New York Times
that autopsies revealed the surgeons had been tortured. There was evidence that the doctors had been blindfolded and handcuffed, then burned and beaten before being strangled to death.
On February 2, police officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told
El Diario de Juárez
that the heightened violence in the city was the product of an internal war between two factions of the Cartel de Juárez, one led by alleged long-time narcotrafficker Rafael Muńoz Talavera, who had served time in a Mexican federal prison for a 1989 cocaine arrest in California, and the other by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the younger brother of the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
Later that month, the
New York Times
quoted a "United States government functionary" as confirming that Muńoz Talavera had emerged as the cartel's new leader. Muńoz, however, disputed reports of his victory, claiming in an open letter to the Juárez newspapers that "I am a simple working man." The
New York Times
reversed its earlier allegations two days after Muńoz's letter was published, stating that the same "government functionary" was now claiming that the victory had not yet been proven.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) maintained that the Juárez Cartel was importing cocaine, heroin, and marijuana as well as "high-quality methamphetamines" into the United States with alarming ease. In a report released in early 2002, the federal agency maintained that "large quantities" of the methamphetamines were being delivered to Phoenix, Arizona, through the cartel's western operations in Hermosillo, Sonora. The agency also disclosed the discovery of cargo shipments from the Cartel de Juárez in Oklahoma, Illinois, Georgia, and Washington State and divulged that the former Carrillo cartel, under the direction of the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, had been shipping cocaine directly to New Jersey and New York City.
That same month, an anti-drug-trafficking sting conducted by U.S. Customs agents resulted in the seizure of three Texas safehouses and an El Paso trucking business owned and operated by an alleged Mexican drug trafficker, Eduardo González Quirarte, who was believed to be a ringleader in the Cartel de Juárez. U.S. authorities reported that agents found that trucks belonging to González's El Paso Trucking Center were outfitted with "secret compartments" that had likely been used to move illegal drug shipments into the United States.
The clampdown in Mexico's northern border region appeared one-sided, with U.S. federal agents conducting the majority of the raids on U.S. soil until an unexpected revelation sparked federal authorities in Mexico to stand up and take action.
That February, it was learned that a slain federal judicial police officer who had been gunned down in January by assassins wielding AK-47s had ties to the Juárez drug cartel. Even more startling was the fact that he was also a member of the Chihuahua special task force investigating the Juárez serial killings. In an article that appeared in the
New York Times
on February 1, 2002, Mexican attorney general Jorge Madrazo Cuéllar confirmed that the office subcommander, Mario Héctor Varela of the Chihuahua state police, was a corrupt "narco-policeman" with ties to the powerful Juárez drug cartel. The Mexican attorney general also confirmed for the newspaper that Varela had been a member of Chihuahua's special police task force investigating the abductions and murders of the women of Juárez.
The revelation, while stunning, came as no surprise to the women, who had long been suggesting that police might be involved in some of the killings.
Mexico's attorney general Cuéllar reacted strongly to the disclosure. Standing before the media that February, he vowed to appoint new detectives and prosecutors to the special unit to investigate women's homicides.
Chihuahua attorney general Arturo Chávez agreed. "Perhaps some of our investigations were not done well," he told journalists that February. "Maybe they should have been done better."
In response to the ongoing public criticism, Chávez invited famed American criminologist Robert Ressler to Juárez in the spring of 1998 to work side by side with Mexican authorities on the homicides. As reasons for the invitation, Chávez cited Ressler's vast experience in the area of criminal profiling and his technical skills at piecing together small bits of information to glean a portrait of a killer. "We have no one with that kind of experience in Mexico," Chávez told reporters at a press conference that April.
Ressler was well known in the United States for his work at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia. He'd left the bureau's famed Behavioral Analysis Unit, which inspired the spine-tingling Hollywood thriller
The Silence of the Lambs,
in 1990 and was working as a consultant to law enforcement and others. He first gained notoriety in the United States in the early nineties after the publication of his book
Whoever Fights Monsters,
an in-depth look at serial killers.
Officials in Juárez were hoping he could help shed some light on the ongoing murders. Ressler would be involved as an independent investigator, hired by Mexican government officials, not as a formal FBI operative, representing the United States government. The plan was to analyze all the aspects of the crime time of disappearance, age of the victims, their social status, and the circumstances of their deaths and to make recommendations for improving the state police department's investigatory skills, such as psychological profiling.
During the first of three trips to Juárez that April, Ressler spent one week reviewing the files of the unsolved homicides and accompanying police to the crime scenes. In an interview, local activist Esther Chávez said she found it curious that officials would ask the American profiler for help when he did not speak the native language and, therefore, could not converse with the families of the murdered girls.
Nevertheless, the Chihuahua state attorney general's office held a press conference in late June at which Ressler announced his findings. Dressed in a dark-colored suit and cowboy boots, and towering over Mexican officials at well over six feet, the fair-haired criminologist told journalists that of the more than 160 murders that had occurred in Juárez since 1993, he found that 76 conformed to a pattern. A majority of the dead girls ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-four, and a large number had been raped and strangled, he said. Like Sagrario González, at least twelve had vanished on their way to or from work at a local factory.
Based on his investigation, Ressler theorized that one or more serial killers were crossing the border into Juárez from the United States to commit the killings. He pointed to areas like Mariscal Street in
el centro,
close to the seedy bars, where maquila girls walk alone after dark on desolate streets and in alleyways to transfer to outbound buses, and to the constant influx of young women, many with no ties or families to report them missing.
In response to questions about the way authorities had been handling the investigations, Ressler told journalists that Mexican police were doing the best they could with what they had. He cited inadequate staffing and inexperience as reasons for the lack of progress but noted that their investigation had been carried out as well as, if not better than, many conducted on the U.S. side of the border.
"The Juárez police did not have adequate cars or adequate personnel working on the case," he told a producer from Univision during a lengthy interview conducted at his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. "They did the best they could, and I'd say a very good job. I looked at seventy-six case files, and the investigation of those crimes in Juárez wasn't, to me, substandard.
"They needed more money, I think maybe from NAFTA, to bring the police services up to standard and to get them the equipment and the personnel."
Ressler claimed to have seen some "convincing" evidence against the jailed Egyptian Sharif Sharif and members of the street gang Los Rebeldes. While he failed to provide any real details, he pointed to bite marks found on several of the victims' bodies that officials maintained matched those of Sergio Armendáriz a claim the gang leader vehemently disputed. While DNA results had initially been favorable to the prosecutor's office, a second test performed at the request of Armendáriz would later prove inconclusive.
Mexican criminologist Oscar Maynez disagreed with Ressler's assessment that a serial killer or killers were crossing the border into Mexico to murder the young women of Juárez. Maynez had served as a staff criminologist for the attorney general's office under Governor Barrio but had quit in disgust after only two years over the way authorities were handling the investigations. He had since been invited back as chief of the state's forensic department. In that capacity, he oversaw much of the evidence in the ongoing homicide cases.
Maynez believed the perpetrator or perpetrators were from Mexico and preying on their own kind. He pointed to Ressler's work with serial killers in the United States, particularly his theory that men who commit serial murder are most often Anglo-Saxon and hail from European roots. Maynez noted there had never been a comprehensive study of serial murder in Mexico to negate the possibility that a Mexican man could be a serial killer.
Maynez was also skeptical about whether state police had actually presented the former FBI agent with all the facts pertaining to the homicides, or whether Ressler had unknowingly based his assessment on incorrect or incomplete data. Maynez maintained that without accurate facts, it would be impossible to reach a proper conclusion.
Whether or not the killers were from Juárez, one fact was extremely clear: they stalked their victims, they knew the desert well, and they had the means to reach desolate areas where no one could hear these young women's desperate cries for help.
* * *
When the American profiler returned to the border city some six months later in September of 1998, he learned there had been a major political upset in the state of Chihuahua. Voters had sent a clear message to members of the state's ruling PAN party in the July elections, casting their ballots for Patricio Martínez, the gubernatorial candidate for the opposing PRI party, which had been controlling Mexico for more than seventy years.
As part of his campaign, Martínez had vowed to end violence in the region "in one month" and had focused particular attention on the murders in Juárez. His promise appeared to win him favor with the electorate and gain him the state governorship.
Martínez appointed PRI member Arturo González Rascón to be sworn in as the new state attorney general on October 4, when the change of power officially took place.
The new politicians welcomed Robert Ressler and appreciated the help he was providing to investigators in accumulating and analyzing their data. The famed criminologist had arranged to have the FBI's fifteen-page Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as VICAP, translated into Spanish so that state investigators could use it as a guide. He and other members of law enforcement in the United States used the form to record data such as the modus operandi and victim profile for analysis, and as a guide to cross-reference data with other law enforcement agencies. Ressler had invited the VICAP people from the FBI to become involved in the case. When they failed to join in, he had taken it upon himself to have the VICAP form translated into Spanish.
Though the Mexican police had come under attack from civic activists, the media, and others, Ressler defended them, saying that they were not "just these guys in big hats taking siestas." He insisted, "They had a pretty good operation and pretty good people in top spots
. What the women's groups are saying is that these macho guys didn't give a damn about the victims
. I disagree with that."
In early October, the new Chihuahua state attorney general, Arturo González Rascón, announced the appointment of a thirty-four-year-old lawyer named Suly Ponce Prieto to the role of director of the Special Task Force for the Investigation of Crimes Against Women. In that capacity, she would oversee the investigation of all women's homicides, including murders of a sexual nature.
Rumors quickly circulated that the tall, auburn-haired Ponce was selected because of her political ties to Rascón, and she was soon labeled a political lackey. She arrived on the heels of three other directors who had stepped down from the post within a six-month period for reasons that were never disclosed.
Ponce would be based out of the attorney general's satellite office in Juárez and report to the district attorney, Nahúm Nájera, in charge in the border city.
In interviews, Ponce said that when she reported for work that first week, she found a state police department ill equipped to handle the homicide investigations. To her amazement, she found that officers lacked even the most basic tools equipment such as paper bags, latex gloves, and crime scene tape, all of which are essential to the proper preservation of a crime scene.
According to published reports, Ponce learned that police had burned more than one thousand pounds of evidence, the bulk of it clothing that had been collected from crime scenes. In the days before she took over the directorship in October, members of the previous administration had also cleared her office of all files pertaining to prior investigations performed by experts, including Robert Ressler. Eager to bring about positive change in her new role, Ponce told Mexican journalists she had been left with "nothing" to work from.
