Authors: Roberto Bolaño
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary Collections, #Mystery & Detective, #Mexico, #Caribbean & Latin American, #Cold Cases (Criminal Investigation), #Crime, #Literary, #Young Women, #Missing Persons, #General, #Women
In the Sonora media, that is,
because in Mexico City a feminist group called Women in Action (WA) made a TV
appearance denouncing the endless trickle of deaths in Santa Teresa and asking
the government to send Mexico City investigators to Santa Teresa to resolve the
situation, since by all accounts the problem was too much for the Sonora
police, who were incapable of handling it, if not complicit. On the same show
the question of the serial killer was addressed. Was there a serial killer
behind the murders? Two serial killers? Three? The show's host mentioned Haas,
who was in prison and whose trial date still hadn't been set. The Women in
Action said Haas was probably a scapegoat and they challenged the show's host
to come up with a single piece of evidence incriminating him. They also talked
about the WSDP, the
circumstances, and they cast aspersions on the seer who had appeared with the
WSDP on a regional TV show, just some old woman who apparently wanted to
exploit the crimes for her own benefit.
Sometimes
Elvira Campos suspected that the whole of
the WA women, she recognized one of them as an old friend from college. She
looked different,
much older,
she
thought in astonishment,
more wrinkled,
sunken cheeks,
but she was the same person. Dr. Gonzalez
medicine? And why this scorn for the seer from
psychiatric center would have liked to ask Juan de Dios Martinez more about the
crimes, but she knew that doing so would only deepen the relationship, lead
them,
together,
into a locked room to
which she alone held the key. Sometimes Elvira Campos thought it would be best
to leave
Or kill herself before she turned fifty-five. Maybe fifty-six?
In
July, the body of a girl was found some five hundred yards from the pavement of
the Cananea highway. The victim was naked, and, according to Juan de Dios
Martinez, who oversaw the case until he was replaced by Inspector Lino Rivera,
the murder took place right there, because clenched in the victim's hand was a
kind of grass called
zacate,
the only
thing that grew in the area. According to the medical examiner, the cause of
death was craniocerebral trauma or one of three stab wounds to the chest, but
he was unable to give a conclusive answer because the body's state of
putrefaction made it impossible to say without conducting further pathological
studies. Those studies were carried out by three students of forensic medicine
at the
their conclusions were filed and then lost. The victim was between fifteen and
sixteen years old. She was never identified.
Shortly afterward, near the
border, in a spot similar to where Lucy Anne Sander was found, Inspector
Francisco Alvarez and Inspector Juan Carlos Reyes, of the narcotics squad, came
upon the body of a girl of approximately seventeen. Questioned by Inspector
Ortiz Rebolledo, the agents claimed to have received a phone call from the
American side, from some border patrol buddies who let them know there was
something strange near the border. Alvarez and Reyes thought it might be a bag
of cocaine, presumably lost by a group of illegals, and they headed for the
spot indicated by the Americans. According to the forensic scientist, the
victim's hyoid bone was fractured, which meant she had been strangled to death.
Before that she had been subjected to sexual abuses that included anal and
vaginal rape. The missing person reports were checked and the dead woman turned
out to be
Guadalupe
Elena Blanco. She had arrived in Santa Teresa
from
The day of her disappearance she had a job interview at a maquiladora in the El
Progreso industrial park and that was the last anyone saw of her. According to
the maquiladora employees, she didn't show up for the interview. That same day
her parents filed a missing person report. Guadalupe was thin, five foot four,
with long black hair. The day of her interview at the maquiladora she was
wearing jeans and a newly purchased dark green blouse.
A
little later, in an alley behind a movie theater, the knifed body of Linda
Vazquez, sixteen, was found. According to her parents, Linda had gone to the
movies with a friend, Maria Clara Soto Wolf, seventeen, a classmate of the
victim. Questioned at home by Inspector Juan de Dios
Clara stated that she had gone to the theater with her friend to see a Tom
Cruise movie. When the show was over, Maria Clara offered to drive Linda home,
but Linda said she was meeting her boyfriend, so Maria Clara left and Linda
stood waiting at the entrance to the theater, looking at the posters for coming
attractions. When Maria Clara passed the theater again, now in her car, Linda
was still there. It wasn't quite dark yet. There was no difficulty locating the
boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Enrique Sarabia, who denied he had planned to meet
Linda. Not only his parents, but also the maid and two of his friends, were
able to testify that Enrique hadn't left the house, where he'd spent the day
playing on the computer and then swimming in the pool. That night, two couples,
friends of his father, had stopped by, and they could also confirm his alibi.
Around the theater no one had seen or heard anything, although by Linda's
wounds it was easy to deduce that she had put up a fight. Juan de Dios
Bustelo decided to give the ticket taker at the theater the third degree. She
said she had seen a girl waiting at the entrance and a little while later the
girl had been approached by a boy who didn't seem to be of the same social
class. The ticket taker got the impression they were more than friends. That
was all she could say, because when she wasn't selling tickets she sat reading
in the booth. They had more luck at a photo shop. The owner was pulling down
the shutters when he saw Linda and the boy. For some reason he thought they
were planning to attack him and he hurried to lock up and leave. The
description he provided of the boy was fairly complete: five foot eight, denim
jacket with an insignia on the back, black jeans, and cowboy boots. The
inspectors asked him about the insignia. The owner of the photo shop said he
didn't remember it
very
well, but it
looked to him like a skull. Juan de Dios
for the moment had been transferred to the narcotics squad) and showed him more
than twenty insignias. The man recognized the one on the boy's jacket with no
hesitation. That same night the police staged an operation that rounded up two
dozen members of the Los Caciques gang. Both the ticket taker and the shop
owner were able to pick Jesus Chimal out of a lineup. Chimal was eighteen,
worked off and on at a motorcycle repair shop in Colonia Ruben Dario, had a
record of minor offenses.
Chimal's
interrogation was conducted by the police chief in person, along with Epifanio
Galindo and Inspector Ortiz Rebolledo.
Within
an
hour,
Chimal confessed to having killed
Linda Vazquez. As he told it, he had been dating the victim for three
weeks, since they'd met at a rock concert outside of El Adobe. Chimal fell in
love with her as he'd never fallen in love with anyone else before. They saw
each other behind Linda's parents' backs. Twice Chimal had visited her house
while her parents were away in
According to Chimal, Linda's parents traveled to
time. The evening of the crime Chimal invited Linda to another concert, this
one at El Arenas, a club where boxing matches were also held. Linda said she
couldn't go. They walked for a while: they went around the block and then
turned into the alley. Waiting there were Chimal's friends, four men and a
woman, in a black Peregrino they had just stolen.
Linda knew the woman and two of the men. They
talked about the concert. They smoked pot. Linda smoked too. They talked about
an abandoned house near a farming cooperative where no farmworkers lived
anymore. One of the boys suggested they go there. Linda refused. Someone
complained about something Linda had done. Someone accused her of something.
Linda wanted to leave but Chimal wouldn't let her. He asked her to get in the
car and make love. Linda didn't want to. Then Chimal and the others started to
hit her. After that, so she wouldn't say anything to her parents, they knifed
her. That same night, thanks to the information supplied by Chimal, the others
were arrested, except for one who, according to his parents, had fled Santa
Teresa a few hours after the crime. All of those arrested pleaded guilty.
At
the
end
of July some children found
the remains of Marisol Camarena, twenty-eight, owner of the nightclub Los
Heroes del Norte. Her body had been dropped into a fifty-gallon drum of
corrosive acid. Only her hands and feet were still whole. Identification was
possible thanks to her silicone implants. Two days before, she had been
kidnapped by seventeen men from her apartment above the nightclub. Her maid,
Carolina Arancibia, eighteen, managed to escape a presumably similar fate by
hiding in the attic with the daughter of the deceased, a tiny two-month-old
baby. From up above she heard the men talk, heard laughter, shouts, curses, the
sound of several cars starting. The case was handled by Inspector Lino Rivera,
who questioned a few regulars at the nightclub, but the seventeen kidnappers
and killers were never found.
•
From
the first to the fifteenth of August there was a heat wave, and two more
victims were found. The first was thirteen-year-old Marina Rebolledo. Her body
was discovered behind Secondary School 30, in Colonia Felix Gomez, a few yards
from the state judicial police building. She was dark, long haired, slightly
built, five foot two. She was wearing the same clothes she'd had on at the
moment of her disappearance: yellow shorts, white blouse, white socks, and
black shoes. The girl had left her house, at 38 Calle Mistula, in Colonia
morning to walk her sister to work at a maquiladora in Arsenio Farrell
industrial park, and she never came back. That same day her family filed a
missing person report. Two of the girl's male friends, fifteen and sixteen
years old, were arrested, but after a week in jail they were both released. On
August 15, the body of Angelica Nevares, twenty-three, was found near a sewage
ditch west of General Sepulveda industrial park. Angelica Nevares, better known
as Jessica, lived in Colonia Plata and was a dancer at the nightclub Mi Casita.
She had also worked as a dancer at the nightclub Los Heroes del Norte, whose
owner, Marisol Camarena, had been found not long ago in a drum of acid.
Angelica Nevares was from
in the state of Sinaloa, and she had been living in Santa Teresa for five
years. On August 16, the heat broke, and a slightly cooler wind began to blow
from the mountains.
On
August
17,
Perla
Beatriz
Ochoterena,
a
twenty-eight-year-old teacher, was found
hanged in her room. She was from the town of
She taught classes at Secondary School 20 and was, according to her friends and
acquaintances, a pleasant, easygoing person. She lived in an apartment on Calle
Jaguar, two blocks from Avenida Carranza, shared with two other teachers. In
her room were many books, especially poetry collections and essays, which she
ordered COD from bookstores in
her roommates, she was a sensitive and intelligent woman, who had started from
almost nothing (the town of
tiny, with virtually nothing but scenic views) and who had gotten where she was
by dint of hard work and stubbornness. They also said she liked to write and
that an
was handled by Juan de Dios
and from the beginning he had no doubt it was suicide. An unaddressed letter
was found in her desk, in which she tried to explain that she couldn't stand
what was happening in Santa Teresa anymore. In the letter it said: all those
dead girls. It was a heartfelt letter, thought Juan de Dios, and also slightly
sappy. In the letter it said: I can't take it anymore. It also said: I try to
make a life for myself, like everyone, but how? The inspector searched through
the teacher's papers for some of her poems but couldn't find any. He noted down
several titles of books from her collection. He asked her roommates whether the
teacher had a boyfriend. Her roommates said they had never seen her with a man.
She led such a quiet life, it got on her friends' nerves. All she seemed to
care about were her classes, her students, her books. She didn't have many
clothes. She was neat and hardworking and she never complained about anything.
Juan de Dios asked what they meant by that. Her roommates gave him an example:
sometimes they would forget to do their share of the housework, like washing
the dishes or sweeping, that kind of thing, and she would do it and not give
them a hard time about it. In fact she never gave anyone a hard time about
anything. Her life seemed devoid of scolding and blame.