Andres Filomeno Mendoza Celis was a 72-year-old former butcher who had lived for decades in Atizapan de Zaragoza, a municipality on the northwestern edge of Mexico City in the State of Mexico. Neighbors knew him as friendly and helpful. He had once been president of his neighborhood's residents' association, and he had helped with local political campaigns.
In May 2021 a woman named Reyna Gonzalez Amador went missing after going to his house. Her husband, a police commander, traced her there and found her dead. The State of Mexico prosecutor's office arrested Mendoza, searched the house for months and recovered human remains that, it said, could belong to 19 people. Between March 2022 and February 2024 the courts of the State of Mexico convicted him in eight separate cases of femicide, homicide and disappearance, covering at least nine people: eight women and a child. He received a life sentence, a sentence of 92 years and six sentences of 55 years each.
The case drew national attention to femicide, the killing of women because they are women, which Mexican law treats as its own crime. In 2022 the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation backed a five-part documentary series about it, and the court's president used the case to argue that state prosecutors routinely fail to look for missing women.
Mendoza was born on November 29, 1947, in the southern state of Oaxaca, according to adn Noticias. Reports at the time of his arrest gave his age as 72. TV Azteca reported in 2026 that he had lived in the same neighborhood of Atizapan de Zaragoza since 1986.
He had worked as a butcher, according to adn Noticias and UnoTV. Expansion, citing El Universal, reported in May 2021 that he had been president of the residents' association in his neighborhood and that he had recently taken part in campaigns for candidates of several parties for municipal president and local deputies. Pedro Rodriguez Villegas, a candidate whom the suspect had approached during the 2021 campaign, rejected any suggestion that Mendoza had a role in it, according to the Tijuana weekly Zeta; he described Mendoza as a citizen who had come to learn about the campaign's proposals.
Neighbors described him as charismatic, kind and willing to help, and adn Noticias reported in 2024 that his age had helped keep him clear of suspicion while women in the area went missing. TV Azteca reported in 2026 that he was not working at the time of his arrest and that a neighbor said nobody had suspected anything. Neighbors called him Andres or "El Chino."
Reyna Gonzalez Amador was 34. She was married, the mother of two, and sold cellphones. She knew Mendoza; El Financiero described him as a family friend. According to her husband, as reported by UnoTV, she had planned to go with Mendoza to buy supplies for her cellphone business on the day she disappeared.
She was reported missing on May 14, 2021. She was last seen in the San Juan Ixtacala area of Atizapan de Zaragoza, and authorities activated the Protocolo Alba, the State of Mexico's search alert for missing women and girls, the same day, Expansion reported. Her husband, a commander with the Tlalnepantla police, learned that the last place she was known to have been was Mendoza's house.
El Financiero and UnoTV reported that on May 15, 2021, her husband went to the house. Mendoza told him he had not seen her. Her husband forced his way inside and found her dead.
Her death was the case that led to everything else, and it was the first one the courts decided. The trial court in Tenango del Valle found that Mendoza had killed her at his home on May 14, 2021.
Reports agree that Mendoza was detained in Atizapan de Zaragoza in May 2021, but they give two different dates. UnoTV, El Financiero, Expansion's 2022 report on the documentary series and TV Azteca give May 15, 2021, the day her husband went to the house. The State of Mexico prosecutor's office, known by its Spanish initials FGJEM, announced the arrest on Tuesday, May 18, 2021, and Excelsior and adn Noticias reported that he was arrested that day under a warrant issued by a judge. Expansion reported that prosecutors obtained a search warrant for the house about three days after Reyna Gonzalez Amador was reported missing.
He was taken to the state prison at Tlalnepantla, known as Barrientos. On May 20, 2021, after a hearing of four to five hours before a control judge in the Tlalnepantla judicial district, he was formally bound over for trial (vinculado a proceso) on a charge of femicide for her death. The judge ordered him held in pretrial detention and gave prosecutors three months to complete their investigation, Excelsior reported.
TV Azteca reported in February 2022 that during a hearing he had admitted killing at least four more women, which led prosecutors to begin digging at the property. SDPnoticias reported in May 2021 that at a hearing in Tlalnepantla he had said he killed Reyna Gonzalez Amador and four other women, whom he named as Norma, Berenice, Flor Ninive and Rubicela, and that he gave revenge as his motive, saying the women made him spend his money. SDPnoticias stressed that the identities still had to be confirmed by the authorities.
On May 18, 2021, prosecutors, investigative police, forensic staff, civil protection officers and firefighters with dogs searched the house. Dilcya Garcia, the central prosecutor for gender crimes, led the search. She told reporters that it had uncovered human remains, voter identification cards and women's clothing, which led investigators to suspect a serial femicide case, and that the evidence would be processed to open case files.
The FGJEM said the house also held shoes, handbags, makeup, notebooks with several names and video cassettes. In later accounts prosecutors listed photographs, identity documents, agendas, books, wallets, keys and costume jewelry among the items recovered, and 53 videotapes. The FGJEM released photographs and video of the search, Expansion reported.
The search lasted more than a year. In July 2021, adn Noticias reported that the excavation had been divided into four zones and that investigators were using two radar systems, one supplied by a research institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), including ground-penetrating radar. Municipal police guarded the site. In August 2021 the head of the FGJEM said the digging would go on until nothing more could be recovered from the house.
Prosecutors said in July 2021 that archaeological and anthropological studies indicated the remains could belong to 19 victims, most of them women, El Financiero reported. In August 2021 the head of the FGJEM confirmed to La Jornada that the remains of a child were among them, and he said a woman who had apparently been accompanied by a child might also be a victim. By June 2022, the FGJEM said the remains could belong to 19 people: 17 women, a child and a man.
In February 2022 the prosecutor's office said that, after comparing genetic material from the remains with samples from at least 11 families, it had matched six victims, and that it had notified their families. It was reviewing files on missing women from 1990 to 2021 in nine nearby municipalities, among them Huixquilucan, Naucalpan, Tultitlan, Tlalnepantla and Cuautitlan Izcalli, TV Azteca reported. Prosecutors described it as the most brutal case ever recorded in the State of Mexico, and their early evidence suggested that the killings had begun in 1991.
Flor Ninive Vizcaino Mejia was 38 when she disappeared in October 2016 in the Tejabanes area of Tlalnepantla, adn Noticias reported. She was divorced and lived with her two teenage daughters. They had spent the weekend with their father, and when they came home she was gone.
Her identity documents were among those found in Mendoza's house in May 2021. Her relatives, like Rubicela Gallegos's family, learned of the discovery through the news media, SDPnoticias reported. In July 2021, adn Noticias described her as one of two women whose documents had been found and who could be among the victims. The prosecutor's sentencing announcements identify most victims only by initials or not at all, and none of them has been publicly tied to her by name.
Rubicela Gallegos Castillo came from Monterrey, in Nuevo Leon. She had moved to the Mexico City area with her young son, then five, in search of a better life. She was studying petrochemical engineering, had worked at a bank and delivered food for app-based services in her spare time, according to adn Noticias and Eje Central. She was 32 when she disappeared.
On July 20, 2019, she took a delivery order from a restaurant in the San Javier area and was not seen again; adn Noticias placed San Javier in Tlalnepantla and Eje Central in Atizapan. She had planned to collect her sister at the Mexico City airport and never arrived. Her son was found alone in the apartment days later, adn Noticias reported. Her father reported her missing, and the Mexico City prosecutor's office opened a search file on July 27, 2019.
Her voter identification card was found in Mendoza's house in May 2021. Her father said the family had found out through social media and that no government institution had told them anything. "We found out through social media," he said, as quoted by La Razon. He told SDPnoticias that no authority had contacted him to take samples or to identify her belongings, and that he was anxiously waiting for someone to tell him something. He told Zeta that the family had never been told anything at all, and he criticized the authorities for failing to investigate her disappearance.
Her remains were identified, and in the early hours of October 14, 2022, officials of the FGJEM brought them to Nuevo Leon. After a wake, she was buried in Monterrey, Eje Central reported.
Prosecutors brought the case of Reyna Gonzalez Amador first. On March 30, 2022, a second set of proceedings was opened, for the femicide and disappearance of another woman, El Financiero reported.
The FGJEM's specialized femicide prosecutors obtained a guilty verdict against him for her femicide in mid March 2022. UnoTV put the verdict on March 16, 2022, and Expansion, publishing an EFE report, on Thursday, March 17. On Friday, March 18, 2022, at the criminal courts in Tenango del Valle, he was sentenced to life imprisonment (prision vitalicia). He was also ordered to pay a fine of 448,100 pesos and 1.34 million pesos in reparation for damages, Expansion reported; UnoTV gave the figures as 448,000 and 1,344,000 pesos. The FGJEM said he had been found guilty of the crime and announced the conviction in a statement and on its social media accounts.
Later reports described the March 2022 conviction as one for femicide and disappearance of a woman.
On June 22, 2022, Mendoza was bound over for trial for femicide, aggravated homicide and the disappearance of a woman and a child, El Financiero reported. On August 24, 2022, the FGJEM obtained a third such order, in a case concerning a woman who left her home on December 2, 2017, and went to his house, after which her whereabouts were unknown. Investigators believed he had killed her and hidden her body in the house. El Financiero noted at the time that he had to be presumed innocent in that case until a verdict.
On October 17, 2022, he received his second sentence: 55 years in prison for the femicide and disappearance of another woman.
On January 18, 2023, he was sentenced to 92 years in prison for femicide, homicide and disappearance-related offenses against a woman and a child. Four more sentences of 55 years each followed in 2023, on March 29, July 10, August 23 and December 6, each for the femicide and disappearance of a woman. The announcements of those sentences did not name the women or give their initials.
On February 8, 2024, he was sentenced to 55 years for the femicide and disappearance of a woman identified in the record by the initials B.S.O. She left her home in Coacalco, in the State of Mexico, on April 7, 2012, to meet someone, and was never heard from again. Investigators established that she was killed at his home in Atizapan de Zaragoza. He was fined 105,961 pesos and ordered to pay 1,864,036 pesos in reparation for material damage. The FGJEM announced the sentence on February 11, 2024, on X, and said it was the eighth conviction it had obtained against him. It said that the evidence presented by its prosecutors had been decisive, and that work continued to identify other possible victims.
The eight sentences together are one life term, one term of 92 years and six terms of 55 years, for femicide, homicide and disappearance-related offenses. The cases cover at least nine people: eight women and one child.
He was first held at the Barrientos prison in Tlalnepantla. In July 2021 he was moved to the prison at Tenango del Valle for his own safety after threats, adn Noticias reported, and his proceedings continued there.
In August 2025 he was taken to the Adolfo Lopez Mateos hospital in Toluca with respiratory complications. TV Azteca, citing sources close to the case, described his condition as serious, and said no detailed diagnosis had been released. He was discharged almost two months later and returned to the Tenango del Valle prison on October 1, 2025, where he was serving his sentences as of May 2026, TV Azteca reported.
In May 2022, Arturo Zaldivar, president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) and of the Federal Judiciary Council, announced a five-part documentary series built around the case, "Canibal. Indignacion total." The court financed it. The journalist and lawyer Javier Tejado, who had first written about the case in a 2021 column in El Universal, produced it, after approaching the court. Grau Serra directed it, Ana Mata wrote the script and the journalist Gabriela Warkentin narrated it. The UNAM psychologist Feggy Ostrosky took part. The series included interviews with victims' families, neighbors, police, firefighters and the convicted man himself, Expansion reported.
Zaldivar said the series aimed to move people's consciences and to show that the cases of murdered and missing women could not keep being handled with frivolity and inefficiency. He said it had been made with care to avoid revictimizing the families and was not meant to stir morbid curiosity but reflection. He said its aim was to put the focus on state prosecutors' offices, because most femicides are state crimes, and he said that most femicides in Mexico are not investigated and that those that are, are investigated badly.
The Atizapan municipal government asked that the series not name the municipality, saying it would stigmatize residents. Mayor Pedro Rodriguez said he agreed with the council. Zaldivar called the request absurd and said the victims' right to the truth came first. "The people of the municipality are not being disparaged; they are the victims," he said, as reported by Quadratin. He said that women had been killed in the municipality for 31 years and nobody had searched for them.
The series ran from Monday, June 27, to Friday, July 1, 2022, on Las Estrellas, the court's own Justicia TV and Canal 22. Zaldivar said it had drawn 27.6 million viewers in all and called it an unprecedented success. Some activists said the series gave the perpetrator more visibility than the victims and turned femicide into a spectacle, SDPnoticias reported.
Mexican newspapers and broadcasters have called him the "feminicida de Atizapan" (the Atizapan femicide), the "monstruo de Atizapan" and the "Canibal de Atizapan." The last name, which the Supreme Court's series also used, came from statements attributed to him after his arrest about what he had done. No court has made any finding on those statements, and none of the eight sentences reported concerns them.
Several families learned through the news that their relatives' belongings had been found in the house. Rubicela Gallegos's father said in May 2021 that no authority had contacted him. Flor Ninive Vizcaino's relatives also found out through the media.
Reyna Gonzalez Amador's husband traced her to the house himself; El Financiero reported that the arrest followed the investigation by the husband of the last victim. In June 2022 Expansion reported that Tejado had chosen to make a documentary after learning that Mendoza had recorded his crimes, and that the official victim count was still not known.
Zaldivar's criticism was aimed at the system rather than any one office. He said at the launch of the series that about eleven women were killed every day in Mexico, and he called for a collective alliance between society and the authorities at every level of government. Expansion, in May 2021, put the country's figure at more than ten women killed each day and an impunity rate of 97 percent in such cases, and noted that the State of Mexico had ranked first in the country for femicides at the end of 2020.
Arrest date. May 15, 2021 (UnoTV, El Financiero, Expansion, TV Azteca) or May 18, 2021 (FGJEM announcement as reported by Expansion, Excelsior and adn Noticias).
Date of the first verdict. March 16, 2022 (UnoTV) or March 17, 2022 (EFE in Expansion); the sentence was handed down on March 18, 2022. One El Financiero report gave February 22, 2022, for the life sentence, which no other source supports.
Number of victims. The courts' findings cover at least nine people. The FGJEM said remains at the house could belong to 19 people. Press reports in May 2021 said he had confessed to about 30 killings over 20 years; La Razon reported the figure without saying who reported the confession or how it was obtained. Other figures, including "more than 30" (adn Noticias, 2024), "at least 50" (El Financiero, 2022) and Zaldivar's remark about "hundreds" of women, are estimates or remarks that no court has tested.
When the killings began. The FGJEM's early evidence pointed to 1991 (TV Azteca, 2022); UnoTV said 1990. Zaldivar spoke of 31 years.
Names he reportedly gave. The names Norma and Berenice come from SDPnoticias's account of a 2021 hearing; no sentence announcement has linked either name to a case.
Statements about remains. Claims that he ate or preserved parts of his victims come from his reported statements and from press reports. They were never the subject of a charge or a court finding.
Reyna Gonzalez Amador's age. Every report of the conviction gives 34; Expansion's June 2022 report on the documentary gave 38.
Rubicela Gallegos Castillo's age. 32 in most reports; adn Noticias gave 31 in the body of one report.
His age. Reports in 2021 gave 72; adn Noticias in 2024 gave his birth date as November 29, 1947.
November 29, 1947: Andres Filomeno Mendoza Celis is born in Oaxaca (adn Noticias).
1986: begins living in the Atizapan de Zaragoza neighborhood where he is later arrested (TV Azteca).
About 1990 or 1991: the period in which investigators believe the killings began.
April 7, 2012: B.S.O. leaves her home in Coacalco to meet someone and is not seen again.
October 2016: Flor Ninive Vizcaino Mejia, 38, disappears in Tlalnepantla.
December 2, 2017: a woman goes to his house and disappears; later the subject of a 2022 court order.
July 20, 2019: Rubicela Gallegos Castillo, 32, disappears after taking a delivery order.
May 14, 2021: Reyna Gonzalez Amador, 34, disappears; a Protocolo Alba alert is issued.
May 15, 2021: her husband goes to Mendoza's house and finds her dead; Mendoza is detained (date given by several outlets).
May 18, 2021: the FGJEM announces his arrest under a warrant and searches the house.
May 20, 2021: a control judge in Tlalnepantla binds him over for trial for her femicide.
July 2021: moved to the Tenango del Valle prison; prosecutors say remains could belong to 19 victims.
August 2021: the FGJEM confirms a child's remains among them.
February 2022: six victims identified by DNA comparison.
March 18, 2022: sentenced to life imprisonment for the femicide of Reyna Gonzalez Amador.
June 22, 2022: bound over for trial in the case of a woman and a child.
June 27 to July 1, 2022: "Canibal. Indignacion total" is broadcast.
August 24, 2022: bound over in the December 2017 case.
October 14, 2022: Rubicela Gallegos Castillo's remains are returned to Nuevo Leon.
October 17, 2022: second sentence, 55 years.
January 18, 2023: third sentence, 92 years, for a woman and a child.
March 29, July 10, August 23 and December 6, 2023: four sentences of 55 years each.
February 8, 2024: eighth sentence, 55 years, for the femicide and disappearance of B.S.O.
August 2025: hospitalized in Toluca with respiratory complications.
October 1, 2025: returns to the Tenango del Valle prison.
May 2026: serving his sentences at Tenango del Valle (TV Azteca).