MEXICO CITY — Mexico City prosecutors sought Thursday to downplay the case of an alleged serial killer who kept women’s bones and a saw in his room and apparently attacked women for more than a decade.
The city’s top prosecutor said the remains of six women were found in the suspect’s rented room, “not 20 as some unfounded reports suggest.”
Municipal prosecutor Ulises Lara highlighted that only three of his crimes occurred during the current administration, which took office at the end of 2018. He said the others apparently occurred in 2012, 2015 and 2018, meaning that the murderer went uncaptured for at least least 12 years.
Lara criticized reports that all the crimes took place in 2023 and 2024, during the term of former Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, who is now running for president, as “absolutely false and unfounded.”
And Lara claimed that the killer was essentially unstoppable because he “showed no signs of violent or aggressive behavior in his daily life.”
Lara did not specify the nature of the remains found in a search of the suspect’s rented rooms last week, but local media reported they were skulls. According to Mexican law, the suspect can only be identified by his first name, “Miguel,” local media reported, who worked as a chemist.
Investigators also found blood stains, bones, a saw, mobile phones and identity documents of missing women, as well as other “biological material” in the rooms. Lara said five of the identity cards belonged to women who have been located alive, but she did not say how many belonged to women who are still missing or among the dead.
Lara said that last week investigators also found “a series of notebooks that could well be narratives of the acts that Miguel carried out against his victims.”
Lara rejected criticism that Mexico City authorities do little to investigate cases of missing women until their bodies pile up, saying the number of reported murders of women has decreased.
But the suspect in this case was not captured until he broke into a neighbor’s apartment to kill his seventh victim last week, was interrupted and left a surviving witness.
According to prosecutors, the suspect apparently waited for a woman to briefly leave her apartment last week and then ran in and sexually abused and strangled her 17-year-old daughter.
The mother returned and watched him leave, but he cut her throat and fled. The mother survived but her daughter did not.
Because the suspect lived near the crime scene, he was quickly identified and captured.
The suspect has been detained to stand trial on charges of murder and attempted murder, both related to his latest victims.
Without adequate funding, training or professionalism, prosecutors in Mexico’s capital have systematically failed to apprehend killers until bodies pile up in such numbers that they are almost inevitable.
In 2021, a serial killer in a Mexico City suburb was only captured after years of alleged crimes (19 dismembered bodies were found buried in his home) due to the identity of the latest dismembered victim: the wife of a police commander
In 2018, a serial killer in Mexico City responsible for the deaths of at least 10 women was captured only after he was found pushing a dismembered body down the street in a baby stroller. He dumped most of the bodies of his victims in vacant lots.