Jose Maria Miculax Bux was born in 1925 at Patzicia, in Chimaltenango, and had come to Guatemala City as a young day labourer. He was twenty-one when he was executed.
Between February and April 1946 he and his cousin, Mariano Macu Miculax, killed boys and adolescents between the ages of ten and sixteen in and around the capital. The victims were bound at the hands and neck with rope, raped and strangled. The first body was found on February 23. Guatemalan reporting called him el Monstruo de Guatemala, the Monster of Guatemala.
Two men were arrested for the killings before he was, and both were wrong. He was taken on April 26, 1946 after an elderly woman gave the police a description of him, and Mariano was arrested the following day at Antigua. Miculax Bux confessed. His cousin denied it.
The legal response is what the case is remembered for in Guatemala. The country was a year into the reformist decade that followed the 1944 revolution, and the government passed a decree to expedite the proceedings against him. It is still known there as the Ley Miculax, and it remains a standing example in Guatemalan legal writing of a law written for a single defendant, with the guarantees that were set aside in the process.
He was sentenced to death on June 18, 1946 and shot by firing squad in public on July 18. Mariano Macu Miculax was sentenced to thirty years with hard labour.
His head was removed after the execution and kept at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala for medical study. It was stolen in the 1990s.
The count is unsettled. Fifteen is the figure in the Guatemalan sources and in the standard reference accounts, and is what this roster carries. Michael Newton's encyclopaedia records the conviction as being for twelve. Some Guatemalan reporting gives fourteen. The three figures are set out here rather than reconciled.
An earlier version of this entry said no detailed judicial account was available and that the record was almost entirely contemporary press reporting. That was wrong: the arrest of both men, the confession, the separate sentences, the date of sentence and the special decree are all on the record.