Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast · Shane L. Waters, Wendy Cee, Gemma Hoskins

Philippines: The Priest Who Killed 57 Parishioners

November 11, 2025·35 min·3 clips

The colonial system documented the priest's life in detail but erased his victims entirely

The parish house stands quiet under the heat of Spanish colonial Philippines. Father Juan Severino Malary is feverish and weak, unable to carry out his priestly duties. Fellow priests come from nearby parishes and tend to him in Christian charity. They pray over him and look for clean bedding and medicine. While searching his residence, one of them finds blood-stained clothing folded with unsettling care. The clothing does not belong to Malary. A shirt, a shawl, and a small purse carry blood that should not be there. The items seem to belong to parishioners from the community. People who had come to Mass and Confession. People who had asked for blessings. More belongings surface. More blood. The priests begin to understand what they are seeing. The objects match people who left for errands months earlier and never returned. Suspicion hardens into certainty. Father Juan Severino Malary had already been under complaint before this discovery. Families had gone to the mayor after loved ones disappeared, and that formal report finally set an investigation in motion on December 20, 1825. Even then, Malary remained free for months. He continued to serve as parish priest through late 1825 and into early 1826. He said Mass. He heard confessions. He carried on as if nothing had happened. The episode also traces how fully the Spanish colonial system documented Malary himself. His birth, family status, academic degrees, ordination, parish postings, rejected applications, and even his artwork survive in the archive. His ornate calligraphy and ecclesiastical documents remain available to history. The 57 Filipinos he killed do not. Their names were not recorded. Their ages were not recorded. Their occupations were not recorded. Their families were not recorded. The episode makes that absence central. It treats the silence as colonial violence made bureaucratic. It ties the killings to failures of severe mental health care, colonial law enforcement, and imperial record keeping. It keeps coming back to the same moral point. Malary was preserved. His victims were erased. The story ends by insisting that those 57 lives deserve to be remembered anyway.

As heard by us

A grim colonial murder case, told with careful moral gravity.

The episode opens in a parish house in Spanish colonial Philippines and stays with a grim discovery: Father Juan Severino Malary, ill and tended by fellow priests, is tied to bloodied belongings that seem to belong to parishioners who never made it back.

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Why you'd press play

For a historical true crime case where colonial recordkeeping is part of the horror.

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