Rayas passed the tip to authorities, and the couple were immediately hauled in for questioning and transported to the former police academy in Chihuahua City, where they later claimed to have been tortured by members of the state police for two straight days before finally signing false confessions. Soon afterward, on May 31, the husband and wife were paraded before the press as the guilty parties in the Viviana Rayas murder.
In an account that echoes those of Juárez bus drivers Gustavo González and Víctor García, the couple said officers kicked and beat them, and burned them with electrical prods. Cynthia Kiecker later told how police had drenched her shirt with water and then applied electrical shocks to her back and legs. At one point, she said, they even stretched her out on a cot and threatened to rape her if she didn't sign a confession.
Their signed documents told an unbelievable and dramatic tale of the young girl's murder admissions that, critics would later point out, differed from each other in critical ways.
According to their declarations of guilt, it was Cynthia's husband, Ulises, who had first befriended Viviana. The wife's jealousy over his affection for the young girl was what ultimately led to her death.
On the night of March 16, according to their admissions, Viviana was to come to the store for an Aztec ritual. Ulises had prepared a pot of special peyote tea for the young girl to drink. But when Viviana grew ill from the concoction, Ulises became alarmed. His concern for the teen incited jealousy in Cynthia, and in a wild rage, she attacked the young girl, first with a baseball bat and then with a piece of steel reinforcing bar, or rebar, the confessions read.
Cynthia then turned her rage on her husband, who confessed to having grown emotionally charged by his wife's anger. In the throes of excitement, Ulises said, he struck Viviana himself, hitting her so hard in the head that she fell to the ground dead.
While the autopsy made no mention of blunt force trauma to the head, the admissions pointed to a violent blow as the cause of death. The couple wrote in their purported confessions that when they realized Viviana was dead, they set about to cover up the crime, transporting her body to the desert, where they hid it beneath a sheet of metal roofing. The chilling account was bolstered by accounts from several supposed witnesses to the young girl's murder all friends of the couple who claim to have been detained by police and also tortured into signing confessions.
Authorities held a press conference at the state prison just outside Chihuahua City to announce the arrests of Cynthia and Ulises. The couple had been transferred there for the event. Authorities labeled the couple
"narco-satánicos"
and claimed the murder was committed as part of a satanic ritual under the influence of illicit drugs.
Cynthia later told a reporter that she was initially relieved to be in prison, in a place where the
judiciales
(members of the state police) could no longer get to her. But her relief quickly turned to fear as she realized she was being charged with murder, a state crime in Mexico for which she could spend up to thirty years in prison.
The couple's story made national news and caught the attention of a Juárez resident who immediately contacted the United States Consulate to alert them to the arrest of one of their citizens. In response to the call, a representative from the consulate went to see Cynthia at the prison and allowed her to use his cell phone to contact her mother. Unlike in the United States, the two detainees had not been permitted to make a single phone call. It was unclear if they would have ever been allowed to alert family members to their plight.
Many observers were skeptical of the investigation, and of the guilt of the couple charged with the crime. After a time, even the victim's father, José Rayas, began to question their involvement in Viviana's murder. That past May, another family in Chihuahua City had come forward, accusing police of official misconduct in the murder investigation of Neyra Cervantes. The eighteen-year-old had disappeared from a computer training school. Her skeletal remains, which had been sawed into three pieces, were found in a shallow grave on July 14, just yards from the state police academy.
Neyra's mother, Patricia, had been vigilant in her attempts to get police to help in locating her missing daughter. But when her efforts failed to rally their support, she contacted a family member in Chiapas to assist in the search for his missing relative.
Distraught over learning that his cousin was in trouble, David Meza traveled two hundred miles to Chihuahua City to help his aunt, boldly confronting police about their unwillingness to get involved. His outspokenness landed him in jail, charged with his cousin's murder. News accounts reported that state police arrested Meza based on his "odd" behavior, denied him a lawyer, and then tortured him over six hours, until he finally confessed to killing the computer student even though he wasn't even in the city at the time his cousin disappeared. Meza claimed that more than a dozen officers participated in the torture: ordering him to strip, they wrapped him like a mummy in twelve-inch-wide bandages, leaving barely enough space for him to breathe, before dousing him in water and shocking him with a cattle prod. They also kicked him, forced spicy water up his nose, and held a plastic bag over his head until he nearly suffocated. The allegations were horrific, and they mirrored those being lodged against state police officers in Ciudad Juárez.
Like the Juárez bus drivers, Meza alleged that police officers had dictated his confession to him and then forced him to sign it. Meza insisted that police first discussed possible scenarios in front of him before settling on a confession: that Meza was sexually excited and that he paid two men seven hundred dollars apiece to kidnap his cousin and bring her to a house outside the capital, where he met the men, purchased a gun, and borrowed their car. From there, he allegedly drove the teen to the desert, where he sexually assaulted her and then shot her, execution-style, in the head.
Officials later acknowleged they had no evidence linking Meza to the crime. They were unable to locate the two men he had allegedly hired to abduct his cousin or the gun he supposedly used to kill her. Neyra's body had been too decomposed to determine if a sexual assault had occurred. Nevertheless, Meza was charged in the homicide.
In a surprising turn of events, Cynthia Kiecker and Ulises Perzábal were finally released from prison in December 2004 after a judge found the couple innocent of the murder of Viviana Rayas. Their release came under intense pressure from U.S. politicians in Kiecker's home state of Minnesota.
In an unusual and controversial move, President Fox had even visited Minnesota that past June, assuring then U.S. Senator Norm Coleman and Cynthia's mother, Carol Kiecker, that the young woman would soon be released.
In September, however, Fox was forced to publicly announce that he had misspoken, after his demand that Kiecker be freed was ignored by state officials who claimed that Fox had misunderstood their intentions. According to members of the Mexican Consulate, authorities had advised the president that the charges against the police officers accused of torturing the couple would be dropped not the murder charges against Kiecker and her husband. Even after the parents of Viviana Rayas stepped forward to criticize the investigation and call for the couple's release, authorities maintained the couple's guilt.
That December, just minutes after the Chihuahua state judge delivered the "not guilty" verdict in the cases against Kiecker and Perzábal, the couple and members of their family were quickly loaded into a car with bulletproof windows and escorted to El Paso by officials from the U.S. Consulate. Surrounding the vehicle to provide additional protection was an entourage of law enforcement officials from both the Mexican federal police and the FBI.
Chihuahua state prosecutors later filed an appeal, maintaining that the couple were guilty as charged. Activists worried that the pending appeal served to guarantee that authorities would not pursue other avenues of investigation in the case.
Meanwhile in Ciudad Juárez, the discoveries of six more bodies in a mass gravesite on a deserted stretch of land at the base of Cristo Negro mountain in northeast Juárez had residents again looking into the possibility of a satanic motive behind the killings.
Teenagers had stumbled upon three of the corpses in October 2002 beneath the giant black cross that marks the site while searching the land owned by a sand and gravel company for recyclables to sell for cash. Then on February 17, 2003, family members of several missing girls found three more bodies in the exact location after a sandstorm exposed some hair on the side of the sandstone hill. News accounts stated that the second group of women had been placed about ten feet apart from each other. Their wrists had been tied with rope and their dresses were pushed up above their waists. Cement covered parts of their bodies. Several items pointing to a satanic cult were reportedly found nearby, including symbols such as a star in a circle, and drawings depicting devil worship were carved into the hillside. Some in the city believed the clues had been left to throw investigators off the trail of the real killers.
Authorities later identified the dead women as Juana Sandoval Reyna, Violeta Mabel Alvídrez Barrios, Esmeralda Juárez Alarcón, Teresa López, Gloria Rivas Martínez, and an unidentified woman believed to be Mayra Yesenia Nájera Larragoitia. There was speculation that victims had been abducted from the downtown area, but not on the same dates.
Soon additional theories began circulating the city. One tied some of the murders to several national computer schools with branches in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City. At least seven of the murdered girls, including slain maquila worker Elizabeth Castro, whom the jailed Egyptian scientist, Sharif Sharif, had supposedly murdered, and Violeta Alvídrez, whose decomposing body had been found at the base of Cristo Negro mountain that past February, were students of a downtown computer school.
There was also speculation that the computer schools were somehow linked to several shoe stores in the city center. One news article pointed out that a number of the computer schools were located within close proximity to busy shoe stores, such as Tres Hermanos, the boutique where Silvia Morales had been employed in the days before she disappeared and where Elizabeth Castro had been seen just before her murder.
Another of the earlier victims, Olga Alicia Pérez, had also worked a shift at a downtown shoe boutique on the day she went missing.
A spokesman for the state attorney general declined to comment on the cases or possible links to the computer schools. State officials were also mum about the discovery of yet another body along the highway Eje Vial Juan Gabriel that medical examiners identified as Verónica Martínez, the missing woman whose family had been told that their daughter was among those found in the abandoned cotton field and whose murder had been linked to bus drivers Víctor García and Gustavo González. In fact, state officials had assured the family that DNA tests performed on one of the bodies recovered from the cotton field confirmed it was their daughter.
It would later be alleged in an article in
El Diario de Juárez
that authorities had participated in a cover-up to avoid fouling up the case against bus driver Víctor García. That allegation would be bolstered by a team of Argentine forensic scientists who traveled to Juárez in early 2005 at the request of federal authorities. Among the team's findings was that DNA studies performed on the body presumed to be Verónica Martínez did not match the remains found in the cotton field.
* * *
In its noteworthy report,
Intolerable Killings,
released in August 2003, Amnesty International faulted state law enforcement officials for their handling of the investigation into the femicides that had been occurring in the state of Chihuahua since 1993. The report criticized Mexican authorities for regularly ignoring the murders occurring in Ciudad Juárez, and for the fabrication of confessions from scapegoats under torture.
The organization noted that the motives behind the killings in the border city varied from domestic violence, suspected drug-related executions, gang shootings, and sexual assaults. But the report highlighted that a number of the killings had followed a pattern in which young women disappeared and were later found raped and murdered. Chihuahua State Governor Patricio Martínez had all but ignored Irene Khan, the organization's international secretary general and her group, when they came to Juárez from Mexico City earlier that year to look into what was being done to stop the decade-long killing spree.
In fact, his administration had been accused of downplaying the city's femicides; it had even claimed that NGOs inflated the homicide numbers to create a stir and win funding for their organizations. In a public statement that year, Martínez told reporters that his office had been researching the killings and had concluded that there was no evidence of a serial killer on the prowl in Ciudad Juárez.
His viewpoint was shared by many of the city's politicians, and even many of its residents. When asked, local citizens still pointed a finger at the victims for bringing on the attacks. Both men and women on the streets of the city said they believed the girls were to blame, for being out alone after dark and for dressing provocatively. It appeared the government's campaign to undermine the reputation of the victims had been extremely effective in swaying public opinion especially in light of the fact that many of the dead women had been abducted in broad daylight and were clothed in slacks or blue jeans and tennis shoes when they were plucked from the streets.
