June 1, 2020 • 41 mins
Episode 2 - Oz and Monica explore the case of Lilia Alejandra Andrade, whose abduction and murder revealed disturbing evidence that connects to other crimes. We meet the former Chief of Forensics in Juárez, to learn why he warned of a serial killer. And Diana shares disturbing details of how the victims were selected.
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the spotlight on series from our Health Discovered podcast. In
this special episode, we'll hear about living a fulfilling life
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and I was one sign. Now. Of course, prior to
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something was seriously wrong. Listen to Health Discovered on the
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Forgotten is
a production of ihont Media and Unusual Productions. Before we start,
(02:08):
This podcast contains accounts which some listeners will find disturbing,
but without them, the story can't be fully understood. Please
take care while listening last time on Forgotten. There were
only speculations that the markings might have indicated the initials
(02:30):
of a perpetrator or representative map, a map of murder.
You'd have to be a cretan if you're a serial murderer,
or you're a psychopath not to understand. Wow, it's like
antelopes at the waterhole. What a great opportunity for a
serial killer. These murders appeared to be taketplace systematically. It's
(02:53):
specific kinds of victims or being selected and kidnapped or
taken by force somehow or lured and then their body sound.
Murders of women had been going on unsolved in Huirez
since the early nineteen nineties. There were countless stories like
that of Sir Gario Gonzalez, who went missing on her
(03:16):
way home from work in nineteen ninety eight and whose
body was found in the desert two weeks later. In
early two thousand and one, there was another case that
matched the pattern, Lilia Alejandra Andrade. Like Sigario, she was
seventeen years old, She left for work one morning and
then she never came home. But this case had some
(03:37):
crucial differences that made El Paso journalist Dinah Washington Valdez
believe that it could be solved and unlock others in
the process. At the very least, it should force the
local police into action. The authorities are saying nothing is
related to each other. None of these deaths connect, you know,
it's all random. Diana didn't buy this, and she wasn't alone.
(04:02):
The FBI Special Agent in charge of El Paso Headrick Crawford,
was concerned about the possibility of an American serial killer
using Juarez as a hunting ground, but wherever the killer
was based. Diana was convinced that they were carefully selecting
their victims, and she was willing to do whatever it
took to prove it. Can you talk about what motivated
(04:25):
you to take vacation time, weekends, evenings to devote to
this story. They were not just random victims. There's something
organized taking place. As much as Diana was sure this
was true, it was almost impossible to prove without official investigation.
But then a case came along that looked set to
(04:48):
change everything. I think that a good prototype or a
model of these kinds of cases would be Lilia Alejandro
Garcia Andrade. Lilia Alejandra was a teenager and a mother
of two who worked at Immacuiladora, assembling plastic parts for appliances.
(05:09):
She posed for photos at work promoting the product she
helped make, and in February two thousand and one, she
went missing. Previously, every victim had disappeared seemingly into thin air,
but witnesses had seen Lilia Alejandra struggling in a car
a few days after she was abducted. Diana became obsessed
(05:32):
with this case as a key to solving the whole,
and she wants to interview the witnesses herself. A lawyer
in Juarez promised to help her find them. Then while
they were meeting, he changed his mind. He said, don't
touch this, don't go near it, like going, well, okay,
you don't want to be part of it, that's fine.
(05:52):
Just draw me the map and show me where I
could find the witnesses. And so he started to draw
me a nap that neighborhood to indicate work and go
find people of interest, and then he tore up the paper,
girdled it up and said, no, no, it's too dangerous
to stay away from it, Diana. But for Diana, the
(06:13):
warning had the opposite effect. It made her confident that
she was onto something. This case continued to strongly appeal
to me as an important case. So, like the naive
person that I was, I go into that neighborhood stunnocking
on doors. You know, here is a picture of that.
You should see this young woman and blah blah blah
(06:34):
and door to door. And I did run into someone
who said, no, you need to be on the other
side of the street, and they showed me where to
go find a couple of witnesses. Diana was able to
uncover an extraordinary detail of the last weeks of Lily
Alejandra's life that directly connected her with several other victims.
(06:56):
But Dinah also learned something else while she was interviewing witnesses.
She wasn't the only person on the case. Someone identifying
themselves as FBI agents knocked on the door and they
wanted to know what they saw, what they knew all
the details. And there is no such thing as the
FBI ever doing this. Somebody went there impersonating FBI. Why
(07:21):
would someone want to conduct their own interviews of the
witnesses to this crime? What they're hoping to learn? Were
they perhaps connected to leadres killer. I'm as Volosha and
I'm mon, this is forgotten. The women of Uires, barn
(07:53):
Sela Felicia. It was two thousand and one and Diana
(08:23):
Washington Valdez had been investigating crimes that she believed were
connected for years. Then Lilia Alejandro was abducted and murdered.
Something unusually sinister seemed to be happening. That story about
the lawyer who was literally about to help Diana tracked
down these witnesses Monica and then who tore up the
(08:46):
piece of paper he was drawing on. What do you
think he was thinking about? Why did he do that?
I think this lawyer was torn between helping Diana advance
her investigation and not wanting to put Diana in harm's way.
And that's attention that we all constantly live with doing
(09:08):
work like this in wat is, you have to make
the decision how far are you going to take things?
And you told me that's something that you've thought about
a lot. And then when you first started reporting Huares
you even develop your own protocols. I would think carefully
about what I would wear going to howatas. I really
loved this pair of cowboy boots that I had, and
(09:30):
I would love wearing them, and they would be helpful,
like if you're out reporting in the desert, they're they're
helpful to keep the sand out. But I would think
twice about putting those cowboy boots on because I would think, shoot,
what if someone stuck me into the back of their trunk.
It would be very uncomfortable to be wearing these cowboy
boots stuffed in somebody's trunk. But even with those grim
(09:55):
and scary thoughts, you did go ahead and do the reporting.
And Diana went ahead did the reporting. What do you
know about the neighborhood that she was knocking on doors in?
Diana describes it as a middle class neighborhood peppered with
small businesses. One of the witnesses who lived there was
a judge and another was a US citizen. They claim
(10:19):
they saw Lelia in a car parked in front of
a TV repair shop, and the people who lived there
seeing an American reporter knocking on doors and asking questions.
That must have been quite a strange site. Yes, yes, so.
At this point Diana had appeared on TV giving multiple
interviews about the work that she was doing, so she
(10:40):
was often recognized even in Wattis, but typically a reporter
going door to door in a neighborhood that isn't her
own is going to stick out, which, of course, property
put her risk. Absolutely to Diana, it seemed like a
risk worth taking, So she was the potal significance of
(11:01):
this case. So here's what Diana was able to piece
together about Lilia. Lilia Lejandra Andrade was say, vivacious, upgoing teenager.
She's very typical of the young women in watts who
turned up missing. You can tell from the victimology reports
(11:21):
that a lot of them were very responsible young women
because they were either enrolled in school or working. So
this young woman disappears, of all days, on Valentine's Day.
It all happened because someone was supposed to pick her
up the day from work and couldn't make it, and
(11:42):
something happened when Lilia got off work. It's assumed that
she got a ride with somebody. She then is missing
for several days. Lilia's shift ended at six pm the
day she disappeared. She borrowed money for fair from a
coworker and was last seen taking a shortcut across a
(12:05):
vacant lot on the way to the bus stop, so
someone sees her, They call her over to a car
and physically grab her. She is seen in a car
later in the neighborhood by witnesses struggling On February nineteenth,
Why does dispatchers receive several emergency calls? Witnesses report a
(12:28):
woman struggling in a white Ford thunder Bird. These witnesses
called the authorities. They call the police, need to come
out here, but no one came out for several hours.
Then the car vanished, and when the authorities finally showed up,
there was nothing happening, so they left. And so the
(12:51):
witnesses are concerned that if police had shown up sooner
than perhaps it could have saved Alilia, because she ends
up being brutally raped and then murdered and then her
body dumped nearby. Despite the multiple calls, the entry in
the log book for the night is nothing to report,
(13:15):
but Lilia's body was found within roughly twenty four hours
of her death, and that meant her autopsy could provide
answers about what had happened to her. Lilia's body was
discovered the day after the witnesses had seen her struggling
in a car, but what had happened to her? Who
was she with during the time she was still alive. Normally,
(13:39):
these questions were impossible to answer when a young woman's
body was discovered in Juarez. Sigario had been dead for
two weeks when her body was found, by which time
physical evidence that could have identified the perpetrator had deteriorated.
In fact, often authorities couldn't even determine who a victim was,
(14:01):
let alone who had killed them. But this time was different.
Despite the police's inexplicable failure to respond to the emergency calls,
Lilia's body was found soon after her death, and one
of the few officials Diana did trust was overseeing the autopsy.
I had confidence because Oscars and others that I knew
(14:22):
personally were involved in doing this examinations at the Morgue.
You and Oscar two people who are on the same side,
more or less right, truth secrecy. Yes, when we come back,
we meet Oscar Mines and learn about the evidence that
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(16:12):
now the best man. I was going to plan this
speech out while I got my oil change, but I
went to take five and it was a lot faster
than I thought. So here he goes. Okay, Tim, you
were my first friend. Angela you were my first Yeah.
I never thought the two of you would make it,
But I guess love really is blind. No, no, no,
(16:34):
I mean in a good way. I take five. Your
oil change is faster than you think. Take five to
stay in your car ten minute oil change. Before the break,
Dinah Washington Valdez told us that Oscar Minez was a
key source to begin to piece together who was killing
(16:55):
young women like Lilia, Alejandra Andrade. We decided to pay
him a visit. So who is this Oscar minus Monica,
who gives him a special insight into the crimes. Oscar
was the head of the forensics department for the State
Police in Chihuahua, so he was very directly involved in
(17:15):
the investigation of the women's murders, and he was actually
one of the first investigators to sound the alarm that
there might be a potential serial killer in the city.
When we met him for our interview, Oscar was teaching
criminology at the Hawades University and so we met him
(17:36):
in school after one of his classes, in an empty auditorium.
My name is Oscar minus Galba. I used to be
a VES for the forensic department at the State Police.
Can you describe your job? I mean, with everything like
you like to pover see the crime scene. Working uptops.
(18:00):
Is a lot of homicides committed against women's basically some
kind of seldom ass acistic sexual predator type crimes. Um
Diana was very was one of the cases they had
the hardest. Yeah, I was there when the relatives went
to identify the body. She was missing for what was
(18:24):
it like a week something like that, a few days,
So she wasn't murdery immediate. I mean she was badly
beaten and greats which did you feel looking at these remains? Well,
the first thing is trying to do the process of
collecting evidence. Well, first you tend to disconnect. You see
(18:50):
this a case when you come from their relatives of
the victims, as it hits you, you know it's h
And also you need to imagine and what these big
things went through to try to find out when were
they taken, how long were they abducted before they were killed?
I mean you have to go through into all this
horrible process. Was she clothed when you found her, or
(19:14):
in a state of to us half naked? And where
was the body in a field within the sea. This
was the reason why Lily Alejandro was discovered so quickly.
Normally victims were dumped in the desert on the outskirts
of town, but Lily's body was discovered near a commercial area,
(19:38):
almost as though the killer was becoming more brazen, and
her autopsy had something strange and disturbing in common with
other victims who OSCAR had examined physical evidence that didn't degrade.
I didn't have access to all the cases, but the
faces are related. They tied their hands choe laces. So
(20:01):
when I saw the body of Alejandra checked their frist
and soon after was the marks of choe laces. How
do you know? Because I've seen this before. Multiple victims
had their hands tied with shoelaces. In fact, this was
so common that Oscar was actually expecting it when he
examined Lily Alexandra, and indeed he was right. This is
(20:26):
the kind of signature that psychological profilers often jump on
to narrow down the field of suspects. It was a
concrete lead. You warned the authorities that you suspected a
serial killer. Yeah, because you saw a pattern. Their young
women poor, usually students, factory workers, and they were adopted
(20:49):
rape and usually murdered by strangulation. And then the position
and the way they left the bodies, you could see
connection there. Diana told us that many victims had broken
necks because the perpetrator wanted to achieve a certain sexual effect.
(21:10):
And sure enough, Lili Alexandra's neck was broken, and her
case revealed another haunting fact about the killer's modus of randy.
We believe she was fed at least half an hour
before she was killed. She was fed. Whoever took Lili
Alejandra on February the fourteenth kept her alive for several
(21:32):
days before killing her. They also moved her around. According
to the witness, reports from February nineteenth. Who could be
capable of this? I mean, in this case its been
how organized? Because she was abducted, she was kept in
a place, so someone was guarding her. She had already
(21:55):
been in captivity for a week, for a few days, yes,
so probably she was fed and then someone came to
her and then she was raping disposed. The fact that
she'd been fed, along with the shoelaces and the broken
neck suggested highly organized serial offender. But there was something else,
(22:15):
something that could have begun the end game in these murders.
Were you able to collect any biological evidence in the
case na? But what do you compare it to in
what kind of evidence? DNA seemen instructed from the bag
I flew to one of what and because they had
a new DNA love there? Did you fly yourself? Because
(22:38):
I don't know. I didn't trusted you know if I
said it to Mexico City, because in Mexico City they
lost the first batch of tissue to test the DNA,
so we had to go again and send another buys
and nothing came back from that or what what came
back from that? Well, you need to compare it to somewe.
(23:04):
Oscar was so worried that the samples will get lost
he personally escorted them to a lab in Guanahuato, almost
a thousand miles away from Juarez. But somehow this potentially
definitive biological evidence never helped secure a conviction, and this
failure to act on all of the evidence that came
to light in Lely Alexandra's autopsy was infuriating to her
(23:26):
family and to Dina Washington. Valdez Oscar Minus is familiar
with the DNA profile. I mean, it's like a take
a piece of paper, The DNA profile is on there.
Why did somebody go on and rest something. The authorities
(23:46):
claimed that they had no suspects to cross reference to
DNA with, and one of the things that stood in
the way of identifying possible culprits was that the authorities
maintained the Huires serial killer was already behind bars. In
nineteen ninety five, after the first mass grave of women
was discovered, an Egyptian national called Abdel Latif Sharif. Sharif
(24:09):
was arrested on suspicion of being behind the killings, and
he was never fully exonerated. So this was something that
jumped out to me even before we started working together
the Monica this idea that there was a prime suspect
in jail, but the killings were continuing. How did this
situation come about? So when these serial sexual murders started happening,
(24:35):
people were startled and shocked. They couldn't understand why this
was happening in their community. During that time, in the
local newspapers, you'd come across headlines almost daily like a
faceless psychopath stalks the city, a maniac on the loose.
It's around this time that an Egyptian chemist x child
(25:00):
from the US moves to Hoattas. His name is Abdel
Latif Shadi Shadif. He's in his late forties, at least
six feet tall, athletic build, and this thick, dark mustache.
He's handsome and has a charming personality, and before long
(25:23):
he becomes a well recognized character among the downtown Wattas
nightclub scene. He develops this reputation as a party animal
with deep pockets. Shadif again is a chemist. He works
for a big American company developing valuable patents. So he's
(25:45):
a smart, professional guy with a dark past. In the
United States, Shadif wrecked up a series of arrests and
accusations for rape and battery. He went to jail for
the crimes, at one point even breaking out of jail
while serving a twelve year sentence. He's not in what
(26:08):
is very long before he gets arrested there too, and
he's accused of kidnapping and raping a woman after hanging
out in the clubs one night, and Chatty fits the
profile of this serial killer the public imagines is stalking
their city, killing their women. So when police arrest him,
(26:32):
they parade him before the media and announce he's a
prime suspect, and at first the public believes the police.
But there's a problem. The killings continue after he gets jailed,
and the killings continue in the same pattern that they
were occurring prior to his arrest. So clearly something is
(26:56):
wrong and said, how do the authority respond to that? Well,
it calls into serious doubt their prime suspect. So you know,
the police have to come up with a way to
explain why are these murders continuing. And so it's like
somebody in the hottest police force must have a vivid imagination,
(27:19):
because the next theory they come up with gets even
more twisted. They bring into custody members of an alleged
gang called the Revels or the Rebels. Police claim Sharif
is paying off this gang to murder more women and
help make the case for his innocence. There was a
(27:43):
moment of relief in Juarez when Sharif was arrested, because
his background made it plausible that he was responsible. The
authorities obviously didn't want to admit that they were wrong,
so they doubled down and the Rebeldez gang appeared in
the Final Flourish. It was claimed that Sharif demanded proof
that the gang were killing women on his behalf, delivered
(28:05):
in the form of underwear to his jail cell. And
the thing is, the police never acknowledged that this wasn't true,
and that meant that no one could acknowledge that the
same killer who was killing in nineteen ninety five might
still be killing in two thousand and one. That's why
Oscar Manez was sounding the alarm. He didn't believe the
(28:25):
murders had ever stopped, and in Lily Alejandra's autopsy he
saw all the hallmarks of a serial killer. And this
wasn't just any serial killer. It was a killer who
was capable of keeping a victim alive for several days,
of moving the victim around, and seemingly of intimidating witnesses.
(28:46):
All of this made Diana all the more determined to
identify her own suspects. But as she led her investigation,
one of the things she found puzzling was how the
crimes were being covered in the local press. It was
very different for me, being in the US media, to
read that Mexican press would refer to the victims as
(29:10):
ultra sacrificada like sacrifice. To use that term specifically, I
always thought it was very odd and even unnecessary and
even unprofessional if I was the editor, you know, saying, hey,
you know, why are you using this kind of terminology
that connotes that were having a ritual here and people
are reading sacrificed as part of that ritual. Later on,
(29:34):
I realized how apt that term is to describe exactly
what was happening in what is It is indeed like
a giant ritual, and the offerings are these victims when
we come back. Diana explains how she came to understand
why the word sacrifice is so appropriate and a highly
(29:57):
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the best man. I was going to plan this speech
out while I got my oil change, but I went
to take five and it was a lot faster than
(30:39):
I thought. So here it goes. Okay, Tim, you were
my first friend. Angela you were my first Yeah. I
never thought the two of you would make it. But
I guess love really is blind. No, no, no, I
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Dinah Washington. Valdez described the murders of women in Huarez
(32:05):
in terms of ritual. The word sacrifice is very closely
related to Mexican indigenous cultures like the Aztecs. There's a
thread of that that still runs strong in Mexico, just
in her practice of folklore and that sort of thing.
The presence of triangles on some of the victims let
(32:29):
people to claim that they had literally been sacrificed to
a saint called Santa Verte the Holy Death. Dinah didn't
buy this, but she was struck by how the victims
were obviously being identified well in advance of being killed.
The Aztec culture, a victim is volunteered, their hearts are
(32:50):
torn out. It's a blood offering to appease the gods.
To me, this is exactly what is taking place in
what is We have the offer of young women as
a sacrifice. And that's the important thing about these systematic
murders is to understand the women were picked. They were selected.
(33:13):
Diana's interviews with the witnesses had turned up that strange
detail about the fake FBI agents. She was never able
to find out who they were, but she was able
to piece together some telling details about Lili Alejandra's last
few weeks alive, including the fact that photographs of her
had circulated in promotional shots for the Maculadora where she worked.
(33:38):
Her kidnapping is very interesting because apparently someone saw her
and decided she's going to be next, right. They liked
her look, they knew something about her background. Already, someone
was watching, someone's watching. They had people looking out for
certain kinds of victims, honing in on them, in on them,
(34:02):
and then arranging for them to be kidnapped. Lilya Lejander
disappeared on the very day that her family didn't come
to collect her from work, and Cigario Gonzalez went missing
shortly after she had changed shift and had to start
commuting to work alone. The killer struck at moments of
(34:24):
maximum vulnerability, but according to Dinah's reporting, they also had
a formalized system to identify victims and to learn their schedule.
I think it's worth mentioning the Eco schools downtown became
and this is also information that FBI informants had given
(34:44):
to the FBI. Several of the young ladies had disappeared
in downtown what is happened to have stopped into a
computer school then called Echo. The FBI again, this time
it's the real FBI who who had their own interest
in solving these crimes, and their informal network in Juarez
(35:05):
suggested that victims were being identified using a computer school
called Echo. In fact, Echo was a national chain of schools,
one opened in the early nineties in downtown Juirez. This
was the time when the personal computer was on the rise,
and you can imagine a young woman like Lili Alejandra
(35:25):
working a grueling job on an assembly line, being tempted
by the promise of transcending circumstances through computer literacy. After all,
most of the victims' families had moved to Juarez in
search for a better life in searchial opportunity, and computer
schools could lead to a coveted white collar job. What
(35:48):
would happened is the young ladies would be walking down
the sidewalk and someone would approach them with the clipboard
the column, the ECO promoters wanting to interest them in
the training that the ECO school provided. The important thing
about these computer schools is that the young ladies were
putting their personal data into the questionnaires and their pictures
(36:11):
were taken. So it became very easy for someone at
another end, whoever this information was being forward to, to
let this operate as a catalog, you know, a catalog
of potential victims through the questionnaires they filled out at
the computer schools, including their pictures. Someone could sit down
there and say, oh, yes about this one or that one.
(36:32):
You know, these schools are being used to look for
and identify young women of certain profiles. Well, I mean
women disappeared and then they were found murdered later, but
they were selected. Approximately how many women linked to the
(36:54):
computer school were murdered, I can only vouch for six.
But when I went back and I question the families
of victims, one of the questions I'd added to my
interviews was how they were coming to contact with a
Nickel score, and they would say, oh, yes, you know,
oh yes. Lilia Lejandra Andrade was one of them. Lilia
(37:19):
Alejandra disappeared on a Wednesday. Her first ECHO class was
set to begin on the Saturday of that week. What
Dinah's reporting revealed went beyond a mere pattern. It suggested
a process that almost certainly involved more than one person,
and as she pushed to reveal who might be involved,
(37:40):
she began to receive serious threats against her life. That's
on our next episode. I'm as Veloschen and see you
next time. Noste Hala Felicia Forgotten. The Women of Juarez
(38:40):
is co hosted by Me Monica and me oswald Oshan.
Forgotten is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hatigia. Our
producers are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvelle. Sound editing by
Julian Weller and Jacopo Penzo Lucas Riley is our story
(39:01):
Kitlyn Thompson is our consulting producer. Production support from Emily
Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Music by Leonardo Hablum and Hakabo Libermann.
Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special thanks to the reporting
of Tim Madigan in the Fort Worth Star Telegram and
John Ward Anderson in the Washington Post for details on
(39:24):
the life and arrest of Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif. Hello, beautiful.
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I was going to plan this speech out while I
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and it was a lot faster than I thought, So
here he goes. Okay, Tim, you were my first friend.
Angela you were my first Yeah. I never thought the
two of you would make it, but I guess love
really is blind. No no, no, I mean in a
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doctor John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host of
(01:05):
the spotlight on series from our Health Discovered podcast. In
this special episode, we'll hear about living a fulfilling life
with chronic cart failure, a condition that doesn't have to
be as scary as it sounds. I was outside shoveling
snow and I noticed I was coughing up flem. Unbeknownst
to me, I left a trail of blood behind me,
(01:26):
and I was one sign. Now. Of course, prior to
I was excessively gaining weight, I had issues breathing, sleep apnea,
I had a lot of those classic signs. My legs
were beginning to retain fluid, and I was having heart
palt patients. My heart would be really excessively fast and so.
But ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought
(01:47):
something was seriously wrong. Listen to Health Discovered on the
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Forgotten is
a production of ihont Media and Unusual Productions. Before we start,
(02:08):
This podcast contains accounts which some listeners will find disturbing,
but without them, the story can't be fully understood. Please
take care while listening last time on Forgotten. There were
only speculations that the markings might have indicated the initials
(02:30):
of a perpetrator or representative map, a map of murder.
You'd have to be a cretan if you're a serial murderer,
or you're a psychopath not to understand. Wow, it's like
antelopes at the waterhole. What a great opportunity for a
serial killer. These murders appeared to be taketplace systematically. It's
(02:53):
specific kinds of victims or being selected and kidnapped or
taken by force somehow or lured and then their body sound.
Murders of women had been going on unsolved in Huirez
since the early nineteen nineties. There were countless stories like
that of Sir Gario Gonzalez, who went missing on her
(03:16):
way home from work in nineteen ninety eight and whose
body was found in the desert two weeks later. In
early two thousand and one, there was another case that
matched the pattern, Lilia Alejandra Andrade. Like Sigario, she was
seventeen years old, She left for work one morning and
then she never came home. But this case had some
(03:37):
crucial differences that made El Paso journalist Dinah Washington Valdez
believe that it could be solved and unlock others in
the process. At the very least, it should force the
local police into action. The authorities are saying nothing is
related to each other. None of these deaths connect, you know,
it's all random. Diana didn't buy this, and she wasn't alone.
(04:02):
The FBI Special Agent in charge of El Paso Headrick Crawford,
was concerned about the possibility of an American serial killer
using Juarez as a hunting ground, but wherever the killer
was based. Diana was convinced that they were carefully selecting
their victims, and she was willing to do whatever it
took to prove it. Can you talk about what motivated
(04:25):
you to take vacation time, weekends, evenings to devote to
this story. They were not just random victims. There's something
organized taking place. As much as Diana was sure this
was true, it was almost impossible to prove without official investigation.
But then a case came along that looked set to
(04:48):
change everything. I think that a good prototype or a
model of these kinds of cases would be Lilia Alejandro
Garcia Andrade. Lilia Alejandra was a teenager and a mother
of two who worked at Immacuiladora, assembling plastic parts for appliances.
(05:09):
She posed for photos at work promoting the product she
helped make, and in February two thousand and one, she
went missing. Previously, every victim had disappeared seemingly into thin air,
but witnesses had seen Lilia Alejandra struggling in a car
a few days after she was abducted. Diana became obsessed
(05:32):
with this case as a key to solving the whole,
and she wants to interview the witnesses herself. A lawyer
in Juarez promised to help her find them. Then while
they were meeting, he changed his mind. He said, don't
touch this, don't go near it, like going, well, okay,
you don't want to be part of it, that's fine.
(05:52):
Just draw me the map and show me where I
could find the witnesses. And so he started to draw
me a nap that neighborhood to indicate work and go
find people of interest, and then he tore up the paper,
girdled it up and said, no, no, it's too dangerous
to stay away from it, Diana. But for Diana, the
(06:13):
warning had the opposite effect. It made her confident that
she was onto something. This case continued to strongly appeal
to me as an important case. So, like the naive
person that I was, I go into that neighborhood stunnocking
on doors. You know, here is a picture of that.
You should see this young woman and blah blah blah
(06:34):
and door to door. And I did run into someone
who said, no, you need to be on the other
side of the street, and they showed me where to
go find a couple of witnesses. Diana was able to
uncover an extraordinary detail of the last weeks of Lily
Alejandra's life that directly connected her with several other victims.
(06:56):
But Dinah also learned something else while she was interviewing witnesses.
She wasn't the only person on the case. Someone identifying
themselves as FBI agents knocked on the door and they
wanted to know what they saw, what they knew all
the details. And there is no such thing as the
FBI ever doing this. Somebody went there impersonating FBI. Why
(07:21):
would someone want to conduct their own interviews of the
witnesses to this crime? What they're hoping to learn? Were
they perhaps connected to leadres killer. I'm as Volosha and
I'm mon, this is forgotten. The women of Uires, barn
(07:53):
Sela Felicia. It was two thousand and one and Diana
(08:23):
Washington Valdez had been investigating crimes that she believed were
connected for years. Then Lilia Alejandro was abducted and murdered.
Something unusually sinister seemed to be happening. That story about
the lawyer who was literally about to help Diana tracked
down these witnesses Monica and then who tore up the
(08:46):
piece of paper he was drawing on. What do you
think he was thinking about? Why did he do that?
I think this lawyer was torn between helping Diana advance
her investigation and not wanting to put Diana in harm's way.
And that's attention that we all constantly live with doing
(09:08):
work like this in wat is, you have to make
the decision how far are you going to take things?
And you told me that's something that you've thought about
a lot. And then when you first started reporting Huares
you even develop your own protocols. I would think carefully
about what I would wear going to howatas. I really
loved this pair of cowboy boots that I had, and
(09:30):
I would love wearing them, and they would be helpful,
like if you're out reporting in the desert, they're they're
helpful to keep the sand out. But I would think
twice about putting those cowboy boots on because I would think, shoot,
what if someone stuck me into the back of their trunk.
It would be very uncomfortable to be wearing these cowboy
boots stuffed in somebody's trunk. But even with those grim
(09:55):
and scary thoughts, you did go ahead and do the reporting.
And Diana went ahead did the reporting. What do you
know about the neighborhood that she was knocking on doors in?
Diana describes it as a middle class neighborhood peppered with
small businesses. One of the witnesses who lived there was
a judge and another was a US citizen. They claim
(10:19):
they saw Lelia in a car parked in front of
a TV repair shop, and the people who lived there
seeing an American reporter knocking on doors and asking questions.
That must have been quite a strange site. Yes, yes, so.
At this point Diana had appeared on TV giving multiple
interviews about the work that she was doing, so she
(10:40):
was often recognized even in Wattis, but typically a reporter
going door to door in a neighborhood that isn't her
own is going to stick out, which, of course, property
put her risk. Absolutely to Diana, it seemed like a
risk worth taking, So she was the potal significance of
(11:01):
this case. So here's what Diana was able to piece
together about Lilia. Lilia Lejandra Andrade was say, vivacious, upgoing teenager.
She's very typical of the young women in watts who
turned up missing. You can tell from the victimology reports
(11:21):
that a lot of them were very responsible young women
because they were either enrolled in school or working. So
this young woman disappears, of all days, on Valentine's Day.
It all happened because someone was supposed to pick her
up the day from work and couldn't make it, and
(11:42):
something happened when Lilia got off work. It's assumed that
she got a ride with somebody. She then is missing
for several days. Lilia's shift ended at six pm the
day she disappeared. She borrowed money for fair from a
coworker and was last seen taking a shortcut across a
(12:05):
vacant lot on the way to the bus stop, so
someone sees her, They call her over to a car
and physically grab her. She is seen in a car
later in the neighborhood by witnesses struggling On February nineteenth,
Why does dispatchers receive several emergency calls? Witnesses report a
(12:28):
woman struggling in a white Ford thunder Bird. These witnesses
called the authorities. They call the police, need to come
out here, but no one came out for several hours.
Then the car vanished, and when the authorities finally showed up,
there was nothing happening, so they left. And so the
(12:51):
witnesses are concerned that if police had shown up sooner
than perhaps it could have saved Alilia, because she ends
up being brutally raped and then murdered and then her
body dumped nearby. Despite the multiple calls, the entry in
the log book for the night is nothing to report,
(13:15):
but Lilia's body was found within roughly twenty four hours
of her death, and that meant her autopsy could provide
answers about what had happened to her. Lilia's body was
discovered the day after the witnesses had seen her struggling
in a car, but what had happened to her? Who
was she with during the time she was still alive. Normally,
(13:39):
these questions were impossible to answer when a young woman's
body was discovered in Juarez. Sigario had been dead for
two weeks when her body was found, by which time
physical evidence that could have identified the perpetrator had deteriorated.
In fact, often authorities couldn't even determine who a victim was,
(14:01):
let alone who had killed them. But this time was different.
Despite the police's inexplicable failure to respond to the emergency calls,
Lilia's body was found soon after her death, and one
of the few officials Diana did trust was overseeing the autopsy.
I had confidence because Oscars and others that I knew
(14:22):
personally were involved in doing this examinations at the Morgue.
You and Oscar two people who are on the same side,
more or less right, truth secrecy. Yes, when we come back,
we meet Oscar Mines and learn about the evidence that
emerged from Lilia Alejandre's autopsy. There's no sign of identity
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(16:12):
now the best man. I was going to plan this
speech out while I got my oil change, but I
went to take five and it was a lot faster
than I thought. So here he goes. Okay, Tim, you
were my first friend. Angela you were my first Yeah.
I never thought the two of you would make it,
But I guess love really is blind. No, no, no,
(16:34):
I mean in a good way. I take five. Your
oil change is faster than you think. Take five to
stay in your car ten minute oil change. Before the break,
Dinah Washington Valdez told us that Oscar Minez was a
key source to begin to piece together who was killing
(16:55):
young women like Lilia, Alejandra Andrade. We decided to pay
him a visit. So who is this Oscar minus Monica,
who gives him a special insight into the crimes. Oscar
was the head of the forensics department for the State
Police in Chihuahua, so he was very directly involved in
(17:15):
the investigation of the women's murders, and he was actually
one of the first investigators to sound the alarm that
there might be a potential serial killer in the city.
When we met him for our interview, Oscar was teaching
criminology at the Hawades University and so we met him
(17:36):
in school after one of his classes, in an empty auditorium.
My name is Oscar minus Galba. I used to be
a VES for the forensic department at the State Police.
Can you describe your job? I mean, with everything like
you like to pover see the crime scene. Working uptops.
(18:00):
Is a lot of homicides committed against women's basically some
kind of seldom ass acistic sexual predator type crimes. Um
Diana was very was one of the cases they had
the hardest. Yeah, I was there when the relatives went
to identify the body. She was missing for what was
(18:24):
it like a week something like that, a few days,
So she wasn't murdery immediate. I mean she was badly
beaten and greats which did you feel looking at these remains? Well,
the first thing is trying to do the process of
collecting evidence. Well, first you tend to disconnect. You see
(18:50):
this a case when you come from their relatives of
the victims, as it hits you, you know it's h
And also you need to imagine and what these big
things went through to try to find out when were
they taken, how long were they abducted before they were killed?
I mean you have to go through into all this
horrible process. Was she clothed when you found her, or
(19:14):
in a state of to us half naked? And where
was the body in a field within the sea. This
was the reason why Lily Alejandro was discovered so quickly.
Normally victims were dumped in the desert on the outskirts
of town, but Lily's body was discovered near a commercial area,
(19:38):
almost as though the killer was becoming more brazen, and
her autopsy had something strange and disturbing in common with
other victims who OSCAR had examined physical evidence that didn't degrade.
I didn't have access to all the cases, but the
faces are related. They tied their hands choe laces. So
(20:01):
when I saw the body of Alejandra checked their frist
and soon after was the marks of choe laces. How
do you know? Because I've seen this before. Multiple victims
had their hands tied with shoelaces. In fact, this was
so common that Oscar was actually expecting it when he
examined Lily Alexandra, and indeed he was right. This is
(20:26):
the kind of signature that psychological profilers often jump on
to narrow down the field of suspects. It was a
concrete lead. You warned the authorities that you suspected a
serial killer. Yeah, because you saw a pattern. Their young
women poor, usually students, factory workers, and they were adopted
(20:49):
rape and usually murdered by strangulation. And then the position
and the way they left the bodies, you could see
connection there. Diana told us that many victims had broken
necks because the perpetrator wanted to achieve a certain sexual effect.
(21:10):
And sure enough, Lili Alexandra's neck was broken, and her
case revealed another haunting fact about the killer's modus of randy.
We believe she was fed at least half an hour
before she was killed. She was fed. Whoever took Lili
Alejandra on February the fourteenth kept her alive for several
(21:32):
days before killing her. They also moved her around. According
to the witness, reports from February nineteenth. Who could be
capable of this? I mean, in this case its been
how organized? Because she was abducted, she was kept in
a place, so someone was guarding her. She had already
(21:55):
been in captivity for a week, for a few days, yes,
so probably she was fed and then someone came to
her and then she was raping disposed. The fact that
she'd been fed, along with the shoelaces and the broken
neck suggested highly organized serial offender. But there was something else,
(22:15):
something that could have begun the end game in these murders.
Were you able to collect any biological evidence in the
case na? But what do you compare it to in
what kind of evidence? DNA seemen instructed from the bag
I flew to one of what and because they had
a new DNA love there? Did you fly yourself? Because
(22:38):
I don't know. I didn't trusted you know if I
said it to Mexico City, because in Mexico City they
lost the first batch of tissue to test the DNA,
so we had to go again and send another buys
and nothing came back from that or what what came
back from that? Well, you need to compare it to somewe.
(23:04):
Oscar was so worried that the samples will get lost
he personally escorted them to a lab in Guanahuato, almost
a thousand miles away from Juarez. But somehow this potentially
definitive biological evidence never helped secure a conviction, and this
failure to act on all of the evidence that came
to light in Lely Alexandra's autopsy was infuriating to her
(23:26):
family and to Dina Washington. Valdez Oscar Minus is familiar
with the DNA profile. I mean, it's like a take
a piece of paper, The DNA profile is on there.
Why did somebody go on and rest something. The authorities
(23:46):
claimed that they had no suspects to cross reference to
DNA with, and one of the things that stood in
the way of identifying possible culprits was that the authorities
maintained the Huires serial killer was already behind bars. In
nineteen ninety five, after the first mass grave of women
was discovered, an Egyptian national called Abdel Latif Sharif. Sharif
(24:09):
was arrested on suspicion of being behind the killings, and
he was never fully exonerated. So this was something that
jumped out to me even before we started working together
the Monica this idea that there was a prime suspect
in jail, but the killings were continuing. How did this
situation come about? So when these serial sexual murders started happening,
(24:35):
people were startled and shocked. They couldn't understand why this
was happening in their community. During that time, in the
local newspapers, you'd come across headlines almost daily like a
faceless psychopath stalks the city, a maniac on the loose.
It's around this time that an Egyptian chemist x child
(25:00):
from the US moves to Hoattas. His name is Abdel
Latif Shadi Shadif. He's in his late forties, at least
six feet tall, athletic build, and this thick, dark mustache.
He's handsome and has a charming personality, and before long
(25:23):
he becomes a well recognized character among the downtown Wattas
nightclub scene. He develops this reputation as a party animal
with deep pockets. Shadif again is a chemist. He works
for a big American company developing valuable patents. So he's
(25:45):
a smart, professional guy with a dark past. In the
United States, Shadif wrecked up a series of arrests and
accusations for rape and battery. He went to jail for
the crimes, at one point even breaking out of jail
while serving a twelve year sentence. He's not in what
(26:08):
is very long before he gets arrested there too, and
he's accused of kidnapping and raping a woman after hanging
out in the clubs one night, and Chatty fits the
profile of this serial killer the public imagines is stalking
their city, killing their women. So when police arrest him,
(26:32):
they parade him before the media and announce he's a
prime suspect, and at first the public believes the police.
But there's a problem. The killings continue after he gets jailed,
and the killings continue in the same pattern that they
were occurring prior to his arrest. So clearly something is
(26:56):
wrong and said, how do the authority respond to that? Well,
it calls into serious doubt their prime suspect. So you know,
the police have to come up with a way to
explain why are these murders continuing. And so it's like
somebody in the hottest police force must have a vivid imagination,
(27:19):
because the next theory they come up with gets even
more twisted. They bring into custody members of an alleged
gang called the Revels or the Rebels. Police claim Sharif
is paying off this gang to murder more women and
help make the case for his innocence. There was a
(27:43):
moment of relief in Juarez when Sharif was arrested, because
his background made it plausible that he was responsible. The
authorities obviously didn't want to admit that they were wrong,
so they doubled down and the Rebeldez gang appeared in
the Final Flourish. It was claimed that Sharif demanded proof
that the gang were killing women on his behalf, delivered
(28:05):
in the form of underwear to his jail cell. And
the thing is, the police never acknowledged that this wasn't true,
and that meant that no one could acknowledge that the
same killer who was killing in nineteen ninety five might
still be killing in two thousand and one. That's why
Oscar Manez was sounding the alarm. He didn't believe the
(28:25):
murders had ever stopped, and in Lily Alejandra's autopsy he
saw all the hallmarks of a serial killer. And this
wasn't just any serial killer. It was a killer who
was capable of keeping a victim alive for several days,
of moving the victim around, and seemingly of intimidating witnesses.
(28:46):
All of this made Diana all the more determined to
identify her own suspects. But as she led her investigation,
one of the things she found puzzling was how the
crimes were being covered in the local press. It was
very different for me, being in the US media, to
read that Mexican press would refer to the victims as
(29:10):
ultra sacrificada like sacrifice. To use that term specifically, I
always thought it was very odd and even unnecessary and
even unprofessional if I was the editor, you know, saying, hey,
you know, why are you using this kind of terminology
that connotes that were having a ritual here and people
are reading sacrificed as part of that ritual. Later on,
(29:34):
I realized how apt that term is to describe exactly
what was happening in what is It is indeed like
a giant ritual, and the offerings are these victims when
we come back. Diana explains how she came to understand
why the word sacrifice is so appropriate and a highly
(29:57):
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the best man. I was going to plan this speech
out while I got my oil change, but I went
to take five and it was a lot faster than
(30:39):
I thought. So here it goes. Okay, Tim, you were
my first friend. Angela you were my first Yeah. I
never thought the two of you would make it. But
I guess love really is blind. No, no, no, I
mean in a good way. I take five. Your oil
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Dinah Washington. Valdez described the murders of women in Huarez
(32:05):
in terms of ritual. The word sacrifice is very closely
related to Mexican indigenous cultures like the Aztecs. There's a
thread of that that still runs strong in Mexico, just
in her practice of folklore and that sort of thing.
The presence of triangles on some of the victims let
(32:29):
people to claim that they had literally been sacrificed to
a saint called Santa Verte the Holy Death. Dinah didn't
buy this, but she was struck by how the victims
were obviously being identified well in advance of being killed.
The Aztec culture, a victim is volunteered, their hearts are
(32:50):
torn out. It's a blood offering to appease the gods.
To me, this is exactly what is taking place in
what is We have the offer of young women as
a sacrifice. And that's the important thing about these systematic
murders is to understand the women were picked. They were selected.
(33:13):
Diana's interviews with the witnesses had turned up that strange
detail about the fake FBI agents. She was never able
to find out who they were, but she was able
to piece together some telling details about Lili Alejandra's last
few weeks alive, including the fact that photographs of her
had circulated in promotional shots for the Maculadora where she worked.
(33:38):
Her kidnapping is very interesting because apparently someone saw her
and decided she's going to be next, right. They liked
her look, they knew something about her background. Already, someone
was watching, someone's watching. They had people looking out for
certain kinds of victims, honing in on them, in on them,
(34:02):
and then arranging for them to be kidnapped. Lilya Lejander
disappeared on the very day that her family didn't come
to collect her from work, and Cigario Gonzalez went missing
shortly after she had changed shift and had to start
commuting to work alone. The killer struck at moments of
(34:24):
maximum vulnerability, but according to Dinah's reporting, they also had
a formalized system to identify victims and to learn their schedule.
I think it's worth mentioning the Eco schools downtown became
and this is also information that FBI informants had given
(34:44):
to the FBI. Several of the young ladies had disappeared
in downtown what is happened to have stopped into a
computer school then called Echo. The FBI again, this time
it's the real FBI who who had their own interest
in solving these crimes, and their informal network in Juarez
(35:05):
suggested that victims were being identified using a computer school
called Echo. In fact, Echo was a national chain of schools,
one opened in the early nineties in downtown Juirez. This
was the time when the personal computer was on the rise,
and you can imagine a young woman like Lili Alejandra
(35:25):
working a grueling job on an assembly line, being tempted
by the promise of transcending circumstances through computer literacy. After all,
most of the victims' families had moved to Juarez in
search for a better life in searchial opportunity, and computer
schools could lead to a coveted white collar job. What
(35:48):
would happened is the young ladies would be walking down
the sidewalk and someone would approach them with the clipboard
the column, the ECO promoters wanting to interest them in
the training that the ECO school provided. The important thing
about these computer schools is that the young ladies were
putting their personal data into the questionnaires and their pictures
(36:11):
were taken. So it became very easy for someone at
another end, whoever this information was being forward to, to
let this operate as a catalog, you know, a catalog
of potential victims through the questionnaires they filled out at
the computer schools, including their pictures. Someone could sit down
there and say, oh, yes about this one or that one.
(36:32):
You know, these schools are being used to look for
and identify young women of certain profiles. Well, I mean
women disappeared and then they were found murdered later, but
they were selected. Approximately how many women linked to the
(36:54):
computer school were murdered, I can only vouch for six.
But when I went back and I question the families
of victims, one of the questions I'd added to my
interviews was how they were coming to contact with a
Nickel score, and they would say, oh, yes, you know,
oh yes. Lilia Lejandra Andrade was one of them. Lilia
(37:19):
Alejandra disappeared on a Wednesday. Her first ECHO class was
set to begin on the Saturday of that week. What
Dinah's reporting revealed went beyond a mere pattern. It suggested
a process that almost certainly involved more than one person,
and as she pushed to reveal who might be involved,
(37:40):
she began to receive serious threats against her life. That's
on our next episode. I'm as Veloschen and see you
next time. Noste Hala Felicia Forgotten. The Women of Juarez
(38:40):
is co hosted by Me Monica and me oswald Oshan.
Forgotten is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hatigia. Our
producers are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvelle. Sound editing by
Julian Weller and Jacopo Penzo Lucas Riley is our story
(39:01):
Kitlyn Thompson is our consulting producer. Production support from Emily
Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Music by Leonardo Hablum and Hakabo Libermann.
Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special thanks to the reporting
of Tim Madigan in the Fort Worth Star Telegram and
John Ward Anderson in the Washington Post for details on
(39:24):
the life and arrest of Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif. Hello, beautiful.
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I'm loving this Cheap Caribbean dot com vacation. Let's take
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Angela you were my first Yeah. I never thought the
two of you would make it, but I guess love
really is blind. No no, no, I mean in a
good way. At take five, your oil change is faster
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than you think. Take five to stay in your car.
Ten minute oil change.
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