In the late 1980s a killer was loose in the East Bronx, and the girls and young women he killed were people Alejandro Henriquez knew. Jessica Guzman was ten. Shamira Bello was fourteen. Lisa Ann Rodriguez was twenty-one. When the police put the cases together, the thread that ran through all three was Henriquez, a livery-car driver born in 1961, who admitted knowing each of the victims and was, by the prosecution's account, the last person seen with them.
He went on trial in 1992 for the three murders. The jury heard that a pair of sweatpants belonging to his wife had turned up on Lisa Rodriguez's body, heard about Jessica's last night alive, heard that he had been seen yards from the spot where one victim was found, and heard about a tangle of lies he had told. Hair and fiber analysis was presented as linking him to all three. He insisted throughout that he had not killed anyone.
The jury convicted him on every count. Some jurors said afterward that they had not been fully convinced; one said he did not seem to fit the man who had done these things. He was sentenced to three consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life, one for each victim, seventy-five years to life in all. New York Magazine ran a long portrait of him that October.
He has stayed in prison and has never stopped saying he was framed. In 2018 he spoke publicly about the case for the first time, in an episode of Piers Morgan's series of interviews with convicted killers broadcast on September 13, 2018, and he denied all three murders. Later writers on the case have pointed to how much of it rested on circumstance and on his own contradictions, and the families of the three girls regard the verdict as justice done.