Born and raised in Juárez, Maynez was also a professor of forensics at the Chihuahua State Police Academy in south Juárez and held university degrees in both psychology and criminology. Determined to make the coursework interesting to the young cadets, he decided to use real homicide cases to demonstrate the steps involved in piecing together a criminal investigation. While browsing state police files for material, he noticed two cases that were eerily similar. The victims were both young women who shared identical physical characteristics and had been raped and killed in a very methodical fashion.
Because of the similarities, Maynez decided to use the two cases in his training of the new police recruits. He also took the step of drafting a three-page report that included a psychological profile of the perpetrator and an argument that there could be a serial killer on the loose in the city.
In mid-1994, Maynez presented his findings to his superior, thinking that they could be of help in the ongoing investigation. But the young criminologist was taken aback when State Police Academy Chief Jorge Ostos simply thanked him for being diligent in his work but did nothing more. When Maynez tried to hand Chief Ostos a copy of the report, his boss pushed it back at him and told him to keep it.
While he had known the quality of investigative work was substandard when he first signed on with the attorney general's office, he was hoping he could make a difference. It was soon after NAFTA was signed, and there was international pressure to make the police more professional, to institutionalize a respect for human rights in Mexico. Maynez saw an opportunity to help, to contribute, and he happily accepted the challenge. But he was quickly faced with a number of obstacles and almost immediately began to question the investigative techniques of members of the state agency.
Time and again investigators asked that he falsify his findings on a wide variety of cases. In an interview, Maynez later admitted to a naďve belief that the investigators were just trying to take the easy way out. He said that he routinely declined their requests in the hopes they would go out and do a thorough investigation. And for a time, they did. As time went on, however, he realized that the officers were being told by their superiors whom to target in investigations regardless of where the evidence pointed.
In addition, he was bewildered by his superior's response to his belief that a serial killer was at work in the city, but continued to follow the cases on his own. He knew from his training that serial rapists and killers were often acting out a fantasy and that if left unchecked, they would continue to replay their fantasy time and again until someone stopped them. He feared that without an aggressive investigation, the murders would continue. He also worried that many of the workers in Juárez's maquiladoras were young, uneducated, and highly vulnerable.
No matter what was going on around them, the young girls still had to make their way to the factories at all hours of the day and night, sometimes on foot. The reality was that they needed to keep working, no matter what the danger, because of their dire financial predicaments.
Just as he predicted, Maynez found more murders during 1995 that followed the same pattern he had described in his report. He observed that nearly all of the victims were poor, young, and slender, with dark flowing hair and warm, reddish brown complexions. An alarming number were employees of Juárez's assembly plants. At least four, including the Morales teen, were found with a severed right breast and the left nipple bitten off.
While authorities put the number of homicides against women at nineteen that year, several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local women's groups reported it was actually higher, with more than forty-two homicides against women that year alone. According to the women's organizations, more than half of the female victims showed signs of rape and torture.
Oscar Maynez was frustrated. In addition to Chief Ostos, he had also told then Deputy Attorney General Jorge López Molinar and Chief Homicide Investigator Javier Benavides that the murders warranted special attention because the deaths would continue if they didn't act quickly. But Maynez claims his warnings went unheeded.
Soon the total number of unsolved cases of rape and murder since 1993 would top one hundred.
Chapter Three
The Juárez Ripper
Corruption, incompetence and incapacity, those are the three things causing the murders of the women.
ABDEL LATIF SHARIF SHARIF, ACCUSED OF MURDER
JUST ONE MONTH AFTER THE BODIES of Silvia Morales and Olga Alicia Pérez were recovered in September 1995, authorities got an apparent break in the case. A young woman identified only as "Blanca" came forward claiming she'd been kidnapped, brutalized, and raped over the course of three days at a home in Rincones de San Marcos, an upscale neighborhood on Juárez's northwest side.
The address was along the same bus route Silvia Morales had traveled the day she disappeared, the one marked "Valley of Juárez," which runs along the busy Calle de Insurgentes to a section of the city dotted with multilevel, single-family houses with private garages, sidewalks, and telephone service.
Blanca led officers to a comfortable Spanish-style villa with arched windows and a terra-cotta roof, just off the Casas Grandes Highway. A roomy white sedan was parked in the carport. Inside, officers found the homeowner, forty-nine-year-old Egyptian scientist Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, an engineer in one of the city's American-owned maquilas.
Blanca told authorities he'd held her captive in his home for three days, during which time she was beaten and raped repeatedly. Local news accounts identified Blanca as a prostitute and reported her claim that Sharif had threatened to kill her if she tried to get away. She said he warned that he'd bury her corpse in the vast, cactus-strewn desert south of the city called Lote Bravo, where the bodies of many of the murdered women of Juárez had been found.
Blanca said that after three days of torture, she finally managed to escape from a first-floor window and staggered to a nearby home, where residents alerted police.
Based on her claims, police arrested Sharif that October and charged him with rape, an accusation he vehemently denied.
The Egyptian told authorities the woman was a prostitute and had actually beaten him after he refused to get her more drugs.
Sharif was quickly released when Blanca suddenly recanted her story and then disappeared without a trace. Rumors circulated that the Egyptian had paid her off, but no proof of such a transaction has ever materialized.
Blanca's disappearance may have gained Sharif his temporary freedom, yet her claims prompted police to look deeper into his criminal past. They learned that he'd been in trouble in the United States for sex-related crimes and that he'd fled to Mexico on October 14, 1994, to escape certain deportation back to Egypt.
It seemed remarkable that U.S. authorities had agreed to let the dangerous sex offender with two felony convictions on his record quietly move south of the border, without alerting Mexican officials.
In fact, authorities had been advised of the Egyptian's crossing by a former business colleague of Sharif's, who cautioned Mexican officials of his impending move across the border in 1994. But his warning had gone unheeded, allowing the dangerous felon unrestricted entry into Mexico.
Even after the charges were dropped, Sharif remained under intense scrutiny by Chihuahua state police, women's activists, and others in the Juárez community. Mexican authorities learned that Sharif was a two-time convicted sex felon, and his criminal history in the United States made him a logical suspect for many of the murders that had taken place since 1993.
An investigation into Sharif's activities in Juárez led police to the red light district, where, it was determined, he was a regular. There they found a woman named Erika Fierro. Fierro worked as a stripper at a club on Ugarte Street and reportedly used drugs. She told police she had met Sharif at a bar called Joe's Place in the spring of 1995. She claimed to have introduced him to nine of her girlfriends.
At some point Sharif supposedly admitted to engaging in sex with the nine women and then told Fierro something that stunned her that he had murdered the girls and buried their corpses in desert areas south of the city. Fierro told Sharif she could no longer introduce him to her friends, but she later claimed she did not dare alert police to his story under a threat of death.
The ongoing police investigation into the Egyptian yielded witnesses who alleged they had seen him in the company of several of the dead women of Juárez, including Silvia Morales and the seventeen-year-old student and maquila worker Elizabeth Castro. A slender brunette, Castro was last seen alive boarding a factory-run shuttle bus to downtown Juárez on August 15, 1995.
In response to the ongoing murders, some of the factories had added shuttle bus services for their employees that took girls like Elizabeth Castro to the downtown district after their nine- and ten-hour shifts. There they would connect with public buses for their long rides home. Many of the factory-run buses were old and rickety. They were owned and operated not by the factories but by private citizens who contracted their services to the maquiladoras. Anyone could operate a bus, as long as they had the appropriate driver's license and no criminal record on file.
Castro's corpse was found on August 19, along the Casas Grandes Highway in Lote Bravo not far from Sharif's upscale neighborhood. Officials said her body exhibited bite marks like those found on the body of Olga Alicia Pérez. An autopsy revealed she had been raped and strangled, her hands bound with her own shoelaces in a manner similar to prior victims.
Castro was a memorable girl with high cheekbones, a regal nose, and a charming space between her front teeth. Witnesses who worked at the rough-and-tumble bars of Ugarte Street recalled seeing the pretty, dark-haired teen in the company of the Egyptian Sharif Sharif that past summer. The polished older man was a standout in fine silks, leather shoes, and pockets full of money. He was well over six feet tall, and his expensive wardrobe stood in stark contrast to the typical patrons cowboys in worn jeans and pointed-toe boots, puffing on Marlboros.
The couple was reportedly spotted cruising the strip in Sharif's shiny white sedan, and later seated at a corner table in one of the local watering holes, kissing and laughing.
Based on this new information, authorities rearrested Sharif in December of 1995 and charged him with Castro's murder. They also suggested that he had been linked to at least a dozen other murders.
While they had no proof, officials successfully dubbed him "the Juárez Ripper" and hailed Sharif's capture as a major development in the case.
Even though authorities were claiming that Sharif Sharif was tied to as many as a dozen of the city's murders, he was officially charged with just one homicide the murder of Elizabeth Castro.
Still, headlines boasted of the capture of the "serial killer of Juárez," and residents of the border city breathed a collective sigh of relief.
* * *
In the days following his arrest, Sharif called a press conference at the sprawling cement-and-stone jail where he was being held in solitary confinement.
El Cereso sits isolated on a vast stretch of dry, sandy earth just south of the city at the intersection of Eje Vial Juan Gabriel and Barranco Azul. Behind a tall, menacing barbed-wire fence, uniformed guards act as sentries manning the security booths and the observation towers of what has been inaccurately labeled "an adult rehabilitation center." In fact, El Cereso is more a maximum-security prison, a kind of way station for the city's most dangerous criminals. Inmates are locked three in a cell; some of those already convicted await transfer to a more permanent prison setting. Others are there to serve out their time.
The facility, with its peeling paint and rust-colored stains, was originally designed to house a maximum of 832 inmates when it was built in 1980. It was now grossly overcrowded with more than 2,000 inmates more than double its intended number. State officials, not interested in managing the jail, had placed its operations in the hands of the local government.
Among those incarcerated inside El Cereso were 500 alleged murderers. Sharif was now counted among them.
For members of the local media, this would be their first look at the man authorities were calling "the Juarez Ripper." Though it was highly unusual for an alleged murderer to call his own press conference, Sharif had been granted permission to do so by the facility's warden.
With the jail in the hands of city officials, state police had no control over the facility or its warden. The director of El Cereso, Abelardo González, had a history of being sympathetic to requests from inmates.
The crowd in the small conference room on the main floor of the jail fell silent as two uniformed guards brought in the inmate, who stood at least a foot taller than the officers. Sharif had an aquiline nose, thick mustache, and arched eyebrows.
Removing the steel cuffs from his powerful-looking hands, the officers led Sharif to a long wooden table, where the media's microphones had been set up. Journalists noted that he looked confused and exhausted. It was clear that Sharif had no idea that authorities were pointing the finger at him for the serial murders.
