Authorities told Irma there was not enough material to conduct a DNA test on the body; she was asked to simply go on the word of officials that this was Olga Alicia. With no financial means to hire an outside party to investigate the findings, she had little alternative but to accept this bag of bones as proof of her daughter's death.
Irma Pérez eked out a measly but honest living cooking and selling hamburgers and sodas from a stand on the narrow sidewalk in front of her tiny stucco house. Like so many other parts of the city, the busy, characterless district where Irma lived had its own square, a local church, and storefronts scrawled with graffiti. The clatter of the passing motorbikes, cars, and trucks was audible even after she closed her front door at night.
Irma was a single parent. She had spent hour upon hour manning the hot grill to scrape up the money to pay the bills each month. The smell of burger grease was forever embedded in her clothes.
Her life changed significantly with her daughter's death. She suffered a stroke and was not well. The only thing that seemed to bring a faint expression of joy was talking about Olga and looking at her pictures. She lived surrounded by photographs capturing moments from Olga Alicia's short and tragic life.
Beneath her bed were shoeboxes filled with more pictures, and stacks of newspaper clippings about the murdered women of Juárez. Ever since her daughter disappeared, she'd been obsessively collecting clippings about every missing girl in the city. At night, she spread them out on the frayed bed coverlet and read them over and over, looking for any similarities, clues that might lead her to her daughter's killer.
Like Ramona Morales, Irma Pérez had quickly alerted authorities to her daughter's disappearance. She, too, was told to wait seventy-two hours to file an official report, and even then it took police six days to send an officer to the location where Olga Alicia was last seen. By then Irma, just like Ramona, had commenced an investigation of her own. She learned that her daughter had gone to the local headquarters of the reigning political party, the National Action Party, or Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN).
The regional government, which controlled the state of Chihuahua, was currently in the hands of the National Action Party under the governorship of Francisco Barrio Terrazas. Barrio was in office when the killings in Juárez first began in 1993, and his administration had been charged with looking into the murders. Now, in 1995, Barrio's six-year term was nearing completion and members of Mexico's opposing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), led by Patricio Martínez, were campaigning hard to overtake the governorship in elections scheduled for later that year. The PRI party held the presidency and had been in power in Mexico for more than seventy years.
To attract support for the local PAN candidate, members of the regional headquarters had been hosting a series of dances. A woman had come to the Pérez house some months earlier to invite Olga Alicia to accompany her to the social gatherings. She would act as Olga's chaperone.
The story was eerily familiar. Ramona Morales spoke of a local woman who chaperoned young neighborhood girls to local dances. Silvia had wanted desperately to go with her in the days before she disappeared, but their night on the town was canceled when one of the woman's daughters misbehaved and everyone got punished.
At first Olga had refused to go the PAN dances. She wasn't interested in going out. She was serious about her studies and was about to begin classes at a prestigious local university, where she had been granted a partial scholarship. But Irma had insisted that her daughter have a little fun and pushed her to go out.
August 10, a Thursday, was supposed to have been a short workday for Olga. At the request of her mother, she was quitting the job at the shoe store to seek employment closer to home. But she had agreed to come in for several hours on her day off to help her boss train some new employees. Olga told her mother that she would be home by six. When Olga did not show up, Irma went out looking for her.
People in the neighborhood said that Olga was among a group of youths at the political headquarters on Avenida 16 de Septiembre, where a rally was going on. Irma knew that her daughter was interested in a young, junior member of the political party. She'd met the young man at a PAN-sponsored dance.
Since attending that first dance, Olga and the chaperone had become regulars at the social gatherings.
Officers laughed at Irma Pérez when she went to police headquarters that Sunday to file the missing persons report.
"How old is your daughter?" one of the uniformed officers asked.
"Twenty," Irma responded, furious when the officer glanced at his coworker and started to snicker.
"She'll be back," the two chuckled in unison. "She's probably running around with some boy."
Irma was horrified at their jokes and at the way the police had dismissed her. To them, her daughter's disappearance was just another domestic case that would eventually resolve itself.
Determined to get help, Irma found a legal aide adviser named Rogelio Loya to accompany her back to headquarters. It was clear to her that authorities paid attention only when someone with clout was representing the family of the missing person.
Still, Irma was so frustrated she wanted to scream at the officers to get them to do something to find Olga Alicia. She asked her sister to try to locate the phone numbers of the families of the other missing girls. But when she dialed the families, she learned that most had found their daughters deceased. "Yes, I found mine, but she is dead," one mother told her.
"Yes, I found my daughter recently, but only her body," said another.
Uncertain what else to do, Irma sought help from the young people at the PAN headquarters who had been friendly with her daughter. But the group was not cooperative. The political community shunned Olga, pushing her away when she tried to learn more about her daughter's involvement.
While members of PAN were uncooperative, Irma found some help in the night watchman. The hired security guard was crying the night he told Irma that her daughter had been brought to the PAN offices that Thursday night by a female employee of the shoe store. He told her that he thought it strange that the employee would drive so far out of her way to drop off the young woman. She lived more than forty minutes away on the opposite side of town.
The night watchman resigned shortly after Olga Alicia disappeared, and the legal aide who had been helping Irma was refusing to take her calls. It was said he had been threatened. Irma had no idea by whom, and was too ill to follow up on any more leads.
As in the case of the Morales teen, several days after Olga vanished, Irma got an anonymous call from someone claiming to know the whereabouts of her daughter. The caller provided an address. Irma's sister volunteered to investigate. Posing as a social worker, she rang the bell of the two-story residence on Fraccionamiento Almita. She found a house full of children as if a nursery school or day care center was in session. There was no sign of Olga Alicia.
Still, Irma continued her search. She paid regular visits to the morgue as part of her vigil, waiting in the reception area to learn if there had been any news. The notification she'd been dreading finally came one Saturday morning, when she arrived at the medical examiner's office for her daily update. Shocked that no one had called her, Irma listened as authorities told her there was not sufficient material to conduct DNA testing. But they assured her the body was that of her only daughter.
To console Irma, officials explained that many of the victims had been leading double lives lives that they kept hidden from their mothers. They insinuated that the dead girls had been furtively working as prostitutes or dancers in the seedy downtown clubs of Ugarte Street. Perhaps Olga Alicia had been one of those girls leading a secret life, they suggested.
Irma fumed. She was well aware that a number of the dead girls were very young nine, ten, eleven years old. How could officials possibly fabricate a double life for those girls?
The authorities had an answer for that too. They blamed the victims' mothers. They were lazy, uncaring; they didn't take proper care of their children. That's why the girls turned to strangers for care and attention.
Irma later learned that the female chaperone who'd been taking her daughter to the political dances was a friend of the detectives assigned to investigate Olga Alicia's case.
Interestingly, there had been a number of stories circulating of women befriending young girls, enticing them with a chance to socialize at dances with other young people. These women were purportedly acting as agents for various men, selling these unwitting young girls for sex.
There were also reports of women disappearing while waiting in line for a job at the city's maquiladoras. Several prospective employees related stories of managers snapping their pictures, purportedly as part of the job interview process. Various accounts reported that a number of these women had either vanished or were turning up dead.
Ramona Morales was told by some of her neighbors that a man had been driving the streets of her colonia, taking pictures of the young girls who lived there.
The accounts were frightening, yet officials were unable to substantiate any of the stories. Nor were they able to stop the murders. From August to November of 1995, the bodies of seven young women were recovered from the vast wastelands in Lote Bravo not far from where the bodies of Silvia Morales and Olga Alicia Pérez were found.
Four of the corpses, including that of Silvia Morales, conformed to a precise pattern: each one had been raped, stabbed, and strangled. All of them were found with a broken neck, a severed right breast, and the left nipple bitten off.
Even more telling was an apparent link between the bodies of two more young women discovered in December not far from Lote Bravo in the fields behind the Pemex property, just off the Casas Grandes Highway. One belonged to a fourteen-year-old girl, who was later identified as Isela Tena Quintanilla. Police noted that the child's hands had been bound together with a rope that was knotted in the exact fashion as one found on an earlier victim, a seventeen-year-old student and maquila worker named Elizabeth Castro. Castro had disappeared on her way home from her factory job that past August. Her mutilated remains were found four days later in Lote Bravo, not far from the corpses of the other dead girls.
With no real answers from authorities, wild theories were being floated. Was organized crime part of the equation? Were police looking at one or more than one serial killer? Were there copycat murderers taking advantage of the situation? Was this a case not of serial murders but instead of a sophisticated organ-trafficking ring? Was someone or some group using these women as leading ladies for cheap snuff films and later disposing of them so as to leave no evidence? Or perhaps the killings were the work of a satanic cult, sacrificing these women as part of a ritual?
* * *
Though record keeping was shoddy at best, and it's unclear when the first crime may actually have occurred, authorities believed that the first of the murders took place in 1993.
State police said the first victim was discovered on January 23 of that year, in a vacant lot in the Campestre Virreyes district of the city. An autopsy revealed that the young woman, later identified as Alma Chavira Farel, had been raped, both anally and vaginally, and had died as a result of strangulation. Bruises on Farel's face indicated she'd been savagely beaten during the assault that claimed her life.
Another young woman was found on May 13, lying on her back in an expansive hilly region about five miles off the city's main highway, known locally as Cerro Bola. Authorities observed puncture wounds and abrasions on her left breast. It was determined that she too had been brutally raped and strangled to death. Her identity remains unknown.
Subsequently, nine more bodies exhibiting the same sorts of injuries and mutilations turned up in the desert. In all, at least fifteen other girls were found murdered in 1993.
Ten more young bodies were discovered in 1994, their deaths just as grisly. Eleven-year-old María Rocío Cordero's pathetic corpse was found on March 11, in a drainage pipe that ran alongside the Casas Grandes Highway. She had been abducted on her way to primary school, raped anally and vaginally, and then strangled to death by an unknown attacker.
Another teen was found tied to a stake in her middle school playground. An autopsy revealed she had been beaten and raped before she was strangled to death and left to be found by students returning to class the following day.
Oscar Maynez Grijalva, a young and talented staff criminologist with the Chihuahua state attorney general's office, or Procuraduría General de Justica del Estado de Chihuahua, had noticed distinct similarities among several of the homicides soon after joining the agency earlier that year.
Maynez found no forensic evidence to suggest that organs were being harvested from the dead women. Such a procedure would require careful removal by someone with medical training, refrigeration, and rapid transport to some facility where the organ could be used. Instead, the criminologist was convinced there was another kind of serial killer on the loose in Juárez.
