Many questioned how the men, who were supposedly high on drugs and alcohol at the time of the killings, could recall such particulars with unerring accuracy. Authorities responded by claiming that some people get high to stay more alert.
Even more troubling was that the director of El Cereso resigned just one month after the bus drivers' arrests. His resignation happened after he reportedly signed off on the release of a medical report that documented specific injuries consistent with police torture found on the men's bodies when they first arrived at the facility that November.
When Ortega was asked about the director's departure, he said it was not linked to the release of the medical findings. He pointed out that the prison director had not conducted the examination of the alleged killers, the prison doctor had, and the physician was still employed at the facility.
Interestingly, news reports claimed that the prison doctor had observed burns and bruises on the men's bodies that were consistent with the marks left by a cattle prod a finding that was vehemently denied by state officials.
In response to questions about the men's injuries, Attorney General González Rascón insisted they had burned themselves in order to claim that they had been tortured while in police custody. How the bus drivers were able to get a hold of matches or a lighter to inflict the burns while under lock and key made little sense. González Rascón also claimed that injuries that had been photographed on Gustavo González's leg were the result of varicose veins that had become severely inflamed not the result of beatings, as he was claiming.
* * *
In the days following her husband's arrest, Miriam García began receiving death threats. People were calling her home and taunting her in public. She grew afraid for her life, and for the life of her baby and the young attorney Sergio Dante Almaraz, who had agreed to represent her husband pro bono.
Miriam García insisted that her husband was innocent. She claimed that she worked alongside him on bus 77, collecting fares from passengers using route 1-A. Her normal work schedule was Monday through Saturday. Sunday was a day of rest for the family. Since she was constantly by his side, she questioned how and when he would have had the opportunity to commit these eight murders without her knowledge.
"My husband has always been very serious in his work, very discreet," she declared in an interview soon after García's arrest. "With some men, you know, something gives them away even if they're discreet. As a woman you perceive those things. And my husband, from the time that I met him, has been very respectful, very sweet. A walking tenderness."
Chapter Ten
Labyrinths
People are scared. People are whispering
when you instill fear, when you divide, you conquer.
VICKY CARAVEO, WOMEN'S ACTIVIST AND FOUNDER, MUJERES POR JUáREZ
WHILE SULY PONCE PRIETO was no longer the special prosecutor in charge of the investigation of women's homicides, she was still active in the state's ongoing investigation into the murders. As regional coordinator of the North Zone for the state prosecutor general's office, she was now at the head of the justice system in Chihuahua.
In November 2001, Ponce found herself in a quandary when members of her own staff, including the state's head of forensics, Oscar Maynez, told her that the two bus drivers she had locked up might not be responsible for the deaths of the eight young women found in the middle of the city. She could ignore the issue and hope the media didn't pick up on it, or she could buttress her case that it was, indeed, the bus drivers who were responsible for the killings.
Ponce opted to go after the bus drivers once again.
In November, Ponce held a press conference to present to the media a thirty-seven-year-old woman who claimed to have been raped by one of the suspects in July of 1996. Ponce identified the woman she was putting forth as "Luz" and claimed that the witness had come forward after recognizing Víctor García from TV news accounts as the same man who had raped her five years earlier.
The woman was heavyset and did not fit the profile of the murdered girls, yet she stood before Chihuahua state police and members of the press and tearfully recounted how García had forced her into a car, beat her, and then raped her at gun-point. When questioned about her appearance, she claimed that she had been thinner back then. Luz explained that her vehicle had broken down and she was waiting on the side of the road for a taxi when García drove past, stopped as if he intended to help, and then pulled her inside his vehicle. During the attack, she managed to break free, exiting the vehicle and crawling under a nearby car to hide. She said her eyes were bloodied and she could barely see, but she could hear García's footsteps coming closer when the headlights of an oncoming car startled him back to his own vehicle.
When asked why she had waited so long to come forward, the woman explained that García had driven off with her purse and house keys that night. He knew where she lived and she feared retaliation.
Luz's horrific account resulted in the filing of additional criminal charges against García. But the case was ultimately dismissed when she declined to testify at trial.
Univision later learned that the woman was not, in fact, a rape victim at all. Rather she was the girlfriend of a taxi driver who was in jail and facing charges at the same time the two bus drivers were arrested. Sources close to the investigation claimed that Luz was promised a plea deal for her boyfriend in exchange for her bogus rape story before the media.
Raising further questions about the men's guilt was lead criminologist Oscar Maynez. He claimed that an order to plant evidence in their case had come down from state officials at the top. The allegation was stunning, and yet many in Juárez were not surprised.
Maynez alleged that after an inspection of the men's brown van had yielded no evidence linking the two bus drivers to the murders, he was instructed to "plant" hairs and fibers from the dead women in the vehicle to incriminate them in the killings.
When he refused, Maynez said he began receiving threats. The threats were so serious that even Maynez's enemies at the attorney general's office were warning him to be careful.
At one point, he said, Suly Ponce took him out to lunch, and during the meal, she stressed the importance of "protecting the institution." While Maynez interpreted the statement as a cryptic message from a person with a "bureaucratic mind-set," urging him to be a team player, there is no evidence to support his belief.
Maynez opposed the theory that officials were trying to float with regard to the men's participation in the crimes. Maynez had repeatedly warned authorities that the hypothesis they had chosen to adopt in this case was flawed and would not stand up to scrutiny. If they continued, it would come back to haunt them, he insisted. Maynez's warnings were ignored, and he could do little more than stand by as authorities pressed forward with their theory of the murders.
Maynez linked the rush to solve the case to the upcoming political elections. "This investigation ought to have been worked scientifically and not politically to stifle social pressure," he said during an interview with Univision.
In spite of his frustration, Maynez was determined to ensure that the evidence and reports he had compiled were not tampered with. He decided to stay on as head of the Department of Forensics and Legal Medicine until the bus drivers' case went to court. For nearly two months, he anxiously kept the files in his possession. Finally, in January of 2002, he passed them along to a judge.
Oscar Maynez was also keeping a close eye on the case against Sharif Sharif. He was dismayed to learn that the accused killer's repeated requests to review the state's DNA evidence against him had been denied.
Maynez was also aware that Sharif had contacted his attorney, Irene Blanco, after his transfer to the maximum-security facility outside Chihuahua City, claiming that officials were deliberately trying to kill him by forcing him to take pills. When he refused to go along with his jailers' demand to swallow the drugs, Sharif said they ground them up and shoved them down his throat.
Maynez was troubled by Sharif's claims and feared that the Egyptian might wind up dead. He was also disturbed by the fact that Sharif's file contained just one highly doubtful murder charge. Now authorities were looking to pin the latest murders on two bus drivers men who could not be tied to the crimes through any forensic evidence. It was clear to the criminologist that every time public pressure rose to find Juárez's killers, police suddenly fingered a suspect. In the case of the cotton field killings, it appeared that García and González were the chosen scapegoats.
Maynez was certain that if given the opportunity he could solve the eight murders. An initial investigation had revealed that at least three of the girls had been killed and maimed in the exact same fashion as young Lilia García, whose mutilated corpse had turned up in the field across from the factory where she worked earlier that same year. The site of García's murder was less than one hundred yards from the field where the eight bodies were found, and Maynez was convinced the cases were linked.
On January 2, 2002, the embattled criminologist submitted his resignation under pressure from his superiors. Oscar Maynez, who later admitted that he would have been fired if he had not agreed to leave, said he was "disgusted and ashamed" over what had transpired in the investigation.
"We were asked to help plant evidence against two bus drivers who were charged with the murders," he later told members of the media. "A couple of police officers brought items for us to put in the van they said was used to abduct the women. We had already checked the van and another vehicle belonging to the suspects for such things as human hairs, fibers, and blood, anything that could link the two suspects to the victims
. We even conducted a luminol test for traces of blood that might have been wiped off. We found nothing; the van was clean."
While Maynez declined to name the officers involved in the alleged cover-up, he assured the public that he had turned over the information to his supervisors. Unbeknownst to his superiors, he had also delivered a copy of the DNA profile conducted on semen collected from Lilia Garcia's body to a friend in Juárez in case something should happen to the original report.
Chihuahua state deputy attorney general Ortega publicly refuted the claims of the state's former chief forensics officer. "As far as I know, no one asked [Maynez] to plant evidence," Ortega declared. "The suspects confessed to the murders and that is an important part of the investigation."
* * *
In a subsequent interview with Oscar Maynez in February of 2002, he offered his views about the case that had come to be known as "the cotton field murders."
"It was like a scene from a horror movie, finding the bodies of eight women in such a relatively small area," Maynez recalled of the crime scene. "The bodies were already in a very advanced state of decomposition, which makes it extremely difficult to determine the cause of death, because they were mostly skeletons."
Photographs and footage of the excavated field looked more like a macabre anthropological dig than a homicide scene. Maynez admitted that the magnitude of the discovery had overwhelmed him. "Ciudad Juárez is a very violent city, and homicides are the order of the day, but a situation like this
the bodies of eight women found in the same area, it was not what I had expected."
Maynez had resigned from his post just shy of two months before he sat down for his interview with Univision, and it was clear he was choosing his words carefully. Still, he was unable to conceal his disbelief when asked to respond to an official government statement concluding that the deaths of the eight women found in the cotton field were not related.
"It's an enormous coincidence finding eight bodies all so close to one another," he said. "It's undeniable that the entire scene looks highly organized. They could hardly not be related, these eight homicides."
While the decomposed state of some of the bodies had made it nearly impossible to determine a cause of death, Maynez believed that the women had most likely fallen victim to the same killer or killers. "I insist that it would be too much of a coincidence that eight different perpetrators or groups of perpetrators, acting on their own, would have disposed of bodies in the same area, especially when there was the same pattern," he concluded.
The criminologist said he could not discount the possibility that drug traffickers or members of the state police force were involved in the killings. He said he was quite certain the murders had been committed by a highly organized group of people with resources and not by the two poor and uneducated bus drivers now in custody. Maynez pointed to a series of different factors. For one, the location of the crime scene in the heart of Juárez suggested that the perpetrators had access to multiple vehicles. Authorities had claimed that the two bus drivers had used a beat-up brown van to transport the bodies to the former cotton field. But Maynez argued that it would have been virtually impossible for someone to escape detection using the same vehicle to transport all eight bodies to the same location over a period of time. He believed that more than one car or truck must have been used to keep people in the neighborhood from becoming suspicious.
