For years, while elderly women were being strangled in their own homes in Mexico City, the police were looking for a man. Witnesses had described someone large and heavily built, and investigators concluded from those descriptions that the killer had to be male. When that produced nobody, the theory was adjusted rather than abandoned: the killer was a man dressed as a woman. Transvestite sex workers were rounded up across the city. A criminal profile was published describing a male suspect. The press had a name for him, El Mataviejitas, the little-old-lady killer, and the masculine article stayed in place until the day someone was caught running from a house.
The person running from the house was Juana Barraza Samperio, a forty-eight-year-old former professional wrestler who had fought under the name La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence.
At least sixteen elderly women were strangled in their homes in Mexico City in the years up to 2006, and by some counts the series runs to forty. The method was consistent: a stocking or a stethoscope, and a killing that happened almost immediately after the killer got through the door. Getting through the door was the part that took skill. She offered help with shopping, or said she was from a government social programme, and to a woman living alone a visitor with an official manner and a plausible errand is not an obvious threat. Small items were taken afterwards.
She was born in Hidalgo state on December 27, 1957. By her own account her mother, an alcoholic, handed her to a man in exchange for three beers when she was twelve. She had four children and was known on the lucha libre circuit, which is where the build the witnesses kept describing came from.
She was caught in January 2006, leaving the house of an eighty-two-year-old woman she had just killed, seen by a lodger. Fingerprints matched prints held from a dozen scenes. In 2008 she was convicted of sixteen murders and sentenced to 759 years, a total arrived at by running the terms consecutively rather than a period anyone could serve; on appeal it was reduced to a sentence that keeps her in prison until 2058. She has admitted four of the killings.
The published profile is the part of this case worth keeping. It was not a guess made in the absence of information. It was a conclusion drawn from real witness descriptions, written down, circulated, and then used to decide who was worth questioning, which meant that the people being questioned were selected on the basis of a characteristic the killer did not have. The descriptions were accurate about the build and wrong about the conclusion drawn from it, and the error was not in the eyewitnesses.
This archive holds other cases where what investigators believed about the killer determined who they looked at, and the resemblance is close enough to be worth setting side by side.
Between August 1985 and April 1990, eight or nine women were stabbed to death in and around Frankford, a working-class district in north-east Philadelphia. Most were older women. Several drank in the same handful of bars along Frankford Avenue, and most were killed in their own homes or in the streets nearby. Witnesses in those bars described a thin white man in his forties who wore glasses and had been seen with several of the women. In 1990 Leonard Christopher, a fish-shop worker, was arrested for the last of the killings and convicted. He was Black, he did not match the description, no physical evidence tied him to the scene, and the case rested largely on witnesses whose accounts changed. He was sentenced to life, has maintained his innocence for over thirty years, and was never charged with any of the earlier deaths. The killings stopped after his arrest, which the prosecution has always cited and which the defence has always pointed out proves nothing either way. The series is unsolved and the conviction is disputed.
In Morocco, Abdelali Amer killed fourteen men over ten months from October 2004, attacking men who were sleeping rough on the coast at Rabat and Sale and along the banks of the Bouregreg, crushing their heads with stones and taking whatever they carried, which was very little. He was living on the street himself. The reason he was able to continue for ten months was not that his victims were unidentifiable. It was that a destitute man found with a head injury on a river bank was recorded as an accident, and for months neither the word murder nor the idea of robbery as a motive was applied to any of the deaths. The fourteenth body, found near the wholesale market in the Akkari district of Rabat on August 1, 2005, was the one where the coincidence finally registered. The river mouth was put under watch and he was arrested within about a week. He then led investigators to every scene from memory, with a precision the officers said astonished them.
Howard Arthur Allen is the third variety, and the failure in his case is administrative rather than investigative. In 1974 he beat eighty-five-year-old Opal Cooper to death during a robbery of her home in Indianapolis. He was convicted, and released on parole after about twelve years. In 1987 he attacked elderly people in Marion County again: Ernestine Griffin, seventy-three, was stabbed and beaten to death at her home that August, and Laverne Hale, eighty-seven, died after an attack in the same period. He robbed the houses and in some cases set fires. He was arrested on August 4, 1987 and sentenced to death the following June. He spent thirty-two years on Indiana's death row and died in custody in 2020, never executed.
What the four have in common is not incompetence, which is the easy reading and the wrong one. In each case the investigation was working from something real: eyewitness descriptions of a large person, eyewitness descriptions of a thin man in glasses, a head injury recorded as an accident, a sentence ended early by parole. The failure in each case was the step after the evidence, where a piece of information was converted into a certainty about the kind of person responsible, and that certainty then decided who was looked at and who was not. Barraza was not among the people questioned because the profile said male. Amer went on for ten months because the classification said accident. The Frankford series remains unsolved, and the one man convicted from it did not match the description that everyone had.
Her sentence runs to 2058. The criminal profile the police published described a male suspect.