The body of Murcia Gallardo (some accounts spell her first name Mucia) was found on the bank of the Consulado river, on the northern edge of Mexico City, in the early weeks of 1888. Her throat had been cut and she showed signs of rape. She was poor and, by most accounts, worked as a prostitute in Peralvillo, the district the river ran past, and she was not the first woman to be found there. Bodies had been turning up along those banks since 1880. What made hers different was that people in the neighborhood had seen her with Francisco Guerrero, a shoemaker they all knew, and some of them were willing to say so.
Guerrero was then in his late forties. He had come to the capital from the Bajío in 1862, at twenty-two, settled in Peralvillo, married a woman named María and had four children with her, and fathered others outside the marriage. He dressed like a charro, in cashmere trousers, an embroidered vest and a short jacket, and told people he was a devout servant of the Virgin of Guadalupe who had been a sacristan as a boy. The vest is one explanation for the name the neighborhood gave him, El Chalequero. The other is a piece of local slang, a puro chaleco, for a man who took any woman he wanted whether she was willing or not. Accounts agree that he talked about the killings in the pulquerías of the district and that nobody reported him, because people were afraid of him.
The method attributed to him held for eight years. He approached women as a customer, took them somewhere out of sight near the river, raped them, and strangled them or cut their throats; some were decapitated. The bodies were left on the banks or put into the water. Some modern retellings add that he skinned victims and used the leather in his trade, a claim that has not been traced to the trial record.
Detective Francisco Chávez made the arrest in 1888 on information from neighbors and from a woman named Lorenza Urrutía. The date is disputed: several Spanish-language profiles give June 13, 1888, while the account that cites Ricardo Ham's 2007 book on Mexican serial killers gives February 13. Guerrero denied everything. Asked about himself, he told the authorities that his favorite book was Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris.
Urrutía's own story was published in 1908, and it is the fullest account any survivor gave. She said he stopped her near the railroad tracks in Peralvillo and asked for a light, then pulled a knife and ordered her to walk with him; she got away by telling him she had to go and collect some money. Two months later he found her again. That time, she said, he took her to a cave outside the city and kept her there for two days, raping and torturing her, and she escaped only when he went out to buy pulque. After the arrest a washerwoman named Emilia also came forward. She had been walking home from a pilgrimage to La Santísima, near the Villa de Guadalupe, when, she said, he raped her by the river and left her for dead.
At trial the case against him rested, in Bertha Hernández's account for La Crónica de Hoy, on two things: the neighbors' complaint over Murcia Gallardo and the word of Emilia, who had lived to describe him. He was sentenced to death. How many killings the verdict covered is less clear. Many profiles say he was convicted of Gallardo's murder and the assault on Emilia and nothing more; the historian Pablo Piccato, in a 2001 study in the Hispanic American Historical Review, credits him with a long series of violent crimes against women in the 1880s that included at least two murders. The figure of about twenty killings that has followed him since is an attribution, not a verdict, and some Spanish-language profiles put it lower, at seventeen to twenty. Porfirio Díaz commuted the sentence to twenty years, and Guerrero was sent to the fortress prison of San Juan de Ulúa at Veracruz. The government censored much of the reporting, but the case became known across the country, and the Mexican press compared him with Jack the Ripper once the Whitechapel murders made the news later that year.
He walked out in 1904, sixteen years into the term. Hernández puts the release down to a bureaucratic error; the other accounts give no reason at all.
On June 13, 1908, he was arrested for the murder of an older woman whose surname was never established; she is known only as Antonia. Her throat had been cut and she had been left on the bank of the Consulado, as the others had. This time there were witnesses. José Inés Rodríguez, a young shepherd herding cattle nearby, heard a woman screaming, hid in the brush and watched the killing from start to finish. Two sisters named Solorio saw a man washing blood from his arms, face and chest in the river not far away. A reporter for El Imparcial who remembered the killings of the 1880s recognized the pattern and went to the police. Asked why he had done it, Guerrero said the woman had angered him. Sources disagree on whether Antonia, like most of the earlier victims, worked as a prostitute.
His arrest passed with little notice, but more than two thousand people came to watch the trial. He was convicted of Antonia's murder and sentenced to death again, and this time nobody intervened. The criminologist Carlos Roumagnac had written in 1906 that El Chalequero killed out of conscious violence rather than sexual compulsion. Reporters who saw him in 1908 described a slender, carefully groomed man of medium height with courteous manners, nothing like the brute the police of the 1880s, working from Cesare Lombroso's theory of the born criminal, had expected to find.
He waited at Lecumberri, the penitentiary in Mexico City, and spent much of his time reading Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie. Other inmates described him as quiet and careful of his appearance; he once wrote to the director asking that his family be allowed to bring him new trousers so that he could dress according to his education. In November 1910, shortly after the Revolution began, he was found unconscious in his cell and died at the Juárez Hospital without waking, about seventy years old. Accounts give tuberculosis, typhoid or an injury from an accident as the cause; the one finding recorded is a cerebral embolism. The death sentence was never carried out. Of all the women laid at his door, Antonia is the one whose verdict no account disputes.