Like many of the young girls employed at the factories, Irma was a talker. Some of the workers in her group or "cell" complained when she didn't return from lunch on time; too busy chatting, she was hurting their chances of winning the special monetary bonus given to those who were most productive. Speed was rewarded at the International Wire Group. The women in Irma's cell knew they would never make their quotas, given the rambunctious girl's endless socializing.
Irma received a warning that first week from her supervisor. She was talking too much and would be moved to a different area of the 200,000-square-foot factory when she returned to work after the weekend, in hopes that she would perform better. Clutching the twenty-one dollars she had earned that first week, Irma and her sister-in-law excitedly headed to downtown Juárez that Friday afternoon for some shopping.
Wanting to look stylish and grown-up, Irma bought her first pair of high-heel shoes and a dress with a floral print. She would wear the new shoes to work that Monday, and in spite of the blisters she got during the nine-hour shift, she vowed to wear them again on Friday when she joined the other girls for a night of dancing downtown.
On Tuesday, February 16, Irma's supervisor confronted her about her performance in the new position. Published reports claimed the young girl had disappeared for a portion of her shift that Monday and was questioned the following day and ultimately fired for leaving her post.
It would be the first time that Irma would travel home by herself. Irma's home, in the neighborhood of Colonia México 68, was just on the other side of a scrolling fence that separated the manicured industrial park from the rows of crude houses of cardboard and tin that made up the expansive squatters' community, named for the anarchistic protests of 1968 in which members of the Mexican Army in Mexico City killed scores of demonstrating students.
Her sister-in-law Yadira could not leave her post. She simply called after the child to be careful on her way home. Irma should look for the number 5 or number 7 bus; either would take her close to their house, a cement hovel they shared with several people and that cost about fifty-five dollars a month to rent. More than three thousand people inhabited their impoverished village.
When Yadira arrived home that evening, she was shocked to learn that Irma was not there. She and Miguel raced back to the factory to search for the girl, then to the local jail, the hospitals, and even the police station. It was nearing 9 p.m. when a news report on television related the grim news that another murdered girl had been found.
Miguel was trembling when he dialed the local precinct to find out if the dead girl was Irma.
"Yes, we have a little girl here," the female dispatcher told him, referring to a young girl who was alive but jailed. She went on to describe the girl's clothing. The description fit what Irma was wearing, right down to her white tennis shoes. The operator claimed the child had been picked up for stealing and was incarcerated on the charges.
Miguel said he would be right down to collect his sister. Hanging up the receiver, he breathed a sigh of relief. At least she was alive, he thought.
A uniformed official greeted Miguel when he arrived at the office of Suly Ponce later that Tuesday evening. But the news he was given was not at all what he expected. There was no young girl being held for stealing, just the body of a young girl who had been raped, murdered, and then dumped in a ditch.
It was Irma, his baby sister, lying in the morgue that night.
Irma Angélica Rosales Lozano's death came on the heels of several other murders of young women, including that of thirteen-year-old Celia Guadalupe Gómez, a technical student who was raped, strangled, and left to die in a vacant lot, where her body was found two months earlier on December 10, 1998. Then in January 1999, the body of a second young girl, who has yet to be identified, was found tossed in an abandoned field. She too had been raped and strangled.
It was on the heels of these murders that the FBI agents would be touching down in Juárez.
* * *
There was no showy display to hail their arrival on March 8, International Women's Day, and it is not clear if their visit was orchestrated to coincide with the important date. In fact, there was no public announcement to mark their arrival; authorities wanted to keep the team's visit quiet and allow the men to conduct their investigation under a veil of anonymity, although a written report of their findings would later be presented to authorities. Though it was routine for members of the bureau to assist Canadian investigators with domestic criminal matters, this was the first time U.S. agents had been invited to Mexico to aid in that country's internal affairs.
During their five-day visit to Juárez, the FBI agents toured the crime scenes and reviewed photos and evidence of seventy-eight of the city's homicides. With few answers and mounting pressure to solve the cases, the residents were left to speculate about potential motives for the crimes. A serial killer on the loose, organ traffickers harvesting body parts to sell on the black market, women being abducted to be used as satanic sacrifices or sold into prostitution were among the rumors running rampant.
In fact, there had been several news accounts pointing to the possibility that the murders were part of a satanic ritual being carried out by members of a local religious sect or gang. One story that appeared in
Texas Monthly
detailed how one group of amateur searchers out scouring the desert in 1996 for possible victims had stumbled upon a wooden hut. Members of the search team claimed that inside were red and white candles, several pairs of women's undergarments, and fingerprints in fresh blood. They also described a number of disturbing images that had been sketched on a long wooden board. There was a drawing of a scorpion, the symbol of Juárez's drug cartel, and one of three naked women with flowing dark hair being watched by a fourth who wore a mournful expression. In that same drawing was a handful of soldiers gathered around what appeared to be a marijuana plant. Fingernails in the form of swords were scrawled across the top of the picture.
The group described another drawing that depicted naked women with their legs spread-eagle surrounded by nails in the shape of sledgehammers, and a male figure who appeared to be a member of a gang at the center of the image.
The profilers were in town to make an assessment and help calm growing anxieties. Oddly, their findings conflicted with those of former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, who was then considered to be America's foremost expert on serial murder. While Ressler believed that the murders were the work of two or three serial killers operating in Juárez, the FBI agents concluded that the crimes were most likely not linked.
"The team determined that the majority of the cases were single homicides," according to a statement released by the FBI field office in El Paso that summer. "It's too premature and irresponsible to state that a serial killer is on the loose in Juárez."
The agents concluded that in the seventy-eight cases they reviewed, there was more than one killer roaming the city. In fact, the team suggested that the only real serial murders to have occurred in the city were perpetrated by Sharif Sharif.
Yet Sharif had been charged and convicted of just one of the city's homicides, the murder of seventeen-year-old maquila worker Elizabeth Castro, which hardly qualified him as a serial killer. In 1999, a Chihuahua state judge cleared Sharif of all the charges connected to the Los Rebeldes gang. In fact, just three days before the team arrived in the city, that same judge had convicted the Egyptian on the single murder count and sentenced him to thirty years in prison. While the case against Sharif was based solely on circumstantial evidence, the judge who presided over the trial had been presented with a forty-page legal report outlining the accused's alleged murder plot, and his ties to the street gang supposedly led by Sergio Armendáriz.
Armendáriz and five other members of the Los Rebeldes street gang had been in jail for three years when the profilers arrived in Juárez. The men were each facing seventeen counts of murder. Yet there had been little movement in their cases and little mention of their involvement in the murders in the agents' subsequent report.
Frank Evans, the FBI special agent who had coordinated the team's visit to Juárez, told a Texas newspaper after his retirement in 2002 that Chihuahua state investigators had dismissed his team's findings "as not fitting with the established theory of the case."
In other words, the FBI's conclusions, based on two visits to the city and a review of the state police files, differed from the official theory that Sharif Sharif had committed the original killings and once in jail had orchestrated a string of copycat murders to make it appear that the true killer was still at large. "Sharif is a psychopath who should be locked up for life," Suly Ponce told a radio talk show host during an on-air interview. "His Egyptian culture contributed to his aggressive conduct against women."
* * *
Less than two weeks after the FBI agents left town, a fourteen-year-old factory worker named Nancy (whose last name is being withheld because of her age and the nature of the crime), was brutally raped, strangled, and left for dead in a remote desert area of Ciudad Juárez. The vicious assault occurred in the early morning hours of March 18, 1999. By then, an estimated 172 women had been murdered in Juárez.
Miraculously, Nancy, a reed-thin girl with dark eyes and a complexion blemished by teenage acne, had survived her ordeal and provided details of the attack to police.
The young worker told authorities that when her shift ended at 1 a.m., she immediately walked to the curb outside Motores Eléctricos, the maquiladora at which she was employed, to wait for the factory-sponsored shuttle bus toward her home in one of the garbage-strewn slums that rimmed the city. She had been assembling parts for the Milwaukee-based A. O. Smith, a manufacturer of glass-lined water heaters, for less than three weeks when the attack occurred. She'd started work on March 1.
The low-paying assembly-line job was the only position she could find. Nancy was under the legal age of sixteen and had no more than a sixth-grade education. Her exposure to city living had stirred dreams of a better life, one with fine clothes and a closet of her own to keep them in. Her mother was sympathetic but unable to help. She told her youngest daughter that if she wanted to add new fashions to her wardrobe of well-worn hand-me-downs, she'd have to earn the money to buy them.
Nancy's family was dirt poor and she had six siblings. They lived in a rickety lean-to, no larger than an outdoor shed, in a colonia of shacks beside some railroad tracks. Children played amid the skeletal remains of dead dogs and other animals and the human waste that washed from the hills each time it rained. Nancy's neighbors pilfered electricity by threading electrical cords together until they reached a power source.
Aware that the export factories required their employees to be at least sixteen, Nancy told police that she had lied about her age on her job application, using falsified documents like so many of the young maquiladora workers did.
The Mexican government, like many third world economies, adhered to a strict policy of suppressing wages in order to draw foreign investment. What was unique to Juárez was the contrast between work life and home life for many of the assembly-line workers. Maquila workers like Nancy and young Irma Rosales were working in twenty-first-century conditions, enjoying central air-conditioning, state-of-the-art machinery, and access to sparkling indoor showers, private changing areas, and complimentary hot and cold meals served in a modern cafeteria.
While the young girls were assembling sophisticated circuit boards in these contemporary plants, they were facing illnesses like cholera and tuberculosis at home. Many, including Nancy, were surviving in seventeenth-century conditions, confronting life without plumbing and electricity in cardboard and tar-paper hovels with no floors or foundations. Typically, the bathroom was literally a hole dug in the ground that was surrounded by odd pieces of wood topped by the base of a fifty-five-gallon drum, probably taken from the garbage of one of the local maquiladoras. In some cases, colorful Mexican blankets were used as privacy curtains for these primitive toilets and showers.
Nancy's was the last stop on the bus route. She told authorities that on March 18, she watched as other passengers got off and then rose in preparation for her stop. Suddenly she realized the bus was heading in the wrong direction. She began to worry as it rolled past towering power lines and thorny cacti, and into the desert beyond her neighborhood.
The bus driver explained that he was experiencing "mechanical problems" and was simply looking for a gas station. Then he broke into sinister laughter.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
Nancy felt the bus rumble onto some rocky terrain and come to a halt in a remote section of Lote Bravo.
"Have you ever had sex?" the driver demanded, grabbing at her throat. The last thing she recalled were his thick hands tightening around her neck. When Nancy came to, she was lying on her stomach in the middle of the desert; it was pitch-black and she was bleeding all over. She was completely unfamiliar with her surroundings.
Nancy recalled little of the attack only that the bus driver had threatened to kill her if she told anyone. Under the cover of darkness, she somehow crawled along the brush, in the direction of a small house illuminated by a dim porch light. There she found help from two local men who answered her knock.
