly worth paying attention to. The problem was that these
(23:00):
mass arrests weren't a great look for the dictator. He'd
just arrested a bunch of young people, many of them wealthy,
many of them women. As his biographer wrote, the list
of those arrested read like a Dominican who's who. The
fact that he was now torturing them was outrageous, and
people started to openly express that sentiment. The Catholic Church
(23:23):
had long been in Thruhio's back pocket through he on
earth God in Heaven, remember, But now they denounced him
in a letter that priests read from every pulpit all
across the country. It was a scathing letter. It never
mentioned the dictator by name, but it was obvious who
it was talking about. In it, the church declared that
human rights come before those of the state. The letter read,
(23:47):
in part, the basis and foundation of all positive law
is the inviolable dignity of the human person. Each human
being boasts even before his birth of a heritage of
prior and ans higher laws than those of any state.
They are intangible laws whose free exercise no human power
can impede. This really irritated the dictator. He wasn't used
(24:14):
to seeing the tides turn against him so publicly. To
his minions, the dictator snarled that he had only two
problems left in the entire world, the Catholic Church and
the Metabal Sisters. Yes, the tide was turning against the Dictator,
(24:45):
he could feel it. He was making all sorts of mistakes.
He tried to assassinate the president of Venezuela. No big deal, right,
The man was always criticizing him, But the assassination failed,
and now everyone was mad at him. Apparently he weren't
allowed to just go around trying to kill other world
leaders whenever you wanted. Ugh, maybe someone should have told
(25:05):
him that earlier. In retaliation for the attempt on his life,
the Venezuelan president asked the Organization of American States to
place economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic. The man who
tried to put his name in front of gods was
now looking around at the global stage and seeing enemies everywhere.
Powerful enemies, so in an attempt to make himself look good,
(25:31):
he decided that he would free all the female political prisoners.
Look how nice he was being to women. He was
practically a feminist. This meant that Minerva and Marie Teresa
were freed, though their husbands were still locked up. They'd
been in and out of prison for the past six months, arrested, freed,
arrested again, placed in solitary confinement. At one point they
(25:54):
were sentenced to thirty years each, and then that was
reduced to three years, and now they were free, sort of.
They were under house arrest at their mother's and if
they wanted to go anywhere, they had to file a petition.
It was kind of strange how much the dictator fretted
over these sisters. At this point in his career, he
had enemies as threatening and formidable as the United States
(26:17):
of America, but he couldn't stop thinking about those damn girls,
especially that Minteva one, the one who refused him. They
were a thorn in his side. Their presence gnawed away
at him. First they wouldn't sleep with him, and then
they had tried to assassinate him. The nerve and so
(26:38):
even though his international reputation was as fragile as an eggshell.
He decided that enough was enough. The Metable sisters were
going to have to die. Of course, he couldn't openly
kill them. They were women, they were well known, they
were well liked. But that was okay. Trujillo had a
(26:58):
little trick up his sleeves from just like this. He'd
done it before when he needed to make other enemies disappear.
He'd make everything look like a traffic accident. Everyone told
(27:27):
the Meetabile sisters, be careful, be careful, you're in danger.
People said, please, please watch your backs. The Meetabile sisters
sort of ignored them. They weren't idiots. They knew they
were dealing with a very dangerous adversary. But they also
knew that Thruhio didn't assassinate women. He just didn't. And
(27:49):
now the eyes of the entire world were on Thruhio's
every move. It would be madness for him to come
at them at a time like this. But then the
husbands of Minerva and Maria Theresa were transferred to a
different prison, a farther away prison. In order to visit them,
(28:09):
the Metaball sisters would have to drive down a highway
that was known as a place where accidents often happened.
This seemed ominous to their friends and family. Please don't
visit them, people begged, it's a trap. But the girls
visited with fresh clothes and food. They could all sew
(28:30):
very well, and they even launched a little clothing shop
to help support themselves and their husbands, since their property
had been mostly confiscated after their arrests. On November twenty fifth,
nineteen sixty, Mineva, Maria, Theresa, and Patria asked one of
Trujillo's men for permission to visit their husbands. Well, Patria's
(28:51):
husband was in a different prison, but she wanted to
go on this trip with her sisters. The man said yes,
and then he promptly reported the news to a group
of assassins. Meanwhile, the sisters couldn't find anyone who would
agree to drive them there. People were terrified. There were
too many rumors flying around about how the dictator had
(29:11):
the sisters and his sights. But finally the sisters found
a driver. His name was Ruffino de Lacruz. He was
a friend of the family and he was a very
brave man. The four of them made the treacherous drive
to the prison with no incident. They didn't know that
they were being followed. Five male assassins had followed them
(29:33):
to the prison, and there the assassins wrote down their
license plate number. Then the assassins drove back down the
road a couple of miles and waited. Around five pm,
the Metable sisters and Ruffino de Lacruz started for home.
It was getting dark, it was starting to rain. At
(29:53):
one point the highway curved, and around that curve the
Dictator's men were waiting for them, blocking the road. Armed,
they stopped the car and forced the sisters into their car,
saying that they were under orders to take them somewhere.
In the tussle, another car drove up. It was a
government car with some social security workers inside it. Miraculously,
(30:18):
Patria managed to break free and she ran towards the workers, screaming,
tell the mutable family that the thugs have taken us.
They may kill us. One of the Dictator's men came
up just then grabbed her, warned the social security workers
not to say a thing, and threw Patria back into
the car with her sisters. The assassins ordered Rufino de
(30:40):
la Cruz to drive after them, and the ominous parade
moved up the curving mountain roads until they arrived at
one of Trujillo's many properties, which had a thick sugar
cane grove on it. There the assassins forced the sisters
out of the car and tied their hands behind their backs.
Then they decided that they would each take one of
(31:02):
the victims into a different part of the grove. They
didn't want the sisters to know what was happening to
each other, although surely the sisters already knew. Surely this
was a fate that they'd discussed before. Surely, in the
drive to the sugarcane grove, they looked at each other
with terror and understanding in their eyes. Now the men
(31:26):
picked up sticks and the sisters were separated. A few
(31:49):
days later, newspapers ran a nothing little story with the
headline three sisters die when a jeep plunges into a chasm.
It wasn't until the second paragraph that the sister's name
were given, Patria Minerva Marie Theresa. This was the dictator's
official version of events, and he even forced the sister's
(32:09):
mother to sign a statement agreeing that her daughters had
died in a car accident, but the Metaball family members,
who had the terrible luck of having to identify Patria,
Minerva and Maria Theresa, could tell that their deaths were
no accident. Maria Teresa's skull was shattered, there were hand
(32:31):
prints on Mineva's neck. Their jeep had been found down
a gully, just like the newspapers said, but it had
been rolled there by the assassins after the women and
their driver had been strangled and beaten to death. In
the midabal sisters last moments, they had screamed out at
each other, and Maria Teresa had yelled to her sisters
(32:55):
that her killer was trying to rape her. You can
kill me, but you're not going to rape me, she cried.
The assassin, who was in charge of the whole thing,
called out to the man cut it out. Orders are
to kill her. Dead Day, the only sister who survived,
looked at her littlest sister lying there in the morgue.
(33:18):
Her hair was still in one long braid, the way
she usually wore it. Deaday carefully cut the braid off
and took it home with her At the funeral, Deaday
didn't talk. She couldn't. But at the cemetery she suddenly
couldn't stop screaming. Murderers, she shouted, they murdered them. Someone
(33:41):
had to pull her away from her sister's graves. Back
in one of his many estates, the dictator and his
ten thousand neckties probably thought that he had gotten away
with it. He'd finally vanquished the Metabile sisters. Now he
could relax. In fact, two months he took himself on
a nice little stroll of the area where they had died,
(34:04):
and he said, pompously, this is where the Midobar women died.
A horrible thing. That foolish people blame the government for
such good women and so defenseless. But with these assassinations,
the dictator had gone too far. He had murdered thousands
(34:26):
and thousands of people, including children and entire families, but
the slaughter of the three Midiball sisters was what destroyed him.
Trujillo had always used masculinity as a tool a way
to bolster his power. He portrayed himself as a super male,
how he dressed, how he ruled, how many women he
slept with. But now with this assassination of three intelligent
(34:50):
bold young women, each of them mothers. The Dominican Republic recoiled.
This wasn't the sort of masculinity they wanted to support.
The cowardly killing of three beautiful women in such a
manner had greater effect on Dominicans than most of Trujillo's
other crimes, wrote one of his biographers. It did something
(35:11):
to their machismo. They could never forgive Trujillo for this crime,
more than Truhio's fight with the Church or the United States,
or the fact that he was being isolated by the
world as a political leper. The Metaball's murder tempered the
resolution of the conspirators plotting his end. Six months later,
Trujillo would be the one ambushed in his car. Seven
(35:35):
men with machine guns opened fire as he drove down
the highway. The dictator crawled from his car and tried
to get away, but the assassins fired again, and before
long the ruler of the Dominican Republic was lying dead
on the road. It took a while for the Dominican
(36:08):
Republic to officially acknowledge the Meetable sisters as heroes. Trujillo
was dead, but his influence and his proteges were still
in power for quite some time, but today no one
can deny that the sisters are heroes. They're recognized as
national murders. Their faces are on the two hundred peso bill.
(36:29):
They've been the subject of books, poems, and plays, most
famously the novel In the Time of the Butterflies by
Julia Alvarez. There is a Meetabal Sisters Foundation and a
Meetabal Sisters Museum, both created by their surviving sister, Deadeh,
who always said that the reason she was kept alive
was to preserve her sister's memory. After their death, Dead
(36:50):
Day raised all six of their children. She lived in
the house where they were all born until the day
she died. The Meetable Sisters influence is now felt across
the world. They are in text books, they are the
subjects of dissertations. November twenty fifth, the day of their death,
is now International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
(37:14):
And in the Dominican Republic, there stands a statue that
Thruhio built to honor himself. It's an obelisk one hundred
and thirty seven feet tall, horribly phallic, and it points
toward heaven. The place where Trujillo felt that he'd be
in charge. But that statue is now covered in murals
honoring the Mida Ball sisters. It's like they've been given
(37:38):
a second life, an immortal one. Minetva's daughter grew up
to be a successful professor and politician, and she always
remembered something that her mother used to say. People would
tell Minheva, stop what you're doing. It's too dangerous. You're
going to get killed, and Mineva would always respond, if
they kill me, I shall reach my arms out of
(37:59):
the grain and I shall be stronger. And she was right.
(38:28):
So that's the story of the Midavell sisters. Aren't they incredible? Inspiring?
And isn't their end just such a horrific one. I
actually didn't find like the some of the details about
the way they were killed until the very end of
researching this episode, And then I found them tucked away
in a book somewhere. And you know, I had, already
(38:52):
in researching and writing this been struck by just how
scary what happened to them was. But then just the
little details of how you know exactly they were separated
at the end, and the one that breaks my heart
the most is how they called out for each other
while they were being separated, just to like it's like
sister radar, you know, they like wanted to know where
(39:14):
each other was at and what was happening to each
other even at the end. Those are just the details.
They give me chills. All Right, we're halfway through Sister Month,
but we have a long way to go, guys, a
lot more sisters to cover. And if any of you
out there are sisters as I am, and have any
anecdotes about your sister that you'd like to share with me. Now,
(39:35):
these don't have to be anecdotes about horror or crime,
you know. These can be cute, these can be funny,
these can be spooky. Do you have any weird like
sister intuition anecdotes? Send me an email Criminal Broads at
gmail dot com and I will read some of them
in the next episode. And until then, just another reminder,
rating and reviewing the podcast is vieway to my heart.
(39:57):
I'm trying to like plug it a little bit harder
and Rea an episode since I've forgotten to for a while,
and we're gonna be back here next week with a
story of ooh, how do I say this? In a
classy manner. Body parts being cut off. Oh, I'm sorry,
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry in advance. I'm sorry
(40:18):
in advance. Okay, i'll see you here next week. Thanks
for being the best listeners ever, and have a good
one bye. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe i'm wrong loving you
deal like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
(40:41):
guilty of loving
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime? Loving you dear like guy do.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you. Hello, Hello, Hello,
Welcome to Criminal Broad's a true crime podcast about wild
(00:25):
women on the wrong side of the law. And welcome
to the second episode of Sister Month. It's System Month.
It's System Month. If anyone wants to quickly compose the
theme song for Sister Month, let me know and I'll
play it in the next episode. So last week we
met the Papa Sisters, the Gruesome Maids of nineteen thirties France,
(00:45):
who brutally, and I cannot emphasize that word enough brutally
murdered their mistresses. We're talking eyeballs being removed by human
fingers type murders. And then they became kind of like
symbols of a class revolution, even though they themselves didn't
really use that rhetoric. And then they were separated in prison,
(01:11):
and the one who was the more dominant one kind
of completely deteriorated and died young, and the other one
lived until this millennium two thousand, the two thousands. Today,
we're going to change tactics and we're going to talk
not about two sisters, but about four sisters hashtag never
enough sisters who have become national heroes instead of sort
(01:36):
of national symbols of gruesome violence like the Papa Sisters.
That being said, it took decades for these sisters to
get the recognition they deserved. So don't think it's easy,
because it's not. Thank you to the listener who suggested
this case and whose name I cannot find despite frantically
searching through my email, my Instagram messages. Listener, you remember
(02:00):
who you are. Please send me a note and I'll
thank you officially in the next episode. Sorry that this
keeps happening, guys, just like a little interesting perspective giving fact.
So right around the time when these today's sisters, the
Mirabell sisters, right around the time when they were all
being born, is when the Papa sisters were committing their
(02:21):
crimes in France. So that's where we are. Of course,
we're in ocean apart. We were in France last week.
We're going to be in the Dominican Republic this week.
We're going to spend most of our time in the
nineteen fifties early sixties. We're going to get a mini
crash course in Dominican Republic history that I hope I
do justice with, but am only scratching the surface here.
(02:43):
And so without further ado, let's go.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Let's meet our main characters.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Let's start with the dictator. His name was Raphael Trujillo.
He joined the army of the Dominican Republic as a
young man, and he trained with the US Marines. Within
ten years he was a general, and three years later,
in nineteen thirty, he was the man in charge. He
seized power, all of it in a military revolt against
(03:27):
the president. For the next thirty years, he ruled the
Dominican Republic with an iron fist. He sent his secret
police riding around the country in black Volkswagen beetles, spying
on citizens and slaughtering his opponents. He forced churches to
post signs that read God in Heaven, Trujillo on Earth,
(03:48):
and then eventually he switched the order so that God
was an afterthought, Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven. He
had his soldiers slaughter twenty thousand Haitians, men, women, and
children because he saw them as culturally and racially inferior.
He liked to be driven around the city secretly so
(04:09):
that he could watch his people. He was always watching.
He would have people in other countries killed if they
opposed him. He couldn't stand to be opposed. He owned
five hundred pairs of shoes, two thousand suits and uniforms,
and ten thousand neckties. He and his family controlled over
sixty percent of their country's economy, but he presented himself
(04:32):
as the savior of the poor and exploited. He loved
drama and spectacle. He baptized thousands of children to make
sure their parents were in his debt. There were rumors
that he had demonic powers, and he loved women. His
thirty year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women.
(04:55):
One academic wrote, it wasn't just that he was married
three times and had numerous mistresses. It was far darker
than that. As another academic wrote, Truxillo's power was based
as much on the consumption of women through sexual conquest
as it was on the domination of enemies of the state.
He would send his men to search the countryside for
(05:17):
beautiful girls, young girls, schoolgirls, and his rapacious appetite was
so well known that families would hide their daughters when
he came through town. While some women wanted to be
noticed by him, he was, after all, the epitome of power,
and many people longed for power. Others feared and loathed
(05:38):
his attention. Families knew that if Truchillo noticed their daughters,
they would have to decide between turning their girls over
to him and refusing him. And refusing him might be
a death sentence. As a third academic wrote, there was
always so much to say about the Dictator. Every Dominican
family had a victim of Truchillo in its clas. Now
(06:14):
that we've met the dictator, let's meet the sisters. The
four Mirabal sisters grew up in a house without a
single picture of Trujillo. Most people in the Dominican Republic
had a picture of the Dictator in their household. It was,
shall we say, encouraged, but not the Mitabal girls. Their
names were Patria, Minerva, Maria, Theresa, and Dede. They were
(06:39):
born in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and they grew
up in a world ruled by the dictator. Their parents
were fairly wealthy farmers who owned land and ran a
general store, and could afford to send their girls to
a nearby Catholic boarding school, which was at the time
the best in the country. Their mother was strict about
keeping her place clean. She would never allow the girls
to get up with that making their bed. Their father
(07:02):
would carry his daughters on his shoulders as he walked
through their fields. All four of the girls were creative.
They liked gardening, pencil drawing, painting, and the Meatabals were
a family that loved their country. Patria, the oldest, was
born on Dominican Independence Day, which was why her parents
gave her her name. It meant homeland. So the four
(07:27):
sisters all went to the same school, and then their
lives diverged. Patria left boarding school at seventeen to get married.
Her husband was a farmer, and she took pride in
homemaking and caring for her garden. They had four children.
But don't be too distracted by this picture of domestic bliss,
because Patria would soon become politically radical. Her home, which
(07:48):
she was so fond of, would become a place where
people made bombs. After all, who would suspect a sweet
little wife and mother of four next was She also
dropped out of boarding school before graduation. At first she
returned home to help her dad work, and then she
got married herself. She had three kids, all sons. She
(08:11):
was the least political of the sisters, at least for now.
After de de came Minerva, the extroverted sister, the charismatic one.
At boarding school, Minevas started learning more about the dictator
whose photo was never allowed in her home. She started
rubbing elbows with her peers, who were distinctly anti Trujillo.
She graduated in nineteen forty six and returned home to
(08:33):
help out with the family business. But what she really
wanted to do, perhaps inspired by the things she'd learned
in school, was study law. Her parents wouldn't let her, though.
Some versions of her story say that her parents didn't
think a woman should be a lawyer, but other versions
say that her parents had a more serious reason for
saying no to law school. They were afraid. They were
(08:54):
afraid for their daughter's safety. They could see how political
she was getting, and they worried that by becoming a lawyer,
she would be putting a target on her back. And
the youngest of the sisters was Maria Teresa. She was
obsessed with her cool older sister, Minerva. Maria Teresa wore
her hair in one or two long braids, which she'd
(09:15):
later become famous for. As the youngest sister, she was
a little bit pampered, as is a younger sister's right,
but she had plenty of brains and she put them
to good use. After graduating from the same boarding school
as her sister's, she went on to study math and
then surveying, which is the science of making accurate measurements
of Earth's surfaces, at the University of Santo Domingo. She
(09:38):
left the school without graduating, though, and she married a man, who,
like her, hated their country's dictator. A year later, they
had a daughter, Maria. Teresa would only get to be
a mother for a single year. Let's take a quick
(10:11):
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(13:33):
In nineteen forty nine, Minerva, the third Midebal sister, was
twenty three, single and very pretty. This was a really
bad thing. By then, Truhio had been in power for
almost two decades. He'd come to power when Mineva was
only three, and he showed no signs of stopping any
of it, any of the killings, any of the obnoxious
(13:55):
tendency of naming things after himself, and any of his
insatiable appetite for young women. Trujillo liked to have fancy parties,
and when a girl caught his eye, he might invite
her to one of these parties. This was an invitation
in name only. There was no option to respectfully decline.
A party was never just a party when Truhillo was involved.
(14:17):
It was a hunting ground. And so when the Meddowall
family got an invitation to one of these parties, it
didn't really matter that they lived in a house that
had no portraits of the dictator in it. They had
to go, and so they got dressed up and they went.
The entire Midabal family was nervous that night. They knew
(14:39):
the Dictator had his eyes on Minerva, and they'd heard
rumors that Thruhillo had a habit of spiking his victim's drinks.
What would they do if he offered a drink to
their sister, Tell her not to drink it and risk jail,
slap it out of her hands and risk prison. The
party unspooled around them, all pomp and circumstance, just as
(15:00):
Trujillo liked it, and before long the inevitable happened. The
Dictator asked Minetva to dance. As they danced, they talked,
or at least the Dictator talked. He made his feelings
known towards her. We don't know exactly what he said,
but he made himself clear. He was propositioning her Minetva
(15:21):
was expected to smile and lower her eyelashes and agree
to do whatever he wanted to do. After all, he
held her life in his hands, he held her family's
lives in his hands. But Mineva said no. There are
lots of rumors about how exactly Minheva Mirabal denied Rafael Trujillo.
(15:44):
The most dramatic stories say that she slapped him across
the face, but her family denies this. Other accounts say
that she told him that her religious beliefs wouldn't let her,
you know, get into bed with him. The third version
of the story is that she told him that she
didn't agree with him politically, and that he responded, what
if I send my followers to get you. However it happened,
(16:07):
Minerva's rejection was obvious. There was no room for Trujillo
to console himself by thinking, oh, maybe she was just
being coy and the dictator couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Women never said no to him. As one of his
biographers writes, Trujillo felt annoyed at this peasant woman who
(16:27):
had refused to face the possibility of something many posh
women yearned to get in those years, a time of
intimacy with Trujillo, the man whom everyone in the country feared.
After the disastrous danced, the entire Midabal family tried to
leave the party as fast as possible. This was a mistake, though,
(16:49):
because nobody was supposed to leave a Truchillo party. Before
Truxillo did, his officers surrounded the family. They threw the
father in jail. Not long i that the dictator ominously
summoned both Minerva and her mother to the capital city
and kept them hostage in a hotel room for two months,
telling Minerva that if she became his mistress, then he'd
(17:11):
let her father go free. She refused. The time in
jail broke her father. As one academic writes, he emerged
a broken man and never regained his physical or mental health,
dying shortly after his release. Life would never be the
same for the Mirabals. Now that Truhillo was angry with them,
(17:33):
they were now being watched really, really closely. Friends had
to be careful when they talked to Minerva. One minute
they'd be exchanging pleasantries about the weather. The next they
might be whisked away in a black Volkswagen beetle to
be interviewed and maybe even tortured. What did she say
to you? What does she know? Trujillo's agents heard and
saw everything. At one party, Minerva wouldn't raise her glass
(17:57):
to the dictator. That got reported when Minetva insulted a
brand of car since it was the same brand that
the dictator drove, that got reported. Now, Mineedva probably knew
that she was being spied on. How could she not know?
And still she refused to make the most minor of concessions,
like toasting to a dictator who wasn't even in the room.
(18:22):
After three years of this, three years of walking on
razored eggshells, Minetva's family finally let her go to law school,
but surprise, surprise, Truchillo was waiting for her there. He
wouldn't let her register for her second year of law
school before jumping through a bunch of hoops, one of
which was a meeting with him. When she graduated. Despite
(18:43):
him Summa cum laude and one of the first female
lawyers in the country, he wouldn't give her her law license.
She couldn't practice. Instead, to make money, Minetva had to
take up sewing back in law school, Mindeva had met
a man named Manolo who thought and acted a lot
like her. They fell in love. They married. Like her,
(19:08):
he had difficulty finding a job in law, and so
he had to farm with his father to make ends meet.
She sewed, he farmed. They talked politics. The two of
them saw eye to eye. They saw that their beloved
country was being crushed under the thumb of a dangerous
petty man, and that they had to do something about it.
(19:42):
The Dominican Republic wasn't the only Caribbean country with a
dictator in those days. There was a dictator in Cuba too,
but his reign was about to end. On the very
last day of nineteen fifty eight, Fidel Castro and his
rebels overthrew the Cuban dictator and replaced his government. Five
hundred miles away in the Dominican Republic, people like the
(20:02):
Metabal sisters watched in awe. If Fidel could do it,
they thought, why couldn't they. As one of Trujillo's biographers wrote,
educated and well positioned youths, shamed and chagrined by their
parents nauseating surrender to Trujillo had quietly begun to rebel,
even as in Cuba, Fidel Castro came out of the
(20:23):
mountains to give them an example. Less than a week
after a rag tag Castro marched victoriously into Havana, Mineva
and Maria Theresa were at lunch with several of their friends,
and Minheva said, if in Cuba it has been possible
to bring down the dictatorship, then in our country, with
so many anti Trujillo youth, we can do the same.
(20:45):
The passion and awareness raised that day eventually coalesced into
an official movement. The young people called themselves the fourteenth
of June movement, named after a failed attempt on June
fourteenth of nineteen fifty nine to overthrow the dictator. Minetva
was one of the movement's leaders, and two of her sisters,
(21:05):
Patria and Maria Theresa, soon joined her along with her husbands.
There were hundreds of members across the country, many of
them the well educated children of Trujillo's own supporters. For safety,
the members of the movement operated in cells so that
no one knew everybody else's names in case they were
arrested and tortured for information. At Patria's cozy home, that
(21:29):
she was so proud of. She and her children built explosives,
and Minerva and Maria Theresa traveled around the country with
their husbands, making sure the movement's cells were organized and
looking for locations where they could organize arms drops, which
is when you have an ally drop weapons from the sky.
The girls used the code name Las mariposas the Butterflies. Later,
(21:54):
the head of Trujillo's secret police would explain that everyone
knew Minetva was the brains behind the ear operation. Minheva
Mirabal was the one who had taken the seed of
sedition to her family. He said she was sick with
radical leftism. It didn't take long for this movement to
start planning their ultimate goal, the assassination of the dictator.
(22:18):
They knew he was going to show up at a
cattle fair on January twenty first, nineteen sixty, and they
made plans to blow him up there, but Trujillo had
eyes and ears everywhere. The day before the assassination could
be carried out, his secret police descended on the movement.
Hundreds of them were arrested, including Maria Theresa, Minerva and
(22:39):
their husbands. Some of the male members of the movement
were tortured and some even died in prison. Meanwhile, the
dictator's pr team got to work telling papers that they
had intercepted nothing more than a quote simple communist plot,
hardly worth paying attention to. The problem was that these
(23:00):
mass arrests weren't a great look for the dictator. He'd
just arrested a bunch of young people, many of them wealthy,
many of them women. As his biographer wrote, the list
of those arrested read like a Dominican who's who. The
fact that he was now torturing them was outrageous, and
people started to openly express that sentiment. The Catholic Church
(23:23):
had long been in Thruhio's back pocket through he on
earth God in Heaven, remember, But now they denounced him
in a letter that priests read from every pulpit all
across the country. It was a scathing letter. It never
mentioned the dictator by name, but it was obvious who
it was talking about. In it, the church declared that
human rights come before those of the state. The letter read,
(23:47):
in part, the basis and foundation of all positive law
is the inviolable dignity of the human person. Each human
being boasts even before his birth of a heritage of
prior and ans higher laws than those of any state.
They are intangible laws whose free exercise no human power
can impede. This really irritated the dictator. He wasn't used
(24:14):
to seeing the tides turn against him so publicly. To
his minions, the dictator snarled that he had only two
problems left in the entire world, the Catholic Church and
the Metabal Sisters. Yes, the tide was turning against the Dictator,
(24:45):
he could feel it. He was making all sorts of mistakes.
He tried to assassinate the president of Venezuela. No big deal, right,
The man was always criticizing him, But the assassination failed,
and now everyone was mad at him. Apparently he weren't
allowed to just go around trying to kill other world
leaders whenever you wanted. Ugh, maybe someone should have told
(25:05):
him that earlier. In retaliation for the attempt on his life,
the Venezuelan president asked the Organization of American States to
place economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic. The man who
tried to put his name in front of gods was
now looking around at the global stage and seeing enemies everywhere.
Powerful enemies, so in an attempt to make himself look good,
(25:31):
he decided that he would free all the female political prisoners.
Look how nice he was being to women. He was
practically a feminist. This meant that Minerva and Marie Teresa
were freed, though their husbands were still locked up. They'd
been in and out of prison for the past six months, arrested, freed,
arrested again, placed in solitary confinement. At one point they
(25:54):
were sentenced to thirty years each, and then that was
reduced to three years, and now they were free, sort of.
They were under house arrest at their mother's and if
they wanted to go anywhere, they had to file a petition.
It was kind of strange how much the dictator fretted
over these sisters. At this point in his career, he
had enemies as threatening and formidable as the United States
(26:17):
of America, but he couldn't stop thinking about those damn girls,
especially that Minteva one, the one who refused him. They
were a thorn in his side. Their presence gnawed away
at him. First they wouldn't sleep with him, and then
they had tried to assassinate him. The nerve and so
(26:38):
even though his international reputation was as fragile as an eggshell.
He decided that enough was enough. The Metable sisters were
going to have to die. Of course, he couldn't openly
kill them. They were women, they were well known, they
were well liked. But that was okay. Trujillo had a
(26:58):
little trick up his sleeves from just like this. He'd
done it before when he needed to make other enemies disappear.
He'd make everything look like a traffic accident. Everyone told
(27:27):
the Meetabile sisters, be careful, be careful, you're in danger.
People said, please, please watch your backs. The Meetabile sisters
sort of ignored them. They weren't idiots. They knew they
were dealing with a very dangerous adversary. But they also
knew that Thruhio didn't assassinate women. He just didn't. And
(27:49):
now the eyes of the entire world were on Thruhio's
every move. It would be madness for him to come
at them at a time like this. But then the
husbands of Minerva and Maria Theresa were transferred to a
different prison, a farther away prison. In order to visit them,
(28:09):
the Metaball sisters would have to drive down a highway
that was known as a place where accidents often happened.
This seemed ominous to their friends and family. Please don't
visit them, people begged, it's a trap. But the girls
visited with fresh clothes and food. They could all sew
(28:30):
very well, and they even launched a little clothing shop
to help support themselves and their husbands, since their property
had been mostly confiscated after their arrests. On November twenty fifth,
nineteen sixty, Mineva, Maria, Theresa, and Patria asked one of
Trujillo's men for permission to visit their husbands. Well, Patria's
(28:51):
husband was in a different prison, but she wanted to
go on this trip with her sisters. The man said yes,
and then he promptly reported the news to a group
of assassins. Meanwhile, the sisters couldn't find anyone who would
agree to drive them there. People were terrified. There were
too many rumors flying around about how the dictator had
(29:11):
the sisters and his sights. But finally the sisters found
a driver. His name was Ruffino de Lacruz. He was
a friend of the family and he was a very
brave man. The four of them made the treacherous drive
to the prison with no incident. They didn't know that
they were being followed. Five male assassins had followed them
(29:33):
to the prison, and there the assassins wrote down their
license plate number. Then the assassins drove back down the
road a couple of miles and waited. Around five pm,
the Metable sisters and Ruffino de Lacruz started for home.
It was getting dark, it was starting to rain. At
(29:53):
one point the highway curved, and around that curve the
Dictator's men were waiting for them, blocking the road. Armed,
they stopped the car and forced the sisters into their car,
saying that they were under orders to take them somewhere.
In the tussle, another car drove up. It was a
government car with some social security workers inside it. Miraculously,
(30:18):
Patria managed to break free and she ran towards the workers, screaming,
tell the mutable family that the thugs have taken us.
They may kill us. One of the Dictator's men came
up just then grabbed her, warned the social security workers
not to say a thing, and threw Patria back into
the car with her sisters. The assassins ordered Rufino de
(30:40):
la Cruz to drive after them, and the ominous parade
moved up the curving mountain roads until they arrived at
one of Trujillo's many properties, which had a thick sugar
cane grove on it. There the assassins forced the sisters
out of the car and tied their hands behind their backs.
Then they decided that they would each take one of
(31:02):
the victims into a different part of the grove. They
didn't want the sisters to know what was happening to
each other, although surely the sisters already knew. Surely this
was a fate that they'd discussed before. Surely, in the
drive to the sugarcane grove, they looked at each other
with terror and understanding in their eyes. Now the men
(31:26):
picked up sticks and the sisters were separated. A few
(31:49):
days later, newspapers ran a nothing little story with the
headline three sisters die when a jeep plunges into a chasm.
It wasn't until the second paragraph that the sister's name
were given, Patria Minerva Marie Theresa. This was the dictator's
official version of events, and he even forced the sister's
(32:09):
mother to sign a statement agreeing that her daughters had
died in a car accident, but the Metaball family members,
who had the terrible luck of having to identify Patria,
Minerva and Maria Theresa, could tell that their deaths were
no accident. Maria Teresa's skull was shattered, there were hand
(32:31):
prints on Mineva's neck. Their jeep had been found down
a gully, just like the newspapers said, but it had
been rolled there by the assassins after the women and
their driver had been strangled and beaten to death. In
the midabal sisters last moments, they had screamed out at
each other, and Maria Teresa had yelled to her sisters
(32:55):
that her killer was trying to rape her. You can
kill me, but you're not going to rape me, she cried.
The assassin, who was in charge of the whole thing,
called out to the man cut it out. Orders are
to kill her. Dead Day, the only sister who survived,
looked at her littlest sister lying there in the morgue.
(33:18):
Her hair was still in one long braid, the way
she usually wore it. Deaday carefully cut the braid off
and took it home with her At the funeral, Deaday
didn't talk. She couldn't. But at the cemetery she suddenly
couldn't stop screaming. Murderers, she shouted, they murdered them. Someone
(33:41):
had to pull her away from her sister's graves. Back
in one of his many estates, the dictator and his
ten thousand neckties probably thought that he had gotten away
with it. He'd finally vanquished the Metabile sisters. Now he
could relax. In fact, two months he took himself on
a nice little stroll of the area where they had died,
(34:04):
and he said, pompously, this is where the Midobar women died.
A horrible thing. That foolish people blame the government for
such good women and so defenseless. But with these assassinations,
the dictator had gone too far. He had murdered thousands
(34:26):
and thousands of people, including children and entire families, but
the slaughter of the three Midiball sisters was what destroyed him.
Trujillo had always used masculinity as a tool a way
to bolster his power. He portrayed himself as a super male,
how he dressed, how he ruled, how many women he
slept with. But now with this assassination of three intelligent
(34:50):
bold young women, each of them mothers. The Dominican Republic recoiled.
This wasn't the sort of masculinity they wanted to support.
The cowardly killing of three beautiful women in such a
manner had greater effect on Dominicans than most of Trujillo's
other crimes, wrote one of his biographers. It did something
(35:11):
to their machismo. They could never forgive Trujillo for this crime,
more than Truhio's fight with the Church or the United States,
or the fact that he was being isolated by the
world as a political leper. The Metaball's murder tempered the
resolution of the conspirators plotting his end. Six months later,
Trujillo would be the one ambushed in his car. Seven
(35:35):
men with machine guns opened fire as he drove down
the highway. The dictator crawled from his car and tried
to get away, but the assassins fired again, and before
long the ruler of the Dominican Republic was lying dead
on the road. It took a while for the Dominican
(36:08):
Republic to officially acknowledge the Meetable sisters as heroes. Trujillo
was dead, but his influence and his proteges were still
in power for quite some time, but today no one
can deny that the sisters are heroes. They're recognized as
national murders. Their faces are on the two hundred peso bill.
(36:29):
They've been the subject of books, poems, and plays, most
famously the novel In the Time of the Butterflies by
Julia Alvarez. There is a Meetabal Sisters Foundation and a
Meetabal Sisters Museum, both created by their surviving sister, Deadeh,
who always said that the reason she was kept alive
was to preserve her sister's memory. After their death, Dead
(36:50):
Day raised all six of their children. She lived in
the house where they were all born until the day
she died. The Meetable Sisters influence is now felt across
the world. They are in text books, they are the
subjects of dissertations. November twenty fifth, the day of their death,
is now International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
(37:14):
And in the Dominican Republic, there stands a statue that
Thruhio built to honor himself. It's an obelisk one hundred
and thirty seven feet tall, horribly phallic, and it points
toward heaven. The place where Trujillo felt that he'd be
in charge. But that statue is now covered in murals
honoring the Mida Ball sisters. It's like they've been given
(37:38):
a second life, an immortal one. Minetva's daughter grew up
to be a successful professor and politician, and she always
remembered something that her mother used to say. People would
tell Minheva, stop what you're doing. It's too dangerous. You're
going to get killed, and Mineva would always respond, if
they kill me, I shall reach my arms out of
(37:59):
the grain and I shall be stronger. And she was right.
(38:28):
So that's the story of the Midavell sisters. Aren't they incredible? Inspiring?
And isn't their end just such a horrific one. I
actually didn't find like the some of the details about
the way they were killed until the very end of
researching this episode, And then I found them tucked away
in a book somewhere. And you know, I had, already
(38:52):
in researching and writing this been struck by just how
scary what happened to them was. But then just the
little details of how you know exactly they were separated
at the end, and the one that breaks my heart
the most is how they called out for each other
while they were being separated, just to like it's like
sister radar, you know, they like wanted to know where
(39:14):
each other was at and what was happening to each
other even at the end. Those are just the details.
They give me chills. All Right, we're halfway through Sister Month,
but we have a long way to go, guys, a
lot more sisters to cover. And if any of you
out there are sisters as I am, and have any
anecdotes about your sister that you'd like to share with me. Now,
(39:35):
these don't have to be anecdotes about horror or crime,
you know. These can be cute, these can be funny,
these can be spooky. Do you have any weird like
sister intuition anecdotes? Send me an email Criminal Broads at
gmail dot com and I will read some of them
in the next episode. And until then, just another reminder,
rating and reviewing the podcast is vieway to my heart.
(39:57):
I'm trying to like plug it a little bit harder
and Rea an episode since I've forgotten to for a while,
and we're gonna be back here next week with a
story of ooh, how do I say this? In a
classy manner. Body parts being cut off. Oh, I'm sorry,
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry in advance. I'm sorry
(40:18):
in advance. Okay, i'll see you here next week. Thanks
for being the best listeners ever, and have a good
one bye. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe i'm wrong loving you
deal like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
(40:41):
guilty of loving
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