June 8, 2020 • 48 mins
Episode 4 - It's 2001 and eight women's bodies are discovered in a well trafficked area of Ciudad Juárez. Oz and Mónica visit the site of the mass grave with the former chief forensic investigator and take a closer look at some unusual crime scene details. Two suspects confess to the crimes.
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Forgotten is a production of ihont Media and Unusual Productions
Before we start. 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,
(01:53):
would run around the house and shout her name with
all my strength in the silence of the night. I
felt you could hear me, so I would call it
to my daughter. The authorities have the responsibility for solving
these crimes. They have not done this, and perhaps never
intended to do it. I pick it up, and then
(02:14):
all of a sudden, there's this electric saw sound coming in.
They took my phone to try and see they could
trace that call, and they traced it back to Mexican
military intelligence. Dinah was disconcerted by that threatening call, but
(02:37):
it wasn't immediately clear just how frightening it really was.
How long after you received that call did your source
trace it back within a month? You know. First, I
wasn't sure what to do that phone call, and I
casually mentioned to this officer and he said, you know what,
can we have your telephone to check it out? But true,
(03:00):
tracing that callback helped Diana understand that the threats against
her were not idle. And then she got a visit.
A friendly source came over one time to pass on.
We met for coffee and the source was told to
convey to me. After this source met with three police
officers in Huais municipal, state, and federal, and the message
(03:24):
to me was not to bother to come to Judas
all right. So I think that was a very good
indicator that I needed to start back in way. Yeah.
Diana attracts the escalation of the threats to starting to
publish articles about the connection between the victims and the
Echo computer schools. The computer schools suggested that some kind
(03:48):
of network was involved, in these crimes, and the threats
suggested that the authorities might be protecting the network. But
all of this time, the Egyptian chemist at Latif Sharif
Sharif had been languishing in jail, accused of being the
serial killer and continuing to mastermind murders from jail. As
(04:09):
far as the authorities and even some of the local
press were concerned, the case was closed. Then in two
thousand and one, something happened that made it clear the
crimes were not just ongoing but escalating. The Mexican press
had decided that the big nightmare of the femicides had ended.
And I remember and one of the reporters in Huadis,
(04:32):
who had covered the murders from the very beginning at
turning to me at a press conference saying, to me,
your problem, Diana, is that you do not believe that
the Egyptian Shahdif Shahdif killed all those women. And it's over,
It's ended, all right. I just looked at him, you know,
and I started to think, well, perhaps he's right, maybe
(04:52):
it's over. And then a month later, eight bodies are discovered,
and everybody like, oh my god, this is like starting
over again. For the first time in five years, a
mass grave of women had been discovered in Juarez, and
(05:14):
even Diana was shocked. I remember it was in our
past with the time there was a report about bodies
had been discovered. Women's bodies had been discovered. This is horrible.
Not only is it just one more murder, it's eight
bodies planted in one place. What is happening to our
young ladies. The horrific discovery at the cotton field came
(05:37):
at a time when Diana still believed it was safe
for her to travel to Juarez, so as soon as
she heard about it, she jumped in her car and
headed for the border. First of all, I had to
figure out where this place was. I imagine something on
the edge of the city. And so when I got
directions and I saw where this graveyard was located, I said,
(06:00):
believe it. It's in the middle of a city. In
across the street is the Association of Makilolaus, the organization
that represents all the assembly plants in Sudharis. It's in
the middle of a very active commercial zone next to
housing development. I just couldn't believe it. Somebody has to
have seen something. Why choose this site to dump, literally dump,
(06:26):
eight bodies of women. This was November two thousand and one,
just nine months earlier, in February, Lili Alejandra had been
abducted and murdered, and because of the witnesses and the
physical evidence from the autopsy, Diana believed there were enough
leads to finally solve the murders. That didn't happen, But
(06:49):
now there were eight bodies in a well traffic part
of town known locally as the cotton Field, just two
miles from where Lili Alejandra's body had been found. The
cotton Field discovery ignited a global interest in solving the murders.
ABC News at a special edition of twenty twenty, and
the eyes of the world were on Juarez. The cotton
(07:11):
Field murders presented an opportunity for the authorities to conduct
a good and thorough investigation that leads to the killers,
solve these cases and maybe prevent more. I'm Volosh and
I'm Monica. This is forgotten. The women of barras known
(07:50):
know I Love Fla. With the cotton Fields discovery, Dina
(08:15):
felt like the murders might finally be solved. The pressure
was building. The mother's protest movement had the urgency, the
international press was demanding answers, and her trusted source, Oscar Minez,
was once again overseeing the crime scene. I mean, if
you have any bodies in an area, you can add
(08:36):
denice seriality in these murders. Isn't that a chance that
they appear everybody the next to each others? You know,
had you ever seen anything like that? When you stepped
out onto this cotton field and saw the bodies, well,
are seeing many bodies not in the same area. For
me was a highly organized crime. You can see it.
(08:58):
And when you're talking about and he says, you took
it a group. If you have a group, you have
a leader, You have a leader, you have a hierarchically,
you have resources. So this is not like a long
the wall for a couple of kids. When Oscar first
began overseeing the autopsies of young women in Huirez, he
believed that a serial killer in the vein of a
(09:20):
Ted Bundy was responsible, but after Lee Alexander's autopsy, he
began to suspect something more organized, perhaps even a group.
We drove out to the cotton field with Oscar to
learn more about a crime scene that seemed to confirm
his theory. You surrounded back hotels, businesses supposed to New
(09:44):
American councilor he has some commercial listen next week. Were
you very shocked when you when you heard what these
bodies were? Yes, because I was expected to find about this.
On the oscar of the c there was a dry
(10:06):
dish and there were three bodies position in line, and
then we started just looking around and then we started
lifting rocks and then we found five more bodies. Those
were buried. They were not out on the open oscar
had been sounding alarm and now multiple bodies have been
discovered in a single location. He was determined to make
(10:27):
sure the forensic work was unimpeachable, to demonstrate once and
for all how all these crimes were connected. It was
like an archaeologist with a brass slowly clear and the
dirt in order to preserve the skeletons. Because when you
have a skeletons to wark, which you need to look
at every aspect, every legion of the to try to
(10:50):
determine the because of death. So and then how long
did that process take like an hour? No? No, they
take a couple of days and night and day. How
did the discovery compared to say, the discovery of the
body of Lilia Lejandra. Well, the case of Lilia Lejandra,
it was the same part. I believe that those cases
were related. Same people killed him. This was a bombshell
(11:16):
to me, Monica. I mean, Lilia Alejandra's autopsy had suggested
all these leads that weren't properly followed up on, and hey,
you have this crime scene that suggests Oscar and Diana
were absolutely right to insist on the importance of Lilia's case.
How did the crime scene first emerge. It was a
Tuesday morning, November sixth, two thousand and one, and there
(11:40):
was a man who worked as a bricklayer. He was
taking a short cut across a vacant lot not far
from a main intersection in a commercial area of Houais,
and he told the local newspaper that he smelt something
funny and went in for a closer look, and that's
(12:00):
when he saw the body of a woman. And so
he goes and he alerts the police, who show up
and find two more bodies. By the time the forensic
team is on the scene, there's a total of eight bodies.
They show various stages of decomposition. Some look like they've
(12:20):
been dead for perhaps a couple of weeks, and others
for as much as a few months. And one of
the bodies is naked except for a pair of torn
white socks, and just like the other cases before, her
hands are tied behind her back with shoelaces. It appeared
(12:43):
that this body had been kept in cold storage. The
fact that it's a place which people pass through often
and then all of a sudden, disguise finds the bodies,
it feels like they probably weren't there all along, right,
someone would have noticed them. The fact that they show
up all at once, you know, kind of points to
(13:04):
the strong possibility that they were placed there at the
same time. And what do we know about who these
eight victims were? Yeah? So the first body that the
bricklayer discovered was identified as fifteen year old Esmeralda Erra Montreal.
(13:25):
Esmeralda's family came from the state of Sacatecas. Her mom
worked at a Phillips factory in Wais and as Miralda,
at the time, she was saving up money for her
kin Senera, to save up money for this party. Is
Miralda starts working as a housekeeper, and like so many others,
(13:46):
she goes to work one day and is never seen again.
Diana interviews as Miralda's mother, Irma at some point, and
one of the eerie details that surfaces from that interview
is that an Echo recruiter had stopped by their neighborhood
and left them a brochure at their house. Some of
(14:09):
the connections between these women are chilling, uncanny. Even another
woman who's identified from the cotton field is a twenty
year old woman named Claudia Yvette Gonzales, and Claudia worked
at Amakila owned by Lear Corporation. So the day Claudia
(14:32):
went missing, she showed up to work a few minutes
late and the factory turned her away. After that, she
was never seen again. You have all these details that
point to a connection, that point to an organized network
behind these killings. We'd had about the shoelaces from Lily
(14:57):
Alejander's autopsy, we'd had about connection to the Echo computer schools,
and we'd heard about victims being snatched at moments of
maximum vulnerability, just like Cloudier Yvette, who was turned away
from the Makila for being late and then found herself
alone on the streets of Juarez. The crime scene seemed
(15:17):
to confirm so much of the evidence that had already
piled up about how these crimes were connected. Then something
truly extraordinary happened. Just days after the bodies were found.
Two suspects confessed to all eight murders at the cotton fields.
About every month, we would snap them a total of eight,
(15:43):
take them by force, raped them and later strangled them.
That is a translation of a video made by the
Juarez police in which two men confessed to the murders
of those eight women. It appears to be a decisive
break in the case. When we come back we find
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That's l e eesa dot com. After the cotton Fields
(18:49):
mass grave was discovered, two men confess to the murders.
They were bus drivers, Gustavo Gonzales Mezza known as La
Folca or the Seal, and Javied Garcia at Udibe known
as Eso the match. Their job was to drive the
young women who worked in factories to and from work.
Bus drivers had access and opportunity to identify when a
(19:13):
young woman like sa Gari Gonzalez started to commute alone.
So the suspects seemed plausible, but were they actually responsible.
Well when the mass grave was discovered and the suspects confessed,
Fredrick Crawford was the FBI Special Agent in charge of
El Paso. His office was just a few miles away
(19:33):
from the site of the mass grave, and he'd taken
a special interest in the murders of women in Huarez
and was following this case closely as a potential breakthrough.
You could sense that the pressure was mounting. Political pressure,
public pressure, international pressure. The families and relatives and friends
(19:53):
of the disappeared women who were allowed those women would
hold the marchers morning the deaths and drawing attention to that.
That was huge. There was a crescendois building. The international
community was fully aware, so the pressure must have been
enormous on the other side of the border. Politically, it
(20:18):
was in this context that the Office of the Attorney General,
known as the PGR, produced two suspects. I remember the
PGR announced they had made a rest the bus drivers,
the bus drivers. The attisode that's them, the bus drivers,
and he was showed the bus drivers. They had him
in custody. So I have my agents come in, all right,
(20:39):
give me the real story and we see what's on there. Immediately, yes,
I wasn't sure. I was thinking seventy thirty it's BS
in favor of the BS, and so I wanted the
agents to tell me what's going on. They said, hey, Boss,
it just says they confessed. They said, Boss, don't ask
(21:02):
us where we got this, but these are photos of
their torsos. And I said, well, what are those? What
are those around circle marks? Burn marks? They said, that's
cattle Proude's Boss, So forget those confessions. I said, oh
my god. Okay, So they're under pressure to solve the crime,
and so they tortured the confessions. I said, yeah, Well,
(21:26):
I'm not one to laugh because many African American was
tortured in the Deep South to confess the crimes that
he didn't do. Because of that, I know full well
it's not reliable when you torture somebody. In the very
moment that it seemed most likely that the crimes could
finally be sold, two innocent men have been coesced into
(21:49):
taking the full In the video produced in house by
the Wires Police Department, the bus drivers appeared dazed and
later they managed to get in front of the media
themselves elves and show the world what had happened to them.
One had a knee swollen to several times its normal size.
There were those burn marks that Hardrick described, and there
(22:10):
were also allegations of suffocation and waterboarding. So a few
years before Monica Sharif had been pinned with these crimes,
why did the authorities go to such lengths with the
bus drivers. Every time a mass grave is turned up
(22:31):
in Wattas of women's bodies, it's been a turning point
for the city, and it's been a moment when suddenly
people paid attention and there was great fear the police
can sort of sweep these individual murders under the rug
up until the point where these mass graves are discovered.
(22:51):
So they had to do something to show they were
taking these crimes seriously, because rightly so, the community was terrified.
The first discovery of a mass grave happened in late
summer of nineteen ninety five. There were nine bodies found
(23:11):
in a deserted terrain in the southern outskirts of Juarez,
not far from the airport, in a plot of land
called Lotte Bravo, and bravo in Spanish means wild or untamed.
Two months later, Shadif is arrested. He was declared as
(23:33):
a primary suspect in the women's murders, and when he
was questioned about this, he was stunned. He told the
Washington Post. I've hung around with a lot of prostitutes
and drunks and topless dancers. I'm not proud of it.
I'll admit to my sins, but I never killed anybody.
Sharif is the perfect scapegoat, given his outsiders status and
(23:58):
his violent criminal history. The police kept building up cases
against him that were subsequently thrown out in court until
he died in jail in two thousand and six. In
(24:19):
nineteen ninety five, the first mass grave of women in
Juarez was discovered, and shortly afterwards Sharif was jailed. In
nineteen ninety six, another mass grave of women was discovered,
and the authorities claimed Shariff was orchestrating the murders from
prison to prove his innocence, using a gang called the Rebeldez.
(24:40):
Now it was two thousand and one and another mass
grave had been discovered, and even before seeing the images
of torture, Diana believed that the process of scapegoating that
usually followed such a discovery was happening all over again.
They were obviously given the script. This seemed frightened to me.
(25:01):
You know, to just nonchalantly admit to eight murders is
quite a feat. And that again spoke to the idea
that here we go again scapegoats. All right, they have
the boilerplate language. Somebody is in charge of right now,
the novella of how this is going to play out,
you know, someone in law enforcement, and here's what you're
going to say, and period. It was just a matter
(25:23):
of like two days after the human remains were gathered
and taken to the morgue, and already they had two
men that the authorities that were responsible to bus drivers.
And we saw that as very suspicious. I mean, how
can you have suspects already five days after the bodies
have been discovered at the cotton Field. Diana attended a
(25:44):
press conference where you got a sickening sense that history
was repeating itself. One of the reporters from White Has
asked the state attorney general has hey, is it possible
that Shadif is involved in these murders too? And he
turned to the rest of the reporters. This state attorney
(26:05):
general is said, you know, we're looking into that. Here
we go again, but they have the perfect scapegoat. He's
been in jail this whole time, and they may try
to find a way to link him to these bus drivers,
and then the bus drivers, of course to the eight
murders of these young women. One of the things you
(26:27):
can't fail to notice in Juarez is buses often repurposed
American school buses, which are everywhere and which I used
to transport Makila workers to and from their jobs. When
you and I went to downtown Huirez, we went to
Mina Street, which is where many of the young women
(26:47):
were last seen alive, but also the central bus exchange
in Juarez. So it's easy to see how bus drivers
might have had the access or the opportunity to kidnap, abduct,
and kill women. How much of that drove the authority's
decision to focus on these two men. There is evidence
(27:07):
to support the notion that the victims were scouted and
selected in the same way. It appears the scapegoats were
also scouted and selected because they themselves had vulnerabilities that
made them less able to defend themselves. And why bus drivers, Well,
(27:33):
it so happened that before the cotton Fields, a woman
had survived an attack by a bus driver on her
way home from work, and so bus drivers were already
seen as an enemy in the public's eye, and so
police just kind of picked up on that thread and
(27:57):
arrested to more bus drivers, saying these guys are responsible
for the deaths of those women found dumped in the
cotton field. You could say they were easy targets, just
like sharif. We don't hear as much about the individuals
who are falsely accused of committing the crimes. And one
(28:21):
of those who was accused was the bus driver named
Javier Garcia Uribe, no relation to me. I went digging
through news archives around the time they were arrested, and
I came across this article written by a reporter named
Minervacanto and she traveled to Hawadis and spent several days
(28:46):
with the bus driver's wife. Her name is Miriam Garcia.
The couple they have two children, and so one night
in two thousand and one, all of a sudden, they
are surrounded by armed men whose faces are covered with
Halloween masks, and they threaten Javier, Miriam and their two
(29:10):
kids and eventually take Kavier, stuff him in a car
and take him away while Miriam protests, but she's really
helpless to do anything these men are armed. She spends
the next three days desperately searching for her husband, just
(29:32):
like the mothers are searching for the daughters. The next
time that Miriam sees her husband is on television confessing
to the murder of these eight women who were found
in the cotton field. Miriam, just like Baola, She's desperate
(29:56):
to come to the rescue of her husband, who she
firmly believes is being scapegoated. On one of the Governor's
visits to Wattis, she manages to push her way to
the front of the crowd and denounces her husband's arrest
(30:16):
and please with the governor, show me one shread of evidence,
one shread of evidence to prove my husband's guilt, and
she surrounded and moved away from the governor. Just the
brazenness by which this is all playing out that inspires
this passion, in these rage and these loved ones that
are like, how dare you? How dare you? And they
(30:38):
call him out in these very passionate public ways. All
of this scapegoating raises a very serious question. Why would
the authorities do it were they're trying to protect the
real killers all along? And if so, how could the
killers have so much power over the authorities. When we
(30:59):
come back, we hear from Oscumnez about some strange details
of the Cottonfield crime scene that revealed the extent of
what the killers might be capable of, and Hardrick Crufit
takes the case to the very top of the FBI.
What is Circle? First of all, it's a beautiful shape.
(31:22):
It's consistent a community. It's meant to be inclusive the
globe at Circle. We build USDC a digital dollar that's
actually dollar backed one to one. We're building a future
where money will travel at the speed of the Internet
for fractions of a penny and no one will think
about it because it will just be the way we
work Circles, the place where crypto meets stability, where local
(31:42):
businesses meet global customers, and the US dollar meets USDC.
Visit Circle dot com Slash podcast. During the month of April,
shop the buy one, get one fifty percent off personal
care sale happening now in the health and beauty aisles.
It's Safeway. Shop select products like Dove Deep Moisture Gel handwash,
Trust them a rich moisture shampoo with Vitamin E, Simple
(32:04):
Kind of Skin, facial cleanting wipes, or in Nexus Color
and short Conditioner Salon haircare and get them Buy one,
get one fifty percent off at Safeway. Visit Safeway dot
com or head into your local Safeway store for more
great deals in the health and beauty aisles. Hi there,
I'm doctor John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host
of the spotlight on series from our Health Discovered podcast.
(32:27):
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,
and I was one sign. Now, of course, prior to
(32:49):
I was excessively gaining weight, I had issues breathing, sleep apnea,
I had a lot of those classic signs. My legs
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But ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought
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(33:11):
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. In Warez,
(33:32):
the women's murders and scapegoating seemed to be two sides
of the same coin, but not every official was content
to let the true killers go free, and before the
bus drivers confessed, Oscar Minez was generating some telling leads
at the crime scene about a sinister network responsible for
the murder. We started working on our Thursday. By Sunday,
(33:55):
the Attorney General of the state gave up pressing interviews,
saying that he had apprehended the murders and that the
whole day victims have been identified. What I mean, we're
just in the process of I mean, those are not
the guys, this is not their profile. I'm looking for
It was clear from Dinah's reporting that at least one
(34:17):
of the ways the victims were selected using echo computer
schools was highly methodical, and Oscar saw clear signs that
the way the women in the cotton field had been
killed and dumped was also organized. Who could be capable
of these kinds of crimes and why would they leave
bodies in such a brazen spot. Those were the questions
(34:39):
on Oscar's mind as he worked the crime scene. Then
all of a sudden he became aware of something suspicious
and disconcerting. I noticed that there were these men with
nice cars, clean and shape and everything in Beermudas and
they were very happy. I mean they seem suspicious. I mean,
(35:02):
these people were too quickly to arrive there, and if
you had to guess who they were, these people they
don't have like a ninety five yeard in that you know,
and like so I don't know. The fact that these
sharply dressed men could turn up to the crime scene
suggested they didn't have an office job or a factory job,
(35:22):
and also wanted to learn more about who they might be.
I took picture with the telescopic lens, and I took
the photographs of the license plates. Like I said, their
leads that you follow for reasons that will become clear.
Oscar wasn't able to follow up on that lead. But
the men weren't the only unexplained presence at the crime scene.
(35:43):
There were a lot of areas of research in this case.
It could have led to something relevant. Bosom was promising.
I believe there was connection with some construction companies because
the second globle bodies, the ones who were buried, they
were buried under rubble, and it was enough material to
cover the bodies. You need like a dump truck to
(36:05):
do that. The people who do this have access to
equipment for a constructure company. You can identify that where
their rubble came from. The cotton Field had so many
promising leads, the connection between the victims, the license plates
of the men who turned up at the crime scene,
and then there's this rubble from a construction site. But
(36:29):
the authorities never pursued those lines of investigation because the
bus drivers had already confessed. Then the crime scene gets
even weirder. The families, in their demand for justice and
Monica are one of the key engines that keeps pressure
up on the authorities. In Huarez. What do the families
(36:50):
do about this crime scene? Three months after the cotton
field discovery, a group of American volunteers and international reporter
went back to the scene of the crime to do
a sweep at the request of the families. One of
those volunteers was an American professor, who describes how they
(37:13):
lined up and combed the lot in one long, single row.
They carried sticks with pointed ends and were instructed to
put anything they found in a plastic bag. And it
turns out they found quite a lot women's underwear, book bags, purses,
(37:33):
a high heeled shoe, clumps of hair. But the most
significant thing they found that day was a pair of overalls.
A teenage boy found them in a plastic bag, and
one of the mothers saw them, and she ran over
there and took those overalls in her arms. It turns
(37:58):
out they belonged to her daughter, Claudia, who was turned
away from the Makila for being late. One of the
students captured that moment in a photograph. It shows this
mother sobbing, clutching the overalls, embracing them as if they
were her daughter. What's odd about this sweep is that
(38:27):
it happens three months after the bodies were discovered, and
nobody has been able to explain how those items got there,
especially the overalls, and how they could have been there
this whole time without anybody discovering them sooner. This wasn't
the first time evidence had turned up in suspicious circumstances.
(38:52):
In the days after the cotton Field discovery, Oskominez received
a surprise visit agent to my office and say, I
need you to put this in the evidence of the case.
And I said no, Dessen order by the Attorney General,
I say no. If he wants to do it, I
skim to send Britain order. Oscar was being asked to
(39:13):
plant evidence by a state official and he was pushing back.
What evidence was he asking you to plan? Apparently there
were drugs and Braley hairs. I didn't even open the
back because when the Attorney General gave the press conference,
he said that this buzz driv drug addict and they
have found evidence in their van that the girls have
(39:37):
been abducted there with the band. I believe it was drugs.
And then some kind of evidence connecting the disease to
the vehicle. Whoever it is, who doesn't want the truth
of these murders to come to light. I want to
stop at death threats or even torture. They also seem
to have some sort of sway over the police and
(39:58):
the Attorney General's office, and Oscar's resistance wasn't going unnoticed.
I mean I received treads. I was careful. I didn't
went to at night during that time. I'm yes, you know,
but I didn't study or prepared to plant evidence. You
know what I mean. It's like, but ask you the
way you tell this to us, you say it come okay,
(40:18):
very nonchalantly. Well, at that time, I was very angry.
I don't tend to get scared, get to get angry.
So I was very angry. And when you're angry, you
don't stop to think clear of the consequences. What was
important to you to put your job, at the least
and at amost your safety on the line in this
particular case, I mean, just because my jab is to
(40:41):
get to the truth of the case. And also if
we're talking about a serial killer or killers, or a
group acting in this way, if you close a case
with a scapegoat, this is not the end of it.
I mean, it's going to continue and continue and continue.
But the order was coming from a powerful place, and
(41:03):
when you don't obey those who are politically powerful, you
tend to suffer the consequence I had to I quit.
I tried to protect the file when the file went
to the Josh is more difficult to manipulate that when
I decided to present my resignation later. But like I said,
(41:24):
I was out anyways. It was a matter of men
as probably Oscar Health Firm, not just because of principle,
but the very practical purposes. He knew the bus drivers
would have to be tried, and he wanted to make
it as hard as possible to secure a conviction, hoping
(41:44):
that that would force the authorities to lead a real
search for the guilty parties. If you see the file,
the original file, there is not a single evidence that
connects the bus drivers to the crime. There is no
evidence that the victims that the state says I didn't
belong to, there's no proof of that. And the only
proof you find is that this guys were torture. That
(42:06):
was a fact, even though it was clearly a case
that was manipulated about the state. Even though Oscar was
essentially forced to resign within days of the discovery of
a crime scene that he felt could finally have exposed
who was killing the woman in Juarez, His protection of
the bus driver's file, his refusal to plant evidence was consequential.
(42:29):
It made the state's case much harder to prove, especially
when a prominent father and son team of lawyers, Mario
Escobedo Senior and Junior, took them honest clients his dinner again.
They were probably the first lawyers to be so open
about what they understood about the femicides in Huais, and
they started to mention that there were people getting away
(42:52):
with murder. But this resistance to the official narrative brings heat.
Mario became aware that he was being far. He called
his father in the cell phone and said to help me,
help me. Meanwhile, across the border in El Paso, Modred
Crawford couldn't believe what he was seeing, and he was
more determined than ever to do something about the crimes.
(43:15):
I'm stunned and amazed at the response of our colleagues
in Mexico to an enormous crime. On my numbing crime,
Andrew couldn't intervene directly in the affairs of another sovereign nation.
But in two thousand and two he visited the jay
At Cahoover Building in Washington, DC because he wants to
(43:36):
get approval to keep digging from his boss, Robert Mueller. Oh. Yes,
director Robert Muller. And I was in the director's office
on the seventh floor. We call it Mahogany Row, all
the mahogany tables, and I expressed concern that my outspoken
activities interaction with my colleagues on the other side of
(43:57):
the border. I was concerned that I was doing something
that they did not find to be in the best
entrance of the FBI And Deputy Director Bruce Gappard said,
just keep doing what you're doing, and the director just
nodded affirmatively. It wasn't long before Heredrich Crawford clearly understood
that something even darker was happening in Juarez than his
(44:18):
initial hypothesis about a cross borders serial killer. And although
the bus drivers were in jail, the true killers remained free.
So as the investigations continued on both sides of the border,
so did the killings of women in Huirez. In our
next episode, death threats against investigators graduate into outright murder,
(44:42):
I'm as Veloschen and see you next time. Quella Felicia
(45:31):
Forgotten The Women of Juarez 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.
(45:51):
Lucas Riley is our story editor. Caitlin Thompson is our
consulting producer. Production support from Emily Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman.
Recording assistance this episode from Melissa Kaplan. Music by Leonardo
Heblum and Hakabo Liberman. Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special
(46:12):
thanks to Cecilia Vaye and Minervacanto, whose research and reporting
contributed to this episode. With Cheap Caribbean dot Com, you
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Forgotten is a production of ihont Media and Unusual Productions
Before we start. 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,
(01:53):
would run around the house and shout her name with
all my strength in the silence of the night. I
felt you could hear me, so I would call it
to my daughter. The authorities have the responsibility for solving
these crimes. They have not done this, and perhaps never
intended to do it. I pick it up, and then
(02:14):
all of a sudden, there's this electric saw sound coming in.
They took my phone to try and see they could
trace that call, and they traced it back to Mexican
military intelligence. Dinah was disconcerted by that threatening call, but
(02:37):
it wasn't immediately clear just how frightening it really was.
How long after you received that call did your source
trace it back within a month? You know. First, I
wasn't sure what to do that phone call, and I
casually mentioned to this officer and he said, you know what,
can we have your telephone to check it out? But true,
(03:00):
tracing that callback helped Diana understand that the threats against
her were not idle. And then she got a visit.
A friendly source came over one time to pass on.
We met for coffee and the source was told to
convey to me. After this source met with three police
officers in Huais municipal, state, and federal, and the message
(03:24):
to me was not to bother to come to Judas
all right. So I think that was a very good
indicator that I needed to start back in way. Yeah.
Diana attracts the escalation of the threats to starting to
publish articles about the connection between the victims and the
Echo computer schools. The computer schools suggested that some kind
(03:48):
of network was involved, in these crimes, and the threats
suggested that the authorities might be protecting the network. But
all of this time, the Egyptian chemist at Latif Sharif
Sharif had been languishing in jail, accused of being the
serial killer and continuing to mastermind murders from jail. As
(04:09):
far as the authorities and even some of the local
press were concerned, the case was closed. Then in two
thousand and one, something happened that made it clear the
crimes were not just ongoing but escalating. The Mexican press
had decided that the big nightmare of the femicides had ended.
And I remember and one of the reporters in Huadis,
(04:32):
who had covered the murders from the very beginning at
turning to me at a press conference saying, to me,
your problem, Diana, is that you do not believe that
the Egyptian Shahdif Shahdif killed all those women. And it's over,
It's ended, all right. I just looked at him, you know,
and I started to think, well, perhaps he's right, maybe
(04:52):
it's over. And then a month later, eight bodies are discovered,
and everybody like, oh my god, this is like starting
over again. For the first time in five years, a
mass grave of women had been discovered in Juarez, and
(05:14):
even Diana was shocked. I remember it was in our
past with the time there was a report about bodies
had been discovered. Women's bodies had been discovered. This is horrible.
Not only is it just one more murder, it's eight
bodies planted in one place. What is happening to our
young ladies. The horrific discovery at the cotton field came
(05:37):
at a time when Diana still believed it was safe
for her to travel to Juarez, so as soon as
she heard about it, she jumped in her car and
headed for the border. First of all, I had to
figure out where this place was. I imagine something on
the edge of the city. And so when I got
directions and I saw where this graveyard was located, I said,
(06:00):
believe it. It's in the middle of a city. In
across the street is the Association of Makilolaus, the organization
that represents all the assembly plants in Sudharis. It's in
the middle of a very active commercial zone next to
housing development. I just couldn't believe it. Somebody has to
have seen something. Why choose this site to dump, literally dump,
(06:26):
eight bodies of women. This was November two thousand and one,
just nine months earlier, in February, Lili Alejandra had been
abducted and murdered, and because of the witnesses and the
physical evidence from the autopsy, Diana believed there were enough
leads to finally solve the murders. That didn't happen, But
(06:49):
now there were eight bodies in a well traffic part
of town known locally as the cotton Field, just two
miles from where Lili Alejandra's body had been found. The
cotton Field discovery ignited a global interest in solving the murders.
ABC News at a special edition of twenty twenty, and
the eyes of the world were on Juarez. The cotton
(07:11):
Field murders presented an opportunity for the authorities to conduct
a good and thorough investigation that leads to the killers,
solve these cases and maybe prevent more. I'm Volosh and
I'm Monica. This is forgotten. The women of barras known
(07:50):
know I Love Fla. With the cotton Fields discovery, Dina
(08:15):
felt like the murders might finally be solved. The pressure
was building. The mother's protest movement had the urgency, the
international press was demanding answers, and her trusted source, Oscar Minez,
was once again overseeing the crime scene. I mean, if
you have any bodies in an area, you can add
(08:36):
denice seriality in these murders. Isn't that a chance that
they appear everybody the next to each others? You know,
had you ever seen anything like that? When you stepped
out onto this cotton field and saw the bodies, well,
are seeing many bodies not in the same area. For
me was a highly organized crime. You can see it.
(08:58):
And when you're talking about and he says, you took
it a group. If you have a group, you have
a leader, You have a leader, you have a hierarchically,
you have resources. So this is not like a long
the wall for a couple of kids. When Oscar first
began overseeing the autopsies of young women in Huirez, he
believed that a serial killer in the vein of a
(09:20):
Ted Bundy was responsible, but after Lee Alexander's autopsy, he
began to suspect something more organized, perhaps even a group.
We drove out to the cotton field with Oscar to
learn more about a crime scene that seemed to confirm
his theory. You surrounded back hotels, businesses supposed to New
(09:44):
American councilor he has some commercial listen next week. Were
you very shocked when you when you heard what these
bodies were? Yes, because I was expected to find about this.
On the oscar of the c there was a dry
(10:06):
dish and there were three bodies position in line, and
then we started just looking around and then we started
lifting rocks and then we found five more bodies. Those
were buried. They were not out on the open oscar
had been sounding alarm and now multiple bodies have been
discovered in a single location. He was determined to make
(10:27):
sure the forensic work was unimpeachable, to demonstrate once and
for all how all these crimes were connected. It was
like an archaeologist with a brass slowly clear and the
dirt in order to preserve the skeletons. Because when you
have a skeletons to wark, which you need to look
at every aspect, every legion of the to try to
(10:50):
determine the because of death. So and then how long
did that process take like an hour? No? No, they
take a couple of days and night and day. How
did the discovery compared to say, the discovery of the
body of Lilia Lejandra. Well, the case of Lilia Lejandra,
it was the same part. I believe that those cases
were related. Same people killed him. This was a bombshell
(11:16):
to me, Monica. I mean, Lilia Alejandra's autopsy had suggested
all these leads that weren't properly followed up on, and hey,
you have this crime scene that suggests Oscar and Diana
were absolutely right to insist on the importance of Lilia's case.
How did the crime scene first emerge. It was a
Tuesday morning, November sixth, two thousand and one, and there
(11:40):
was a man who worked as a bricklayer. He was
taking a short cut across a vacant lot not far
from a main intersection in a commercial area of Houais,
and he told the local newspaper that he smelt something
funny and went in for a closer look, and that's
(12:00):
when he saw the body of a woman. And so
he goes and he alerts the police, who show up
and find two more bodies. By the time the forensic
team is on the scene, there's a total of eight bodies.
They show various stages of decomposition. Some look like they've
(12:20):
been dead for perhaps a couple of weeks, and others
for as much as a few months. And one of
the bodies is naked except for a pair of torn
white socks, and just like the other cases before, her
hands are tied behind her back with shoelaces. It appeared
(12:43):
that this body had been kept in cold storage. The
fact that it's a place which people pass through often
and then all of a sudden, disguise finds the bodies,
it feels like they probably weren't there all along, right,
someone would have noticed them. The fact that they show
up all at once, you know, kind of points to
(13:04):
the strong possibility that they were placed there at the
same time. And what do we know about who these
eight victims were? Yeah? So the first body that the
bricklayer discovered was identified as fifteen year old Esmeralda Erra Montreal.
(13:25):
Esmeralda's family came from the state of Sacatecas. Her mom
worked at a Phillips factory in Wais and as Miralda,
at the time, she was saving up money for her
kin Senera, to save up money for this party. Is
Miralda starts working as a housekeeper, and like so many others,
(13:46):
she goes to work one day and is never seen again.
Diana interviews as Miralda's mother, Irma at some point, and
one of the eerie details that surfaces from that interview
is that an Echo recruiter had stopped by their neighborhood
and left them a brochure at their house. Some of
(14:09):
the connections between these women are chilling, uncanny. Even another
woman who's identified from the cotton field is a twenty
year old woman named Claudia Yvette Gonzales, and Claudia worked
at Amakila owned by Lear Corporation. So the day Claudia
(14:32):
went missing, she showed up to work a few minutes
late and the factory turned her away. After that, she
was never seen again. You have all these details that
point to a connection, that point to an organized network
behind these killings. We'd had about the shoelaces from Lily
(14:57):
Alejander's autopsy, we'd had about connection to the Echo computer schools,
and we'd heard about victims being snatched at moments of
maximum vulnerability, just like Cloudier Yvette, who was turned away
from the Makila for being late and then found herself
alone on the streets of Juarez. The crime scene seemed
(15:17):
to confirm so much of the evidence that had already
piled up about how these crimes were connected. Then something
truly extraordinary happened. Just days after the bodies were found.
Two suspects confessed to all eight murders at the cotton fields.
About every month, we would snap them a total of eight,
(15:43):
take them by force, raped them and later strangled them.
That is a translation of a video made by the
Juarez police in which two men confessed to the murders
of those eight women. It appears to be a decisive
break in the case. When we come back we find
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That's l e eesa dot com. After the cotton Fields
(18:49):
mass grave was discovered, two men confess to the murders.
They were bus drivers, Gustavo Gonzales Mezza known as La
Folca or the Seal, and Javied Garcia at Udibe known
as Eso the match. Their job was to drive the
young women who worked in factories to and from work.
Bus drivers had access and opportunity to identify when a
(19:13):
young woman like sa Gari Gonzalez started to commute alone.
So the suspects seemed plausible, but were they actually responsible.
Well when the mass grave was discovered and the suspects confessed,
Fredrick Crawford was the FBI Special Agent in charge of
El Paso. His office was just a few miles away
(19:33):
from the site of the mass grave, and he'd taken
a special interest in the murders of women in Huarez
and was following this case closely as a potential breakthrough.
You could sense that the pressure was mounting. Political pressure,
public pressure, international pressure. The families and relatives and friends
(19:53):
of the disappeared women who were allowed those women would
hold the marchers morning the deaths and drawing attention to that.
That was huge. There was a crescendois building. The international
community was fully aware, so the pressure must have been
enormous on the other side of the border. Politically, it
(20:18):
was in this context that the Office of the Attorney General,
known as the PGR, produced two suspects. I remember the
PGR announced they had made a rest the bus drivers,
the bus drivers. The attisode that's them, the bus drivers,
and he was showed the bus drivers. They had him
in custody. So I have my agents come in, all right,
(20:39):
give me the real story and we see what's on there. Immediately, yes,
I wasn't sure. I was thinking seventy thirty it's BS
in favor of the BS, and so I wanted the
agents to tell me what's going on. They said, hey, Boss,
it just says they confessed. They said, Boss, don't ask
(21:02):
us where we got this, but these are photos of
their torsos. And I said, well, what are those? What
are those around circle marks? Burn marks? They said, that's
cattle Proude's Boss, So forget those confessions. I said, oh
my god. Okay, So they're under pressure to solve the crime,
and so they tortured the confessions. I said, yeah, Well,
(21:26):
I'm not one to laugh because many African American was
tortured in the Deep South to confess the crimes that
he didn't do. Because of that, I know full well
it's not reliable when you torture somebody. In the very
moment that it seemed most likely that the crimes could
finally be sold, two innocent men have been coesced into
(21:49):
taking the full In the video produced in house by
the Wires Police Department, the bus drivers appeared dazed and
later they managed to get in front of the media
themselves elves and show the world what had happened to them.
One had a knee swollen to several times its normal size.
There were those burn marks that Hardrick described, and there
(22:10):
were also allegations of suffocation and waterboarding. So a few
years before Monica Sharif had been pinned with these crimes,
why did the authorities go to such lengths with the
bus drivers. Every time a mass grave is turned up
(22:31):
in Wattas of women's bodies, it's been a turning point
for the city, and it's been a moment when suddenly
people paid attention and there was great fear the police
can sort of sweep these individual murders under the rug
up until the point where these mass graves are discovered.
(22:51):
So they had to do something to show they were
taking these crimes seriously, because rightly so, the community was terrified.
The first discovery of a mass grave happened in late
summer of nineteen ninety five. There were nine bodies found
(23:11):
in a deserted terrain in the southern outskirts of Juarez,
not far from the airport, in a plot of land
called Lotte Bravo, and bravo in Spanish means wild or untamed.
Two months later, Shadif is arrested. He was declared as
(23:33):
a primary suspect in the women's murders, and when he
was questioned about this, he was stunned. He told the
Washington Post. I've hung around with a lot of prostitutes
and drunks and topless dancers. I'm not proud of it.
I'll admit to my sins, but I never killed anybody.
Sharif is the perfect scapegoat, given his outsiders status and
(23:58):
his violent criminal history. The police kept building up cases
against him that were subsequently thrown out in court until
he died in jail in two thousand and six. In
(24:19):
nineteen ninety five, the first mass grave of women in
Juarez was discovered, and shortly afterwards Sharif was jailed. In
nineteen ninety six, another mass grave of women was discovered,
and the authorities claimed Shariff was orchestrating the murders from
prison to prove his innocence, using a gang called the Rebeldez.
(24:40):
Now it was two thousand and one and another mass
grave had been discovered, and even before seeing the images
of torture, Diana believed that the process of scapegoating that
usually followed such a discovery was happening all over again.
They were obviously given the script. This seemed frightened to me.
(25:01):
You know, to just nonchalantly admit to eight murders is
quite a feat. And that again spoke to the idea
that here we go again scapegoats. All right, they have
the boilerplate language. Somebody is in charge of right now,
the novella of how this is going to play out,
you know, someone in law enforcement, and here's what you're
going to say, and period. It was just a matter
(25:23):
of like two days after the human remains were gathered
and taken to the morgue, and already they had two
men that the authorities that were responsible to bus drivers.
And we saw that as very suspicious. I mean, how
can you have suspects already five days after the bodies
have been discovered at the cotton Field. Diana attended a
(25:44):
press conference where you got a sickening sense that history
was repeating itself. One of the reporters from White Has
asked the state attorney general has hey, is it possible
that Shadif is involved in these murders too? And he
turned to the rest of the reporters. This state attorney
(26:05):
general is said, you know, we're looking into that. Here
we go again, but they have the perfect scapegoat. He's
been in jail this whole time, and they may try
to find a way to link him to these bus drivers,
and then the bus drivers, of course to the eight
murders of these young women. One of the things you
(26:27):
can't fail to notice in Juarez is buses often repurposed
American school buses, which are everywhere and which I used
to transport Makila workers to and from their jobs. When
you and I went to downtown Huirez, we went to
Mina Street, which is where many of the young women
(26:47):
were last seen alive, but also the central bus exchange
in Juarez. So it's easy to see how bus drivers
might have had the access or the opportunity to kidnap, abduct,
and kill women. How much of that drove the authority's
decision to focus on these two men. There is evidence
(27:07):
to support the notion that the victims were scouted and
selected in the same way. It appears the scapegoats were
also scouted and selected because they themselves had vulnerabilities that
made them less able to defend themselves. And why bus drivers, Well,
(27:33):
it so happened that before the cotton Fields, a woman
had survived an attack by a bus driver on her
way home from work, and so bus drivers were already
seen as an enemy in the public's eye, and so
police just kind of picked up on that thread and
(27:57):
arrested to more bus drivers, saying these guys are responsible
for the deaths of those women found dumped in the
cotton field. You could say they were easy targets, just
like sharif. We don't hear as much about the individuals
who are falsely accused of committing the crimes. And one
(28:21):
of those who was accused was the bus driver named
Javier Garcia Uribe, no relation to me. I went digging
through news archives around the time they were arrested, and
I came across this article written by a reporter named
Minervacanto and she traveled to Hawadis and spent several days
(28:46):
with the bus driver's wife. Her name is Miriam Garcia.
The couple they have two children, and so one night
in two thousand and one, all of a sudden, they
are surrounded by armed men whose faces are covered with
Halloween masks, and they threaten Javier, Miriam and their two
(29:10):
kids and eventually take Kavier, stuff him in a car
and take him away while Miriam protests, but she's really
helpless to do anything these men are armed. She spends
the next three days desperately searching for her husband, just
(29:32):
like the mothers are searching for the daughters. The next
time that Miriam sees her husband is on television confessing
to the murder of these eight women who were found
in the cotton field. Miriam, just like Baola, She's desperate
(29:56):
to come to the rescue of her husband, who she
firmly believes is being scapegoated. On one of the Governor's
visits to Wattis, she manages to push her way to
the front of the crowd and denounces her husband's arrest
(30:16):
and please with the governor, show me one shread of evidence,
one shread of evidence to prove my husband's guilt, and
she surrounded and moved away from the governor. Just the
brazenness by which this is all playing out that inspires
this passion, in these rage and these loved ones that
are like, how dare you? How dare you? And they
(30:38):
call him out in these very passionate public ways. All
of this scapegoating raises a very serious question. Why would
the authorities do it were they're trying to protect the
real killers all along? And if so, how could the
killers have so much power over the authorities. When we
(30:59):
come back, we hear from Oscumnez about some strange details
of the Cottonfield crime scene that revealed the extent of
what the killers might be capable of, and Hardrick Crufit
takes the case to the very top of the FBI.
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(32:27):
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,
and I was one sign. Now, of course, prior to
(32:49):
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
put patients. My heart would be really excessively fast and so.
But ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought
something was seriously wrong. Listen to Help Discovered on the
(33:11):
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. In Warez,
(33:32):
the women's murders and scapegoating seemed to be two sides
of the same coin, but not every official was content
to let the true killers go free, and before the
bus drivers confessed, Oscar Minez was generating some telling leads
at the crime scene about a sinister network responsible for
the murder. We started working on our Thursday. By Sunday,
(33:55):
the Attorney General of the state gave up pressing interviews,
saying that he had apprehended the murders and that the
whole day victims have been identified. What I mean, we're
just in the process of I mean, those are not
the guys, this is not their profile. I'm looking for
It was clear from Dinah's reporting that at least one
(34:17):
of the ways the victims were selected using echo computer
schools was highly methodical, and Oscar saw clear signs that
the way the women in the cotton field had been
killed and dumped was also organized. Who could be capable
of these kinds of crimes and why would they leave
bodies in such a brazen spot. Those were the questions
(34:39):
on Oscar's mind as he worked the crime scene. Then
all of a sudden he became aware of something suspicious
and disconcerting. I noticed that there were these men with
nice cars, clean and shape and everything in Beermudas and
they were very happy. I mean they seem suspicious. I mean,
(35:02):
these people were too quickly to arrive there, and if
you had to guess who they were, these people they
don't have like a ninety five yeard in that you know,
and like so I don't know. The fact that these
sharply dressed men could turn up to the crime scene
suggested they didn't have an office job or a factory job,
(35:22):
and also wanted to learn more about who they might be.
I took picture with the telescopic lens, and I took
the photographs of the license plates. Like I said, their
leads that you follow for reasons that will become clear.
Oscar wasn't able to follow up on that lead. But
the men weren't the only unexplained presence at the crime scene.
(35:43):
There were a lot of areas of research in this case.
It could have led to something relevant. Bosom was promising.
I believe there was connection with some construction companies because
the second globle bodies, the ones who were buried, they
were buried under rubble, and it was enough material to
cover the bodies. You need like a dump truck to
(36:05):
do that. The people who do this have access to
equipment for a constructure company. You can identify that where
their rubble came from. The cotton Field had so many
promising leads, the connection between the victims, the license plates
of the men who turned up at the crime scene,
and then there's this rubble from a construction site. But
(36:29):
the authorities never pursued those lines of investigation because the
bus drivers had already confessed. Then the crime scene gets
even weirder. The families, in their demand for justice and
Monica are one of the key engines that keeps pressure
up on the authorities. In Huarez. What do the families
(36:50):
do about this crime scene? Three months after the cotton
field discovery, a group of American volunteers and international reporter
went back to the scene of the crime to do
a sweep at the request of the families. One of
those volunteers was an American professor, who describes how they
(37:13):
lined up and combed the lot in one long, single row.
They carried sticks with pointed ends and were instructed to
put anything they found in a plastic bag. And it
turns out they found quite a lot women's underwear, book bags, purses,
(37:33):
a high heeled shoe, clumps of hair. But the most
significant thing they found that day was a pair of overalls.
A teenage boy found them in a plastic bag, and
one of the mothers saw them, and she ran over
there and took those overalls in her arms. It turns
(37:58):
out they belonged to her daughter, Claudia, who was turned
away from the Makila for being late. One of the
students captured that moment in a photograph. It shows this
mother sobbing, clutching the overalls, embracing them as if they
were her daughter. What's odd about this sweep is that
(38:27):
it happens three months after the bodies were discovered, and
nobody has been able to explain how those items got there,
especially the overalls, and how they could have been there
this whole time without anybody discovering them sooner. This wasn't
the first time evidence had turned up in suspicious circumstances.
(38:52):
In the days after the cotton Field discovery, Oskominez received
a surprise visit agent to my office and say, I
need you to put this in the evidence of the case.
And I said no, Dessen order by the Attorney General,
I say no. If he wants to do it, I
skim to send Britain order. Oscar was being asked to
(39:13):
plant evidence by a state official and he was pushing back.
What evidence was he asking you to plan? Apparently there
were drugs and Braley hairs. I didn't even open the
back because when the Attorney General gave the press conference,
he said that this buzz driv drug addict and they
have found evidence in their van that the girls have
(39:37):
been abducted there with the band. I believe it was drugs.
And then some kind of evidence connecting the disease to
the vehicle. Whoever it is, who doesn't want the truth
of these murders to come to light. I want to
stop at death threats or even torture. They also seem
to have some sort of sway over the police and
(39:58):
the Attorney General's office, and Oscar's resistance wasn't going unnoticed.
I mean I received treads. I was careful. I didn't
went to at night during that time. I'm yes, you know,
but I didn't study or prepared to plant evidence. You
know what I mean. It's like, but ask you the
way you tell this to us, you say it come okay,
(40:18):
very nonchalantly. Well, at that time, I was very angry.
I don't tend to get scared, get to get angry.
So I was very angry. And when you're angry, you
don't stop to think clear of the consequences. What was
important to you to put your job, at the least
and at amost your safety on the line in this
particular case, I mean, just because my jab is to
(40:41):
get to the truth of the case. And also if
we're talking about a serial killer or killers, or a
group acting in this way, if you close a case
with a scapegoat, this is not the end of it.
I mean, it's going to continue and continue and continue.
But the order was coming from a powerful place, and
(41:03):
when you don't obey those who are politically powerful, you
tend to suffer the consequence I had to I quit.
I tried to protect the file when the file went
to the Josh is more difficult to manipulate that when
I decided to present my resignation later. But like I said,
(41:24):
I was out anyways. It was a matter of men
as probably Oscar Health Firm, not just because of principle,
but the very practical purposes. He knew the bus drivers
would have to be tried, and he wanted to make
it as hard as possible to secure a conviction, hoping
(41:44):
that that would force the authorities to lead a real
search for the guilty parties. If you see the file,
the original file, there is not a single evidence that
connects the bus drivers to the crime. There is no
evidence that the victims that the state says I didn't
belong to, there's no proof of that. And the only
proof you find is that this guys were torture. That
(42:06):
was a fact, even though it was clearly a case
that was manipulated about the state. Even though Oscar was
essentially forced to resign within days of the discovery of
a crime scene that he felt could finally have exposed
who was killing the woman in Juarez, His protection of
the bus driver's file, his refusal to plant evidence was consequential.
(42:29):
It made the state's case much harder to prove, especially
when a prominent father and son team of lawyers, Mario
Escobedo Senior and Junior, took them honest clients his dinner again.
They were probably the first lawyers to be so open
about what they understood about the femicides in Huais, and
they started to mention that there were people getting away
(42:52):
with murder. But this resistance to the official narrative brings heat.
Mario became aware that he was being far. He called
his father in the cell phone and said to help me,
help me. Meanwhile, across the border in El Paso, Modred
Crawford couldn't believe what he was seeing, and he was
more determined than ever to do something about the crimes.
(43:15):
I'm stunned and amazed at the response of our colleagues
in Mexico to an enormous crime. On my numbing crime,
Andrew couldn't intervene directly in the affairs of another sovereign nation.
But in two thousand and two he visited the jay
At Cahoover Building in Washington, DC because he wants to
(43:36):
get approval to keep digging from his boss, Robert Mueller. Oh. Yes,
director Robert Muller. And I was in the director's office
on the seventh floor. We call it Mahogany Row, all
the mahogany tables, and I expressed concern that my outspoken
activities interaction with my colleagues on the other side of
(43:57):
the border. I was concerned that I was doing something
that they did not find to be in the best
entrance of the FBI And Deputy Director Bruce Gappard said,
just keep doing what you're doing, and the director just
nodded affirmatively. It wasn't long before Heredrich Crawford clearly understood
that something even darker was happening in Juarez than his
(44:18):
initial hypothesis about a cross borders serial killer. And although
the bus drivers were in jail, the true killers remained free.
So as the investigations continued on both sides of the border,
so did the killings of women in Huirez. In our
next episode, death threats against investigators graduate into outright murder,
(44:42):
I'm as Veloschen and see you next time. Quella Felicia
(45:31):
Forgotten The Women of Juarez 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.
(45:51):
Lucas Riley is our story editor. Caitlin Thompson is our
consulting producer. Production support from Emily Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman.
Recording assistance this episode from Melissa Kaplan. Music by Leonardo
Heblum and Hakabo Liberman. Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special
(46:12):
thanks to Cecilia Vaye and Minervacanto, whose research and reporting
contributed to this episode. With Cheap Caribbean dot Com, you
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