Andres Filomeno Mendoza Celis was born about 1949 in Zimatlan de Alvarez, in Oaxaca, and lived for decades in a house on Margaritas street in Atizapan de Zaragoza, in the State of Mexico, on the north-western edge of the capital.
On May 15, 2021 the dismembered body of a woman was found outside the house. She was identified as Reyna Gonzalez Amador, a neighbour, whose husband had seen enough to report it. Mendoza, then seventy-two, was arrested. Officers searched the property and recovered more than four thousand three hundred human bone fragments, a figure some accounts give as four thousand six hundred. The nickname the press gave him followed from what he was said to have done with some of the remains.
What the search also produced was a record. The prosecution service recovered notebooks containing the names of women, along with costume jewellery, photographs, handbags and shoes, and video recordings on VHS and nine-millimetre film. Some of the women who had survived contact with him identified him.
The convictions came one at a time, each tied to a single identified victim. On March 18, 2022 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for femicide and offences connected with a woman’s disappearance. On October 17, 2022 he received fifty-five years for the femicide of Reyna Gonzalez Amador. On January 18, 2023 he received ninety-two years for the homicide and disappearance of a woman and a child. Five further sentences of fifty-five years followed. 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 also fined and ordered to pay reparations.
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 is 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.
The interval is the part worth noting. The earliest killings covered by these sentences date to the 1990s, the victims disappeared from municipalities across the north of the Valley of Mexico across two decades, and the case was opened only because one body was left where a husband could find it.