On the night of July 13, 2011, Blanca Elia Quintero Magaña, a lawyer at a temporary shelter for women, boarded a Route 2 microbus at Santa Mónica, in front of the Safari restaurant. The bus was number 002468, and across its windshield was painted the word Coqueto. The driver was César Armando Librado Legorreta. She was one of seven women he would be accused of raping and killing inside that bus over the next seven months.
He was born on June 16, 1982, at Tenango del Valle in the State of Mexico. When he was caught he was twenty-nine, living in Tultitlán with his partner and their children, and working the late shift on the route between Metro Chapultepec and Valle Dorado. The job was the method. When a woman was left alone on board he raped and strangled her inside the vehicle and dumped her body on waste ground along the route he drove every day, across Tlalnepantla, Naucalpan, Cuautitlán Izcalli and the capital. One body was left in a central district of Mexico City, which investigators read as an attempt to break a pattern they were beginning to see. Years later, in a prison interview, he described the thought behind it: "You see her alone, you see she's pretty, you play the friend."
The women named at his sentencing were Sireni Dayana Pulido García, Blanca Elia Quintero Magaña, Eva Cecilia, Fernanda Navarrete Valladares, Patricia Briano Herrera, and a woman who appeared to be between twenty and twenty-five and was never identified. Dayana, whose first name some reports spell Cireni, was twenty-three and the mother of two children. Blanca Elia was a lawyer of twenty-eight. Fernanda was twenty. Patricia worked as a cook and had three children. Eva Cecilia, a student, was seventeen by the CIMAC account; La Jornada named her as Cecilia Pérez Vargas, sixteen. She disappeared on November 26, 2011, after saying goodbye to her boyfriend and setting off home after going skating; she had taken the Route 2 microbus between Metro Chapultepec and Valle Dorado. Her body was found on December 24, and her mother, Amparo Vargas, learned of it only three days later, after officials had told her there was nothing on her daughter. Mexican press accounts also name two others, Camila and Fidelia.
He was caught through the woman who lived. She was raped on the bus and left for dead, and her account gave investigators the driver, the route and the vehicle. By his own later account he never knew his first victim had survived. Sources differ on the date of that attack, given in one account as June 2010 and in others as the start of the 2011 series.
Agents of the State of Mexico prosecutor's office picked him up at his home in a working-class neighborhood of Tlalnepantla sometime between February 18 and 23, 2012; reports give the 18th, the 23rd and the 26th. He was held at the office of the deputy prosecutor in Tlalnepantla under a precautionary order, because the control judge at Barrientos prison had not set the first hearing until February 28. In custody he admitted raping eight women and killing seven of them, and told investigators he had killed them "so they wouldn't report me." By his account the first rape was in June 2010 and the last in October 2011.
In the early hours of Monday, February 27, the day before that hearing, he got away. According to the state prosecutor, Alfredo Castillo Cervantes, he slipped the handcuff that held his right hand to a metal bar and then the cuffs on his ankles while the three agents assigned to guard him slept, knotted computer and telephone cables into a rope, and tried to lower himself from the third floor. The cable gave way and he fell. Injured, he covered some two hundred yards to a median strip, where a driver stopped to help him; he said he had been hit by a car. Castillo apologized publicly for the escape. One of the three guards was arrested and charged with allowing a prisoner to escape, and was released on bail of 28,414 pesos to face the charge; the other two fled. An aunt who worked for the Mexico City prosecutor's office was reported to be connected to one of the guards, and she denied any part in it. The state offered a reward of a million pesos, and some eight hundred police joined the search.
He was recaptured on the afternoon of Saturday, March 3, 2012, at a relative's house in a ravine on the Cerro del Judío, in the La Malinche neighborhood of Magdalena Contreras in Mexico City, after an intelligence unit of the prosecutor's office located him; that morning police had also raided an Infonavit housing complex in Cuautitlán Izcalli. When he saw he was surrounded, Castillo said, he gave himself up without a fight. He was found lying on a mattress on the floor, in shorts, bandaged at the waist and unable to walk, and he had shaved his head. Governor Eruviel Ávila announced the arrest on Twitter and said in a video message that his government would ask the judge for life imprisonment, under reforms to the penal code passed the previous October. He was taken to the Nicolás San Juan hospital in Toluca with injuries to his spine, lower back and right foot, and the prosecutor said the fall might leave him paralyzed. His defense asked for the constitutional time limit before the judge ruled on the charges to be extended to 144 hours, to present evidence of his innocence. He had surgery in Toluca on April 12, 2012, which the victims' mothers resented: the state paid for the operation, they said, while it had ignored them when they reported their daughters missing. The Coalition against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America, speaking for some of the mothers, said two unidentified women's bodies held by the prosecutor's feminicide unit might also be linked to him.
Amparo Vargas said the mothers, not the state prosecutor's office, had gathered the evidence that led to him. She had told investigators that whoever took her daughter might be found on the Route 2 microbuses, and she said the lead was not taken seriously until the woman who survived came forward and identified her attacker. Feminicide had been a crime in the State of Mexico only since March 2011, when article 242 bis of the state penal code made it punishable by forty to seventy years.
The case was split in two. On December 4, 2012, he received sixty-one years for the rape and attempted murder of the survivor. For the six killings he pleaded guilty, and on December 12, in a hearing in the oral trials court at Barrientos prison that began at eleven in the morning and ran more than six hours, with a three-hour recess before the sentences were read, Judge Juan Arturo Velázquez Méndez sentenced him to forty years for each feminicide, two hundred and forty years in all, with a fine of 700 days' minimum wage and 94,515 pesos in compensation for each victim's family, and confiscated the bus. The prosecution had asked for the minimum term on each count and the judge excluded any other benefit; he found no grounds for an award for moral damages and described Librado Legorreta as highly dangerous and likely to offend again. The case was file 172/2012, and the terms were counted from March 4, 2012. With the sentence for the survivor the total came to 301 years. Reporters present described him yawning through the verdicts while the mothers of the dead women listened. He walked into the last hearings without the wheelchair or brace he had used after the fall, which the families took as a sign of how well he was being treated.
Amparo Vargas said she was at peace with the sentence, compared with mothers who had spent years searching for missing daughters, but that it was a sign of the authorities' inaction rather than of justice: he had had to kill six women before anyone acted. She said the case had pushed women in the State of Mexico to organize against the failures of the justice system, and that some of the mothers were forming a group to report disappearances so that other families would not go through the same thing. Two further cases, one elsewhere in the State of Mexico and one in Mexico City, had not been tried when the December sentences were passed.
He entered Barrientos prison in 2012. In March 2014 state prison authorities moved him to the state maximum-security prison at Tepachico, in Otumba, and placed him in a high-danger unit, citing his criminal profile, conflicts with other inmates and worsening behavior. A 2020 report said he used a wheelchair. In a 2024 interview for the podcast Penitencia with Saskia Niño de Rivera, he said he had no contact with his parents or brothers, that he had been raised with values at home, and that killing had made everything feel easy and the adrenaline had driven him on. He also claimed his sentence did not include rape or feminicide and that some of the crimes had been planted on him, a claim the court record contradicts. One outlet reporting the interview gave his total sentence as 296 years.