The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Cercoa hired a top lawyer for Sharif’s defence who plea bargained the rape charge down to sexual battery and five years’ probation, though the law called for the deportation of aliens conviction of crimes involving “moral turpitude”. On 13 August, the night before he was to plead guilty, he attacked a second woman in her home in West Palm Beach. This time he kicked and threatened to kill her, before asking her to fix him a drink and for another date the following night.

  The prosecutor of the first case was not informed of the second and, as soon as Sharif was paroled, he was rearrested, then bailed again. On 11 January 1982, Sharif was sentenced to 45 days in jail for the second attack and Cercoa finally sacked him.

  Sharif moved to Gainesville, Florida, where he set up a company and was married briefly. The short-lived marriage ended in divorce when he beat his bride unconscious. On 17 March 1983, he beat and repeatedly raped a 23-year-old college student who answered his ad for a live-in housekeeper, telling her: “I will bury you out back in the woods. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” He was arrested and held without bail pending trial. Sharif escaped from the Alachua County jail, but was soon recaptured. However, other women who had told the police that he was terrorizing them now refused to co-operate further in case he escaped again. On 31 January 1984 Sharif was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for rape. The prosecutor told local reporters that Sharif would be deported when he was released, though the authorities were seeking to tie him to unsolved murders in Florida and New Jersey. In January 1977, the body of a pretty 30-year-old brunette called Sandra Miller had been found at the side of the road. She had been killed by a single stab wound. Sharif worked at a chemical plant just two miles from the remote farmhouse where Miller lived with her five-year-old daughter and Sharif and Miller used the same bar. He was a prime suspect in the case

  However, when Sharif was paroled in October 1989, he was not deported. Instead, he moved to Midland, Texas, when he got a job with Benchmark Research and Technology. His work there was so exceptional that the US Department of Energy singled him out for praise, and he was photographed shaking hands with US Senator Phil Gramm.

  Sharif was arrested again 1991, this time for drink driving. It then came to the attention of the authorities and Sharif was liable for deportation. Hearings dragged on for two years. Then Sharif was arrested for holding a woman captive in his home and repeatedly raping her. His lawyers cut a deal. Sharif would leave the country voluntarily if the charges were dropped and, in May 1994, Sharif moved across the border to the exclusive Rincones de San Marcos district of Ciudad Juarez and worked at one of Benchmark’s maquiladora factories.

  On 3 March 1999 Sharif was convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia, though six other murder charges were dropped. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The police named Sharif as the Ciudad Juarez serial killer, but the murders continued – even escalated – after his arrest. Between Sharif’s arrest in October 1995 and the first week of April 1996 at least 14 more female victims were slain in Ciudad Juarez. Their ages ranged from ten to 30. In cases where the cause of death was established, one had been shot, one strangled and ten stabbed. At least four had been mutilated after death. Significantly, one – 15-year-old Adrianna Torres – had her left nipple bitten off and her right breast severed. The scale of the slaughter was staggering. The police admitted that of the 520 people who had disappeared over the past 11 months, most were adolescent females. The populace was terrified.

  The police then came up with a bizarre theory to explain why the killing continued while Sharif was in jail. After the raped and mutilated body of 18-year-old Rosario Garcia Leal was found in 8 April 1996, they picked up members of a street gang called Los Rebeldes – “The Rebels”. One of them, Hector Olivares Villalba, said that the gang’s leader Sergio Armendariz Diaz – aka El Diablo – had half a dozen Rebels rape and murder Rosairio Garcia Leal on 7 December 1995. Although Olivares’ confession was made under torture and he later recanted, the police used it to moved against Los Rebeldes, raiding their club and arresting some 200.

  Armendariz, Juan “El Grande” Contreras Jurado, Fernando Guermes Aguirre, Carlos Barrientos Vidales, Romel Cerniceros Garcia, Erika Fierro, Luis Adrade, Jose Juarez Rosales, Carlos Hernandez Molina and Olivares were all accused of being in the pay of Sharif. The police said that he had hired them to rape and murder at least 17 women in copycat killings to make it look as if the original “Ripper” was still at large. Juan Contreras told police Armendariz had sent him to collect “a package” from Sharif in prison. It contained $4,000 in cash. Then, Contreras said, he had joined Armendariz and other Rebels in the rape and murder of a young woman known only as Lucy. Contreras also later recanted, and the charges were dropped against suspects Ceniceros, Fierro, Guermes, Hernandez and Olivares. However El Diablo remained in jail serving a six-year sentence for leading the gang-rape of a 19-year-old fellow inmate in February 1998.

  It was said that the Rebels liked torturing their victims on a sacrificial slab before stoving their heads in. Several victims had bite marks on their bodies. Chihuahua’s medical examiner claimed that dental casts from Armendariz match bite marks found on the breasts of at least three of the victims. However, the Rebels claimed they were tortured by police and displayed burn marks on their bodies caused by cigarettes and cigars. And in 1999, a Mexican court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to charge Sharif with conspiracy in any of the murders attributed to Los Rebeldes.

  By then the police theory was already looking distinctly threadbare as the murders continued despite the round-up of the Rebels. Between April and November 1996, at least 16 women were killed. Three were shot, five stabbed and one was found in a drum of acid. In some cases advanced decomposition made it impossible to determine cause of death or whether the victim had been sexually assaulted. Eight could not be identified.

  The following year there were another 17 unsolved murders involving females aged from 10 to 30 years. Sexual assault was confirmed in only four cases, but other corpses were found nude and in positions that suggested that there had been a sexual motivation for their killing. Where the cause of death could be established, three were shot, three strangled, five were stabbed and two beaten to death. Seven of the dead were never identified.

  The murder rate continued to climb. In 1998 there were 23 unsolved murders following the same general pattern. There was the usual mix of shootings, stranglings, stabbings, beatings and burnings. Six remained unidentified. Not only were the police helpless but complicit. On 21 September 1998, Rocio Barrazza Gallegos was killed in a patrol car in the parking lot of the city’s police academy by Pedro Valles, a cop assigned to the Ripper case.

  The spate of murders in Ciudad Juarez was now attracting media attention internationally. In May 1998, the Associated Press reported more than 100 women raped and killed in Ciudad Juarez. In June they put the figure at 117, while the women’s advocacy group Women for Juarez said it was somewhere between 130 and 150.

  On 10 June 1998 Mexico’s Attorney General Arturo Chavez told the Reuters news agency that, with Sharif still safely behind bars, “police think another serial killer may be at work due to similarities in three crimes this year”. The story was taken up again by AP who reported on 9 December 1998: “At least 17 bodies show enough in common – the way shoelaces were tied together, where they were buried, how they were mutilated – that investigators say at least one serial killer is at work. And 76 other cases bear enough similarities that investigators say one or more copycats may be at work.”

  However a team of three profilers from the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, spent a week reviewing the cases and concluded that “the majority of the cases were single homicides . . . It is premature and irresponsible to state that a serial killer is loose in Juarez.”

  The first quarter of 1999 began with eight more victims. Then while Sharif went on trial for the rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro
Garcia in March 1999, another suspect emerged. Before dawn on 18 March a 14-year-old girl named Nancy arrived at a ranch on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. Sobbing and covered with blood, she said she had been raped, strangled and left for dead. Miraculously she survived. The attacker, she said, was the bus driver who had picked her up when she left work at the maquiladora at 1 a.m. When he had dropped off all the other passengers, he drove out into the desert and stopped, claiming the bus had mechanical problems. Then he grabbed her by the neck and asked her if she had ever had sex. The last thing she remembered before she lost consciousness was him telling her that he was going to kill her.

  The bus driver’s name was Jesus Guardado Marquez, aka El Dracula. A check of the records revealed that 26-year-old Guardado had a previous conviction for sexual assault. But by the time police went to arrest him, he had fled with his wife. Guardado was arrested a few days later in Durango, some 550 miles to the south. He claimed that he was beaten by the police when he was returned to Ciudad Juarez. However, the police said that Guardado confessed to a number of the murders and named four accomplices who were also maquiladora bus drivers – Victor Moreno Rivera (El Narco), Bernardo Hernando Fernandez (El Samber), Augustin Toribio Castillo (El Kiani) and Jose Gaspar Cerballos Chavez (El Gaspy). Together they were called Los Choferes – “The Chauffeurs”. More sinisterly, they are also known as Los Toltecas – “The Toltecs” – who were the blood-thirsty forerunners of the murderous Aztecs. Moreno was the leader of the gang, the police said, and he too was in the pay of Sharif.

  They were charged with 20 murders, but protested their innocence. The only evidence against them was their own confession which had been extracted by torture. Sharif denied having any contact with the Chauffeurs and maintained he knew nothing of any conspiracy.

  Again, the arrest of Los Choferes did nothing to stem the murders. By May 1999 it was reported that “nearly 200 women” had been murdered since 1993 – a substantial leap from October 1998’s figure of 117.

  Celebrated profiler Robert Ressler, who heads the Virginia-based corporation Forensic Behavioural Sciences, visited Juarez at the invitation of the authorities and concluded that his former employer, the FBI, were wrong. He found that 76 of the murders fitted into a pattern. The victims were all women aged between 17 and 24. Most of them had been raped and strangled, and more than a dozen had been killed on their way to, or on the way home from, work at a maquiladora. But he concluded that the killings were not the work of a lone serial killer.

  “I think it’s probably two or three,” he said. One of them, he thought, was an American coming across the border to take advantage of the situation in Juarez. The police had already demonstrated their inability to catch one killer. There were plenty of dark streets and abandoned buildings, and with a transient population of young women there were plenty of victims to choose from.

  “It’s an ideal situation for an American with money,” said Ressler.

  The founder of the Citizens’ Committee Against Violence Astrid Gonzales Davila said: “The failure to solve these killings is turning the city into a Mecca for homicidal maniacs.”

  Candice Skrapec, the Canadian-born professor of criminology at California State University in Fresno, also identified 67 cases where she thought serial killers were involved. She told the Toronto Star she believed that three or four killers were at large in the 182 post-1993 cases she had studied and “there may be even more murders that could be tied to the three suspected serial killers, and that they were operating in 1992”.

  Skrapec believed that “Railway Killer” Angel Maturino Resendez, was one of the perpetrators as he had lived in the barrios there and much of this family – including his uncle, Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, whose name he used as one of many aliases – still live in Juarez. On 13 July 1999, at the urging of his brother and his sister, Resendez crossed the Ysleta Bridge over the Rio Grande into the United States and surrendered to the Texas Rangers after a six-week televised manhunt that made him the most wanted man in America. The US authorities had held back on charging Resendez, fearing the Mexican government would prevent the suspect’s extradition if he was liable to face the death penalty – in Texas he would receive death by lethal injection. But a $125,000-reward had been offered for his capture and his family feared that he might be shot by a bounty hunter. Instead, they brokered his surrender and claimed the reward themselves.

  Resendez was charged with nine counts of murder. The first was the murder of a 21-year-old college student who was bludgeoned to death while walking with his girlfriend along a railway line in Kentucky on 29 August 1997. After that eight more bodies were found in victims’ homes along a railroad track from Texas to Illinois as he travelled from state to state. His last two victims were a 51-year-old woman and her 79-year-old father who were found dead in their home near the line in Gorham, Illinois, on 15 June 1999.

  Although Resendez could be a suspect in at least some of the Juarez killings, it is unlikely that he was responsible for the majority of the unsolved cases. Indeed, they continued after his arrest.

  In December 1999, a mass grave was found outside Ciudad Juarez. It contained nine corpses – three belonging to three US citizens. This invited renewed attention across the border with some, again, suspecting the involvement of the Mexican police. The Dallas Morning News wrote: “Still a mystery is what happened to nearly 200 people, including 22 US citizens who, in many cases, vanished after being detained by men with Mexican police uniforms or credentials.”

  These missing persons became known as Los Desaparecidos – “The Disappeared”. Some were thought to be victims of Juarez’s drug wars. But the Association of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons in El Paso believe they may have been kidnapped by the police.

  Maquilladoras still went missing and on 6 November 2001 a mass grave containing the skeletal remains of eight women were found in employ plot just 300 yards from the headquarters of the Association of Maquiladoras, the organization that represents most of Juarez’s US-owned export assembly plants. Police then announced creation of a new task force to investigate the murders and a $21,500 reward for the capture of those responsible.

  Three days after the grave had been opened bus drivers Gustavo Gonzalez Meza, La Foca, and Javier Garcia Uribe, El Cerillo, both 28, were charged with killing the eight women. The prosecutor claimed they “belonged to a gang whose members are serving time for at least 20 of the rape-murders”. The victims were identified as 15-year-old Esmerelda Herrera, 17-year-old Laura Ramos, 17-year-old Mayra Reyes, 19-year-old Maria Acosta, 19-year-old Veronica Martinez, 20-year-old Barbara Martinez (no relation to Veronica), 20-year-old Claudia Gonzales and 20-year-old Guadalupe Luna.

  The suspects claimed that their statements were extracted under torture. Their lawyers received death threats. On 5 February 2002, one of them was killed by police after a high-speed chase. The police claimed they “mistook him for a fugitive” and a judge ruled that the shooting was “self-defence”. Meanwhile it was revealed that DNA tests had failed to confirm the police’s early identifications of the victims. New DNA tests apparently confirmed the identification of Veronica Martinez, though it threw no light on the other seven cases. Then Gonzalez died in jail, ostensibly from complications arising after surgery.

  By now 51 suspects were in jail, but still the killing did not stop. Ten days after Garcia and Gonzalez and Garcia were arrested, the body of another young woman, stripped and beaten to death, was found in Ciudad Juarez. Maquilladoras protesters were reportedly harassed by police and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights moved in to investigate. The new Mexican President Vicente Fox sent in “federal crime specialists”. Resentful, local prosecutors told the Dallas Morning News that “27 of the 76 cases” were resolved, while “the other killings involving women have been isolated incidents”.

  On 9 March 2002, member of the Texas state legislature joined a protest march through El Paso. Then a federal deputy attorney general in Mexico City claimed that the
killings were committed by “juniors” – the son of prosperous Mexican families whose wealth and influence had protected them from arrest. He was quickly found another job. Later that year the FBI returned to lend a hand but have failed to further the investigation.

  Juarez’s leaders are particularly conscious of the effect the killings are having on the image of the city. When a large wooden cross was erected as a memorial to the murdered women, the mayor received a letter from the chamber of commerce, complaining that this would damage tourism.

  The day that letter was received – 23 September 2002 – the bodies of two more women were found in Ciudad Juarez. One victim was strangled and partially undressed; the other, the police said, had died of a drug overdose. Special investigator David Rodriguez was “sceptical” of that claim. Another young woman was found beaten to death two weeks later. Then Martha Sahagun de Fox, Mexico’s new first lady, addressed more than a thousand women dressed in black who marched through Mexico City in protest at the deaths.

  In January 2003, residents of Lomas de Poleo reported finding three corpses, but the Attorney General Jesus Solis and the police refused to confirm or deny whether they were connected to maquilladoras murders. These were not the first corpses found in this desert area near a rundown suburb. Two others had been found nearby in October 2002. One of them identified as 16-year-old Gloria Rivas.

  On V-Day, 14 February 2004, in Ciudad Juarez, busloads of female students from around the world calling themselves “vagina warriors” marched into town for special performances of The Vagina Monologues, performed by such film stars as Jane Fonda and Sally Field, to highlight and denounce what was now being dubbed “femicide”. It did no good.

  On 17 February 2003, two teenagers searching the wasteland for cans and bottles found three more bodies. When the police turned in Mimbre Street at 2 p.m., they found the remains of three women dumped there. While the bodies were being removed, an onlooker found a fourth.