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Police dumbfounded as serial killer stalks Mexico

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack in a city so gigantic where anonymity is the rule, where people don't know each other."

Bernardo Batiz, Mexico City attorney-general

This much they know: Someone has been murdering older women in Mexico City, strangling them in their homes, pocketing a keepsake and vanishing into the city's streets.

But investigators do not know whether the killer is a man or a woman, whether there is an accomplice or how the victims are chosen.

After two years and at least 24 unsolved murders, they have one fingerprint that matches partial prints from five other cases, a modus operandi and a police sketch of what appears to be a man made up as a woman.

Investigators pieced together much of the killer's technique from evidence at the crime scenes. The rest resulted from a break in July when the son of a possible prospective victim dropped by his mother's house unexpectedly and caught a glimpse of someone fleeing. The person left behind a full fingerprint.

To the residents of this capital and its unbounded suburbs, inured to street violence as they are, the presence of a serial killer is something alien. Such killers are seen as peculiarly American, a perversity born from a society many Mexicans believe long ago abandoned family ties, one that breeds hostile loners. Even the largely unsolved killings of more than 350 women over the past decade in Ciudad Juarez is seen as distant, a product of the city's closeness to the US and the fractured families that migration to the US has left behind.

Mexico City's apparently homegrown serial killer rattles the cultural myth here that older people are protected within the cocoon of loving extended families. The truth is that increasing numbers of older Mexicans live alone in a city where families are dispersed.

Bernardo Batiz, the attorney-general for Mexico City, took a long time to admit that the city was dealing with a serial killer, although newspapers have been referring to the mataviejitas, or "little old lady killer," for almost two years.

"It cost us more than a year for the authorities to take it seriously," said Pedro Borda, director of Mexico's National Institute for Elderly People. "Now we know that the prosecutor feels the pressure."

With the fingerprint offering evidence of a serial killer, the attorney general's office formed a task force and sought help from criminologists at the National Institute of Penal Sciences, who are creating a psychological profile of the killer.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack in a city so gigantic where anonymity is the rule, where people don't know each other," Batiz said.

The criminologists are looking for shared traits among the victims and clues from the crime scenes, and are comparing the profile of this killer with cases documented elsewhere.

"These are not casual victims, they are chosen victims," said Miguel Ontiveros, a criminologist at the institute.

Investigators believe that they can attribute nine homicides over the last two years to one person and that the same person may be responsible for 15 more in the same period. Others believe that the murderer may be responsible for more. Borda said there had been 66 murders of people older than 60 since 1998. They have been spread out all over the city, in middle-class and lower middle-class neighborhoods, in no evident pattern.

Public pressure has grown over the past few months with the killing of Maria de los Angeles Repper, 92, in the modest central neighborhood of Escandon, who was strangled with her scarf in her ground-floor apartment in October.

"The big problem is the scant data they have to work with," said Rafael Ruiz Harrell, a criminologist.

Until recently, many prosecutions relied solely on a confession, often extracted under torture. Preserving a crime scene has only recently become standard procedure.

"It's just inexcusable that after fingerprints have been taken from a crime scene, they turn out to be the prints of police themselves. It happens all over Mexico," Ontiveros said.
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