Hiena de Queretaro

Claudia Mijangos Arzac (born 25 May 1956) is a Mexican woman who was convicted of filicide. In April 1989, Mijangos stabbed her three children to death declaring she was obliged by a diabolical entity that possessed her. She was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and temporal lobe epilepsy. Therefore, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison, the maximum sentence for such a crime in Mexico. Mijangos was released from prison in 2019 and admitted to a psychiatric clinic.

According to local legends, the house where she committed the crime (in the Jardines de la Hacienda colonia of Querétaro) is haunted. The site was explored by the Mexican paranormal television program, Extranormal and by the Mexican parapsychologist Carlos Trejo.

Background Claudia Mijangos was born on 25 May 1956 in Sinaloa, Mexico, where she was raised in an upper-middle-class family. In her youth, she was named beauty queen of her hometown of Mazatlán. There, the three children were enrolled in the Catholic school Colegio Fray Luis de León, where Claudia Mijangos worked as a catechism teacher. After locking the door behind him, Claudia went upstairs to tuck her children in bed and went to sleep.

A few hours later on 24 April 1989, at around four in the morning, Claudia awoke to loud voices in her head. She stated that the voices told her Mazatlan had disappeared and that "all of Queretaro was a spirit". Desperate, Claudia called her friend Veronica Vazquez who asked Claudia to calm down. Veronica promised to come in the morning to help her. Following the call, Claudia got out of bed, dressed, went to the kitchen and took three knives while her children were still sleeping.

At about five in the morning Claudia woke up her 6-year-old son Alfredo and attacked him with a knife. Leaning on his bed, she grabbed his left hand and completely amputated it. Alfredo screamed out which awoke his eldest sister, 11-year-old Claudia Maria, came to the room and begged her mother to stop. Switching knives, Claudia rushed over her eldest daughter and stabbed her six times. Wounded, Claudia María managed to leave the room and loudly pleaded her mother for mercy. The screams woke the neighbors. Claudia took the third knife and stabbed her nine-year-old daughter Ana Belén in the heart. Claudia ran downstairs, searching for Claudia Maria who had fainted on the dining room floor and stabbed her again. She then dragged her upstairs and placed her lifeless body in the master bedroom.

Crime scene and evidence