On May 11, 1997, Ana Gloria Gómez Palacio Escudero was shot dead in the Toriello Guerra neighborhood of Mexico City in what her fiancé told investigators was a street robbery. The couple had already booked a church for their wedding. Gabriel Arturo Garza Hoth was unhurt, drove her to the nearest hospital, where she died, and gave the prosecutors an account of the holdup as the only witness. He collected more than four hundred thousand dollars in life insurance. Two months into the inquiry, the Mexico City prosecutor's office concluded he had lied. He said he had been in the driver's seat when she was shot, and the blood on the left leg of his trousers and on his left shoe did not fit that.
The investigators went back through his past and found a pattern. Garza Hoth, born in Mexico City in 1966, had been married for nine years to Soledad Valdez, who died in 1991 of what was recorded as heart disease, though doctors suspected poison from the start; he collected four hundred thousand pesos. His next partner, Marcela Muñoz Palacios, was found shot dead in her car in the Nápoles neighborhood on October 3, 1992, hit by two bullets from two different guns, in another apparent robbery. He collected on two life policies with the insurer La Territorial worth a total of one million two hundred and fifty thousand pesos. A psychological profile described him as a man who used people's emotional crises to begin a friendship, offering moral support, company and attention to win the trust of the women and their families.
He was placed under house arrest while the case was built, and fled to Spain. On November 20, 1998, Interpol agents detained him at Barajas airport in Madrid. He was extradited and arrived in Mexico on January 8, 2000, and was arraigned at the 61st criminal court at the Reclusorio Oriente on charges of killing his wife and two fiancées for their insurance. The Mexican press named him el viudo negro, the Black Widower.
He was convicted in 2000. Accounts of the sentence differ: forty-five years, imposed on October 27, 2000, in some, and forty-one years in others; some foreign reports say life imprisonment. His present status is not publicly recorded.