César Armando Librado Legorreta drove a microbus on a public-transport route that ran from Valle Dorado, in the State of Mexico, to Metro Chapultepec in Mexico City. In February 2012 investigators of the State of Mexico prosecutor's office arrested him, and he confessed, according to the office and the press, to attacking eight women, seven of whom died. Within days he escaped from the prosecutor's offices in Tlalnepantla, and the six-day manhunt that followed became a political crisis for the state government. He was recaptured on March 3, 2012.
In December 2012, after an abbreviated trial, a State of Mexico court sentenced him to 61 years in prison for the rape and attempted homicide of the one woman known to have survived, and to 240 years for six feminicides, 40 years for each woman. His prison terms totaled 301 years. The press called him "El Coqueto," and the case is still cited in Mexico as an example of what happens when an early complaint goes unanswered: the woman who survived had given state investigators his description, his route and his hours in June 2010, more than a year before the first of the killings for which he was sentenced.
When he was sentenced in December 2012, Librado Legorreta was 30, according to Notimex, the Mexican state news agency, whose report was carried by SDP Noticias. The EFE news agency had given his age as 29 at the time of his recapture in March. He lived in Tultitlán, a municipality in the north of the Valley of Mexico, with his wife and their two children. His date and place of birth have not been reported.
He worked as a driver on public-transport Route 2. Quadratín México, a news service, reported at his sentencing that he drove a microbus for about two years on the route from Valle Dorado toward Chapultepec, and that he had worked it with impunity through that period. A 2024 report by N+, the news service of Televisa, described the same route as running between Metro Chapultepec and Valle Dorado. The bus was later seized by order of the court as part of the sentence, according to a 2026 account by Azteca Jalisco, part of TV Azteca.
Notimex reported that the women he attacked were passengers on his microbus. That was the core of the case against him: the vehicle he drove for a living, on a fixed route and on fixed hours, was where the crimes took place. The bodies of the women who died were left in Naucalpan, Tlalnepantla and Cuautitlán Izcalli, three municipalities of the State of Mexico, Notimex said. The agency also reported that he took the women's belongings and gave them to his wife as gifts.
Six women died in the cases for which he was convicted. Their names have not been reported. They were described as young women; Quadratín reported that one of them was a girl of 17, and that he admitted killing her. Notimex gave the dates of the crimes in the case as July 14, November 26 and December 13, 2011, and December 30 and January 8 and 18, 2012. The cause of death, in Notimex's account, was asphyxiation.
At the time of his arrest he was reported to have admitted seven killings, not six, and press accounts after the arrest spoke of seven dead women. The judgments of December 2012 covered six feminicides and the case of the one woman who lived. The gap has never been explained, and it is not known whether a seventh case was charged.
The woman who survived was 23. On the morning of June 21, 2010, about a year before the first of the killings in the series, she was attacked on his microbus and survived, according to an account she gave La Razón de México in March 2012.
She went to the State of Mexico prosecutor's office, then known by its initials PGJEM and led by Alberto Bazbaz. She gave a physical description of the driver, the route he worked and the time of day he drove it. No one was arrested. La Razón reported that she stopped going to the authorities because of the strain and the poor treatment she received, and that a few weeks before its March 2012 article the office had decided to close her file. She said the office's medical examiner treated her in a way no woman in her situation deserved.
Guillermo Zayas, a former homicide prosecutor in the Federal District, told La Razón that without a thorough investigation victims see no results and stop cooperating. In his view, the office should have drawn up a composite sketch and compared it against the licenses of the route's drivers, a step he said would have led to an arrest. La Razón concluded that the failure left the driver free to work the same route for almost two years, and that he attacked seven more women, all of whom died.
In 2015 the same woman spoke again, to the Mexican news site Sin Embargo, in an interview reprinted by the New York Spanish-language daily El Diario. She said she had given the police the bus, the place where she boarded it, the driver's approximate age and his route, and that she was repeatedly told officers would act, but they did not. She said she and her family paid about 10,000 pesos to investigators, and that she did not know whether the money reached the officials it was meant for. She described the agent who took her statement as an official "with little experience, little judgment and no sensitivity," and said it took about three and a half hours to finish. She believed that if the police had acted on her case, at least three more women would still be alive.
In 2011 the State of Mexico created a new deputy prosecutor's office for crimes linked to gender violence. Its first head was Italy Desiree Ciani Sotomayor, then 30 and new to criminal investigation, who later became known as "La Jefa." She told N+ in 2024 that she led a team of more experienced men who at first did not trust her, and that being a pioneer had given her a different view of the work. Serial cases, she said, were hard to investigate because a single mistake could cost another person her life.
According to N+, her team identified the driver after a careful investigation, watched him for several days and then located his home. The report drew on interviews for "Archivo Negro, Sombras del Crimen," a five-part documentary series on Mexican criminal cases produced by N+ Docs for the ViX streaming service, which released it on June 13, 2024; the episode on the case was titled for Ciani's nickname.
Notimex reported that he was arrested on February 26, 2012, in Mexico City and taken to the offices of the deputy prosecutor in Tlalnepantla. EFE reported only that he had been arrested in late February. Quadratín, in its sentencing report, wrote that he had been arrested in Tlalnepantla on the testimony of a surviving victim who identified him as her attacker, though it gave the year as 2010; the other reports place the arrest in February 2012.
In February 2012 the woman who had survived was brought in to view a suspect behind a one-way mirror. She told Sin Embargo in 2015 that she recognized him at once. Ciani told N+ that she took part in the interrogations and that he confessed his crimes to her. According to EFE, after his capture he said that he had attacked the women and then killed them out of fear that they would report him.
The State of Mexico prosecutor, Alfredo Castillo Cervantes, described him in public as accused of attacking eight women and killing seven of them, La Jornada reported. That figure, eight women attacked and seven killed, was the one repeated in most press reports in the weeks that followed.
He was held, handcuffed at the hands and feet, in a third-floor office of the deputy prosecutor's building in Tlalnepantla, guarded by three officers of the state's ministerial police, Notimex reported. He had not yet been brought before the judge. Overnight between February 26 and 27, 2012, he got out of the cuffs and left through a small window, lowering himself on cables. He fell and was badly hurt, but he made his way to relatives, who helped him, and he hid in the south of Mexico City. The escape became public on Tuesday, February 28. In a 2015 interview with Sin Embargo, the woman who had survived said she did not believe the official account of how he got away.
Families of the victims protested in the days that followed. Two days before his recapture, according to EFE, the mother of one of the women asked for the removal of the state prosecutor, Alfredo Castillo, over the failure to guard him. One of the three officers was arrested in connection with the escape; the other two had fled, EFE reported on March 4. Separate proceedings were later brought against all three guards, Notimex said. The outcome of those cases has not been reported.
Castillo Cervantes offered a reward of one million pesos for information leading to the recapture of the microbus driver, La Jornada reported on March 2. More than 72 hours after the escape there was still no trace of him. The prosecutor's office sent requests for help to the prosecutors of the Federal District, Hidalgo, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Morelos and Guerrero. About 60 members of the office's elite unit, whose main work was tracking organized crime, were assigned to the search, and police watched around twenty homes of his relatives and friends day and night. Investigators put up "wanted" posters at the Valle Dorado roundabout in Tlalnepantla and at bus shelters along the Periférico Norte, and state patrol cars carried them.
The escape quickly became a political matter. Governor Eruviel Ávila wrote on Twitter that he had spoken with the victims' families, promised to "do justice and recapture the fugitive," and said the police who had allowed the escape would be punished. In the state Congress, the PRD demanded that the governor give the prosecutor a deadline of one week or 15 days to recapture him. At the opening session of the legislative period the PRD and the PAN tried and failed to debate the escape and to summon the prosecutor; the PRI and its allies, who held the majority, voted the proposal down on the ground that the session was ceremonial. The State Human Rights Commission started a complaint on its own initiative over the escape, citing omission and negligence.
Teresa Ulloa, president of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean, told La Jornada that the parents of the young women who had been killed suspected the prosecutor's office of tapping their telephones. She said two state investigators posing as reporters had attended a press conference the mothers had held in the Federal District that Tuesday.
He was found on the night of March 3, 2012. Governor Ávila announced the arrest on Twitter, writing that the State of Mexico prosecutor's office had "just detained César Armando Librado," EFE reported. The radio station Formato 21 reported that the arrest might have come during one of two operations that day, in Cuautitlán Izcalli and in the Federal District, in which more than 200 agents took part after tips from the public. The governor said his government would seek life imprisonment, according to Notimex.
The fall from the window had left him with serious injuries, among them a fracture of the spine, Notimex reported. Ciani told N+ in 2024 that the recapture took six days, and she blamed the escape on failures in the prosecutor's office, which she said was more concerned with publicity than with the work under Castillo. Before he entered the Barrientos prison, she said, she asked him not to try to take his own life. She said he had not tried to.
On March 4, 2012, he was admitted to the infirmary of the state prison at Barrientos, in Tlalnepantla, and two cases were begun against him: one for six feminicides, the other for rape and attempted homicide, Notimex reported. Because of his injuries, his first hearings took place in the prison's medical area.
On March 8 a morning session was postponed because he had been flown by helicopter to the Adolfo López Mateos hospital in Toluca for an MRI and a CT scan, part of the medical file for a planned operation; he was treated for several fractures and had pre-operative tests. He was outside Barrientos for about four hours, under guard by prison custodians, state security forces and staff of the state health department, and the hearing was held that day, behind closed doors, in the prison's medical area. It lasted three hours. The state's prison directorate said it would release details of his condition and any surgery only afterward, citing the safety of the inmate and of the medical and security staff. Under constitutional time limits, the control judge, José Luis Velázquez, had until that Saturday to decide whether to bind him over for trial, Notimex reported. On March 9 the judge ordered him held for trial on the six feminicides.
On April 13, 2012, he underwent spinal surgery in Toluca that lasted nearly ten hours and cost 300,000 pesos, according to Notimex. Doctors warned that he might never walk again. He recovered, and in the months that followed he was brought to hearings on stretchers or in wheelchairs.
On August 8, 2012, Governor Ávila accepted the resignation of Alfredo Castillo Cervantes, which Castillo had submitted twice, La Jornada reported. Miguel Ángel Contreras Nieto was named to replace him, subject to ratification by the state Congress. La Jornada listed the escape of the man it called a serial rapist and feminicide from the third floor of the Tlalnepantla offices among the controversies of Castillo's tenure, alongside his handling of the death of the girl Paulette Gebara Farah in 2010 and a 2011 raid on the home of a poet in the Federal District. The paper reported that Castillo was expected to join the transition team of the president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto.
His trial was due to begin on October 19, 2012, but the start was suspended after he changed lawyers and the prosecution had not served notice on all the parties, Notimex reported. That day he walked into the courtroom unaided and looked heavier, and before the judge entered he was seen laughing with others in the room.
On November 21, after a hearing that lasted nearly 12 hours, the defense asked for an abbreviated trial. The victims' families and the prosecution accepted. Throughout the hearings, according to Notimex, he showed no visible remorse, even when he described the crimes in front of the families.
On December 4, 2012, he was sentenced to 61 years in prison for the rape and attempted homicide of the woman who had survived.
On Wednesday, December 12, 2012, the court sentenced him to 240 years for the six feminicides. Because he had chosen the abbreviated procedure, the judge applied the minimum penalty: 40 years for each woman, a fine of 700 days' minimum wage per victim, and compensation of 94,515 pesos for each death, Notimex reported. The total of his sentences came to 301 years. Quadratín named the judge as Juan Arturo Velázquez of the Seventh Criminal Chamber for oral trials of the State of Mexico, and described the term as the highest penalty applied in the state, in effect life imprisonment; Notimex placed the hearings in the court of control and oral trials that sits across from the Barrientos prison. In the judge's view, Notimex reported, he showed a high level of criminality and a likelihood of offending again. Azteca Jalisco reported in 2026 that the sentence also ordered the seizure of the vehicle he drove.
At the last hearing he watched the families calmly and, in their words, challenged them with his eyes. The families said that their ordeal was over, but they were not satisfied. Justice, in their view, would have meant arresting him after his first crime, not after six women had died.
No appeal against either judgment has been reported.
In December 2012 Baruch Delgado, president of the High Court of Justice of the State of Mexico, said that Librado Legorreta would serve his sentence at the Juan Fernández Albarrán social readaptation center in Barrientos, Tlalnepantla, where he had been held since his arrest, Notimex reported in a story printed by El Siglo de Torreón on December 14. The judge had given no special instructions about where he should be held, and no transfer had been ordered, even though the court had found him highly dangerous and likely to reoffend. The state's prison directorate could later decide to move him, Delgado said, but a transfer was ruled out for the time being because Barrientos had the security he required.
In April 2024 TV Azteca listed him among the serial feminicide cases in Mexico, saying he had been sentenced. In June 2024 Ciani told N+ that he had not tried to take his own life. Where he has been held since 2012 has not been reported.
The case left two lasting questions in the Mexican press. The first was the 2010 complaint. La Razón's report of March 15, 2012, was built around it: the woman who survived had handed the prosecutor's office enough to find him, it argued, and nothing was done. Her own account in 2015 added that she had been asked for money and that the investigation went nowhere until she was called in to look at a suspect in February 2012. The families made the same point at the sentencing, telling Notimex that real justice would have meant an arrest after the first crime.
The second was the escape. A prisoner who had confessed to seven killings got away from three guards in the prosecutor's own building within days of his arrest, and the search drew in the governor, the state Congress, the human rights commission and prosecutors in neighboring states and the Federal District. La Jornada still counted the escape among the low points of Castillo Cervantes's tenure when he left office that August.
In 2024 Ciani's account of the investigation reached a national audience through the ViX documentary series, and in 2026 Azteca Jalisco returned to the case in a segment of its program on criminal cases, recalling the escape, the reward of one million pesos and the sentence of 240 years.
The number of victims. After his arrest the prosecutor and the press spoke of eight women attacked and seven killed. The judgments of December 2012 covered six feminicides and one rape and attempted homicide, the case of the woman who survived. What became of the seventh death he was reported to have admitted has never been explained. La Razón wrote that after the 2010 attack he went on to kill seven more women; that is the paper's own count, not a finding of the court.
The arrest date and place. Notimex gave February 26, 2012, and Mexico City; EFE gave only late February; Quadratín placed the arrest in Tlalnepantla in 2010, which conflicts with every other report, including its own account of the escape.
The charges. Notimex, El Siglo de Torreón and Azteca Jalisco described the 240-year sentence as one for six feminicides. Quadratín wrote that he was found responsible for aggravated homicide and other offenses against six young women. The reports agree on the terms: 40 years for each of the six, 240 in all.
The court. Quadratín named the judge as Juan Arturo Velázquez of a criminal chamber for oral trials; Notimex referred to the court of control and oral trials across from the Barrientos prison and did not name the judge in its sentencing report. The control judge who handled the early hearings was named by Notimex as José Luis Velázquez.
The escape. The official account, as reported by Notimex, Quadratín and La Jornada, was that he slipped his handcuffs and left through a window, lowering himself on cables, and was hurt in a fall. The woman who survived told Sin Embargo in 2015 that she found that account laughable. A 2026 Azteca Jalisco segment said he tried to escape by jumping from a police patrol car, which does not match the account of the escape from the prosecutor's building given in 2012.
Where he is held. In December 2012 the state court president said he would stay at Barrientos. Where he has been held since has not been reported.
June 21, 2010: A woman of 23 is attacked on his microbus and survives; she reports the attack to the State of Mexico prosecutor's office and describes the driver, his route and his hours. No arrest follows.
2011: The State of Mexico creates a deputy prosecutor's office for crimes linked to gender violence, headed by Italy Desiree Ciani Sotomayor.
2011 to January 18, 2012: Dates of the crimes in the feminicide case, as given by Notimex (July 14, November 26 and December 13, 2011; December 30; January 8 and 18, 2012).
February 26, 2012: Arrested, according to Notimex, and taken to the deputy prosecutor's offices in Tlalnepantla; the surviving woman identifies him behind a one-way mirror.
February 26 to 27, 2012: Escapes overnight through a window of the third-floor office and is injured in a fall.
February 28, 2012: The escape becomes public.
March 1 to 2, 2012: A reward of one million pesos is reported; requests for help go to prosecutors in neighboring states and the Federal District; the State Human Rights Commission starts a complaint.
March 3, 2012: Recaptured at night; Governor Eruviel Ávila announces the arrest on Twitter.
March 4, 2012: Admitted to the infirmary of the Barrientos prison; cases begun for six feminicides and for rape and attempted homicide. One guard has been arrested over the escape.
March 8, 2012: Flown to a hospital in Toluca for scans; a closed hearing is held in the prison's medical area.
March 9, 2012: Ordered to stand trial on the six feminicides.
March 15, 2012: La Razón reports that the prosecutor's office had the survivor's description in 2010.
April 13, 2012: Spinal surgery in Toluca.
August 8, 2012: Castillo Cervantes resigns as State of Mexico prosecutor.
October 19, 2012: Start of the trial suspended after a change of lawyers.
November 21, 2012: The defense requests an abbreviated trial; the families and the prosecution agree.
December 4, 2012: Sentenced to 61 years for the rape and attempted homicide of the woman who survived.
December 12, 2012: Sentenced to 240 years for six feminicides; total 301 years.
December 2012: The president of the state High Court of Justice says he will serve the sentence at Barrientos.
June 17, 2015: The surviving woman's account of the 2010 investigation is published by Sin Embargo and reprinted by El Diario.
June 13, 2024: ViX releases a documentary series episode on the investigation, featuring Ciani.