Juana Barraza Samperio was arrested in Mexico City on January 25, 2006, as she ran from a building where an elderly widow, Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, had just been strangled. She was 48, a former professional wrestler who had fought under the name La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence, and who sold popcorn at wrestling arenas. By the next day the city's attorney general had announced that she was the person the press had for two years called "el Mataviejitas," the killer of old women, and that fingerprints tied her to at least ten earlier deaths.
The arrest ended what Susana Vargas Cervantes, a Carleton University researcher who has studied the case, calls the first search for a serial killer in Mexico, and it upended the theory behind it. Investigators had told the public that the killer was most likely a man dressed as a woman, and in 2005 police had detained dozens of transgender sex workers to take their fingerprints. None matched. On March 31, 2008, a Mexico City criminal court convicted Barraza of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced her to 759 years in prison. She called the sentence unjust. She has said since then that she killed one woman, not the others, and that she confessed under threats. As of September 2026 she was still in prison, now 68 and using a wheelchair.
Barraza was born on December 27, 1957, in Epazoyucan, in the state of Hidalgo, north of Mexico City, according to Expansión Política. A 2024 Milenio report gives the date as December 27, 1958, and the place as Pachuca, the state capital. Her father left the family, and she moved to Mexico City with her mother.
Much of what is known about her early years comes from her own account, given to investigators and later to journalists and researchers. She has said that her mother mistreated her, beat her and cursed her, and that her mother handed her over to a man in exchange for alcohol when she was a girl. She has said that the man abused her for years, from about the age of 12. The details of this account vary between reports, and none of it was tested in court. Researchers who have studied the case, among them Vargas Cervantes, have pointed out that the press coverage of her arrest gave little attention to the violence she described suffering as a child. Vargas Cervantes also reported that Barraza could not read or write.
As an adult she had four children. Her eldest son died at 24 in a street fight, Expansión reported in 2023, and in a 2024 interview she described his death as the saddest moment of her life. Relationships with men were marked by violence, she has said, and she decided to live only with her children.
At about 30 Barraza began to wrestle professionally in lucha libre, the Mexican style of masked and costumed wrestling, under the name La Dama del Silencio. Prosecutors said in 2006 that she sold popcorn at lucha libre arenas and sometimes wrestled in the ring. A spinal injury ended her career as a wrestler, Expansión reported, and she later worked as a wrestling promoter. In a 2024 interview she said that she had run a small kitchen and sold clothes and sneakers at a market stall, and she denied ever working as a nurse.
From the late 1990s, the Mexico City attorney general's office, known then as the PGJDF (Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito Federal), was recording a rising number of killings of elderly women in their homes. La Jornada, counting from the office's records the day after Barraza's arrest, reported 49 such cases from 1998 through 2005: 12 in 2003, 17 in 2004 and 11 in 2005. Police had solved eight of them, with three people jailed. The prosecutor's office itself gave a figure of 48 homicides of elderly women over eight years, of which it said 38 shared similar features.
La Jornada dated the first case showing what became the recognized pattern to March 2003, when Guillermina León Oropeza was found dead in her home in the Cuauhtémoc borough. The victims were women in their seventies and eighties, many of them widows who lived alone. They were strangled, and their homes were robbed. Two academic researchers at UNAM, Tonatiuh Suárez-Meaney and Luis Chías Becerril, later put the average age of the victims in the series at 79.
The women killed were, in the words of one academic study of the press coverage, isolated, often left to themselves by relatives and neighbors. Reports from the investigation said the killer won entry to their homes by offering to enroll them in pension programs or to help with household work.
One of the deaths the prosecutor's office later attributed to Barraza was that of María Guadalupe González, who was killed on October 9, 2003. Her case was first charged against another man, M.T., who was arrested in September 2004 and was accused of three killings of elderly women. In April 2006, after Barraza's fingerprints had been taken, the attorney general, Bernardo Bátiz, told La Jornada that a fingerprint match showed that María Guadalupe González had been killed by Barraza, not by M.T., and that the case file would be corrected. Bátiz said that M.T. remained responsible for the two other killings with which he had been charged, for which he had been sentenced.
Before August 2005, officials of the prosecutor's office denied that most of the cases were related, La Jornada reported. In December 2003, a month after police first announced that they were looking for a serial killer with a specific method, they released a first sketch based on witnesses, according to Vargas Cervantes. It showed someone who was said to pose as a worker for Sí Vale, the city program that paid financial support to older adults. Over the following years the police produced more than 64 sketches and posted them across the city, in parks, in patrol cars, in government offices and at metro and bus stations.
In August 2005 the first composite sketches of a single suspect were published, and posters went up on patrol cars in all 70 of the city's police sectors. On August 25, 2005, Bátiz acknowledged that four of the homicides were similar. In September 2005 police assigned 100 officers to the case under the homicide prosecutor, Guillermo Zayas. Two of the sketches released in August 2005 were printed side by side under the heading "Se buscan" (Wanted), and Vargas Cervantes has noted that they did not look like each other.
By early October 2005, 46 people had been brought to police stations, fingerprinted and photographed, and more than 300 interviewed, she reported; some media put the number of people detained as suspects at more than 500. In late October 2005 police arrested between 38 and 50 transgender sex workers and took their fingerprints. None matched the prints found at the crime scenes. La Jornada reported that sex workers detained in the Tlalpan borough were among those compared. Bátiz was quoted saying that the killer might not be a travesti but was certainly transgender. Vargas Cervantes described the raids as resting on homophobic and transphobic assumptions, and noted that they were carried out in poor neighborhoods rather than in wealthier ones.
The scholar Vek Lewis, writing in 2008, linked the raids to a Televisa soap opera, La Madrastra, which had shortly before aired a storyline about a man who disguised himself as a woman to kill. Lewis argued that the story shaped how police profiled transgender women as suspects. Police profiles of the period, as Vargas Cervantes summarized them, described a middle-aged gay man who had been abused as a child and raised among women; after two years the physical profile became a man dressed as a woman, or a heavily built woman, about 45 years old.
Investigators also drew on a French case. In January 2006, 100 Mexico City officers took a 30-hour course taught by three French police officers over one week, because police saw parallels with the case of Thierry Paulin, who was blamed for the killings of more than 20 elderly women in Paris in the 1980s.
On November 17, 2005, the deputy attorney general for central investigations, Renato Sales Heredia, gave the most detailed public account of the case so far. He told reporters that a single killer could have committed 24 of the 32 homicides of elderly women recorded since 2003. Nine of the killings and one attempted killing, he said, carried the same fingerprints, and 15 more were very probably the work of the same person. Investigators presented a three-dimensional portrait of the suspect and said they could not yet tell whether the killer was a woman or a man dressed as one. They also released a portrait of a possible accomplice, based on a neighbor's description in one case.
Sales said that the fingerprints had been sent to the national public security system for comparison but could not be checked quickly against the national voter registry, because no digital system existed for that, and comparing by hand was slow. He advised older people not to give personal information to strangers. A clay bust of the suspect made in November 2005 by the sculptor Patricia Payán was later presented as closely resembling Barraza.
Over these years police arrested other people in connection with the killings of elderly women. A woman, A.V.G., was arrested in March 2004 in Acolman, State of Mexico, and was sentenced to more than 42 years for the homicide and robbery of a woman. M.T., called "El Enfermero" (the Nurse) in the press, was arrested in September 2004 and sentenced to 61 years for two homicides. La Jornada reported in January 2006 that both had been linked to at least five killings of elderly people. The UNAM researchers Suárez-Meaney and Chías later described their arrests as mistaken arrests prompted by early descriptions of the killer.
By January 2006 at least 300 plainclothes police officers were watching public squares, churches and parks across the city, Proceso reported. The arrest, when it came, began with a call from the public. On the evening of Wednesday, January 25, 2006, Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, a widow in her eighties, was found strangled in her home in the Venustiano Carranza borough, in the east of Mexico City. A young man who lived in the same home found her, according to Expansión, and a neighbor alerted the police. When a patrol car arrived, a woman leaving the building ran, and officers caught her a short distance away.
Reports of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro's age differ. The Associated Press gave it as 82, Proceso as 80, and the Spanish agency EFE as 81. Beyond these details, little has been published about her life. She is remembered in nearly every account of the case as its last victim, and her death was the one to which Barraza confessed from the start.
Police said they found in the woman's bag a stethoscope, pension forms and a card identifying her as a social worker, the AP reported. Proceso described a folder with copies of voter identification cards, a list of names and a Sí Vale card, which police believed she used to deceive her victims. Barraza told reporters that she had gone to the house looking for laundry work and denied that she had been carrying the documents. As officers led her away, she told television cameras, "Yes, I did it," in the AP's translation.
The arresting officers' superiors noticed at once that she resembled the prosecutor's composite sketch. The AP reported that she looked like the sketches and the sculpted bust, down to a similar haircut and a mole on her face. According to Vargas Cervantes, a week before her arrest she had appeared on national television at a wrestling event without anyone connecting her to the sketches, and she had reportedly gone to the prosecutor's offices at least three times before her arrest.
The next day the attorney general, Bernardo Bátiz, presented Barraza as the person the city had been looking for. Flanked by the city government secretary, Ricardo Ruiz, and the public security secretary, Joel Ortega Cuevas, he said there was a 99 percent probability that she had committed 11 homicides and one attempted homicide. Her fingerprints, he said, matched those found at the scenes of 10 homicides and one attempted murder; Proceso reported that in an initial comparison the prints were similar in six cases. Bátiz told the broadcaster Televisa that she had admitted killing three other women besides Reyes Alfaro. She offered no motive, the AP reported, but said the reason would be clear from her statement to police.
Bátiz also said she might have had an accomplice, and he warned of possible copycat killers. In the same week police announced the arrest of a former soldier accused in an unrelated series of killings of gay men, and the two arrests were reported together in the international press.
The arrest overturned the official picture of the killer. The press had spoken for years of "el Mataviejitas," in the masculine; the name became "la Mataviejitas." An academic study of 58 articles in two Mexico City newspapers between December 2005 and February 2006 found that coverage shifted, after her arrest, from portraying a brilliant and sick killer to portraying an angry, poorly educated woman. In October 2005 Bátiz had described the killer's mind as brilliant, skillful and careful, Expansión later recalled.
In the days after her arrest prosecutors began sending case files to a criminal court. On February 5, 2006, La Jornada reported that three files had been sent, with the rest to follow, to be joined to the case for which she had been arrested on January 25. Bátiz said there was no certainty that she had acted with an accomplice, though he did not rule out that someone had waited near the homes she entered.
A friend of Barraza, A.T., was charged with making false statements in judicial proceedings, and prosecutors said she had protected Barraza knowing what she had done. A.T. said she had taken part in some robberies but gave no details. Prosecutors in the State of Mexico opened an investigation of one of their own judicial police officers, accused of extorting money from Barraza in exchange for not turning her in over a robbery. Bátiz denied that there was evidence that Mexico City police had done the same.
Barraza's case was heard by a criminal court housed at the Santa Martha Acatitla women's prison, where she was held. During her two years there, prison authorities reported good behavior, according to Notimex.
The neuropsychologist Feggy Ostrosky of UNAM examined her with brain-wave and neuropsychological tests and concluded that she showed little emotional response and some impairment of the frontal lobes, Vargas Cervantes reported. A criminologist, Martín Barrón, published a book on the case in 2006 that printed close-up photographs of her eyes under the title "Miradas que matan" (Looks that kill). Vargas Cervantes has criticized these studies, along with claims by other commentators about Barraza's appearance, as attempts to read criminality from the body.
On March 25, 2008, Notimex reported that the judge would sentence her within days on 29 criminal cases of homicide and aggravated robbery, according to the prosecutor's office. Miguel Ángel Mancera, then an official of the attorney general's office, said that the total sentence could exceed 900 years, but that under the Penal Code she would serve no more than 50.
The sentence was read on Monday, March 31, 2008, at Criminal Court 67 at Santa Martha Acatitla. Barraza was found responsible for 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies against elderly people, Notimex reported. The prison term was 759 years and 17 days, La Razón later reported. Barraza, who appeared with long reddish hair and glasses, listened calmly. Asked whether she agreed and would sign the notice of the sentence, she answered, in Notimex's report: "No estoy de acuerdo, es injusto, no voy a firmar nada" ("I don't agree, it's unjust, I'm not signing anything").
She told reporters that she would appeal. Under the Federal District's code of criminal procedure she had five working days to file, and the appeal would go to a criminal chamber of the city's Superior Court of Justice. She said she would keep working inside the prison like other honest women, and that elderly women held there were unjustly imprisoned.
Wire reports carried a fuller account of her position. Barraza, then 50, had admitted to killing four women over the age of 70 out of anger toward her mother, a Deseret News wire summary reported. She said she had not killed the others and did not agree with the sentence, but prosecutors said her fingerprints matched those in 12 other cases. Reuters described her as having killed at least 11 people in Mexico City since 2000 and reported that she might have killed close to 40.
The number of homicides covered by the sentence is reported as 16 by Notimex in 2008 and by La Jornada in 2023, and as 17 by El Financiero in 2015 and La Razón in 2026. The court number is given as 67 in Notimex's report of the sentencing and as 69 in an earlier Notimex report and in El Financiero.
No ruling on her appeal has been reported. No report says that the sentence was reduced or overturned, and every report from 2023 to 2026 describes her as serving the 759-year sentence.
Barraza began her sentence at the Santa Martha Acatitla women's prison, where she had been held since 2006. Infobae reported in 2023 that she sold food inside the prison, and, as an unconfirmed rumor, that she charged reporters for interviews.
On June 26, 2015, she married a fellow inmate in a mass wedding held under "Lazos en Reclusión" (Ties in Confinement), a city government program, El Financiero reported. Prison authorities said the couple had been together for more than a year and were taken in turns to each other's prison for conjugal visits. Her husband was serving a sentence for robbery and homicide, Infobae reported. About a year after the wedding she asked for a divorce.
In July 2023 she fell inside the prison and broke a femur. On July 26 the city's Secretariat of Citizen Security transferred her to the Xoco General Hospital in the Coyoacán borough for treatment, La Jornada reported. That month Eje Central wrote about a Netflix documentary on the case, "La Dama del Silencio" (The Lady of Silence), directed by María José Cuevas, who had met Barraza on visits to Santa Martha Acatitla, according to Eje Central.
In January 2024, in an interview for "Cartas para la libertad," a series on the channel Canal Catorce, Barraza repeated that she was innocent of the series of killings. "It is time society knew the real truth, because everything they put out is not the truth," she said, as Milenio reported her words. She said that what she told the prosecutor's office in 2006 she said because she had been threatened and abused, and that she had signed for the sake of her children, who she said had been threatened. She denied having been a nurse, said she had never been caught dressed as one, and said that killings of elderly women continued after she was in prison. None of these claims has been tested in court.
The prosecution's case, as reported at the time, rested on fingerprint matches and her own statements.
On May 23, 2026, Barraza, 68, was taken under guard from Santa Martha Acatitla to the Belisario Domínguez specialty hospital in Iztapalapa with kidney failure, La Razón and N+ reported. The Secretariat of Citizen Security said she could be discharged the next day and returned to prison. Pablo Vázquez Camacho, the city's secretary of citizen security, confirmed that she had been returned, Récord reported. Despite headlines suggesting she had "left prison," she had not been released.
On September 14, 2026, a city legislator, Rebeca Peralta, released a video recorded during a visit to the Tepepan women's prison in the Xochimilco borough, where she delivered hygiene kits and other supplies to the inmates. In it Barraza appeared in a wheelchair, aged and helped by a guard, and thanked her for the support, El Financiero and Expansión Política reported. Expansión and El Financiero both placed her at Tepepan; Récord, in May 2026, had described her as held at Santa Martha Acatitla for more than 15 years. As of September 14, 2026, she remained in custody.
The case has drawn sustained academic study. Lewis, Vargas Cervantes and others have studied the 2005 raids on transgender sex workers as an example of police profiling shaped by television and by assumptions about who could kill. The journalist Víctor Ronquillo published "Ruda de corazón: el blues de la Mataviejitas" in 2006, and the Mexican television series "Mujeres asesinas" dramatized the case in 2010, UnoTV reported.
In September 2026 El Financiero reported a new HBO drama series, "Mataviejitas," with Mónica Jiménez playing Barraza and Mayra Hermosillo as a detective pursuing her.
How many people died. Barraza was convicted of 16 homicides (some reports say 17). The prosecutor's office linked her to 10 or 11 deaths by fingerprints in January 2006; Sales had attributed 24 of 32 recent deaths to one killer in November 2005; La Jornada counted 49 killings of elderly people from 1998 to 2005; and the UNAM researchers put the possible total at 30 to 50, with 17 credited in court. None of the larger figures has been proven against her.
When the killings began. Expansión reported that the prosecutor's office attributed a first killing to her in the 1990s; La Jornada dated the first case with the recognized pattern to March 2003; Reuters wrote "since 2000." The convictions do not settle the question.
What she admitted. In January 2006 she admitted only the Reyes Alfaro killing at the scene; Bátiz said she then admitted three more. At sentencing a wire summary reported that she had admitted four killings out of anger toward her mother and denied the rest. Since 2024 she has said that her statements were made under threats.
Whether she acted alone. In 2005 investigators released a portrait of a possible accomplice, and in 2006 Bátiz said an accomplice could not be ruled out. The UNAM researchers concluded that she acted alone. Reports of her sentencing mention no accomplice.
The earlier arrests. A.V.G. and M.T. were convicted of killings of elderly women before Barraza's arrest. In 2006 the attorney general moved one of M.T.'s cases to Barraza on fingerprint evidence but said his two other convictions stood. Later academic work describes both arrests as mistaken; no court ruling clearing either of them has been reported.
Her birth date and place. Most reports give December 27, 1957, in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo; Milenio in 2024 gave December 27, 1958, in Pachuca.
December 27, 1957: Juana Barraza Samperio is born in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo (Milenio gives 1958 and Pachuca).
March 2003: Guillermina León Oropeza is found dead in the Cuauhtémoc borough, the first case with the recognized pattern according to La Jornada.
October 9, 2003: María Guadalupe González is killed; the case is later linked to Barraza by fingerprints.
December 2003: police release a first sketch, a month after announcing that they are seeking a serial killer.
March 2004: A.V.G. is arrested in Acolman, State of Mexico.
September 2004: M.T. is arrested.
August 2005: composite sketches are published across the city; on August 25 Bátiz acknowledges four similar homicides.
September 2005: 100 officers are assigned to the case.
October 2005: police detain transgender sex workers for fingerprinting; none match.
November 17, 2005: Renato Sales says one killer may be behind 24 of 32 recent deaths.
January 2006: Mexico City officers take a course from French police.
January 25, 2006: Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro is killed in the Venustiano Carranza borough; Barraza is arrested nearby.
January 26, 2006: Bátiz says fingerprints link her to 10 homicides and one attempt.
February 5, 2006: the first case files are sent to court.
April 2006: Bátiz says the María Guadalupe González case belongs to Barraza, not M.T.
March 31, 2008: Barraza is convicted of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies and sentenced to 759 years and 17 days; she says she will appeal.
June 26, 2015: she marries a fellow inmate; she later seeks a divorce.
July 2023: she breaks a femur in a fall and is treated at Xoco General Hospital; the Netflix documentary "La Dama del Silencio" is discussed in the Mexican press.
January 2024: in a television interview she says she is innocent and confessed under threats.
May 23, 2026: she is hospitalized with kidney failure and returned to prison.
September 14, 2026: a video shows her in a wheelchair at the Tepepan women's prison.