Rather than snatch babies from cribs at night, the Catholic Church went straight to the source when they decided to kidnap children. Directly after childbirth many babies were whisked away under the guise of routine testing and later their mothers were told that the baby had died. One mother who experienced this first hand explained to the BBC that she fell for this trick because she had been raised to believe that the church was infallible and that they would have no reason to lie to her. "I couldn't accuse them of lying. This was Franco's Spain. A dictatorship. Even now we Spaniards tend not to question authority."

Many of the mothers who asked to see their child after hearing that it had passed away claim that they were shown the corpse of a child who had been frozen, or that was freezing cold.