Now Sagrario was on her own, traveling the desolate route from the family's makeshift residence to the factory alone. To be on time for work, she needed to wake at three o'clock in the morning, shower in the dark, and be on her way by four.
The González family lived in one of the more marginal areas of the city, where the architecture was as harsh as the landscape. Some houses had literally been fabricated from rubbish; they were erected from pieces of cardboard, wood, and metal cobbled together with screws driven through bottle caps. The buildings were frightening and odd-looking structures on the outside, but the laughter of the children playing and the ranchera music emanating from the radio told a different tale. There was love here, and hearth and warmth inside.
The Gonzálezes' home had been hastily slapped together with tar paper and wood and then painted a pale pink with a forest green shingle roof. There was a series of smaller shacks that the family used to store farming tools and animal feed encircled by a fence of wooden stakes and barbed wire. The barrier was intended to keep farm animals from wandering away. There was no running water. The outhouse stood behind the dwelling, and a small well dug by hand provided fresh drinking water. The home had just one large room, divided into separate living spaces by pieces of fabric. Odd sections of rug and carpet covered areas of the dirt floor and helped to hold the warmth inside during the dry, cold winter nights.
A colorful floral curtain divided the living room from the family's cramped sleeping quarters. The parents' double bed was pushed against one wall, and two sets of bunk beds hugged the other. There was barely room to walk between them.
Paula and Jesús González had moved with their seven children to Juárez in 1996, from the state of Durango, after the forestry industry in their tiny village had begun to falter and jobs grew scarce. The family constructed their house almost overnight and illegally tapped into utility lines to obtain power for several lightbulbs and a small television.
A number of the city's residents pilfered electricity by stringing common household extension cords together until they reached a home. A tangle of crisscrossing wires through the neighborhoods made it impossible to determine who was connected to whom. Many of the live wires ran along the ground, and even across the dirt roads, making them hazardous to the children playing outside or walking with friends.
For miles there was nothing but parched sand, sagebrush, and bristly, pencil-thin saguaro cacti. There were no traffic sounds, only the clucking of roosters roaming the hills.
Jesús González was dismayed when his wife phoned him at the factory just before 10 p.m. on April 16 to report that Sagrario had not yet reached home. Her shift had ended at 3 p.m., nearly seven hours earlier. But there was no sign of her.
At first Jesús believed his youngest child had left work with her boyfriend, a young man who was also employed at the Capco plant. Then he saw the boyfriend working, and his heart stopped. At that moment Jesús was overcome with panic and the horrible realization that he might never see Sagrario again. He knew what had become of the young women who disappeared on their way to and from work. His little girl was naďve and innocent. She sang in the church choir and spent many of her free hours rehearsing with her choir group. She was beautiful, with pale brown skin that was unblemished, dark wavy hair that fell to her waist, and plump lips. Like her mother, Sagrario had full, bushy eyebrows and long, thick lashes. She rarely wore slacks, opting for pretty dresses that fell to her knee.
Racing up to his supervisor, Jesús told him what had happened and obtained permission to leave and to take his eldest daughter with him.
Guillermina burst into tears when she learned that her little sister had not made it home. Shaking, she ran to her locker to retrieve her purse, then met her father at the front of the building.
Their first stop was the local jail in downtown Juárez, where the municipal police were headquartered. The facility spanned four square city blocks and was reputed to be a place where inmates were treated harshly, not only by fellow prisoners but more often by the guards. Located in a dangerous section of the downtown area between Avenida 16 de Septiembre and Calle Oro, the jail was known locally as "the rock" because of a wall of white brick that encircled it like a fortress. It was also called "the brick jail."
Jesús was horrified at the officers' reaction to his concern over Sagrario's failure to return home that evening. It astounded him that with all the missing young women already found dead in the city, police were still trivializing a report of another missing girl. It was as if they were patronizing him when they told him they'd contact him if they found his daughter. While they didn't insinuate that she'd run off with a boyfriend, as they had with Ramona Morales and Irma Pérez, they snickered when he implored them to commence a search.
Jesús's eldest daughter tried to contain her emotions as she stood by her father listening to the officers belittling him with promises of help, knowing in her heart that these men didn't care at all about Sagrario's fate. Guillermina also didn't like the way the officers were leering at her. Like Sagrario, she too was slender with bright eyes framed by thick, dark eyelashes. Her long, shiny hair fell well past her shoulders.
Desperate to find Sagrario, Jesús and his daughter climbed into their van and rushed from the municipal police station to a friend's ranch. They knew the family had a cell phone and wanted to borrow it to call the emergency line in hopes of getting a better response from officials.
Guillermina watched as her father dialed 060 on the telephone keypad. She could tell by his posture the news wasn't good. Officials claimed that police wouldn't dispatch a patrol car unless there was a real emergency. That a missing seventeen-year-old girl in a city saturated with murders of young women wasn't an emergency seemed unbelievable to Guillermina.
Aware that his wife was worried, Jesús stopped at home to pick up Paula and their son, Juan.
It was pitch-black when the family arrived at the mirrored-glass building housing both the district attorney's headquarters and the state police, who were handling the investigation into the murdered young women. Surely the state police would be able to help, Jesús thought as he stepped up to the window and asked to report his missing daughter. Someone could be raping and killing his child at that very moment. He needed to rescue her. He could barely get the words out before the uniformed officer interrupted him.
"Sir, you need to wait twenty-four hours before you can file a formal report on a missing person," the officer advised.
"We are looking for her alive," Jesús shot back.
It all seemed surreal. His daughter was missing and the police were refusing to do anything to help. While the official wait time to report a missing person had been shortened from the original seventy-two-hour requirement thanks to the efforts of local activists like Esther Chávez a full day still seemed too long to wait to commence an investigation, given the ongoing criminal climate. Following a check of the local hospitals, Jesús and Juan next retraced the route Sagrario would take on foot if she were on her way home. A light wind stirred up the powdery sand of the desert as they yelled her name into the blackness.
"Sagrario!"
they shouted.
There was no answer, only the howls of the coyotes off in the hills.
Paula was outside, standing in front of the pretty lace curtain that served as the family's front door, when her husband and son came trudging up the dirt path to their farm compound.
Jesús looked weary and defeated, and Juan was sad, angry, and tired. Hearing the commotion, Guillermina rushed outside to learn if there was any news. The twenty-two-year-old was more assertive than her baby sister and had stronger physical features. She wore her thick, pencil-straight hair pulled off her face, accentuating her angular cheekbones and Clorox-white front teeth.
Collapsing into each other's arms, the four sobbed uncontrollably. It was clear that something terrible had happened to Sagrario.
With no help from the authorities, the family had done what little they could to look for Sagrario. There was one chance left the local volunteers who routinely searched the desert for victims.
There was growing speculation among residents of Juárez that officers from both the state and municipal police forces were somehow involved in the increasing number of murders or that they were covering up for the guilty party or parties. Concerned that authorities were doing little to protect the citizens of the poorest communities of the city, a team of volunteer ham radio operators was periodically checking the scrublands that bordered the city for any signs of foul play.
Many of these men couldn't afford to own cars, so they organized carpools to travel to the search sites, and then split up to conduct their own explorations on foot. The task was not without risk. The desert heat was often stultifying, and blinding sandstorms and poisonous rattlesnakes abounded. The majority of the searchers donned cowboy hats, heavy cowhide boots, and sunglasses to guard against the elements.
Paula and her husband joined in the searches.
Sagrario had been missing for a little more than two weeks when the family learned that a woman's body had been found in a trench in a desolate area of Lote Bravo called Loma Blanca.
Someone had notified the local police that there was a taxi on fire there. Some boys had been playing nearby when they noticed the flames and raced over to see what was burning. On their way back, they stumbled upon the dead body and ran to alert police.
Paula grabbed her son Juan and rushed to the police station on Friday, May 1, to find out if the dead girl was her Sagrario. There she was greeted by a group of mothers of missing or slain girls and several local activists who were holding a vigil in the hallway of the government building. The look on their faces told Paula what she didn't want to know.
Finally a reporter spoke to her. "Seńora, they just found another girl," he said.
"Which one and where did they find her?" Paula asked, fearful of his response.
"All I can tell you is that this girl was wearing an overdress from Capco."
Paula's heart sank in her chest.
"Wait here, Mama, I'll go," Juan interrupted.
Paula's legs trembled as she watched her youngest son disappear inside the building, aware that the other mothers congregated nearby were avoiding her gaze. In her early forties, Paula González was still physically fit and had managed to retain her youthful, natural beauty. She wore no makeup, and her thick hair was tied loosely in a ponytail. Like many of the city's residents, she dressed casually in slacks and the colorful sweaters she knit by hand.
Minutes seemed like hours as she paced the sidewalk, ruminating over why authorities had waited nearly three days to tell the family about Sagrario. From what Paula had gathered, officials had discovered the teenager's body that past Wednesday but had failed to contact family members or alert them when she had come to headquarters the previous day to check for news.
Less than thirty minutes had passed when Paula spotted her son exiting the building. His face told her what she already knew: the dead child was her baby girl.
According to authorities, Sagrario had been strangled and stabbed, three times in the chest, twice in the back. The wounds were shallow and did not penetrate any vital organs. The police believed she had also been raped, but her body was too decomposed to determine for certain.
Officials said the teen was still wearing the white smock typically worn by female workers at the city's factories when her body was discovered. Paula had embroidered her daughter's name on the uniform the day she brought it home from the factory, never expecting that it would later serve as a tool for the family to identify Sagrario's disfigured corpse.
News accounts were reporting that about one-third of the murdered girls were maquiladora workers. Now Sagrario González had been added to the rising statistics. Her body was in such an advanced state of decomposition that it was difficult to know if it really was Sagrario.
For identification purposes, her brother Juan was shown the white smock found on the body and some items of underwear that he believed belonged to his sister. For humanitarian reasons, he was shown a portion of his sister's arm and a reconstruction of her skull, rather than Sagrario's actual head and face, which had decayed into an amorphous mass of putrid tissue.
To alleviate some of the horror of the identification process, authorities had begun creating reconstructions of a victim's skull and face. They used those reconstructions rather than a cleaned skull, as they had been doing in past cases. The new technology was not yet available when mothers including Ramona Morales and Irma Pérez were asked to identify their daughters.
Chihuahua was one of the first of the country's states to employ facial reproduction techniques. Using the bones of the face and cranial measurements, the state's pathologist, Irma Rodríguez, was able to "give a face" to a cadaver, which was often nothing more than a skeleton with some tissue that was bloated and black from decomposition when it was brought in. The process normally took fifteen days from start to finish.
