"Don't you know that you are being accused as the multi-homicidal killer?" one reporter yelled out in English. To which Sharif appeared dumbfounded. The cameras were rolling when the Egyptian slammed his fist on the table, looked out at the journalists through narrow black eyes, and declared his innocence. His enormous hands flailed as he charged that authorities had manipulated witnesses into making false statements against him.
"They lie, they even go to extremes to fabricate evidence like lying, manipulating, kidnapping people, beating up people," Sharif told reporters in a high-pitched, almost nasal rant. He was speaking about Chihuhuan state police official Francisco Minjares, later described as the architect of the case against Sharif.
The local media disregarded Sharif's claims, joining authorities in painting him as the Juárez Ripper. The nickname El Monstruo, or the Monster, appeared beneath his picture in morning newspapers. Local residents were scared to even look at the accused killer's image on television, saying he looked like the devil.
In the months ahead, state officials tied "the Egyptian," as he was popularly tagged, to at least a dozen of the city's murders, including the homicides of Silvia Morales and Olga Alicia Pérez.
News accounts stated that witnesses had come forward alleging that Sharif had paid five hundred pesos, about fifty American dollars, to the boyfriend of Olga Alicia Pérez to have sex with her. The young man was reportedly paid his fee upon delivering Pérez to Sharif's residence in Rincones de San Marcos.
Police had questioned Olga Alicia's boyfriend and claimed to have found nothing to link him to her death.
Sharif, meanwhile, was insinuating that government officials were holding him unjustly and without evidence to deflect public criticism in an election year.
Sharif had come to the United States in the early 1970s, first settling in the New York metropolitan area before transferring to the Miami-based headquarters of the U.S. oil company Cercoa, Inc., where he worked as an inventor and engineer.
There are reports that Sharif had been in trouble with several women there, but no charges were ever filed against him. The Egyptian was living in Florida only a short time when a beautiful young woman who lived several floors below him accused him of rape. In a television interview, the alleged victim, who identified herself as "Tracy," told a reporter that Sharif had invited her to a dinner party at his apartment in May of 1981.
The two were barely acquaintances, but she said Sharif had eased her mind when she learned that several of her friends would be among his dinner guests. When she arrived at the apartment, however, she was the only guest there.
Uncomfortable, she stayed just long enough to have a few sips of a drink that Sharif had mixed for her and then quickly returned to her own apartment, telling her host that she would come back when the other guests arrived. In the elevator, she began to feel dizzy, and once inside her apartment, she phoned her boyfriend for help.
Some time passed, and there was a knock at the door. Believing it to be her boyfriend, Tracy said, she answered it and was suddenly pushed into the living room by her now-crazed neighbor. She told authorities that Sharif had brutally raped her. She was later treated at a nearby hospital, where it was established that she had, indeed, been raped. Sharif was later arrested and charged with the assault.
Executives at Cercoa were sympathetic when their star employee came to them with his plight. Insisting that the sex was consensual, he asked for help. The company agreed to cover his legal expenses and even gave him a raise.
After pleading guilty to a lesser offense, Sharif received probation for the crime.
But soon he was in trouble again. In August of 1981, a second woman in North Palm Beach told police Sharif had brutally raped her in his car after she agreed to accompany him to his home for just a moment so that he could pick up something at his residence. The woman claimed she finally managed to break free by repeatedly striking the brutish man in the head with the heel of one of her shoes. Her clothes soaked in blood, she somehow jumped out of the moving vehicle and ran to a roadside gas station for help.
Executives at Cercoa were again sympathetic, and again they funded Sharif's defense. The brilliant chemist had reportedly earned millions of dollars for the company with his inventions, and it appeared they did not want to lose their precious employee. Sharif remained on the payroll while serving a sentence of forty-five days in the Palm Beach County jail for the attack, and then returned to work.
According to news accounts, the following year Cercoa bought out Sharif's contract apparently because he had racked up substantial legal bills for the company. But that did not stop investors from offering to fund him and a fellow Cercoa employee, Tom Wilson, in a partnership of their own.
In a subsequent interview with the A&E Network about Sharif, Wilson admitted that at the time, he had had some reservations about the scientist and had even questioned him about his criminal conviction. But Wilson had felt satisfied by Sharif's explanation that the sex had been consensual.
It was a decision Wilson would later regret. The two were not in business for long when Wilson began to notice that his new partner had a drinking problem. He'd also observed that Sharif was abusive toward women while under the influence of alcohol. The revelation was troubling to Wilson, who was no longer certain he wanted to continue his business partnership with the Egyptian chemist.
While in Gainesville, Sharif reportedly married, but the union quickly ended after he supposedly beat his new wife until she fell unconscious.
In the spring of 1983, Sharif was arrested again. This time he was charged with the brutal rape of a twenty-year-old nursing student he had lured to his home with an ad in the
Gainesville Sun
seeking a roommate.
The vicious attack took place on the night the woman moved into the tidy green ranch house at NW 35th Street in Alachua County. According to a police report, it was just before midnight on March 16, 1983, when she heard Sharif entering her bedroom. She said he grew enraged when she turned down his advances. He then began pounding her in the head and face with his fists before forcing himself on her in her own bed.
During the attack, the woman later told authorities that Sharif grabbed the bedside lamp and threw it at her, shattering it against the wall and breaking the bulb. He then stepped on the glass and cut his foot, leaving a trail of blood on the carpet. He also attempted to hit her with a glass she kept on the night-stand and with a statue of W. C. Fields that the victim kept near the bed.
During the hours-long assault, the woman said Sharif smashed her head against a wall and threw her into a window. He then threatened to kill her and said he intended to bury her body in the woods behind his home.
Then, in a bizarre turn of events, he suddenly apologized to her and rushed her to a local hospital for treatment.
There he lied to officials, telling them that the young woman's injuries were the result of a lover's quarrel, not a rape. But her wounds were so severe that his words could not explain the physical harm he had inflicted upon her.
Sharif was taken into custody by members of the Gainesville Police Department on March 18, 1983, and ordered held without bail. During a search of his home, police found evidence to corroborate the victim's story.
On the floor of her bedroom lay a smashed statue of the comedian W. C. Fields. They observed a large crack in the plaster of one wall, a broken lightbulb on the left side of the bed, and bloodstains on the floor. A glass by the bedside was also shattered, and semen stains were found on the sheets. A gun was also confiscated during the search.
In January of 1984, while awaiting trial, Sharif managed to escape from the Alachua county jail, but was quickly recaptured. On the thirty-first of that month, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the rape and attempted murder of the young nursing student.
At the sentencing, the prosecutor vowed that Sharif would be met at the prison gates upon his release and immediately deported to his native Egypt. But it was not to be. After serving only five years, Sharif was granted early release and paroled. The prosecutor's letters to officials at the Immigration and Naturalization Service requesting immediate deportation had no effect; there were no federal agents to meet the olive-skinned ex-convict when he strolled through the prison gates in 1989.
Instead, there was a job waiting for him in Midland, Texas, with Benchmark Research and Technology, an oil company that also ran a factory in Juárez, Mexico. Midland, a city of one hundred thousand located halfway between Dallas/Fort Worth and El Paso, is about a five-hour drive to the Mexican border. Sharif was well liked by his peers at Benchmark, and his work was hailed as exemplary. Nearly two years passed before he had another run-in with the law. This time, the offense was minor, a drunk driving arrest.
But word of Sharif's arrest sparked his former business partner into action.
Tom Wilson was now living in Texas. When he learned that Sharif had been released from prison and had escaped deportation, he was horrified. He felt partially responsible for what had happened to the young nursing student back in Gainesville. He was wracked with guilt that his partnership with the foreign-born scientist had provided Sharif with the means with which to continue his violent escapades; wanting to ensure that no one else would fall prey to his former business partner, he set out to make things right.
Wilson made a series of phone calls, including one to the Gainesville police. A lieutenant named Sadie Darnell took the call. While Darnell had not worked Sharif's rape case, she was outraged to learn that the forty-two-year-old chemist had been permitted to remain in the United States with two felony arrests on his record.
Darnell was incredulous when told the ex-con appeared to be winning over the judge presiding over his ongoing deportation hearing in Texas.
During the lengthy proceeding, Sharif had used his intellect and charm to persuade the court that he was remorseful, and he even begged the magistrate to give him one more chance.
Darnell's background check on Sharif revealed that he had five aliases and three dates of birth on file hardly the profile of someone likely to change his ways. In a subsequent letter to the court, she lobbied for his deportation.
"Sharif has been given the unique privilege of being able to reside in the United States," Darnell wrote to the judge. "He has abused this privilege time and time again. His behavior has demonstrated him to be a predator of women
. The victims have been irreparably damaged. Please consider them."
It was Darnell's strong letter to the court that finally moved the El Paso judge to commence proceedings for deportation in 1993.
Remarkably, while awaiting word on the deportation proceeding, Sharif allegedly abducted a woman, held her captive in his home, and raped her over and over again before she finally escaped. Charges were filed, but Sharif's deportation lawyer struck a deal with the government: his client would leave the country of his own volition if the case against him was dismissed.
The American oil company for which he worked in Midland, Texas, kept him on the payroll, allowing him to continue his work as an engineer from an assembly plant they operated in Juárez. A company lawyer had even represented him when he was first arrested and charged with the alleged rape and kidnapping of Blanca.
* * *
For a short while, it appeared Mexican police had done their job. The first four months of 1996 passed without a single murder. But April brought a grisly discovery.
As the alleged serial killer of Juárez, Sharif Sharif, sat in the city's central jail awaiting trial on twenty-six counts of murder, the decomposing bodies of seven young women were uncovered within yards of each other amid discarded potato chip bags and beer bottles in a desolate area of fine, powdery white earth called Lomas de Poleo, on the very northwest edge of the city. The makeshift burial site was about twenty minutes outside of the city of Juárez, just off the Casas Grandes Highway. The location was in the complete opposite direction of Lote Bravo, where many of the earlier bodies had been recovered.
Among the corpses were the remains of a ten-year-old girl whose identity is still a mystery. The child stood just three feet, nine inches tall. The discovery of eight deep cuts on her tiny frame led authorities to conclude that her final hours on this earth had been brutal. Another of the victims had been bound with her own shoelaces; the teenager had been stabbed and mutilated in a similar fashion to the other dead girls found nearby.
The findings sent a wave of terror through the city and raised questions about Sharif's involvement. Nine more bodies would be found by year's end.
Medical examinations of the victims revealed that their murders had occurred at different times. Yet it was reported that all of the young women had been sexually assaulted and brutalized by one or more killers.
Residents and activists soon began to question whether police had the right man in custody and were looking to the state's new attorney general, Arturo Chávez Chávez, for answers. In March, Governor Francisco Barrio had appointed Chávez to the state's top law enforcement post, and already the state official was in the hot seat.
