In the parish registers, there is only one entry that corresponds to the data mentioned by the judges: "On the eighteenth day of December of one thousand seven hundred and forty-eight, in this church of Figueira, Father João Baptista Barreto (...) baptised and placed the holy oils on Luiza, born on the tenth day of the same month and year, from the first marriage of Manoel Roiz and his wife Mariana Roiz, from Gavinhos (...)".
[4] Luísa de Jesus eventually hatched a money-making criminal scheme involving a foundling wheel in Coimbra: at the time, these devices were used by mothers to abandon their children at local charities, in the hopes that a good samaritan of means would take them instead.
[2] Deciding to take advantage of this, de Jesus, using either her real name or that of her clients as a delivery worker, would adopt children at Coimbra's Foundling Wheel House as often as possible, but would then kill them by either smothering or strangling them.
[1] Initially, nobody noted anything suspicious about the rate at which she adopted multiple children until 1 April 1772, when a worker at Coimbra's Foundling Wheel House, Angélica Maria, accidentally stumbled upon a shallow grave in Monte Arroio, containing the corpse of a baby with strangulation marks around its neck.
[2] She reported the finding to the authorities, who immediately started investigating, eventually discovering that the child had been adopted by de Jesus under her real name.
[2] In an attempt to escape prosecution, de Jesus' attorneys claimed as she was under 25 years of age, she was considered a minor under the law and thus ineligible for the death penalty.
"The foundling wheel worker's procedure was what we would today call criminal negligence, since she had handed over all these children to a woman who went to collect them on behalf of others, without the person in charge of the foundling wheel investigating the children's fate," said historian Maria Antónia Lopes, who discovered in the records of Coimbra's public prison that the two officials "obtained a release permit" on 7 October 1772.
[1] A man called Pascoal Luís Ferreira da Silva registered the act of formally entrusting 34 institutionalized children released by Coimbra's Foundling Wheel House to Luiza de Jesus.