Andres Filomeno Mendoza Celis was born in Zimatlan de Alvarez, in Oaxaca, on November 29, 1947, by one account; the police gave his age as seventy-two in 2021. For decades he lived in a house on Margaritas street in the Lomas de San Miguel neighborhood of Atizapan de Zaragoza, in the State of Mexico, on the northwestern edge of the capital. He had worked for years as a butcher at a slaughterhouse in Tlalnepantla, and in 2015 he served as president of his neighborhood's citizen participation council under the municipal administration of the day. Some neighbors said he could not bear being ignored or rejected by young women; others described him as quiet and said he never bothered anyone.
Reyna Gonzalez Amador, thirty-four, was married with two daughters and worked at a shop selling cellphones. He had won her trust by bringing her phones to repair and offering to help with odd jobs. On Friday, May 14, 2021, she was to meet her husband to go into central Mexico City to buy stock, and she stopped at Mendoza's house first. She did not come back. Her husband, Bruno Angel Portillo, a police officer, forced his way into the house the next day and found her dismembered body. Mendoza was arrested on Saturday, May 15, and taken to the prison at Tlalnepantla.
Officers searching the property recovered thousands of human bone fragments, 3,787 by the count reported in June 2021 and about 4,600 a year later, which investigators said probably belonged to nineteen people, seventeen women, a child and a man. They also found voter identification cards, clothes, shoes, makeup and handbags belonging to various women, notebooks listing women's names, costume jewelry, photographs, and video recordings on VHS and nine-millimeter film, some of them said to show killings. The nickname the press gave him followed from what he was said to have done with some of the remains. Some of the women who had survived contact with him identified him.
In his statement to prosecutors he said that, except for Reyna, he had met all his victims in bars in Tlalnepantla where they worked and he drank; he spent time with them, invited them home intending to have sex, and in almost every case they drank together and then he stabbed them. Among the women named in the reporting are Flor Ninive Vizcaino Mejia, thirty-eight, a single mother of two who worked as a hostess in Tlalnepantla and disappeared on October 16, 2016; Rubicela Gallegos Castillo, thirty-two, a single mother from Monterrey who delivered for Uber Eats and disappeared on July 20, 2019; and Norma Jimenez Carreon, who disappeared in Tlalnepantla on August 6, 2011. Two other women he had courted at a bar and who turned him down were also named in the case.
The convictions came one at a time, each tied to a single identified victim. In March 2022 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the femicide of Reyna Gonzalez Amador and offenses connected with a woman's disappearance. On October 17, 2022, he received fifty-five years for another femicide. On January 18, 2023, he received ninety-two years for the homicide and disappearance of a woman and a child. Further sentences of fifty-five years each followed on March 29, July 10, August 23 and December 6, 2023, for the femicide and disappearance of four more women. The eighth, handed down on February 8, 2024, and announced three days later, was for the femicide of a woman identified in the record as B.S.O., who left her home in Coacalco on April 7, 2012, to meet someone and was never seen again; investigators established that she was killed at his house. He was fined 105,961 pesos and ordered to pay 1,864,036 pesos in reparations. Accounts of the order of the first two sentences differ.
Feggy Ostrosky, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who studied the case, has estimated that he may have killed around thirty women. That figure is an academic estimate and not what the courts have found. Eight convictions covering at least nine people is what the record establishes, and the State of Mexico prosecution service has said its work on identifying the rest of the remains continues. He is held at the Tenango del Valle prison by some accounts. In June 2022 the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation produced a documentary series on the case, broadcast on Las Estrellas.
The earliest killings covered by these sentences date to the 1990s. The victims disappeared from municipalities across the north of the Valley of Mexico over two decades, and the case was opened only because one body was left where a husband could find it.