The gruesome discoveries sparked angry protests in the border city, with hundreds of women taking to the streets to demand justice. Among those marching were the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and cousins of the victims, waving banners and clutching crude wooden crosses they'd painted black to symbolize the loss of their loved ones.
As the questions surrounding Sharif's involvement grew, Ramona Morales and Irma Pérez began to wonder if the Egyptian scientist truly was responsible for killing their daughters.
Authorities even found that one of their own was raising questions about their claims. Contrary to what many believed, Oscar Maynez, the criminologist, was also convinced that Sharif Sharif was not the culprit. Maynez was aware of "El Egipcio's" criminal past and his status as a violent sex offender. And while he shared the widely held belief that Sharif Sharif deserved to be behind bars, he was not convinced that he was responsible for the Juárez murders. For one thing, Maynez pointed out, the murders had begun before the Egyptian even moved to Juárez. Secondly, Sharif was a relative newcomer to Juárez. Based on his investigation, Maynez had concluded that the bodies were being dumped in a very organized and methodical fashion in little-known areas outside the Juárez city limits that were extremely inaccessible: a car wouldn't go there.
In addition, a forensics examination of Blanca, the local prostitute who first brought Sharif to the police's attention, had determined the woman to be lying. She was not the victim of a rape, as she claimed, but had gotten into an argument with the Egyptian that turned violent, resulting in her injuries.
Even more startling was a forensics report on Elizabeth Castro, the young maquila worker Sharif was charged with killing. The body recovered by police couldn't have been Castro; it was that of a woman nearly four inches taller. In addition, the skin tones were different. Castro had an olive complexion while the corpse had fair skin and freckles. In addition, an autopsy determined that the young woman police had identified as Castro had been dead well over a month. Castro, meanwhile, had been missing just four days when the body, identified as hers, was recovered in the Pemex field.
"She's alive
because the corpse of the woman that the authorities say I killed is that of a tall woman, a woman with freckles, and more important, she is a white woman, totally different from the description in the file of Seńorita Elizabeth Castro," Sharif insisted in an interview with Univision.
* * *
Mounting public pressure on authorities to get to the bottom of the latest string of murders prompted police to conduct a massive raid on the bars and nightclubs of the red light district, where several of the dead women had been seen in the weeks before their disappearances. Nearly two hundred youths were rounded up during the sting operation in April 1996, among them nine members of a local street gang known as Los Rebeldes, or the Rebels. The raid was ordered in response to a tip police had gleaned from a man named Héctor Olivares Villaba.
To calm the frazzled nerves of the residents of the border city and to save face in light of the ongoing crimes following the arrest of Sharif Sharif police had questioned a number of suspects, including Olivares, an alleged member of the Los Rebeldes street gang, in connection with the rape and murder of an eighteen-year-old maquila worker named Rosario García Leal, whose battered body had turned up on April 8, in a remote area outside of the city.
Leal was still wearing her factory identification tag from the Philips assembly plant when her corpse was recovered. An autopsy revealed that she had been brutalized and stabbed during the violent assault that had claimed her young life.
During an interrogation of Olivares, the gang member reportedly confessed to participating in Leal's murder, which he said took place in December 1995. Police said that Olivares claimed he had committed the crime in concert with other gang members, including its supposed leader, Sergio Armendáriz Díaz, also known as El Diablo, or the Devil. Perhaps this new lead would prove Sharif's claims of innocence.
Acting on this new information, officers stormed the clubs of Mariscal and Ugarte Streets, including the one where Armendáriz was employed as a security guard. Over the next several days, investigators interrogated the detainees. While they released a majority of the young men and women, at least ten of the gang members, including Armendáriz, were held and subsequently charged with some of the murders, raising questions about Sharif's role in the murders. But his culpability would soon be solidified with a startling revelation by state officials.
In the days ahead, police claimed that during subsequent interrogations, Armendáriz and his cohorts confessed to the killing of at least eight women under orders from the jailed Egyptian, Sharif Sharif. That the clever foreign-born scientist could have hatched such a plot from his jail cell seemed unthinkable. Yet authorities said the gang members had provided intimate details of their arrangement with the Egyptian.
According to police, Sharif had agreed to pay in the neighborhood of one thousand pesos for the murders of two women a month. The killings were to be carried out in a similar fashion to those of which he was accused to prove police had the wrong man in custody and to leave the public with the impression that the "real" killer was still on the prowl.
The money was allegedly exchanged during prison visiting hours, with Sharif slipping an envelope of hard currency across the table. The first installment was said to contain the equivalent of three thousand dollars. The cash payments were reportedly delivered to a local pool hall, where they were handed over to Armendáriz.
Based on their confessions, police subsequently indicted ten members of Los Rebeldes on at least seven of the homicides. The individuals were Sergio Armendáriz Díaz, Juan Contreras Jurado, Carlos Hernández Molina, José Luis González Juárez Rosales, Héctor Olivares, Fernando Guermes Aguirre, Luis Andrade, Carlos Barrientos Vidales, Romel Omar Ceniceros García, and Erika Fierro, the woman who had earlier claimed to have arranged "dates" for Sharif. In testimony given that April before ministers of the court, Fierro explained that she was at a bar called La Tuna with a female friend she called "Mausy," whom she described as the girlfriend of a man who sold hamburgers on the street near Joe's Place, when Sergio Armendáriz signaled her over.
"Sergio Armendáriz, El Diablo, the leader of the gang Los Rebeldes, said he wanted me to introduce her [Mausy] to him," Fierro reportedly testified. "She didn't want to talk to him. But I insisted and she went. Later, I didn't see her again. I knew he was going to kill her, but I couldn't do anything else because he had threatened to kill me."
Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez was pleased and appeared before the media that month to boast about the "FBI-style" investigation that had led to the arrests.
In the days ahead, news reports gave several versions of the alleged killings; one claimed that the gang members had tortured their victims on a sacrificial block of concrete before slaughtering them and dumping their corpses in remote locations outside the city. Other stories maintained that the girls were taken to cheap motels where they were raped and murdered and then cast in the desert. Forensic examinations showed that several of the corpses displayed bite marks over portions of their bodies, and a number of the young women were found to have crushed skulls.
Police later linked the jailed gang members to even more of the killings, a total of seventeen, claiming that Sharif Sharif had ordered all of the murders from the confines of his maximum-security jail cell. State police comandante Antonio Navarrete led the investigation that tied the gang to Sharif Sharif.
Gang members charged they had been beaten and tortured and ultimately forced to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Their stories were corroborated by family members, who described debilitating and painful injuries, including the gang leader's claim that he'd been handcuffed to his cell for three days straight and struck in the head hard enough to leave him with a permanent scar.
To many, the alleged murder-for-hire plot seemed absurd. How could Sharif Sharif make contacts with these individuals, convince them to carry out a series of murders, and pay them for their work from his jail cell? The men had no apparent connection to Sharif Sharif and no serious criminal backgrounds.
Further questions arose after it became apparent that police were not able to establish any money trail between Sharif and his supposed gang of assassins. Indeed, Sharif spoke only a few words of Spanish and would have been hard pressed to communicate with the men much less lay out a detailed modus operandi for crimes to ensure that all of the murders looked similar.
In his exclusive one-on-one interview in February of 1999, the Egyptian told Univision he believed he was being used as a scapegoat. That day, Sharif was in day twelve of a hunger strike. Supposedly he was refusing food to call attention to what he characterized as his "wrongful conviction."
Sharif was an imposing figure, taller and fairer-skinned than most of the inmates at El Cereso. He appeared ashen, no doubt from twelve days without food. He was only allowing himself Gatorade and water, nothing else.
"I am the perfect scapegoat because I don't speak Spanish!" he cried, his voice rising as he spoke to the camera. "I didn't even speak any Spanish until I got into prison! And I'm not from here. I am a foreigner. I don't have family to defend me on the outside!
"But I am a hardworking man. When I was on the outside, I worked very hard. As vice president of a company in Midland, Texas, I supervised all the communications via telephone, fax, and computers. And I also started a company here."
Leaning back in the chair, Sharif pulled out a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and lit up.
"Mira,
look," he said, pointing to some of the documents as he exhaled the smoke. "Here are the forensic findings on the body of the woman they say is Elizabeth Castro. Her corpse was at least two weeks old, and the Elizabeth Castro they refer to is a woman whose body was found only four days before.
"They come here, they take impressions of my teeth, sperm samples, blood samples, hair from my head, pubic hair, urine, and my
" He stretched out a hand, tapping the tips of his fingers, alluding to his fingerprints. "But everything was negative! They don't want to announce the results so we can't use it for my behalf, but everything was negative."
Sharif was correct. Authorities did, in fact, take dental impressions, and the teeth marks on Castro's body did not match those of the Egyptian.
Like so many others in Juárez, Sharif alluded to police involvement in the crimes. "I am absolutely certain of one
policía,"
he claimed. "And I believe more, but I have no proof. I have the proof about one, and I am sure about two other people. But they're not
policías.
They're rich, they're drug traffickers
ricos, narcotraficantes, mafia."
Mexican mafia? This seemed entirely too far-fetched for such ritualistic crimes against the poor. Why would they waste their time with these girls? Could there be much more to this convoluted plot? Could the killers be raping the girls to satisfy their sexual whims, later murdering them so no one could identify them?
Sharif insisted that "incompetence, corruption, and ineptitude" were behind the murders in Juárez. "There is one
policía
who is very powerful and he is always everywhere, handling things no matter where he is, hiding, and fabricating lies."
According to the Egyptian, the officer was "short of stature." He pointed out that all of the victims had been "slender and petite." "It's the type of woman he likes, a woman he can control and overpower." He grinned.
When asked about his alleged ties to members of Los Rebeldes, Sharif almost cut in, as if expecting the question.
"I never saw Los Rebeldes,
nunca en mi vida.
Never in my life, before I came here to El Cereso, had I even heard of Los Rebeldes, never. It's all fabricated. The police tortured them, put guns to their heads; they received death threats so they would make incriminating statements against me.
"What do I have in common with the gangs? I don't like gangs." He grimaced. "They hurt and kill people. I am an educated person, I am an intelligent person, but I don't speak Spanish! You hear how I speak Spanish, and I taught myself in prison. How am I going to manage a Mexican gang,
una ganga mexicana?"
When asked when he intended to reveal the identity of this corrupt police officer, Sharif smiled. "When I get out of here," he said. "Dead or alive, I will get out of this place."
Sitting back in his seat, Sharif began to blow smoke rings and break them with his long fingers. "I'm not fasting to pressure a judge," he said in conclusion. "My fast is to God. It's been twelve days since I've eaten anything. I want the people to listen to me. What I'm saying is the truth and I have proof.
"Meantime I'm here. I may even die here, who knows? I take it one day at a time, one Gatorade at a time."
Sergio Armendáriz, aka "El Diablo," also denied any role in the killings when he spoke to Univision that day. "They forced me to sign a confession," the broad-shouldered inmate insisted. "And they signed my name with a
X,
saying I'm illiterate. That's not true! I've been to school."
