At the request of the New Mexico office of the state attorney general, Ross Reichard, an assistant medical investigator for the New Mexico office of the medical investigator, was immediately flown to Chihuahua City to conduct an autopsy.
Dr. Reichard concluded from his examination that Sharif had died of natural causes stemming from cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis C, which can cause cirrhosis. In an official report, the U.S. forensic pathologist determined that an "upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage" had led to Sharif's death at the age of fifty-nine. He also noted that Sharif suffered from heart disease.
Dr. Reichard told authorities he found no indications of abuse or acute, traumatic injuries on the body. "There was no evidence
of foul play at the time of his death," he told local journalists.
Sharif's former attorney, Irene Blanco, now a federal congresswoman for the PAN party, had once overheard the Egyptian complaining to representatives from the National Human Rights Commission that prison personnel were "force-feeding" him unknown medications, yet no toxicology tests were performed upon his death.
Blanco had done what she could to bring his allegations to light, but after the near-fatal attack on her son, she moved out of the area to an undisclosed location. Still, she continued to speak out on Sharif's behalf. At the time of his death, a new lawyer had taken up the Egyptian's cause.
In an interview with the local Juárez media, Blanco recalled that in a conversation with Sharif about one month before his death he spoke of knee problems. News accounts portrayed the Egyptian as suffering from depression over his inability to prove his innocence. Ulises Perzábal, the Mexican national who, along with his wife Cynthia Kiecker of Minnesota, was arrested for the 2003 murder of Viviana Rayas, told a Mexican journalist of his encounters with Sharif in the prison infirmary during his eighteen-month incarceration at Aquiles Serdán. Perzábal described Sharif as "rebellious, isolated and incredulous," and recalled several instances in which prison staff had administered medication to his fellow inmate. "He couldn't believe what was happening to him," Perzábal recalled. "I think that was killing him little by little."
Sharif was laid to rest in a plot at the Panteón Municipal No. 1 of the city of Chihuahua. His grave was identified in case relatives wanted to claim his body and return it to his native Egypt for burial. To date, no one has come for him.
At one time, Sharif had been portrayed as the most feared person in Juárez, yet his passing came with little more than a mention on the evening news and a few lines in the local newspapers. The prison director at Aquiles Serdán told the local TV station that Sharif had spent his last years teaching English and Arabic to other inmates.
"The news hit me hard," said Esther Chávez Cano of Sharif's death. "I was driving when I heard the news and I said to myself, 'Has an innocent man died, or a guilty man?' The uncertainty will forever remain."
Irma García, the mother of Sharif's alleged victim Elizabeth Castro, told a local newspaper that she still had faith that authorities had detained the "right man who had killed her daughter."
Yet Ramona Morales expressed uncertainty of Sharif's guilt. Ramona said that when she first read about Sharif's passing in
El Diario de Juárez,
she reported a sense of relief that the man police had told her was responsible for her daughter's murder had finally died. Now Silvia could rest in peace, she thought.
At sixty-seven, Ramona was operating a small trinket shop out of her home. She had been inconsolable since Silvia's death; even visits from her grandchildren had failed to lift her spirits. Concerned for their mother, Ramona's sons had cleared out the furnishings in the family's small living room and set up a tiny shop with glass counters for their mother to display a hodgepodge of cake toppers and party favors. Ramona would also sell cold sodas and ice cream from a small freezer and other plastic toys and knickknacks to the neighborhood children. Tending a business from the house seemed to help pass the days without Silvia. Yet Ramona still broke into tears whenever she spoke about her daughter's murder.
In an interview in June of 2006, Ramona said that in the days after Sharif's passing, she went to the court in Juárez to find out more about the Egyptian's role in the killing. She had not heard anything about the investigation since police had informed her of Sharif's role in the murder back in 1995. But with his death, she believed that she was legally entitled to a copy of her daughter's homicide file. That day, the clerk at the Fifth Circuit court told her something unbelievable. "No, Sharif had nothing to do with your daughter's case."
Ramona was floored. "They say that a victim cannot be at peace until the killer passes away or pays for the crime," she explained. "I thought my daughter would finally rest in peace with Sharif's death. But now I find out he's not the killer."
That Ramona had had no idea that Sharif Sharif had not been implicated in her daughter's murder was nothing short of shocking. Even more astounding was that state authorities had allowed the relatives of the murdered girls, as well as the community of Juárez at large, to believe that Sharif Sharif had been responsible for many of the crimes against the city's women, when in fact he had been found guilty of just one murder.
Spurred into action once again, Ramona Morales reached out to several others whose daughters had also supposedly died at the hands of the Egyptian chemist. She had stayed in close contact with Irma Pérez, the mother of Olga Alicia, and several other families of murdered girls. During her phone call with Irma, the two women decided they would try to get a meeting with the new governor, José Reyes Baeza, who was coming to Juárez that month. They had heard that he was more humane than the past state governor and was also more sympathetic to the plight of the murdered women.
Irma had moved, but continued to flip hamburgers to make ends meet.
Suddenly Ramona found herself feeling sorry for Sharif. From the start, she had never really believed that he had been responsible for Silvia's murder. Her suspicions had grown even more as time passed and the scapegoats began to surface. It appeared that like Silvia, Sharif too had been a victim of the state's corrupt justice system.
In the end, Ramona and the other mothers never sat down with Baeza when he came to town. They had wanted to make sure their daughters had not died in vain and that something had come of their deaths. The statute of limitations of ten years was about to run out on many of the cases, and the mothers of the murdered girls wanted to ask for an extension in light of the recent government findings that corruption and negligence had pervaded the investigations.
In a telephone interview in the fall of 2006, Ramona explained that illness had prevented her from pursuing the meeting with the governor. Her blood sugar was high and she was suffering from severe leg pain. During the call, Ramona related news on some of the other families. The family of her slain thirteen-year-old neighbor, Lupita, had moved to Veracruz soon after the murder, vowing never to return to Juárez.
Jesus González, the father of murdered maquila worker Sagrario, had died just two months earlier. His eldest daughter, Guillermina, was now a mother of two and was living with her husband.
Meanwhile, Sagrario González's case would remain open and see no police involvement until 2005. At the urging of family members, authorities finally arrested a local man, José Luis Hernández Flores, and charged him with the slaying of the seventeen-year-old factory worker. It took the family seven years to convince police that their Lomas de Poleo neighbor was responsible for the April 1998 murder of the young maquila worker.
The family had first became suspicious of Hernández after he suggested they look for Sagrario's remains in the Valley of Juárez, in the exact location where her body was later found. Guillermina González claimed that the family had alerted police to the eerie coincidence but officials had simply brushed the lead aside and done nothing.
For years, Sagrario's father unsuccessfully scoured the neighborhood looking for Hernández until one day in February 2005, when Jesús González spotted the slim, dark-haired man in a local store buying beer. González hid from sight until the man returned to his house, and then immediately called police. Once in custody, officers contended, Hernández confessed to Sagrario's murder and named two other men who had participated in the killing. It is unclear whether the police questioned the two other suspects for the crime. There are those in the community who have raised doubts about Hernández's confession and his culpability in the crime.
At last account, Guillermina González and her siblings were working together in the family's grocery store. Paula and Jesús constructed and opened the small bodega on their property in Lomas de Poleo to ensure that their remaining children would not have to leave home to earn a living.
* * *
Since early in the investigation, former Chihuahua State forensics chief Oscar Maynez had been urging officials to entertain the possibility that a serial killer was on the loose in the city. He later theorized that an "organized group with resources" was behind the homicides.
Some of the recent government findings suggested that Maynez was on target with his suspicions. The reports pointed to a combination of corrupt police officers and local drug traffickers as collaborators in a number of the killings. But still, there were no arrests.
Since resigning from the
procuraduría
under pressure to plant evidence in January 2002, Maynez had found work with another state agency. But he continued to closely monitor the ongoing investigation into the city's murdered women. Maynez maintained that the answer to many of the unsolved cases lay in the abandoned cotton field where officials had exhumed the eight bodies in November 2001. The two bus drivers had been cleared of the eight murders, yet an investigation had never been commenced to locate those responsible for the crimes.
While authorities were calling it a cold case, Maynez insisted there were a number of lines of investigation that had never been followed up on. For one, there appeared to be DNA evidence that could link a suspect to the murders. And Maynez was certain the same people who had killed Lilia García several months earlier had committed the eight murders. In that previous case, DNA had been collected but nothing had come of the forensic sample, although Maynez had sent a copy of the DNA profile to García's mother for safekeeping.
Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler had theorized that several serial killers were crossing into Mexico from the United States to commit the murders.
On August 15, 2006, his theory would also prove credible. That day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Edgar Alvarez Cruz in Denver, Colorado, on immigration violations and later announced that Cruz was a member of a gang of killers who had purportedly raped and killed at least ten women in Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2003.
The break in the case had come several months earlier on March 24, when a man named José Francisco Granados de la Paz, a relative of Alvarez Cruz by marriage, was questioned by a Texas Ranger about possible links to the crimes in Juárez. This occurred while Granados de la Paz was in U.S. custody in Sierra Blanca, Texas, on immigration charges.
Prosecutors said that during an interrogation, Granados admitted to participating in the murders of several women in Ciudad Juárez, and he implicated Alvarez Cruz in the killings. Among the murders for which the men were being investigated were the eight women found in the cotton field in November 2001.
Granados claimed he and Alvarez were responsible for those homicides. He also took responsibility for the murders of at least two women the duo allegedly killed in the rear seat of Alvarez's red Renault. Granados told law enforcement officials the two had wrapped one of the bodies in black plastic before disposing of it. During his alleged confession, Granados had even supplied authorities with a map of the locations where he said the bodies had been dumped or buried.
According to law enforcement officials, Granados claimed that beginning in 1993, when he was fifteen and Alvarez Cruz was seventeen, the two pals would drive around the city, sometimes accompanied by a third man, Alejandro "Cala" Delgado Valle, kidnapping women, raping and killing them in the back seat of Alvarez's car, and disposing of their remains throughout the city.
Granados blamed his role in the murders on Alvarez, who he claimed would supply him with drugs or pills and then threaten him into taking part in the crimes. "They never told me, 'Let's go kill women.' They didn't say that. They'd say, 'Let's go drinking, let's go crazy,' " Granados reportedly told investigators in a taped confession that March.
Sgt. Brooks Long of the Texas Rangers told reporters that he had no reason to doubt Granados's accounts during their fifty-minute interview although Sergeant Long had been unable to get Granados to commit to specific dates as to when these crimes had occurred. He had also failed to provide physical descriptions of the supposed victims when interviewed by Long.
In one instance, when the sergeant asked him to describe one of the victims he claimed to have tossed into the desert in Lomas de Poleo in 1993, he simply said, "She was hot," according to the taped confession. Granados also described stabbing one victim "right there in the heart. Pow-pow."
