On Thursday, October 4, 2018, investigators from the State of Mexico prosecutor's office were watching a street in Jardines de Morelos, a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Ecatepec de Morelos, the large municipality that borders Mexico City to the north. They were looking for three young women who had gone missing that year, and for the two-month-old daughter of one of them. When a man and a woman came out of their building pushing a baby stroller, officers stopped them, expecting to find the baby. The stroller held human remains.
The couple were Juan Carlos Hernández Bejar, 38, and his wife, Patricia Martínez Bernal, 44. In the days that followed, the man told investigators that he had killed 20 women, and a recording of him saying he would keep killing women if he were released spread across Mexico. Over the next two and a half years the couple were sentenced ten times, for nine femicides and for selling a victim's baby, ending with life in prison. The case became one of the clearest illustrations in Mexico of a problem that women's groups had been describing for years: women vanishing from the same neighborhood, families doing the searching, and authorities moving only when the evidence was put in front of them.
This account uses the couple's full names because the Mexican press and the State of Mexico prosecutor's office published them once the sentences began. In the first months the reports called them Juan Carlos "N" and Patricia "N," the convention Mexican authorities use for people who have not been convicted.
What the sources establish about the couple's lives before their arrest is limited, and much of it comes from Hernández himself. BBC Mundo, reporting from the neighborhood a week after the arrest, said they lived in a cramped service room on the roof of a two-story blue building in Jardines de Morelos, with four children and three dogs. Neighbors said the windows were always covered and that the couple were about to be evicted. Jessenia Cruz, who ran a beauty salon on the ground floor, told the BBC she had never seen or heard anything wrong. She described them as respectful, hardworking and friendly, and said they called each other "mi amor."
Patricia Martínez sold things. Women in the area knew her as someone who offered cheese, perfume, or used clothing imported from the United States. Psychological assessments cited by BBC Mundo indicated that she had an intellectual disability. According to Mexico News Daily, summarizing El Universal's report on the final sentence, 2018 psychiatric testing found that Hernández had psychotic and personality disorders and that Martínez had had an intellectual disability since birth and showed signs of delirium, and both were found to know the difference between right and wrong.
Hernández described his own past in the recorded interview that leaked after the arrest. The Associated Press, which reviewed the video, reported that he said women had abused him as a boy, that a female babysitter had sexually abused him when he was ten, and that his mother had been unfaithful and once tried to knife his father. Excélsior reported that at a hearing he said his mother had forced him to dress as a girl, which he presented as the origin of his hatred of women. Vanguardia later reported that he described a head injury at ten and a brief period in the military. None of this was tested in court, and the sources give it only as his account.
Prosecutors' account of the method, given at hearings and in sentencing statements, was consistent across the cases. Martínez approached women she knew or met in the neighborhood and offered them goods at low prices: clothes for their children, baby things, perfume, kitchenware. The women came to the rooftop room to buy them. Hernández attacked them there with a knife or other sharp instrument, and the bodies were dismembered. Martínez, according to the sentencing statements, helped place the remains in plastic bags and sacks. Some remains were taken to vacant lots, including one in the neighboring Lázaro Cárdenas district; others were kept at home.
Mexico News Daily, citing El Universal, reported that some victims were sexually abused before they were killed, and that Hernández had had a relationship with one of the women and Martínez, out of jealousy, had ordered her death. Mexico News Daily also reported that the couple confessed to eating some remains, and Hernández said in the leaked video that he fed flesh to his dogs. This account does not go further into those details.
Many of the women in this case were not named in official statements. The State of Mexico prosecutor's office usually announced sentences by the victim's age and the date of the crime. Where the press named them, the names are given here.
The earliest case in the convictions is that of a girl of 13 who lived nearby. On April 12, 2012, she went to the property where the couple lived in Jardines de Morelos. Hernández attacked her with a sharp instrument and mutilated her body, prosecutors said, and Martínez helped put the remains in plastic bags and a sack, which they left on a vacant lot in Lázaro Cárdenas. Her name was not published. Her case was the last to be sentenced, nearly nine years later.
A woman of 26 who disappeared in 2012 was the subject of the ninth conviction. A woman of 33 died in January 2017. On February 20, 2017, a woman and her daughter, a child under seven, were killed in a property in Ecatepec. A girl of 17 was killed in February 2018. Beyond their ages and the dates, the sources opened say nothing about who these women and girls were.
Arlet Samanta Olguín Hernández was 22 (BBC Mundo gives 23). She was raising three young children on her own; her husband had gone to the United States to look for work. She rented an apartment on Calle Playa de Tijuana in Jardines de Morelos, in the same blue building where the couple rented the rooftop room, near the laundry area. On the morning of April 25, 2018, she was supposed to collect her eldest son from a preschool near home at noon. She did not come. Her mother, Guadalupe Hernández, went to get her grandson instead. Arlet's three-year-old daughter told her grandmother that her mother was "up there," near the laundry area. A bag of dirty clothes sat on the ground floor. Her phone went unanswered. Guadalupe Hernández traced the phone's last signal to the San Carlos area of Ecatepec, and phone records showed the last call at 10:30 that morning.
She reported Arlet missing on April 26 through Odisea, the state's program for locating missing people, but by then the phone could no longer be traced. On May 2 she complained publicly that the search had concentrated on an area near Parque Ehécatl instead of where she had traced the signal. She also told El Universal that before Arlet vanished, a man had contacted her on Facebook claiming to be a school friend. Days after the arrest, she said, the prosecutor's office still had not told her whether her daughter's remains had been found.
Evelyn was 29 and the mother of two. On July 26, 2018, she told her family she was going to buy clothes for her son from a woman who sold used American clothing. She did not come back. Her mother is Lilia Matus Cruz. (Chilango gave June as the month of her disappearance; BBC Mundo gave July 26.) At the October 2018 hearings, the prosecutor said Hernández had named her among the women he killed. In January 2019 the couple were bound over in a second femicide case, over a woman killed in July 2018, and in August 2019 they were sentenced for the killing of a woman in July 2018. Neither report named the victim, and no source opened ties Evelyn's name to that sentence.
Nancy Nohemí Huitrón Solorio was 28. She had an older daughter in school and, in the summer of 2018, a newborn girl named Valentina. On September 6, 2018, she left home with the baby, telling her family she was going to a meeting at her older daughter's school. According to prosecutors, Martínez had offered her clothes for the baby and a loan, and she went to the couple's home in the Playa Tijuana section of Jardines de Morelos. Prosecutors said Hernández killed her in the bathroom while Martínez was with the couple's children, and that Hernández said they had planned to harm her because of her daughter. Her remains were later found on a vacant lot in Jardines de Morelos. Her daughter was alive.
Guillermina del Ángel, a neighbor who sold corn on the cob, is named in a Milenio report of a later hearing at which the couple described her killing; the headline calls it a birthday present for Hernández. The full article could not be opened, and the sources do not say which sentence covered her case.
The couple did not keep Nancy Huitrón's baby. Prosecutors said they sold her for 15,000 pesos to another couple, Adrián, 39, and Rosa Laura, 38. The buyers told investigators they had been told the baby belonged to a woman from Guerrero who was giving her up, and that they had paid the money as "support." The handover took place outside an Elektra store in Jardines de Morelos, and the buyers registered the baby as their own. They were arrested, bound over on October 12, 2018, for human trafficking in the form of illegal adoption, and, according to El Universal, sentenced to four years. Valentina was recovered and placed with her maternal grandmother. (One early Expansión report described the baby as a boy; the other sources, including BBC Mundo and Excélsior, say a girl named Valentina.)
Milenio later reported that a midwife was bound over as an alleged accomplice, accused of issuing a birth certificate that allowed the child to be registered under a false parentage. Only the headline and summary of that report could be read, and the outcome of her case was not found; she should be treated as charged, not convicted.
The arrest did not come from a routine police investigation. BBC Mundo reported that the relatives of Arlet, Evelyn and Nancy, who did not know one another, compared notes and found that each woman's last calls included the same number. It was Patricia Martínez's. The three women lived within half a kilometer of one another, two in the Playas section of Jardines de Morelos and one in the Ríos section, and all three, according to their mothers, had known Martínez as a woman who sold clothes or cheese. Excélsior reported that the mothers said the prosecutor's office had not followed that line until they pressed it. Excélsior also described the three as single mothers who had been looking for work to earn money for celebrations for their children.
The activist Frida Guerrera, author of a book on femicide titled #NiUnaMás, told BBC Mundo that without the families the couple would not have been caught. State Attorney General Alejandro Jaime Gómez Sánchez said the investigation had found that the victims had all had some relationship with the couple, and that this was why a surveillance operation was set up in Jardines de Morelos. That surveillance led to the stop on October 4.
After the stop, the couple told investigators there were more remains on a nearby vacant lot. Investigators searched two homes in Ecatepec. Gómez said on Facebook that they found eight 20-liter plastic buckets holding remains covered in cement, and more remains wrapped in plastic bags in a refrigerator. Remains were also recovered from three places Hernández said he had left them. The AP reported that much of what was found was badly decomposed, and that tests were under way to establish the age, sex and number of the people. Local media later reported that a child's heart had been found in the house; EFE presented this as a media report, not an official finding.
Gómez spoke to Radio Fórmula about Hernández's statement. "He described it in a completely natural way," he said, as quoted by AFP. "I would say he actually seemed happy to have done this." He added: "I would obviously classify this person as a murderer, a serial killer." At the same time he said prosecutors had to establish whether the claims were true or were boasts. The AP reported that Hernández had given names and descriptions for only 10 of the 20 women he said he had killed.
Hernández also told investigators he had sold bones to a man he met at a bus stop. Gómez said investigators had "a line of investigation about one or two people in the area who may have bought them," and were checking whether they had been sold for use in Santería rituals. No charge over the bones appears in any source opened.
On Tuesday, October 9, a video of Hernández answering questions from a doctor at a police station appeared on social media. The AP described him handcuffed, in a T-shirt and jeans, alternating between calm, polite answers, self-pity and soft crying. He told the doctor that if he got out he would keep killing women, because he hated them, and he addressed the officers as "bosses." He said he had killed women "with all pleasure" and that he was "cleaning the world of filth." Vanguardia quoted another line: "Yo estoy bien, yo estoy bien, lo que hago está bien patrón" ("I'm fine, I'm fine, what I do is fine, boss"). El Universal reported that in an interview with prosecutors he said he wanted to reach 100 victims.
Gómez confirmed the video was genuine, called it "a piece of evidence that was made public," and described its release as "una filtración de un traidor," a leak by a traitor. The leak meant that, before any court had heard evidence, much of the country had seen the main suspect describe the crimes in his own words.
The couple were taken to the state prison at Chiconautla in Ecatepec, where the hearings were held. The first charge was narrow. On Thursday, October 11, 2018, a control judge bound them over for offenses against the respect due to the dead and violations of the laws on burial and exhumation, which carry six months to two years. That kept them in custody while prosecutors built the homicide cases. Outside, dozens of relatives of missing women waited.
On Friday, October 12, prosecutors charged both with the femicide of Nancy Huitrón. At that hearing Lilia Matus Cruz, Guadalupe Hernández and María Eugenia Solorio were among the relatives in the room, and El Universal reported that they wept as the prosecutor described the case. They said they had never imagined the couple could do such a thing and asked for the full weight of the law. Hernández asked repeatedly where his four children were, and the judge directed prosecutors to tell him.
On Tuesday, October 16, a judge bound the couple over for the femicide of Nancy Huitrón and for trafficking, over the sale of her daughter. Under State of Mexico law, femicide carries 40 to 70 years or life imprisonment. On January 22, 2019, they were bound over in a second femicide case, the woman killed in July 2018, whose remains had been identified through genetic analysis. By then five separate proceedings were open against them: two for femicide, one for offenses against the dead, one for trafficking and one for disappearance committed by private individuals.
Most of the convictions were reached through the abbreviated procedure, in which a defendant accepts the prosecution's account in exchange for a reduced or minimum sentence. Excélsior reported that the first three femicide convictions came that way. The sentences, as the State of Mexico prosecutor's office announced them and the press reported them, were these.
April 24, 2019: 30 years each, 15 for each of two women, Nancy Nohemí and Arlet Samanta. Prosecutors had asked to reclassify the original burial-law charge, first as concealing human remains to hide another crime, and the sentence was reported as being for disappearance of persons committed by private individuals. Univision reported reparation of 161,200 and 88,036 pesos; Chilango reported a fine of 160,000 pesos each. In July 2019 the magistrates of the First Criminal Appeals Tribunal of Ecatepec ordered the proceedings redone, holding that prosecutors had changed the legal classification at the wrong moment. The prosecutor's office said it would challenge the ruling by amparo, arguing that "the law does not prohibit reclassifying at the moment the abbreviated procedure is raised." No later report on that challenge or a retrial was found.
May 20, 2019: four years and six months for human trafficking in the form of illegal adoption, for the sale of Valentina.
June 11, 2019: 40 years for the femicide of Nancy Nohemí Huitrón Solorio, the first femicide conviction, with a fine of 56,534 pesos, 193,508 pesos in material reparation and 36,000 in moral reparation, and suspension of their civil and political rights.
June 19, 2019: 40 years for the femicide of Arlet Samanta. Milenio reported that at the hearing one of the couple said they killed her because she looked down on them as "ñeros" and "nacos," slang for low-class people.
August 7, 2019: 70 years for the femicide of the woman and her young daughter killed on February 20, 2017, with reparation of 130,705 and 159,957 pesos.
August 20, 2019: 40 years for the femicide of a woman killed in July 2018, reported by adn40 as the fourth femicide conviction.
Late September 2019: 53 years and four months for the femicide of the 17-year-old girl killed in February 2018, and 40 years for their part in the death of the 33-year-old woman killed in January 2017. The prosecutor's office announced both on Wednesday, September 25; UnoTV dates them September 24. EFE reported that each spouse's sentences now totaled 287 years, and that one femicide case and one disappearance case were still pending.
October 1, 2019: 40 years for the femicide of another woman. UnoTV and Vanguardia put the total at eight convictions and 327 years.
March 13, 2020: 40 years for the femicide of the 26-year-old woman who disappeared in 2012. Milenio counted nine sentences and 367 years.
February 17, 2021: life imprisonment for the femicide of the 13-year-old girl killed on April 12, 2012, and a fine of 311,650 pesos, imposed by a judge in Ecatepec. The prosecutor's office said the evidence was conclusive. It was the couple's tenth sentence and ninth for femicide.
The running totals in the press help explain what happened to the first sentence. Excélsior's August 2019 total of 184 years included the 30 years from April. EFE's 287 years in September, and every later total, do not. That is consistent with the April disappearance sentence having been set aside by the appeals tribunal, though no source opened says so directly.
The convictions cover the deaths of ten women and girls in nine femicide cases, by this account's count of the reported sentences, plus the trafficking of Valentina. EFE, writing in September 2019, described the couple as known for killing at least eight women; three more sentences followed. Those are the proven cases.
Hernández's figure of 20 is his own claim. Prosecutors said in 2018 that he could give details of about 10, and the AP advised treating parts of the confession with skepticism. Prosecutors' early statements that the couple could be linked to at least 10 cases match the number eventually convicted, but no source opened lists any charge beyond those sentenced. The other killings he described have not been proved.
The disappearance charge over Nancy Nohemí and Arlet Samanta was sent back by the appeals tribunal in July 2019. Its final outcome is not known from the sources opened, so on that count the couple should be regarded as charged, not convicted. The same applies to the midwife.
The reports that the couple sold bones, that remains were offered to Santa Muerte, that a child's heart was found in the house, and that they ate parts of the bodies come from Hernández's statements, from prosecutors describing those statements at hearings, or from local media. They were not the subject of separate charges in any source opened. The motive Hernández gave, hatred of women rooted in abuse in his childhood, is also his own account.
When the couple were arrested, Ecatepec was already known as one of the most dangerous places in Mexico to be a woman. BBC Mundo had called it the worst place in the country to be a woman in a 2015 report. That year, several State of Mexico municipalities, Ecatepec among them, came under a gender violence alert, a mechanism meant to send more resources to investigating killings of women. The Observatorio Ciudadano Nacional del Feminicidio recorded 1,420 killings of women in the State of Mexico from 2014 to 2017. In 2018, official figures from the national public security system cited by EFE recorded 112 femicides in the State of Mexico, more than any other state, and 901 nationwide, with Ecatepec recording more than any other municipality. CNN, citing UN Women, reported that seven women and girls were killed every day in Mexico in 2016, and that a joint study by the Interior Department, the National Women's Institute and UN Women counted 52,210 killings of women from 1985 to 2017, nearly a third of them in the last six years of that period.
Mexican law defines femicide as the killing of a woman for reasons of gender, and it carries heavier penalties than homicide. The Ecatepec case showed both what that classification could do and what it had not done. The couple were sentenced for nine femicides, at the top end of the scale in the last case. But several of the convicted killings went back to 2012 and 2017, and the women had been missing for years without anyone connecting them. The cases that broke open were the ones in 2018 where mothers did their own tracing, filed complaints, and pushed prosecutors to follow the one lead they shared.
On Sunday, October 7, 2018, three days after the arrest, more than 1,000 people marched through Jardines de Morelos dressed in white, carrying banners and photographs of the women. They walked along Avenida Central and ended at the vacant lot on Nicolás Bravo where remains had been found, which became a makeshift memorial with candles and white flowers. Speakers said many other women had disappeared or been killed in Ecatepec and the State of Mexico, and that not all of those cases involved this couple. "Aquí nadie está a salvo," one resident, Rafaela Adame, told BBC Mundo: here no one is safe. An organizer, Ishtar García, described the black bags left on streets, which locals called "embolsados," that might hold human remains. Antonio Soto, a shopkeeper, said he was afraid to let his daughter out of the house. A neighbor told the BBC it was a relief the couple had been caught, "but we know they are not the only ones." Collectives such as Mujeres en Cadena and Red Andrómeda said many cases still went uninvestigated despite the alert.
A woman who gave the BBC the pseudonym Carolina, 29, said Patricia Martínez had invited her for a beer at the couple's home a few days before the arrest, and that she had put it off because of a family problem. "Yo podría haber sido la próxima víctima de la pareja de asesinos," she said: I could have been the next victim of the killer couple.
In February 2019, according to adn40, neighbors reported on social media that the couple's former home had been remodeled and rented out.
On September 28, 2023, Guadalupe Hernández, Arlet's mother, appeared at the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City with the PAN federal deputy María Teresa Castell de Oro Palacios. She said that Netflix had negotiated with Juan Carlos Hernández over a series about his crimes, and that, according to neighbors, the company had visited his mother and paid her. Those claims are hers and were not confirmed in the reports. She said her family had never received full reparation of damages, and that Arlet's children lacked guaranteed education, health care and psychological care. "Aquí no puede haber justicia a medias," she said: there cannot be half-justice here. "They can change the names, but it's the same story." Another family member told TV Azteca that Hernández wanted to write a book and that people wanted to make him famous. Guadalupe Hernández also objected to the ease with which, she said, he had access to cell phones and journalists from prison.
Castell proposed legislation requiring streaming platforms that produce series about killers and other criminals to pay royalties to victims' families, so that "perpetrators do not benefit from the commercialization of their crimes." She told TV Azteca that if the series could not be stopped on free speech grounds, the money should at least go to the families. The reports describe the initiative as in progress; whether it passed, and whether any series was made, was not established in the sources opened.
As of the September 28, 2023 Vanguardia report, Juan Carlos Hernández Bejar was held at the Chiconautla prison in the State of Mexico. The sources opened do not give Patricia Martínez Bernal's place of detention after the sentences, though both were held at Chiconautla during the proceedings. Both are serving the sentences listed above, the last of them life imprisonment, which make them convicted, not accused, in the nine femicide cases and the trafficking case. The retrial of the disappearance count ordered in July 2019 and the midwife's case are unresolved in the sources found. No report later than September 2023 on the couple was found in this research, and their status in 2026 has not been confirmed.
April 12, 2012: A girl of 13, a neighbor, is killed at the couple's home in Jardines de Morelos.
2012: A woman of 26 disappears; the couple are later convicted of her femicide.
January 2017: A woman of 33 is killed.
February 20, 2017: A woman and her daughter, under seven, are killed.
February 2018: A girl of 17 is killed.
April 25, 2018: Arlet Samanta Olguín Hernández, 22, disappears on her way to collect her son from preschool.
July 2018: A woman is killed; the couple are later convicted. Evelyn, 29, disappears on July 26.
September 6, 2018: Nancy Nohemí Huitrón Solorio, 28, is killed. Her two-month-old daughter, Valentina, is sold.
October 4, 2018: Hernández and Martínez are stopped in Jardines de Morelos with human remains in a baby stroller.
October 7, 2018: More than 1,000 people march in Jardines de Morelos.
October 9, 2018: Video of Hernández's interview leaks.
October 11 to 16, 2018: The couple are bound over for burial-law offenses, then for the femicide of Nancy Huitrón and for trafficking. The buyers of Valentina are bound over.
January 22, 2019: Second femicide case opened, over the woman killed in July 2018.
April 24, 2019: 30 years for the disappearance of Nancy Nohemí and Arlet Samanta.
May 20, 2019: Four and a half years for trafficking.
June 11 and 19, 2019: 40 years each for the femicides of Nancy and Arlet.
July 11, 2019: Appeals tribunal orders the disappearance case redone.
August 7 and 20, 2019: 70 years (mother and daughter) and 40 years (woman killed July 2018).
September 24 to 25, 2019: 53 years and four months (girl of 17) and 40 years (woman of 33).
October 1, 2019: 40 years for another femicide.
March 13, 2020: 40 years (woman of 26).
February 17, 2021: Life imprisonment (girl of 13).
September 28, 2023: Arlet's mother asks the Chamber of Deputies to stop a reported Netflix series and calls for reparation. Hernández is held at Chiconautla.