The death penalty in Santa Dolorosa

" You know what it is like to BURN ? " the nearly delirious prisoner Pablo, who was only 20 years old but just sentenced to " life " for murdering the saintly girl Maria, asked old judge Juarez .

"For you the Almighty has prepared the torment of his Inferno. When I look upon your evil face excited by mad lust I hear all the screams of the damned. But I will waste no more words with you. Guards take this abominable being into the earthly abyss that we have prepared for him until his Maker calls."

When Maria Santos would not let the hot blooded Pablo have his way with her under the falls of the sacred grotto, he strangled her to death. Dr. Perez for posterity made one of those ghastly " death masks "of the martyred virgin.

Later he had an idea: he made copies of the death mask in bronze. A true work of art ! One of the bronze death masks of Maria Santos was secured - beyond
tampering - on the stone wall of young and passionate Pablo's cell.

He refused the crucifix but day and night he had to look at his pitiful victim, captured by the finest art of Dolorosa, in her death agony.

Judge Juaraz had " mercifully " spared the " burning " young man the death penalty. But Pablo - after 40 days in his cell - would not spare himself: He was found at three o'clock in the morning . His body was now cold. He had hanged himself with Maria Santos' long, black rosary beads - which he had cleverly hidden as fetish of his infatuation with the 14 year old girl.

Pablo was buried - without holy ceremonies -in the desert.