Post by Bozur on Dec 12, 2005 21:48:45 GMT -5
Mexico City Journal
A Serial Killer Shakes Up a City and a Cultural Myth
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Published: December 12, 2005
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 11 - This much they know: Someone has been murdering older women in Mexico City, strangling them in their homes, pocketing a keepsake and vanishing into the city's streets.
Rubelio Fernández/El Universal
A bust and sketches, top, of the "little old lady killer," as displayed by the Mexico City attorney general's office.
But investigators do not know whether the killer is a man or a woman, whether there is an accomplice or how the victims are chosen.
After two years and at least 24 unsolved homicides, they have one fingerprint that matches partial prints from five other cases, a modus operandi and a police sketch of what appears to be a man made up as a woman.
Investigators pieced together much of the killer's technique from evidence at the crime scenes. Then they got a break in July, when the son of a possible prospective victim dropped by his mother's house unexpectedly and caught a glimpse of someone fleeing. The person left behind a full fingerprint.
To the residents of this capital and its unbounded suburbs, inured to street violence as they are, the presence of a serial killer is something alien.
Such killers are seen as peculiarly American, a perversity born from a society many Mexicans believe long ago abandoned family ties, one that breeds hostile loners. Even the largely unsolved killings of more than 350 women over the past decade in Ciudad Juárez is seen as distant, a product of the city's closeness to the United States and the fractured families that migration to the United States has left behind.
Mexico City's apparently homegrown serial killer rattles the cultural myth here that older people are protected within the cocoon of loving extended families. The truth is that increasing numbers of older Mexicans live alone in a city where families are dispersed.
Bernardo Bátiz, the attorney general for Mexico City, took a long time to admit that the city was dealing with a serial killer, although newspapers have been referring to the mataviejitas, or "little old lady killer," for almost two years.
"It cost us more than a year for the authorities to take it seriously," said Pedro Borda, director of the National Institute for Elderly People. "Now we know that the prosecutor feels the pressure."
With the fingerprint offering evidence of a serial killer, the attorney general's office formed a task force and sought help from criminologists at the National Institute of Penal Sciences, who are creating a psychological profile of the killer.
"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack in a city so gigantic where anonymity is the rule, where people don't know each other," Mr. Bátiz said.
The criminologists are looking for shared traits among the victims and clues from the crime scenes, and are comparing the profile of the killings with other documented cases elsewhere. "These are not casual victims, they are chosen victims," said Miguel Ontiveros, a criminologist at the institute.
Investigators say they believe that they can attribute nine homicides during the past two years to one person and that the same person may be responsible for 15 more in the same period.
Others say they believe that the killer may be responsible for more. Mr. Borda said there had been 66 murders of people older than 60 since 1998. They have been spread out all over the city, in middle-class and lower middle-class neighborhoods, in no evident pattern.
Public pressure has grown during the past few months with the killing of María de los Ángeles Repper, 92, in the modest central neighborhood of Escandón. She was strangled with her scarf in her ground-floor apartment in October after she went out to buy bread and milk.
But this is a country with little experience in the kind of painstaking police work needed to catch a serial killer, experts say. "The big problem is the scant data they have to work with," said Rafael Ruíz Harrell, a criminologist.
Until recently, many prosecutions relied solely on a confession, often extracted under torture. Preserving a crime scene has only recently become standard procedure.
"It's just inexcusable that after fingerprints have been taken from a crime scene, they turn out to be the prints of police themselves," Mr. Ontiveros said. "It happens all over Mexico."
The following is what the investigators have concluded from their studies of the crime scenes, interviews with possible witnesses and the evidence from the July case: the killer is a broad-shouldered and heavily made-up person in women's clothing, suggesting a man trying to disguise himself; the killer works in the daytime, either approaching older women on the street and offering to help them carry bags home from the bakery or the supermarket, or by knocking on the door and claiming to be a nurse or a social worker; there has been no sign of forced entry in any case.
Analyses of the crime scenes suggest that the killer usually stands behind the victim and then strangles her with an article of her own clothing. The body is left seated in a chair or on the bed. The killer then rifles through the house, taking something small, sometimes a religious statue.
Strangely, three of the victims had a print of "Boy in Red Waistcoat" by the 18th-century French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze hanging on the wall.
"We don't think it's a coincidence," Mr. Ontiveros said. "Everything we find at the scene could be an indicator."
The killer has left a trail across the city, and the police officers assigned to shopping centers, markets, bakeries and parks watch for anybody who fits the description. Early this month, investigators released a composite of a second person, a man, after there were reports of a possible accomplice in four of the killings.
But without much more to go on, the authorities have focused on prevention. Some police officers give talks, advising older people on how to look out for themselves. Some 1.6 million fliers have been handed out, warning, "Do not mention that you live or are alone at the moment."
After the April killing of Ana Velázquez, 64, a neighborhood group invited elderly people to a meeting to give them advice on how to protect themselves, recalled Catalina Butrón, 80, a resident of the same central leafy neighborhood of Condesa. "I'm not really scared," she said. "But I am very careful."
A Serial Killer Shakes Up a City and a Cultural Myth
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Published: December 12, 2005
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 11 - This much they know: Someone has been murdering older women in Mexico City, strangling them in their homes, pocketing a keepsake and vanishing into the city's streets.
Rubelio Fernández/El Universal
A bust and sketches, top, of the "little old lady killer," as displayed by the Mexico City attorney general's office.
But investigators do not know whether the killer is a man or a woman, whether there is an accomplice or how the victims are chosen.
After two years and at least 24 unsolved homicides, they have one fingerprint that matches partial prints from five other cases, a modus operandi and a police sketch of what appears to be a man made up as a woman.
Investigators pieced together much of the killer's technique from evidence at the crime scenes. Then they got a break in July, when the son of a possible prospective victim dropped by his mother's house unexpectedly and caught a glimpse of someone fleeing. The person left behind a full fingerprint.
To the residents of this capital and its unbounded suburbs, inured to street violence as they are, the presence of a serial killer is something alien.
Such killers are seen as peculiarly American, a perversity born from a society many Mexicans believe long ago abandoned family ties, one that breeds hostile loners. Even the largely unsolved killings of more than 350 women over the past decade in Ciudad Juárez is seen as distant, a product of the city's closeness to the United States and the fractured families that migration to the United States has left behind.
Mexico City's apparently homegrown serial killer rattles the cultural myth here that older people are protected within the cocoon of loving extended families. The truth is that increasing numbers of older Mexicans live alone in a city where families are dispersed.
Bernardo Bátiz, the attorney general for Mexico City, took a long time to admit that the city was dealing with a serial killer, although newspapers have been referring to the mataviejitas, or "little old lady killer," for almost two years.
"It cost us more than a year for the authorities to take it seriously," said Pedro Borda, director of the National Institute for Elderly People. "Now we know that the prosecutor feels the pressure."
With the fingerprint offering evidence of a serial killer, the attorney general's office formed a task force and sought help from criminologists at the National Institute of Penal Sciences, who are creating a psychological profile of the killer.
"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack in a city so gigantic where anonymity is the rule, where people don't know each other," Mr. Bátiz said.
The criminologists are looking for shared traits among the victims and clues from the crime scenes, and are comparing the profile of the killings with other documented cases elsewhere. "These are not casual victims, they are chosen victims," said Miguel Ontiveros, a criminologist at the institute.
Investigators say they believe that they can attribute nine homicides during the past two years to one person and that the same person may be responsible for 15 more in the same period.
Others say they believe that the killer may be responsible for more. Mr. Borda said there had been 66 murders of people older than 60 since 1998. They have been spread out all over the city, in middle-class and lower middle-class neighborhoods, in no evident pattern.
Public pressure has grown during the past few months with the killing of María de los Ángeles Repper, 92, in the modest central neighborhood of Escandón. She was strangled with her scarf in her ground-floor apartment in October after she went out to buy bread and milk.
But this is a country with little experience in the kind of painstaking police work needed to catch a serial killer, experts say. "The big problem is the scant data they have to work with," said Rafael Ruíz Harrell, a criminologist.
Until recently, many prosecutions relied solely on a confession, often extracted under torture. Preserving a crime scene has only recently become standard procedure.
"It's just inexcusable that after fingerprints have been taken from a crime scene, they turn out to be the prints of police themselves," Mr. Ontiveros said. "It happens all over Mexico."
The following is what the investigators have concluded from their studies of the crime scenes, interviews with possible witnesses and the evidence from the July case: the killer is a broad-shouldered and heavily made-up person in women's clothing, suggesting a man trying to disguise himself; the killer works in the daytime, either approaching older women on the street and offering to help them carry bags home from the bakery or the supermarket, or by knocking on the door and claiming to be a nurse or a social worker; there has been no sign of forced entry in any case.
Analyses of the crime scenes suggest that the killer usually stands behind the victim and then strangles her with an article of her own clothing. The body is left seated in a chair or on the bed. The killer then rifles through the house, taking something small, sometimes a religious statue.
Strangely, three of the victims had a print of "Boy in Red Waistcoat" by the 18th-century French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze hanging on the wall.
"We don't think it's a coincidence," Mr. Ontiveros said. "Everything we find at the scene could be an indicator."
The killer has left a trail across the city, and the police officers assigned to shopping centers, markets, bakeries and parks watch for anybody who fits the description. Early this month, investigators released a composite of a second person, a man, after there were reports of a possible accomplice in four of the killings.
But without much more to go on, the authorities have focused on prevention. Some police officers give talks, advising older people on how to look out for themselves. Some 1.6 million fliers have been handed out, warning, "Do not mention that you live or are alone at the moment."
After the April killing of Ana Velázquez, 64, a neighborhood group invited elderly people to a meeting to give them advice on how to protect themselves, recalled Catalina Butrón, 80, a resident of the same central leafy neighborhood of Condesa. "I'm not really scared," she said. "But I am very careful."