On July 18, 1946, a crowd gathered in front of the outer wall of the Cementerio General in Guatemala City to watch José María Miculax Bux, twenty-one, face a firing squad. He drank two last small bottles of liquor and received a priest's ministrations before he was shot. He had been arrested less than three months earlier, and he had been tried under a law written to speed up his own case.
Between January and April 1946 fifteen boys and adolescents had been found dead in the capital, in Mixco and around Antigua, raped and strangled, their hands and necks bound with rope. Most were between ten and fifteen. The names that survive include Enrique Sactic Cuyuch, fourteen; Oscar Emilio López, twelve; César Augusto Bolfovich, thirteen; Francisco Juárez Ajvix, eleven; Gumersindo Flores, fourteen; Jesús Reyes, thirteen; Cecilio Uyú Pirir, thirteen; Nicolás Antonio Gómez Reyes, eighteen; Juan Lorenzo Iboy, thirteen; and Guillermo Rolando Castillo, ten. Five were never identified. The press called the killer the Monster of Guatemala, and the security forces were turned over almost entirely to the hunt. Two men were arrested before him, and both were the wrong men.
An elderly woman gave the police the description that caught him, and on April 26, 1946, they arrested Miculax, a day laborer born in 1925 at Patzicía, in Chimaltenango, whose illiterate parents worked the land; he had two children, Juana and Enrique. His cousin, Mariano Macú Miculax, was arrested the next day at Antigua. José María confessed. Mariano denied it.
The case arrived in the second year of the reformist government that followed the revolution of 1944, and once Miculax had confessed there was uncertainty over how to proceed. The victims' parents wrote to President Juan José Arévalo asking that both men be publicly shot, since only with their lives, they said, could they pay for their crimes, and so that the government would show it could guarantee the people's safety. Congress passed Decree 235, which shortened the procedure for trying murderers and has been known ever since as the Ley Miculax; it remains a standing example in Guatemalan legal writing of a law made for one defendant. On June 18, 1946, Miculax was sentenced to death, by one account for two of the fifteen killings proved at trial, and Mariano to thirty years in prison as his accomplice, although, by the same account, the evidence showed him no less guilty.
The count is usually given as fifteen, the figure in the Guatemalan sources; Michael Newton's encyclopedia records the conviction as being for twelve, and some Guatemalan reporting gives fourteen. After the execution, according to Guatemalan accounts, his head was kept at the Universidad de San Carlos for medical study, and it was stolen in the 1990s.