Forensics Expert Struggles With Work
by Mark Stevenson
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
There are four words that forensics expert Irma Rodriguez dreads: "This is your daughter".
They are words she has had to repeat over and over for years when she shows parents her book of photographs - smiling girls as young as 13 on the left side, raped and mutilated corpses on the right.
Rodriguez, former police commander and orthodontist who carved out her own niche in forensic investigations, prides herself on her calm, scientific ability to confront horror. She spends several hours a day in the morgue; as Chihuahua state's first female police commander, she went into rough outback towns and disarmed suspects.
But she has a teenage daughter, and sometimes the meetings with parents are too much.
"Believe me, I have knots in my stomach sometimes," Rodriguez. "I feel sick when I have to tell a parent, 'Yes, this is your daughter'."
For now, police believe this border city's six-year-long nightmare - the rape-murders of at least 57 young women - may be over. Since five bus drivers were charged in March with about 20 of the murders, killings with the trademarks of the earlier ones seem to have ended.
But that doesn't mean Rodriguez's work is done. She and other investigators continue to work on a dozen cases, some dating back five years, in which the victims' remains still have not been identified.
They are using computers to reconstruct faces from skulls, comparing dental records with bones and matching skull measurements with pictures of missing girls.
That last technique involves juxtaposing a photo of the girl in life, most taken at parties or family outings, with another of the remains. Rodriguez has a whole book of such photo pairs: a smiling girl; a grinning skull, most of the flesh rotted off or chewed by rats.
Flip, flip. Again and again. Smiling teenager, grinning skull. After the first few, feelings of disgust disappear, replaced outrage: Someone took these happy young girls and turned them into rotting corpses.
Rodriguez stops on some of the pictures, noting with pride where she was able to make a positive match with DNA tests.
In those cases, she has to call in the parents, most of whom have been desperately searching for their daughters.
One of those parents was Irma Perez. Her daughter Olga Alicia was one of the first victims.
"The police didn't understand how hard it is to accept that this sack of bones, just a few weeks ago, was your daughter," she said. "It's only because God is great that I haven't gone insane."
Since 1993, more than 200 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling desert city of 1.3 million people that looks across the border at El Paso, Texas. But prosecutors say only 57 are linked by the same rape-torture-murder profile.
Women are still being killed in Juarez, but the victims are older, their bodies are being found in a wider variety of places, and in some cases the killers appear to try to cover up the evidence by burning the bodies rather than simply leaving them in the desert - possibly because the killers have some relationship to the victim, Rodriguez said.
The strangling and skull-crushing usually involved in the previous deaths have given way to more routine knife and gun wounds. Bodies are being left in houses, hotels or cars.
Since the bus drivers were arrested, there have been no more slayings with that profile.
"Since March, there hasn't been a single case...of what we classify as sex murders," said Juan Carmona, spokesman for the state prosecutor's office.
All the suspects arrested in March confessed to the crimes in chilling detail, police said. Most of them, howver, later retracted the confessions, saying they were extracted under police torture.
But Carmona described how the chief suspect, former bus driver Jesus Guardado, re-enacted the crimes.
"He demonstrated how two of them would grab the victim by the neck and strangle her between them, often until the vertebrae cracked," Carmona said. "He said, 'That made such a nice cracking sound'."
According to the confessions, the men didn't select their victims - police earlier believed there was a pattern since most of the women were young, thin, dark-haired workers at border factories.
The men just used the common logic of poverty and vulnerability, police say - the suspects would attack the last woman left alone on a bus making a run to a shantytown district on the edge of town.
The victims were among the thousands of young women - most migrants from conservative southern Mexico - who make up a large part of the work force at the maquiladoras, factories that supply the US market.
Relatives of the victims and their supporters aren't as sure as authorities that the killing siege has ended.
"We're worried about the disappearences," said Esther Chavez, an accountant who heads the women's support group Casa Amiga. "Girls of 11 and 12 disappear, and the first thing the police say is that they probably ran off with their boyfriends. That's ridiculous."
Perez, the mother whose daughter was one of the torture victims, doesn't believe the right people are in custody either.
"The people they have in jail were drug addicts, and they don't plan something like this," she said. "I don't think the real criminals have been caught."
Copyright 1999 Associated Press