Suspect Confesses, Implicates 8 Others in Murders on Mexican Border
by Ricardo Sandoval, Knight-Ridder Newspapers
MEXICO CITY - A bus driver who admitted in court Thursday to raping and beating a 14-year-old girl has provided authorities with what they term their first big break in investigating a series of unsolved murders near the Texas-Mexico border.
Jesus Manuel Guardado, who claimed responsibility before a judge Thursday for assaulting the girl last year in Ciudad Juarez, is standing behind his statement to police that he killed four women in the industrial city across from El Paso, Texas. Police were investigating whether he had killed several more.
Guardado also named eight other bus drivers he alleged were involved in other killings.
Since 1993, about 130 women - mostly young and slender with long dark hair - have been murdered in and around Ciudad Juarez, a gritty city where young Mexican women are thronging to work at foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras.
On Thursday, the teen-ager - a slight girl with long dark hair - stood before a judge in Ciudad Juarez and identified Guardado as her assailant.
Mexican police, with the help of FBI agents and famed criminal "profiler" Robert Ressler, have closed many of the Juarez murder cases as individual crimes of passion and domestic violence. As many as 76 murders, however, remained unsolved.
"This could be the break we've been working hard to find," said Alonso Rodela, one of a team of Mexican investigators who for years have been sifting mounds of evidence in the string of murders.
Rodela said he was in court Thursday with Guardado and that his team is checking into the eight other bus drivers.
Guardado was arrested Tuesday in Durango, a desert city south of Ciudad Juarez, in connection with last June's attack on the Juarez teen-ager. She was the last passenger on Guardado's bus on a maqiladora run.
The girl bears facial scars and has been under psychiatric treatment since the assault, but she calmly obliged Mexican law by accusing the suspect in open court.
"She was brave," Rodela said. "And because of her, the city is feeling better today, and we're feeling good. This could be a great accomplishment for us."
Criminologists involved with the investigation warned it may be premature to attribute the killings only to bus drivers.
"It?s difficult to imagine how eight or nine individuals could keep this secret for so long," said Jose Antonio Parra, a Spanish criminologist who spent several years investigating the Juarez murders.
"We had Guardado on our list of suspects, but there was not enough evidence at the time to arrest him," Parra said. "We also sent people undercover as bus drivers and did not see evidence that any were the killers."
Several previous suspects were accused in multiple killings in Juarez in recent years, only to see most of the charges dismissed for lack of evidence.
Nevertheless, Guardado at least in part fits a profile Ressler developed for Mexican police: one or more men who work at or around maquiladoras and know when the women might be alone on their way to and from their jobs. Many victims lived in shantytowns in the desert that have sprung up as the maquiladoras flourished.
"Guardado could be blowing smoke, but it would not surprise me if he's convicted of several murders," said Ressler, the former FBI agent whose work inspired "The Silence of the Lambs." Ressler was recruited last year to help Mexican police create a database that helped produce profiles of possible victims and assailants.
"There could be several people responsible for six or eight killings each," Ressler said.
Copyright 1999 Knight-Ridder Newspapers | found at UTD Digital Mercury