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.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese