Who's Guilty? A Look At The Suspects
By Diana Washington Valdez
El Paso Times
JUAREZ - Three times, Chihuahua state authorities have announced that the serial killings were solved. Over the past six year years, they have arrested 17 men and one woman in 32 out of a possible 90 serial slayings in Juárez, but a lack of evidence has cast doubt on the suspects’ guilt.
Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif was charged twice with paying other men in 1996 and 1999 to kill for him while he was in custody and under the watch of state authorities.
In November, two bus drivers were charged in the deaths of eight women whose bodies were discovered dumped in the trash-filled ditches on a lot at Ejercito Nacional and Paseo de la Victoria.
Meanwhile, Chihuahua state authorities are ignoring other possible suspects, experts and police say.
Those suspects include an escaped serial killer, two ex-convicts who were in El Paso at the time of the slayings, the "railway killer," and an elusive man who fled Juárez and who authorities say has gone underground.
Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler and California criminologist Candice Skrapec said Angel Maturino Resendez, the so-called railway killer, should be investigated for connections to the Juárez murders.
Chihuahua state authorities asked Ressler in 1998 and Skrapec in 1999 and again this year to assist with the cases - 80 to 90 of which are believed to be the work of serial killers.
"Serial killers don’t have a particular motive," Ressler said. “They kill for the sake of killing, and they can’t stop until someone else stops them."
Several people who were murdered in Juárez in the 1990s were found along or near railroad tracks, one of Maturino’s favorite hunting grounds. Skrapec said autopsy reports on Maturino’s U.S. victims bear similarities to the reports she’s seen on the Juárez slayings.
Maturino, on death row in Texas for murder, has denied killing anyone in Mexico. His U.S. victims were found near railroad tracks. But his ties to Mexico are clear: His mother lives in Juárez, and Mexico’s Interpol reported he had lived in Anapra.
El Pasoans scrutinized
Whoever is killing the women is able to slip across the border with ease, said Ressler, based on his examination of the cases and the profile he developed.
"He would have to be Hispanic or Mexican-American, someone who blends in. All the abductions are done so easily."
Ressler and Skrapec, the only U.S. criminologist who has examined the murder-case files, believe more than one serial killer could be at work. A 1999 investigation by FBI profilers supported that theory.
Skrapec said one of the serial killers is targeting "young girls."
During his 1998 visit to Juárez-El Paso, Ressler and El Paso Police Department officials came up with two potential suspects - both ex-convicts living in El Paso at the time.
"One of them was monitored for a while, and the other one left the region for an unknown location," said former El Paso Assistant Police Chief J.R. Grijalva, now police chief for El Paso Community College. He would not disclose names, but said both were Hispanic.
Another possible suspect is Pedro Padilla Flores of Juárez. Now a fugitive, Padilla was jailed in Mexico in 1986 after being convicted in the rapes and murders of several women. He escaped from a rehabilitation center in 1991 and remains at large.
Padilla was convicted only in the deaths of two women and a 13-year-old girl, although he confessed to killing more women.
"Padilla was a serial killer. He killed and raped women in the same manner as some of the victims we’ve seen in recent years," said Felipe Pando, a former Chihuahua state homicide investigations chief.
Padilla lived in the Mariscal district of downtown Juárez when he was arrested. Pando, who now works for the city police internal-affairs unit, said Padilla used drugs and tended to dump his victims in the Rio Grande.
In 1999, the name 'Flores' turned up in the register of the Hotel Juárez, where Hester Suzanne Van Nierop was killed. The Dutch tourist was strangled and found nude under a hotel bed.
The man who checked in with her signed as 'Roberto Flores', and hotel employees described him as looking like "a norteamericano." He was seen with Van Nierop at Norma’s Club before they checked into the hotel, police said.
But Mexican officials said they have no leads. Chihuahua state officials who were asked about Padilla said they never heard of him, although his case was reported widely by the media.
Man eludes police
A name that comes up frequently in relation to the homicides is a Juárez man police identified as Alejandro Maynez. His adoptive relatives said Maynez is one of several aliases used by Armando Martinez.
State officials issued an arrest warrant for him in connection with the 1992 death of a young woman from Chihuahua City. Former Chihuahua state Police Chief Refugio "Cuco" Rubalcava arrested Maynez in 1992. He was released by a different police official and allegedly went underground.
Lawyer Francisco Peña said Maynez’s name next came up in the case of Ana Benavides, a woman accused of murdering and dismembering a Juárez couple and their child in 1998.
Peña, who was Benavides’ lawyer, said, "My client told the authorities that Maynez was behind these deaths. She was scapegoated, but (he) and the others continue to be free."
Chihuahua state Special Prosecutor Liliana Herrera said her office recently received a tip about Maynez.
"Despite his earlier arrest, I couldn’t find a single mention of him in our files," she said. "I couldn’t even find a copy of the amparo (similar to a habeas corpus) he allegedly obtained."
Before he retired last year, former El Paso police Sgt. Pete Ocegueda said Juárez police had asked the El Paso police for help in finding Maynez in connection with the 1994 slaying of Lorenza Gonzales Alamillo, whose strangled and mutilated body was found off the Panamerican Highway.
"They thought he might be a U.S. citizen because he came back and forth across the bridges all the time, but we didn’t have anything for him under that name," Ocegueda said.
Chihuahua state authorities said they believe Maynez fled Mexico. His relatives said he is living in El Paso or New Mexico under another alias. He has not returned messages left for him with relatives in Juárez.
Ramiro Romero Gomez, a Mexican federal police agent, and Victor Valenzuela, a state auxiliary policeman, went to Chihuahua state authorities in 1997 to tell them that Maynez might have killed women, Valenzuela said during an interview at the Cereso prison in Juárez.
"We were at the Club Safari when he told us that he and (another man) raped and killed women," Valenzuela said. "He once invited us to come along to rape women ... but we turned him down. He said nothing would even happen to him because his father was a very important man."
Mexican federal congressman Carlos Camacho, another Mexican federal official, an El Paso Times reporter and a Mexico City reporter were present for the interview.
Allegations about Maynez also were noted in a book "The Case of Elizabeth Castro and Abdel Latif Sharif" and in Mexican newspapers such as Reforma.
His adoptive relatives did not want to disclose the names of his biological parents.
Copyright 2002 El Paso Times