The uniformed officer behind the window barely looked up as Ramona described the circumstances of Silvia's disappearance.
"My daughter never returned, not from the shoe store, not from school," the visibly shaken woman blurted out. "She said she was going to school to take a test, and then she was going to the shoe store to work. She'd be home some time between nine and nine twenty."
"Does she have a boyfriend?" the officer asked.
Ramona didn't like the officer's attitude. But eager to get help, she provided the name of the young man from the neighborhood whom Silvia had been dating.
"Does she go to bars frequently?"
"No. Not my Silvia. She is a good girl. She is a girl who goes from her school to home. She is a very happy girl."
"How does she dress? Does she wear miniskirts?"
Ramona was growing angry at the officer's derisiveness. "My daughter was wearing jeans, a rose-colored blouse, and white tennis shoes when she left the house on Tuesday morning."
"She probably went with some
cholo,
some guy, a boyfriend," the policeman snickered.
Neighbors and friends had told Ramona about the offensive, obnoxious attitude of the state police. While its officers were better educated than those of the local Juárez force a high school degree was mandatory their salaries were still considered low on the pay scale, and corruption was rumored to be rampant among their ranks.
Women's rights activists had begun voicing their outrage that detectives were faulting the victims, implying that they willingly went off with a man or were leading double lives, sneaking off after work to dance at the city's bars and discos. In fact, a majority of the dead girls had disappeared on their way to or from work and were wearing long pants and sneakers, not miniskirts and spiked heels, as police were insinuating.
In this male-oriented culture, girls out on their own were frowned upon and often assumed to be promiscuous. Activists believed it was this mind-set that had prompted officials to overlook the growing number of poor Mexican girls whose violated, butchered bodies had been turning up in the desert.
There was growing speculation among residents of Juárez that officers from both the state and municipal police forces were somehow involved in the murders or that they were covering up for the guilty party or parties.
Ramona watched as the uniformed policeman slid her a form and instructed her to fill it out. With Sandra's help, she completed the paperwork, believing it was a preliminary step to a meeting with detectives from the Chihuahua State Police Department, which carried out all investigations of a criminal nature. Instead, they told her to commence an investigation and keep them apprised of any new developments.
"Perhaps she has run away with her boyfriend, or maybe she is with some friend," the officer suggested. "Wait to see if she returns."
"That's not the kind of girl my daughter is!" Ramona snapped, her voice rising as she glared at the man behind the window. "My daughter would never do that. She would have told me, 'I'm gonna stay with a friend.' She's not like that. She's a good girl.
"Silvia only went to school, and from there she went to work. From her home to school and from school to work," she said over and over in a tearful mantra.
Frustrated, confused, and worried about her daughter's whereabouts, Ramona left the police station with no help and no answers.
In the days that followed, there were more anonymous calls to the Morales home. One male caller claimed to know where Silvia was being held and provided Ramona with an address. Jumping into a car, she and her husband, along with her son and daughter-in-law, raced to the residence. Domingo went inside but found only an elderly couple who knew nothing of Silvia. The family reported the lead to police, along with a second tip from a man claiming that a factory worker named Alejandro knew the teen's location.
Police assured the family they were following these and several other, more promising leads. But as the days turned into weeks, the Moraleses heard nothing of Silvia.
Then, on August 19, Ramona learned that a body had been found not far from her home on Casas Grandes Highway. It was that of a young woman with long dark hair. She had been raped and strangled, her ravaged remains dumped beside the vacant lot that belonged to Pemex.
Ramona fell to her knees and recited a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint, when she learned that it was not Silvia; for a moment she experienced a renewed faith that her daughter was still alive and would be returning home soon.
* * *
In early September, nearly two months after Silvia Morales disappeared, a local rancher was scouting a secluded stretch of desert east of the airport called Lote Bravo for wild horses when he stumbled upon the remains of a young woman hidden beneath some brush. She was partially naked; her blouse and bra were pulled up over her head, exposing what remained of her mutilated breasts. Carefully placed just beside the body were a pair of white panties and white tennis shoes, later identified as belonging to the Morales girl.
Startled, the rancher raced back to his truck and sped off in search of a telephone to notify police.
Uniformed officers encircled the scene with yellow crime scene tape and began a perfunctory investigation. Already more than forty women had been murdered, many with the same modus operandi. Yet police had few leads and no real suspects.
Donning a surgical mask, forensic pathologist Irma Rodríguez of the Chihuahua State attorney general's office arrived on the scene to collect evidence from what little was left of the young woman with the cinnamon skin who sang like Selena. Dr. Rodríguez was dismayed by the growing number of young women turning up dead in Juárez. While forensic science enabled her to determine the cause of their deaths, she had been unable to identify their killers.
"She has several small cuts on her right arm," one uniformed officer standing over the mutilated body remarked. The multiple surface wounds appeared to indicate that the victim had struggled fiercely with one or more assailants.
Authorities subsequently determined that the remains were those of Silvia Morales. She had been raped and then strangled with her own shoelaces. Her right breast had been severed and her left nipple was bitten off. Sand was found embedded underneath her fingernails, raising the possibility that Silvia had been alive after the attack and was left in the desert to die.
It was just before 10 a.m. on Saturday, September 2, when Ramona Morales spotted the blue and white patrol car pulling up to her house. She and her husband were outside on the porch, sipping coffee and enjoying some fruit, when two uniformed policemen got out of the vehicle and strode to the chain-link fence that encircled their property.
"Ma'am, we've found your daughter," one of the men said, pushing open the gate and stepping onto the porch.
Ramona sprang from the white plastic armchair, overjoyed that Silvia had finally been located. "How did you find her?" she asked the officer. "Tell me, tell me."
Even after the men asked to see one of Silvia's shoes, she continued to remain optimistic.
Puzzled, she led the officers inside, leaving them to wait in the small, rectangular living room, hung with ornately framed photographs of Silvia posing in the lacy white quinceańera dress she had worn to mark her fifteenth birthday, as part of the Latin American tradition symbolic of a young woman's coming-of-age.
The officers stood with their arms folded behind their backs as Ramona disappeared into a back bedroom and then emerged moments later, breathless and clutching a single white shoe. The officers exchanged glances.
"Ma'am, we need you to come with us," the same officer directed. His response should have telegraphed to Ramona that something was amiss. But her mind was not going in that direction.
Ramona wondered why the policemen had asked to see one of Silvia's shoes when they didn't even bother to take it with them. They had simply looked at the size and put it down.
Francisco, the couple's second-oldest son, was in the kitchen. Hearing a commotion, he poked his head into the living room in time to see the officers leading his mother from the house.
"I'll come with you," Francisco volunteered, racing after the trio. His father was not anxious to accompany them. Angel looked fearful of what he might learn.
Yet Ramona was certain that Silvia was alive and waiting for her at the police station. The officers had given her no reason to believe otherwise.
"No!" one of the officers retorted. "She will go alone."
For a moment there was complete silence on the patio as the Moraleses exchanged fretful looks.
"Come on, seńora," the officer directed, motioning Ramona to the police car. He assured Francisco he would return his mother home in a few hours.
Ramona Morales collapsed to the floor of the morgue after authorities showed her the bleached white skull that had been recovered from beneath some brush in Lote Bravo. She could not reconcile this parched, skeletal remnant as having belonged to her beloved daughter.
Even after police showed her the pretty rose-colored blouse they had found hiked up over her daughter's breasts, the one that Silvia had been wearing on the day she disappeared, Ramona clung to the hope that Silvia was still alive. The ugly reality was simply too painful for the mother to accept. Instead, she convinced herself that somehow there had been a terrible mix-up. Ramona maintained that the remains she had been shown were not those of Silvia, and that her daughter was still alive, studying and singing in some far-off place, happy and well.
Despite their promise, the police didn't drive Ramona back home that afternoon but left her to fend for herself outside the morgue. The despairing mother was forced to beg in the street for bus fare back to Colonia Nuevo Hipódromo, where her husband and sons confronted the horrible reality.
Grief numbed Ramona's senses and robbed her of her will to live. The family buried Silvia in a cemetery nearby. Ramona made daily visits to the tomb of her dead child, and nightly she prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, that the same fate didn't happen to another daughter of Juárez.
But it did.
Eight days after Silvia Morales's forsaken body was discovered in the desert, another one was found in Lote Bravo: that of a twenty-year-old woman whom police later identified as Olga Alicia Pérez. She had been raped and stabbed; her hands had been tied with a belt and her neck was broken. As with Silvia, her right breast had been severed, and her left nipple bitten off.
Ramona's blood ran cold when she read of the grisly finding in the newspaper and of the discovery of the bodies of six more teens in the days ahead. By the winter of 1995, nineteen young women had been killed, bringing the total, over three years, to forty-five.
Juárez, it seemed, was the perfect setting for a killer or killers. The victims were plentiful, poor, and trusting, and the crimes seemed to go unpunished.
And yet the question remained, who was killing these young women and why?
Chapter Two
A Bag of Bones
They showed me a slab of bones. The only thing I could see was her little severed head.
IRMA PÉREZ MOTHER OF VICTIM OLGA ALICIA PÉREZ
IT WAS SEPTEMBER 9, 1995, when police showed Irma Pérez all that remained of her daughter a bag of bleached bones. Olga Alicia Carrillo Pérez had disappeared about one month before on August 10, after working the afternoon shift at a downtown shoe store not far from the one where Silvia Morales had been employed.
Her disfigured corpse was found not by police as part of an organized search, but by a passerby, some distance off the Airport Delivery Highway in a remote area of Lote Bravo known as Zacate Blanco. Olga Alicia was one of eight young girls recovered in that same lonely stretch of desert in the four-month period between August and November of that year.
Like those of earlier victims, Olga Alicia's remains were not buried but simply left out in plain sight for others to find, as if the killer or killers felt immune to detection or capture. Indeed, corpses would quickly decompose once exposed to the harsh elements of the desert: in summer, temperatures rose well above 110 degrees, enough to rapidly increase the rate of decay. And in winter, coyotes, mice, and rats fed on the human flesh.
Olga Alicia had been missing barely one month, yet her skull was so badly deteriorated that the pathologist had to hold it together for her mother to look at the jaw. With no fleshy tissue to soften its appearance, the jaw and teeth appeared frighteningly large. Irma Pérez nearly passed out from the gruesome sight, and after only a few seconds, begged the medical examiner to halt the identification process. She could not bear to look at what authorities insisted were the remains of her only child.
It took several minutes for Irma to regain her composure, enough to acknowledge that the pretty blouse that had been found near the body belonged to Olga. Still, she was skeptical that this decomposed corpse was once her daughter. The bones were so badly decayed they appeared as if they had been exposed to the elements far longer than thirty days.
