The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (61 page)

The first official victim of
El Depredador Psicópata
– or “the Juarez Ripper” – was Alma Chavira Farel, whose body was found on 23 January 1993 in an empty lot in a middle-class neighbourhood of Campestre Virreyes. She had been raped both vaginally and anally, beaten and strangled. There was a bruise on her chin and she had a black eye. She was wearing a white sweater with a design on it and short blue pants. No mutilations were reported at the time, but later victims were said to have suffered slashing wounds to their breasts similar to those of Chavira. In all likelihood she was not the killer’s first victim at all. Juarez is a city of transients where disappearances exceed recorded homicides each year.

No one is sure how many people live in Ciudad Juarez. Official estimates hover around one million, while there are probably more like two million people there at any one time. Many are street people who don’t show up in the official statistics. For others, it is a stopping-off place on their way to the US which lies just across the Rio Grande. It is also home to numerous drug traffickers and other criminals who use it as a temporary base for cross-border operations.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has set up over 330
maquiladoras
in Juarez. These are factories that use cheap labour to produce goods to sell over the border. The wages range between US$3 and US$5 a day. Nevertheless thousands of young uneducated female workers from southern Mexico, known collectively as
maquilladoras
, flock to work in these factories. The owners prefer hiring women because they are less trouble. They also put up with the squalid work conditions, sexual harassment and violent shanty towns where they are forced to live. Some 70 percent of the labour force is female.

This piques Mexican men’s traditional Latin
machismo
. It also drives men into crime or to find work in the other traditional male preserve – the police force. However, the police earn so little that bribery is an accepted practice and there is enough drug money flowing through the city to ensure that the legal system is thoroughly corrupt. Any offence can be overlooked for the right price. Largely individual murders are overlooked, but it was hard to hide that the overall murder rate for women in Juarez is twice that of Mexico as a whole. The rate for women aged between 15 and 24 in Juarez is five times that of the rate in Tijuana, another border town, and more than ten times that of El Paso on the US side.

In May 1993, a second victim was added to the Juarez Ripper’s list when a body was found on the slopes of Cerro Bola, a hill that carried a sign saying: “Read the Bible.” She had been raped and strangled. A third corpse appeared in June; she had been stabbed and the body set on fire. On the 11th, another anonymous victim was found partially naked in the playground of Alta Vista High School on the way to a dirt road at the edge of the Rio Grande. She had been tied to a stake, raped, stabbed and had her head beaten in.

By the end of the year, 16 more murders had been added. The last, on 15 December, was “solved”, along with three others – though the Juarez police had an unfortunate reputation for torturing confessions out of innocent suspects. In the dozen cases that remain unsolved, five of the victims remain unidentified. At least four were raped. Four had been stabbed to death and four strangled. One had been shot and one beaten to death. In two cases, the body was so badly decomposed that a cause of death could not be established.

The following year the Juarez police had eight unsolved murder cases involving women. In three other cases they named “probable suspects”, but none of them were arrested. Three of the victims remain unidentified today. The ages of those identified ranged from 11 to 35. In the cases where the cause of death could be determined, one was beaten to death, one burned alive, two were stabbed and six strangled. At least four of the victims were also raped. State criminologist Oscar Maynez Grijalva was already warning that, in at least some of the cases, a serial killer was at work.

His words would be remembered the following year when a killer began to reveal a signature. Three of the four bodies found in September 1995 had their left nipple bitten off or their right breast severed. By then, at least 19 women had been slain – making 1995 the worst year yet. Eight of the victims are still unidentified. At least four had been raped. Where the cause of death was established, one was shot, one stabbed and six strangled. Again in two cases, “possible suspects” were named and the police claimed to have “solved” one of the murders. In October, they arrested Abdul Latif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist living in one of Juarez’s wealthier neighbourhoods.

Sharif was arrested in 1995 after a prostitute accused him of raping her at his home. She claimed that Sharif also threatened to kill her and dump her corpse in Lote Bravo, a desert region south of town where the bodies of other victims were found. But these charges were dropped after the police had discovered that Sharif had dated 18-year-old Elizabeth Castro Garcia, who had been found raped and murdered in August.

In custody Sharif allegedly confessed to five
El Depredador Psicópata
murders. But publicly he has always maintained that he was innocent.

“They are pinning this all on me because I am a foreigner,” he claimed. “I’m just a drunk, I’m not a murderer.”

Sharif was born in Egypt in 1947. Later, he claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, sodomized by his father and other male relatives. In 1970, he emigrated to America and settled in New York City. He was known for drunken womanizing. Lovers thought him charming and funny. Years after the event, it was said he had an obsessive interest in young girls.

Sacked for suspected embezzlement in 1978, he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. A former friend there named John Pascoe claimed that, on a deer-hunting expedition, Sharif tortured a wounded buck. Pascoe also claimed that girls seen in Sharif’s company often disappeared later, though no missing person reports tied to Sharif ever surfaced. The friendship ended in 1980, Pascoe said, after he found possessions of a “missing” girl in Sharif’s home and a spade caked in mud on the porch.

By 1981, Sharif had moved to Palm Beach, Florida. A talented chemist and engineer, Sharif was hired by the oil company Cercoa Inc., who gave him his own department. But then on 2 May 1981 he beat and raped a 23-year-old woman neighbour, later claiming that it was consensual sex that got a little rough. Afterwards, he showed remorse, saying: “Oh, I’ve hurt you. Do you think you need to go to a hospital?”

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.”