Francisco Guerrero was a shoemaker from Peralvillo, a district of Mexico City, whom the city's newspapers called "el Chalequero". In the 1880s he was blamed for a series of killings of women, and in 1888 he was sentenced to death. That sentence was not carried out. Twenty years later, in May 1908, an elderly woman was found dead near the Consulado river, and Guerrero, by then free, was arrested, confessed and was condemned again, this time by a popular jury that took 30 minutes to decide. He was never executed. He died in the Hospital Juárez in about 1910 and was buried in a common grave.
His case became one of the best known in the history of crime reporting in Mexico. The historian Ricardo Morales López, writing in 2012 for a conference volume of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), traced how El Imparcial, the leading daily of the new press industry of the late Porfirian era, covered the 1908 case almost day by day, and how illustrators and broadside printers made images of him for two decades. Much of what is repeated about him today, including the count of about 20 killings, comes from later retellings and not from any court finding.
Accounts of his early life differ. Morales López gives his dates as about 1853 to about 1910, and writes that he was the eleventh of 14 children. A 2023 profile by the Mexican broadcaster N+, drawing on the journalist Gerardo Villadelángel's "Libro Rojo", says he was born in 1840 in an unspecified part of the Bajío region, into a poor family, and that he was treated badly by his mother at a time when his father was absent. According to N+, he moved to Mexico City in 1862, at the age of 22, to work for a shoemaker.
In the capital he worked as a shoemaker in the area then known as San José, in the Cuartos de la Cuchilla del Fraile, which Morales López identifies with today's Peralvillo. There he lived with a woman, and they had six children, according to Morales López; N+ says he married and had four children, and that he also had children outside the marriage. His youngest daughter would play a small part in the story of his second arrest.
The newspaper El Monitor Republicano described him in the late 1880s as fair-haired with light eyes, fond of dark clothes: gray trousers, a black jacket, a wide-brimmed hat and black shoes. Morales López, summarizing what Guerrero said of himself, writes that he described his own temper as docile, though at times "solid", that he was a Catholic who believed in the soul and in the Virgin, that he enjoyed melodramatic theater and that he read serialized novels.
The nickname has more than one explanation in the accounts; the plainest is that he was known for wearing vests (chalecos). Mexico City papers of the time also called him "the ripper of the Consulado river", "the Mexican ripper" and "the Mexican Bluebeard", according to N+.
Morales López records that Guerrero was first confined in 1881 for a minor offense against the police. Nothing in the accounts connects that episode to the later killings.
Between about 1880 and 1888, women were killed in and around Peralvillo and along the Consulado river. N+ puts the number attributed to Guerrero at about 20, over those eight years. Morales López describes him, in the language of a criminal profile, as a man who attacked and killed women, many of them elderly. These figures and descriptions belong to later reconstructions; the court record of the 1888 case, as far as historians have described it, does not set out a list of victims.
N+ writes that neighbors suspected him and that he boasted of the killings, but that they were afraid to report him. Morales López writes that a man later shown in the broadsides, whose role he does not explain in detail, was connected with the earliest killings attributed to Guerrero.
The broadsides printed in the shop of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo around 1890 named at least one woman as a victim of "the crimes of the Chalequero". Another sheet from the same press announced "the coming execution of Francisco Guerrero (alias) el Chalequero" and set out what it called the communication of his sentence. These sheets were popular prints, sold cheaply on the street, and they are evidence of how the case was told at the time, not of what a court found.
On January 3, 1888, El Monitor Republicano carried a short report under the headline "Importante aprehensión", an important arrest. N+ writes that the detective Francisco Chávez arrested him for the first time in 1888, after neighbors reported him. Chávez's own version was published much later, in 1932, as "The memoirs of Pancho Chávez", a series in the weekly magazine Detectives credited to Nick Carter.
In 1888, an anonymous reporter wrote that Guerrero had earned a "doctorate in crime", a phrase Morales López quotes. N+ states that he was sentenced to death that year. The exact wording of the charges on which he was convicted in 1888, the court that tried him and the number of killings the verdict covered are not known.
The death sentence was not carried out. N+ reports that, according to some accounts, President Porfirio Díaz reduced it to 20 years in prison. Morales López writes that Guerrero was held at San Juan de Ulúa, the prison at the port of Veracruz, and later at the Cárcel Nacional in Mexico City. He also writes that Guerrero may have contracted tuberculosis in the port prison.
How Guerrero came to be free again before 1908 is not clear from the record. N+ says that some reports put his release in 1904 and attribute it to a bureaucratic error. Morales López writes more cautiously that, in the two decades between the two cases, Guerrero left prison more than once, and that he received two death sentences, neither of which was carried out.
On the morning of May 26, 1908, according to Morales López, an elderly woman was killed near the Consulado river. The 1908 press described her as about 80 years old. Her name was not reported in the accounts of the case.
Two days later, on May 28, 1908, El Imparcial ran a story on page 7 under a headline that asked whether "the times of the Chalequero" were returning, and called the death a mysterious killing. A follow-up on May 30 said the case was still unsolved. By June 1, the paper reported that Guerrero was in custody and still denying everything, and it carried the account of a further witness and of a child who had seen something of the crime.
N+ describes that witness evidence. A boy herding livestock near the Consulado river saw the attack, and two sisters saw a man washing in the stream nearby. On June 5, El Imparcial wrote that the evidence against him was overwhelming: a witness and physical evidence. On June 6 he appeared before the judge.
The family reaction drew attention as well. Morales López writes that Guerrero's youngest daughter read about the killing in the newspaper and mentioned it to him. He showed no surprise and told her calmly that the area was dangerous and that such things had happened there before.
On June 17, 1908, El Imparcial reported on its front page that "el Chalequero" had confessed, under a headline built around his words: "Sí señor, yo maté", "Yes, sir, I killed". According to Morales López, Guerrero's account was that the woman had rebuffed him, that he had tried to rob her, that she had insulted and scratched him, and that he struck her in anger. Afterward, he said, he went off calmly to look for work.
The coverage that followed treated him as a returning figure from the 1880s. On June 18, the paper asked whether he acted unconsciously and compared "the old and the new Chalequero". On June 19, it ran a feature recalling his earlier victims. On June 22, it wrote about his fear of the gallows and reconstructed the latest killing. On June 24, it reported that about two thousand people had gathered at the scene of the crime and described the prisoner's calm as he recalled the day. Later stories, on July 4, August 6 and August 12, dealt with the legal procedure, with the question of degeneration, concluding that he was not epileptic, and with his life in prison.
Morales López writes that Guerrero was placed in cell 67 of the Cárcel Nacional, the same cell once occupied by the prisoner known as the "Tigre de Santa Julia". N+ says that he was held at Lecumberri, the penitentiary of Mexico City, and that fellow inmates described him as calm, quiet and very concerned with his appearance. According to N+, he wrote to the prison director asking that his family be allowed to bring him new clothes suited to his education.
The trial took place before a popular jury. El Imparcial reported on August 30, 1908 that the jury proceedings were beginning, and covered them again on September 3 and September 4, when the paper said the hearing had opened with a dramatic incident. In early September 1908, Morales López writes, the jury deliberated for 30 minutes and he was sentenced to death by firing squad. On September 5, El Imparcial headlined its report: "El Chalequero will pay with his life for his long chain of crimes."
The exact name of the offense on which the jury convicted him is not known, though the case concerned the killing of the elderly woman on May 26, 1908. N+ gives a different picture, saying he died before receiving a sentence; the contemporary El Imparcial headlines listed by Morales López, which report the sentence, are the earlier and more direct evidence.
The 1908 death sentence, like the one of 1888, was not carried out. Morales López writes that Guerrero died at the Hospital Juárez in Mexico City, of a cerebral hemorrhage or of tuberculosis contracted in the prison at Veracruz, and that he was buried in a common grave. N+ says he was found unconscious in his cell, taken to the Hospital Juárez and declared dead in 1910. Neither account gives the exact date of death.
Morales López's study is mainly about images. He compares the way El Imparcial illustrated the case in 1908 with the broadsides printed by Vanegas Arroyo around 1890. El Imparcial, owned by Rafael Reyes Spíndola, received a government subsidy of about 50,000 pesos a year and enjoyed privileged access to officials; one official is reported to have told a reporter that he would give news only to the men from El Imparcial and El Mundo, because they were government employees. Its illustrator Eugenio Olvera drew Guerrero for the editions of June 18 and September 5, 1908.
The earlier broadsides showed the killings in the style of the popular prints of the day. One drew Guerrero at about 35, from a photograph; another showed him in his fifties. One sheet included the man linked to the early killings and recalled his time at San Juan de Ulúa. Morales López points out that the artist drew Guerrero as left-handed, which he was, although reporters did not mention it. The image from the execution broadside was later reused for a sheet about the Carrancista rebels during the Revolution.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds a type-metal engraving of Guerrero by José Guadalupe Posada, dated about 1892, which its catalog describes as an image from the corrido "El Chalequero", reprinted in 1930. It was given to the museum by the artist Jean Charlot in 1930.
The case has been studied by several historians of crime in Mexico. Ricardo Pérez Montfort's 1997 work on the press and crime in late Porfirian Mexico City includes a chapter titled "El Chalequero". In a 2012 review of the historian Pablo Piccato's book on crime in Mexico City, María Dolores Lorenzo-Río noted that Piccato used the case of Francisco Guerrero, El Chalequero, among his examples. Pilar Adriana Rey Hernández, of El Colegio de México, listed him in 2020 among the celebrated criminal cases of the city, alongside that of "Goyo" Cárdenas.
The N+ profile of 2023, which calls him the first serial killer in Mexico, credits Villadelángel, Pérez Montfort and a report by Hernán Almaguer for its account.
The number of killings. The figure of about 20 women killed between 1880 and 1888 appears in later accounts such as the N+ profile. It is an attribution, not a verdict, and no account of the 1888 case says how many killings the court considered.
The 1888 commutation and the 1904 release. That Porfirio Díaz reduced the 1888 sentence to 20 years, and that Guerrero was freed by mistake in 1904, are reported by N+ only as what "some reports" say. Morales López states only that he left prison more than once and that neither death sentence was carried out.
His age and origin. Morales López puts his birth at about 1853; N+ gives 1840 and the Bajío.
The trade claim. N+ repeats a claim that he used the skin of his victims in his work as a shoemaker. Nothing tied to the court record supports it.
The date of his first arrest. El Monitor Republicano's report of an "important arrest" ran on January 3, 1888.
About 1853 (Morales López) or 1840 (N+): Francisco Guerrero is born; N+ places his birth in the Bajío.
1862: He moves to Mexico City to work for a shoemaker, according to N+.
1880 to 1888: Killings of women in and around Peralvillo and the Consulado river are later attributed to him.
1881: He is confined for a minor offense against the police (Morales López).
January 3, 1888: El Monitor Republicano reports "an important arrest".
1888: He is sentenced to death; the sentence is not carried out. Some reports say Porfirio Díaz reduced it to 20 years.
About 1890: Broadsides from Vanegas Arroyo's press depict the killings and announce his "coming execution".
About 1892: José Guadalupe Posada engraves his image for the corrido "El Chalequero".
1904: Some reports place his release from prison in this year.
May 26, 1908: An elderly woman is killed near the Consulado river.
May 28, 1908: El Imparcial asks whether "the times of the Chalequero" are returning.
June 1, 1908: El Imparcial reports him in custody and denying the killing.
June 17, 1908: El Imparcial reports his confession.
Early September 1908: A popular jury deliberates for 30 minutes; he is sentenced to death by firing squad.
September 5, 1908: El Imparcial reports the sentence.
About 1910: He dies at the Hospital Juárez in Mexico City and is buried in a common grave.
1932: The detective Francisco Chávez's memoirs appear in the magazine Detectives.