The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border Read Online Free PDF Page B

going in that direction.
     
     
Ramona wondered why the policemen had asked to see one of Silvia's shoes when they didn't even bother to take it with them. They had simply looked at the size and put it down.
     
     
Francisco, the couple's second-oldest son, was in the kitchen. Hearing a commotion, he poked his head into the living room in time to see the officers leading his mother from the house.
     
     
"I'll come with you," Francisco volunteered, racing after the trio. His father was not anxious to accompany them. Angel looked fearful of what he might learn.
     
     
Yet Ramona was certain that Silvia was alive and waiting for her at the police station. The officers had given her no reason to believe otherwise.
     
     
"No!" one of the officers retorted. "She will go alone."
     
     
For a moment there was complete silence on the patio as the Moraleses exchanged fretful looks.
     
     
"Come on, seńora," the officer directed, motioning Ramona to the police car. He assured Francisco he would return his mother home in a few hours.
     
     
Ramona Morales collapsed to the floor of the morgue after authorities showed her the bleached white skull that had been recovered from beneath some brush in Lote Bravo. She could not reconcile this parched, skeletal remnant as having belonged to her beloved daughter.
     
     
Even after police showed her the pretty rose-colored blouse they had found hiked up over her daughter's breasts, the one that Silvia had been wearing on the day she disappeared, Ramona clung to the hope that Silvia was still alive. The ugly reality was simply too painful for the mother to accept. Instead, she convinced herself that somehow there had been a terrible mix-up. Ramona maintained that the remains she had been shown were not those of Silvia, and that her daughter was still alive, studying and singing in some far-off place, happy and well.
     
     
Despite their promise, the police didn't drive Ramona back home that afternoon but left her to fend for herself outside the morgue. The despairing mother was forced to beg in the street for bus fare back to Colonia Nuevo Hipódromo, where her husband and sons confronted the horrible reality.
     
     
Grief numbed Ramona's senses and robbed her of her will to live. The family buried Silvia in a cemetery nearby. Ramona made daily visits to the tomb of her dead child, and nightly she prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, that the same fate didn't happen to another daughter of Juárez.
     
     
But it did.
     
     
Eight days after Silvia Morales's forsaken body was discovered in the desert, another one was found in Lote Bravo: that of a twenty-year-old woman whom police later identified as Olga Alicia Pérez. She had been raped and stabbed; her hands had been tied with a belt and her neck was broken. As with Silvia, her right breast had been severed, and her left nipple bitten off.
     
     
Ramona's blood ran cold when she read of the grisly finding in the newspaper— and of the discovery of the bodies of six more teens in the days ahead. By the winter of 1995, nineteen young women had been killed, bringing the total, over three years, to forty-five.
     
     
Juárez, it seemed, was the perfect setting for a killer or killers. The victims were plentiful, poor, and trusting, and the crimes seemed to go unpunished.
     
     
And yet the question remained, who was killing these young women and why?
     
     
     
    Chapter Two

A Bag of Bones
They showed me a slab of bones. The only thing I could see was her little severed head.
     
     
    — IRMA PÉREZ MOTHER OF VICTIM OLGA ALICIA PÉREZ
IT WAS SEPTEMBER 9, 1995, when police showed Irma Pérez all that remained of her daughter— a bag of bleached bones. Olga Alicia Carrillo Pérez had disappeared about one month before on August 10, after working the afternoon shift at a downtown shoe store not far from the one where Silvia Morales had been employed.
     
     
Her disfigured corpse was found not by police as