On January 25, 2006, in the Venustiano Carranza borough of Mexico City, a heavyset woman with close-cropped hair dyed blonde was caught running from the home of Ana Maria de los Reyes Alfaro, eighty-two, who had just been strangled with a stethoscope. She was carrying a stethoscope, pension forms and a card identifying her as a social worker. To the surprise of a city that had been told the killer of its old women was a man, she was Juana Barraza, forty-eight, a professional wrestler who fought as La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence. She matched the police model of the killer down to a mole on her face.
For years elderly women, most of them living alone, had been found bludgeoned or strangled in their homes and robbed. The press called the killer La Mataviejitas, the Old Lady Killer. The count is uncertain: some accounts date the first killings to the late 1990s and at least one to November 17, 2003, and the authorities and press estimated forty-two to forty-eight deaths in all. As late as the summer of 2005 officials were dismissing the idea of a serial killer as media sensationalism. The chief prosecutor, Bernardo Batiz, described someone with a brilliant mind, clever and careful, who won the victims' trust first, and investigators came to suspect the killer posed as a government official offering to sign old people up for welfare programs.
The evidence pulled the police in different directions. At one point they thought there might be two killers. At least three of the victims owned a print of the same eighteenth-century painting, Jean-Baptiste Greuze's Boy in a Red Waistcoat. Witnesses described a masculine-looking woman, and the police went looking for a man dressed as one, launching what one journalist called a ham-fisted and unproductive sweep of the city's transvestite sex workers. In 2005 two other people, Araceli Vazquez and Mario Tablas, were arrested and at times identified by police and press as La Mataviejitas.
Barraza Samperio was born on December 27, 1957, in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo, north of the capital. Her mother, Justa Samperio, an alcoholic, reportedly traded her for three beers to a man who repeatedly raped her and by whom she had a son. She had four children; the eldest, a son, died of injuries from a mugging. She loved lucha libre and fought as a ruda, a villain.
Prosecutors said fingerprints linked her to at least ten of the roughly forty killings attributed to the series. She was said to have confessed to killing Alfaro and three other women and denied all the rest, and she told reporters she had strangled Alfaro in a dispute over pay for work as a maid. At trial, in the spring of 2008, she admitted only the Alfaro killing and said her motive was resentment over how her own mother had treated her; the authorities believed she associated her victims with her mother. On March 31, 2008, she was convicted on sixteen charges of murder and aggravated burglary, including eleven separate murder counts, and sentenced to 759 years. After her arrest officials closed the investigation with more than thirty cases unresolved.
In prison she has worked as a gym instructor and sold tacos to support her family. In July 2015 she married another inmate, Miguel Angel, who had been convicted of murder, and divorced him in October 2016.