The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (57 page)

“She was proud of what I was trying to do,” said Rosa, who was left to raise her daughter and two younger sons alone. In a note written on Valentine’s Day that year, Maria told her mother to “always look ahead and up, never down”. That has been almost impossible since the day her daughter disappeared.

Rosa remembers every detail of the day her daughter vanished.

“As usual, she did not want breakfast – she wanted to stay thin – though I persuaded her to have a bowl of cornflakes before she left for work,” Rosa said. “I had given my daughter permission to work in a shop during the Christmas holidays, as she wanted to buy herself some new clothes. I wasn’t well that day and went to sleep early. When I woke up the next day and my daughter wasn’t there, I went to the police to report her missing. They said she’d probably run away with a boyfriend.”

That night, while watching a round-up of the news, Rosa recognized the clothing Maria Isabel had been wearing when she left for work the day before. The body of her daughter had been found lying face down on wasteland west of Guatemala City. Her hands and feet had been bound with barbed wire. There was a rope around her neck. Her hair had been cut short and all her nails had been bent back. Her face was disfigured from numerous punches, her body punctured with small holes. She had been raped and stabbed.

When Rosa went to the morgue and discovered the brutal details of her daughter’s injuries, she fainted.

“When I collapsed, they told me not to get so worked up,” says Rosa, who later suffered a heart attack.

Rosa then began pushing the authorities to find her daughter’s killers. She gave them telephone records showing that Maria’s mobile phone had been used after her death. And she tracked down witnesses who had seen her daughter being pulled from a car. The police accused Rosa of meddling and denounced her daughter publicly as a prostitute. Such smear tactics are often used to intimidate the families of murder victims.

Undeterred, Rosa continued to demand that the police investigate the death of her daughter. Instead they merely increased the level of intimidation. Rosa’s teenage sons are often followed home from school. Cars are parked outside her house day and night, their occupants watching – undeterred even when a journalist visited to check out her story. Human-rights workers told the
Sunday Times
that such surveillance was a sign that the murder had a connection with officialdom and organized crime.

“I’m afraid,” Rosa said. “But when I see reports of more and more murders of girls and women, I know what other mothers are going through. I vow I will not give up my fight.”

In 2006, BBC correspondent Olenka Frankiel went to Guatemala to investigate the killings there. She found 21-year-old Claudia Madrid lying dead in the gutter. She had been shot while out for a walk with her children.

“Investigators walk past her husband in the morgue as he waits to identify her body,” said Frankel. “They will never question him.”

The husband was phlegmatic.

“It’s the fashion here to murder women,” he said. “They never investigate such third class crimes.”

Also in the morgue were two refuse sacks containing the body of a woman cut into 19 pieces and found in the street.

“Her decapitated head lies in the road,” said Frankiel. “Police remove her limbs from the plastic bags to show the press. If no one comes to identify her she will be classed XX, and buried in an unmarked grave.”

Then there was the naked swollen body of another woman found in a dried up river bed.

“Her mouth hangs open,” said Frankel. “Her eyes and a gash in her skull have been pecked by vultures. An investigator says: ‘She was probably a prostitute.’ He points at her hands. ‘Red nail varnish,’ he says . . . In Guatemala, the victim is always to blame. Another XX.”

Olenka Frankiel came across a dental technician whose neighbours ran to tell him they had seen kidnappers force his 20-year-old daughter into a car. He went to the police and begged them to put up road blocks to help save her. They told him nothing could be done for 24 hours. By then she was dead. Her body was found, mutilated and covered in teeth marks. She had been shot numerous times.

“I don’t want to live,” he told human-rights activist Norma Cruz. “I wish someone would shoot me.”

“There is total indifference from the authorities to these crimes,” says Cruz.

Months later, the man returned to the home he and his family had abandoned in fear and found the blood-and saliva-stained clothes his daughter was wearing when she was killed. This treatment of vital evidence is commonplace. It is routinely contaminated and returned to the families, or buried with the victim.

The police were no more helpful when Nancy Peralta went missing just a few months after Maria Isabel Veliz. When Nancy’s younger sisters Maria Elena and Liliana reported that the 30-year-old accountancy student had not returned home from university in February 2002, the police told them to come back a few days later if she did not show up. The following day, their father read that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found on the outskirts of Guatemala City. He phoned the morgue but was told that it could not be that of his daughter as her physical description did not match. However an item of clothing on the body recovered was the same as one she had been wearing when she left home. When he went to the morgue to check, he found his daughter had not only been killed, but her body had been horrifically mutilated. She had been stabbed 48 times and her head was practically severed.

“When I talk to the police, they refer to my sister jokingly as ‘the living dead’,” says Nancy’s sister Maria Elena, who is now studying law in the hope of bringing her sister’s murderer to justice. “They insisted that she was not dead as some other student had assumed her identity to enrol on a new university course. They showed no interest in investigating what had happened.”

One complaint of the Peralta family and Rosa Franco is that even the most basic forensic tests that could help identify the murderers were never carried out at the morgue. Morgue chief Dr Guerra complains of the lack of a forensic laboratory on site and the absence of DNA-testing facilities in the country. If they were taken, sample would have to be flown to Mexico or Costa Rica for analysis.

“Until a few years ago, the US helped train our workers in forensic science,” said Guerra. “But now that help has stopped.”

Police Chief Mendez, who runs a special unit set up in 2005 to look into the murder of women, explained why less than 10 percent of cases are investigated and, of the 527 murders of women in 2004, only one resulted in prosecution.

“Women are coming out of their homes and participating in all aspects of society more,” he said. “Many men hate them for this – This is a country with many
machistas
.”

Nearly 40 percent of the women killed are listed as housewives and over 20 percent as students.

Mendez says that the mutilations of women killed are the result of “satanic rituals” used as initiation ceremonies for new gang members. The Ministry of the Interior claims that Manuela Sachaz and Anthony Hernandez could have been murdered because Manuela was a gang member – even though the 19-year-old had only recently arrived from the countryside and had little, if anything, to do with the
barrios
.

Believing that the Guatemalan authorities are being deliberately obstructive, the Peralta family and Rosa Franco are planning to take their cases to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights set up in 1959. But most victims’ families have neither the know-how or resources to launch such a legal fight. Instead they sit in queues waiting to talk to human-rights workers and beg for news about what is being done to bring those who murdered their loved ones to justice. The answer is usually nothing.

Despite the frequency of the killings, the Guatemalan police rarely admit that they have one or many serial killers on their hands. However, in 2000, they conceded that a man that they dubbed as “Guatemala’s Jack the Ripper” was at large on the streets. In three months he strangled five prostitutes and they believed that he may also have killed streetwalkers in El Salvador and even Los Angeles. The killer uses plastic sheeting to strangle his victims and is fond of scrawling angry, moralistic messages on their backs in blood-red marker.

The killer began his work in Guatemala City on 27 January when police discovered the body of an unidentified prostitute who had been strangled in a run-down, pay-by-the-hour hotel downtown. On the victim’s back, the killer wrote he “didn’t like it, but couldn’t help killing” and that his spree of murders had already taken the life of two prostitutes in Los Angeles. Authorities in California said they had no record of similar killings.

The body of Roxana Jamileth Molina was discovered two weeks later in a dingy hotel room on the western edge of Guatemalan capital. She had been strangled. On 6 March, the owner of a hotel nearby led police to the remains of another strangled unidentified prostitute.

Four days later, the killer’s fourth victim was found in downtown Guatemala City. On the woman’s body, etched on her back in flowery handwriting, was written: “Death to all the dogs. Seven down, three to go.” More had plainly died. Then on 29 March, the body of a fifth strangled prostitute was found in Huehuetenango, 80 miles northwest of Guatemala City.

For once, they put officers on the streets at all hours, warning prostitutes and passing out computer-generated composites of the man they suspect was behind the killings. The pictures was compiled from witnesses who said they had seen the suspect enter various hotels with prostitutes who were later found murdered. The killer was depicted as a short, olive-skinned, 35-year-old man with sunken brown eyes and closely cropped black hair. The police said he had a Salvadorean accent and uses the last name Blanco.

“Everyone is scared,” said Rosa, a prostitute who charges $5 a trick to support her two children. “They all say, ‘I wonder if the next man I go with could be this killer.’ What we do is dangerous . . . this killer is hunting us.”

Even so, the prostitutes refuse to co-operate with the police. Although prostitution is not illegal in Guatemala, they have as much to fear from the police as their clients.

At one time, Enio Rivera, the director of Guatemala’s national police force, claimed that the authorities were so close to an arrest that the suspect left the country.

“We’re afraid our suspect has fled to El Salvador,” Rivera told reporters in April 2001. “We have been in close contact with authorities there because we are convinced this man will kill again.”

He said that police did not know for sure how many women the serial killer had slain but that authorities in neighbouring El Salvador were ready to blame the same suspect for the murder of a prostitute there that March. Rivera also said the killer had used his red marker to mark his victims with the letters MS, the initials of the gang “Mara Salvatrucha”.

“If he returns to Guatemala, the prostitutes are the ones in danger,” police spokesman Faustino Sanchez said. “If we are going to catch this delinquent, we will have to do it with their help.”

It was only after this serial killer got away that murder statistics were compiled by sex and the number of women being killed became apparent. Human-rights workers, who are regularly subjected to death threats and intimidation, say blaming the murder of women on gang violence is a deliberate oversimplification of the problem. Women are not only being “killed like flies” because they are considered of no worth, they say, but also they are being used as pawns in power struggles between competing organized crime networks.

This problem, it seems, has been going on for millennia. In the rainforests to the north of modern-day Guatemala City, in the country’s northern rainforest, archaeologists recently entering a long-sealed Mayan crypt found the remains of two women. One was pregnant. They were arranged in a ritual fashion, making it clear that they had been sacrificed as part of a power struggle between rival Mayan cities.

An attempt by the UN to set up a commission with powers to investigate and prosecute the country’s “hidden powers”, which they hope would serve as a model for other countries recovering from civil was, was dismissed by the Guatemalan authorities as “unconstitutional”. A debate began about how the terms of the commission can be amended to make it acceptable. But as the talking continues, so does the killing.

On just one day in June 2006, 12-year-old Hilda Macario was eviscerated with a machete while resisting rape – Hilda survived, but was shunned by her community because of the stigma attached to sexual violence – and 21-year-old Priscilla de Villatoro was stabbed to death by her boyfriend for refusing to have an abortion.

“Women here are dying worse than animals,” says Andrea Barrios of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights. “When the municipality announced this summer that it was launching a campaign to exterminate stray dogs, the public took to the streets in protest and it was stopped. But there is a great deal of indifference towards the murder of women, because a picture has been painted that those who die somehow deserve what they get.”

Hilda Morales, the lawyer heading a network of women’s groups formed as the problem has escalated: “Neither the police nor the government are taking this seriously. Yet what we are observing is pure hatred against women in the way they are killed, raped, tortured and mutilated.”

The situation is unlikely to change, she says, unless international pressure is brought to bear. Meanwhile the murder figures, not just of women, but also of political dissidents, male and female, continue to soar.

“Despite these cruel figures,” says Guatemala’s President Oscar Berger, “I am optimistic. We have reformed the police and we have more radio patrols.”

No one is holding their breath.

Iran’s Spider Killings

A new gang of serial killers are at large in Mashhad, one of Iran’s holiest cities. They have been strangling the local prostitutes and drug users and dumping them into local streets and canals. Newspapers have dubbed these slayings “the spider killings” because of the way the women were found wrapped in their black chadors.