For two years Mexico City looked for a man. Elderly women were being strangled in their homes, the press had named the killer "el Mataviejitas," in the masculine, and the city’s prosecutors told the public that the person they wanted was most likely a man dressed as a woman. Police rounded up transgender sex workers and took their fingerprints. Sketches went up on patrol cars in all seventy police sectors of the city. None of it found the killer.
On the night of January 25, 2006, a neighbor in the Venustiano Carranza borough, in the east of the capital, alerted police. A woman was leaving a building where an elderly widow had just been strangled. She ran, and two officers caught her within a short distance. "We caught her by the arms and took her back to the patrol car," one of them, Ismael Alvarado Ruiz, told the Associated Press. She was Juana Barraza Samperio, forty-eight years old, a former professional wrestler who had fought under the name La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence. As officers led her away she smiled at the television cameras and said, in the AP’s translation, "Yes, I did it."
Two years later a Mexico City court convicted her of sixteen homicides and twelve aggravated robberies of elderly people and sentenced her to 759 years in prison. The police search that preceded her arrest has been studied ever since, as a lesson in how a theory of who the killer must be can decide where investigators look.
Barraza was born on December 27, 1957, in Epazoyucan, in the state of Hidalgo, north of Mexico City, according to Expansión Política. Her father left the family, taking one of her brothers, and her mother brought the children to the capital.
Much of what is known about her childhood comes from Barraza herself, in what she told investigators, journalists and researchers, and none of it was tested in court. She has said that her mother beat and mistreated her and handed her over to a man in exchange for alcohol, and that the man abused her for years, from about the age of twelve. La Razón, quoting El Libro Rojo de la Administración de Justicia, reported her saying that she hated older women because of how her mother had treated her. The researcher Susana Vargas Cervantes has written that Barraza could not read or write.
As an adult she raised four children on her own after relationships with men that, by her account, brought deceit and violence. Her eldest son died at twenty-four in a street fight, Expansión reported.
At about thirty she began to wrestle professionally in lucha libre, the costumed Mexican style of the sport, as the Lady of Silence. A spinal injury in the ring ended that career when doctors warned that she could be disabled if she kept fighting, and she went on to work as a wrestling promoter. When she was arrested, the prosecutor’s office said she sold popcorn at lucha libre arenas and still sometimes climbed into the ring. A week before her arrest, Vargas Cervantes found, she appeared on national television at a wrestling event at the Arena Coliseo, talking about how much she enjoyed the sport. Nobody connected her with the sketches that were then posted all over the city.
By the time anyone spoke publicly of a single killer, the deaths had been accumulating for years. Counting from the prosecutor’s records the day after Barraza’s arrest, La Jornada reported forty-nine killings of elderly people in the capital from 1998 through 2005, with a sharp rise from 2003: twelve that year, seventeen in 2004 and eleven in 2005. Police said eight of those cases had been solved and three people jailed. The office itself, then called the Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito Federal, or PGJDF, gave a figure of forty-eight homicides of elderly women over eight years and said thirty-eight of them shared similar features.
La Jornada traced the first case with what became the recognized pattern to March 2003, when Guillermina León Oropeza was found dead in her home in the Cuauhtémoc borough. The women who died after her were mostly in their seventies and eighties, many of them widows living alone. Two UNAM researchers, Tonatiuh Suárez-Meaney and Luis Chías Becerril, later put the average age of the victims in the series at seventy-nine and found that the killings were concentrated in the central districts of the city, the areas with the highest incomes and the largest numbers of older residents. By January 2006, according to Expansión, the deaths had touched twenty-seven neighborhoods in nine boroughs.
A study of the press coverage by researchers at the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo described the victims as isolated women, often forgotten by their families and neighbors, whom the newspapers treated as little more than the martyrs of a madman. The newspapers, the study found, gave them little space.
One of them was María Guadalupe González, who was killed on October 9, 2003. Her death was first charged against a man, M.T., whom the press called "El Enfermero," the Nurse, and who was arrested in September 2004 and accused of three killings of elderly women. Two years later, after Barraza’s fingerprints had been taken, the attorney general said a fingerprint match showed that María Guadalupe González had been killed by Barraza, and that the case file would be corrected. He said M.T. remained responsible for the two other killings for which he had been sentenced. A woman, A.V.G., arrested in March 2004 in Acolman, in the State of Mexico, was sentenced to more than forty-two years for the homicide and robbery of an elderly woman. The UNAM researchers later described both arrests as errors prompted by early descriptions of the killer.
Early on, Excélsior later recalled, the authorities played the deaths down. Vargas Cervantes dates the first official sketch to December 2003, about a month after police first spoke publicly of a serial killer with a particular way of working. Over the next two years investigators produced more than sixty-four sketches and posted them in parks, in patrol cars, in government offices and in metro and bus stations. In her account, a more rigorous search began in January 2005 with two new composites.
The search became a public campaign in August 2005. Composite sketches were published and posters were fixed to patrol cars in all seventy of the city’s police sectors, La Jornada reported. Two of the images went out side by side under the heading "Se buscan," Wanted, and Vargas Cervantes has pointed out that they did not resemble each other. In September the office put one hundred officers on the case under its homicide prosecutor, Guillermo Zayas.
What the posters did not say, the officials did. Witnesses had described a tall, strongly built figure; two of them, the scholar Vek Lewis wrote, spoke of a man dressed as a woman, and investigators settled on a man. About a week after the sketches appeared, according to Vargas Cervantes, officials described a middle-aged man who had been abused as a child and raised among women. Later the physical profile became "a man dressed as a woman, or a robust woman," about forty-five years old and around 1.70 meters tall. In October 2005, Expansión later recalled, the capital’s prosecutor described the killer’s mind as brilliant, very skillful and careful.
By early October, Vargas Cervantes reported, forty-six people had been brought to police stations, fingerprinted and photographed because they looked like the sketches, and more than three hundred had been interviewed; some outlets put the number held as suspects at more than five hundred. Then, in late October, police turned to the city’s transgender sex workers. Over two days of raids, between thirty-eight and fifty were detained, photographed and fingerprinted, and their prints were compared with those taken from the crime scenes. La Jornada reported that sex workers detained in the Tlalpan borough were among those checked. None matched. The attorney general, Bernardo Bátiz, defended the operation in terms that became part of the record of the case: the killer, he said, might not be a travesti, but was certainly transgender.
Vargas Cervantes has noted that the raids were carried out in poor neighborhoods where sex workers were known to work, not in the wealthier districts of the city. Lewis, writing in 2008, connected them to a Televisa soap opera, La Madrastra, which shortly before had ended a season with a storyline about a man who disguised himself as a woman to kill, and argued that the fiction shaped how real people were profiled as suspects. In the study of El Universal and El Metro by the Hidalgo researchers, the idea that the killer might be a woman was barely considered in the press before the arrest.
The investigators also looked abroad. Early in January 2006, three French police officers gave a thirty-hour course to about one hundred Mexico City agents, because the case was thought to resemble that of Thierry Paulin, who was blamed for the killings of more than twenty elderly women in Paris in the 1980s.
The most detailed public account of the case before the arrest came in mid-November 2005, from Renato Sales Heredia, the deputy attorney general for central investigations. He told reporters that one killer could have committed twenty-four of the thirty-two homicides of elderly women recorded since 2003. The same fingerprints, he said, appeared in nine killings and one attempted killing, and fifteen more were very probably the work of the same person. Investigators released a portrait of a possible accomplice, drawn from a neighbor’s description in one case, and said they still could not say whether the killer was a woman or a man dressed as one. That another killing would follow in the coming days, Sales said, was "not speculation."
He also described a practical obstacle. The fingerprints could not be checked quickly against the national voter registry or other government files, because the country had no computerized system for comparing them, and matching by hand was slow. He urged older people not to give personal information to strangers or to talk with people they did not know. A clay bust of the suspect, made that November by Patricia Payán of the city’s justice department, was later presented as a close likeness of Barraza.
By January 2006 at least three hundred plainclothes officers were watching squares, churches and parks across the city, Proceso reported. The break came on the night of Wednesday, January 25, in the Venustiano Carranza borough. Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, a widow in her eighties, was found strangled in her home. A young man who lived in the house found her, according to Expansión; a neighbor alerted police. When a patrol car arrived a woman leaving the building ran, and the officers caught her nearby.
The reports of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro’s age differ: 82 in the Associated Press and Notimex, 80 in Proceso, 81 in the Spanish agency EFE, and 89 in later reports by Excélsior and an agency piece in El Siglo de Torreón. Beyond her name, her age and the fact that she was a widow, little was published about her life. Her death was the one Barraza acknowledged from the start.
The officers saw at once that the woman they had caught looked like the prosecutor’s sketches. The AP reported that she resembled the composites and the sculpted bust down to the haircut and a mole on her face. Barraza told reporters that she had gone to the house looking for laundry work, and she rejected part of the police account outright. "Just because I’m going to pay for it, that doesn’t mean they’re going to hang all the crimes on me," she said. She offered no motive, telling reporters that they would understand why she did it when they read her statement to police.
Vargas Cervantes, examining how the arrest happened, concluded that it came by chance rather than through the sketches. She also reported that Barraza had gone to the city’s justice offices at least three times before her arrest and left each time.
The next day Bátiz presented Barraza to the press, flanked by the city’s government secretary, Ricardo Ruiz, and its public security secretary, Joel Ortega Cuevas. He said there was a 99 percent probability that she had committed eleven homicides and one attempted homicide. Her fingerprints, he said, matched those from the scenes of ten homicides and one attempted killing, the AP reported, and she had made incriminating statements about four of them, including the killing of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro. Proceso reported that an initial comparison had found similar prints in six cases. Bátiz said she might have had an accomplice and warned of possible imitators.
The arrest overturned two years of official description. "El Mataviejitas" became "la Mataviejitas." In the study of the two newspapers, the Hidalgo researchers found that the killer the press had portrayed before the arrest as almost mythical, brilliant and sick became, afterward, a strange woman, angry at life and illiterate, a figure of poverty and ignorance rather than cunning.
Within days, prosecutors began sending case files to a criminal court. On February 5, 2006, La Jornada reported that three files had gone and the rest would follow, to be joined to the case for which she had been arrested on January 25. The office then presumed her responsible for eleven homicides. 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 with protecting her while knowing what she had done. A.T. said she had taken part in some robberies but gave no specifics. In the neighboring State of Mexico, prosecutors were investigating one of their own judicial police officers, accused of extorting money from Barraza in exchange for not turning her in over a robbery. Bátiz said there was no evidence that Mexico City police had done the same.
In April 2006 came the correction in the case of María Guadalupe González, moving one of M.T.'s files to Barraza on the strength of her fingerprints.
Barraza was held at the Santa Martha Acatitla women’s prison, and her case was heard by a criminal court that sat there. Prison authorities reported good behavior during her two years in custody, Notimex said. Researchers examined her while she waited. The neuropsychologist Feggy Ostrosky ran brain-activity tests while showing her images and reported very little emotional response and a mild alteration of the frontal lobes, according to Vargas Cervantes, who has criticized such studies, and a book by the criminologist Martín Barrón, El nudo del silencio, that printed close-up photographs of her eyes, as attempts to read criminality from the body.
On March 25, 2008, Notimex reported that a judge would sentence her within days on twenty-nine criminal cases of homicide and aggravated robbery. Miguel Ángel Mancera, then the deputy attorney general for prosecutions, said the total could exceed nine hundred years, though under the Penal Code she would serve no more than fifty.
The sentence was read on Monday, March 31, 2008, in Criminal Court 67 at Santa Martha Acatitla. Barraza was found responsible for sixteen homicides and twelve aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced to 759 years in prison, Notimex reported. She appeared with long reddish hair and glasses and listened closely. Asked whether she agreed and would sign the notice of the judgment, she said: "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 city’s procedure she had five working days to file, and the appeal would go to a criminal chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Federal District. She said she would keep working in prison, like many honest women held there, among them elderly women she said should not be inside.
A wire report printed in the Deseret News gave her position more fully. Barraza, then fifty, had admitted killing four women over the age of seventy, out of anger toward her mother, but said she had not killed the others; prosecutors said her fingerprints matched those found in twelve other cases. Reuters, in a report carried by Gulf News, described her as one of the worst serial killers in Mexico’s recent history and said she might have killed close to forty people. Vargas Cervantes, citing contemporary press, called the sentence the longest given to a killer in Mexico.
Later reporting gives the term as 759 years and 17 days. The homicide count appears as sixteen in Notimex’s report of the sentencing and in most later coverage, and as seventeen in some reports from 2015 onward. She was still serving the 759-year sentence in 2026, and no reduction of it has been reported.
On June 26, 2015, Barraza married a fellow inmate at Santa Martha in a mass wedding held under "Lazos en Reclusión," Ties in Confinement, a city government program, El Financiero reported. Prison officials said the couple had been together for more than a year and that each was taken in turn to the other for conjugal visits. Her husband was serving a sentence for robbery and homicide, Infobae reported, and 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 moved her to the Xoco General Hospital for treatment. On May 23, 2026, aged sixty-eight, she was taken under guard from Santa Martha Acatitla to the Belisario Domínguez specialty hospital in Iztapalapa with kidney failure, La Razón reported. The city’s security secretary, Pablo Vázquez Camacho, confirmed that she had been discharged and returned to prison, Récord reported; headlines that she had "left prison" meant only the hospital transfer.
On September 14, 2026, a city legislator, Rebeca Peralta, released a video recorded during a visit to the Tepepan women’s prison in Xochimilco, where she had delivered hygiene kits and other supplies. Barraza appeared in a wheelchair, visibly aged, helped by a guard, thanking the legislator for always looking out for the women inside, El Financiero and Expansión Política reported. Both outlets placed her at Tepepan that September.
Barraza has not held to one account. At her arrest she admitted a single killing; by her sentencing she had admitted four and denied the rest. In January 2024 she spoke from prison to "Cartas para la libertad," a program of the public broadcaster Canal Catorce. Excerpts released before the broadcast showed her describing herself as a wrestler, blaming the press for the name Mataviejitas and challenging the authorities to prove she had been caught dressed as a nurse, Diario de México reported. After the program aired, Luz Noticias reported that she said she had never committed a homicide, that she had been the victim of an injustice, that she only went into houses to steal, and that she did not hate older women. None of those claims has been tested in court, and the conviction, resting on fingerprint matches and her own earlier statements, stands.
The case has become a subject for documentary and drama. In July 2023 Netflix released "La Dama del Silencio," a documentary by María José Cuevas, produced by Mezcla, drawing on former officials' testimony and case files; Cuevas had met Barraza on visits to Santa Martha Acatitla, Eje Central reported, and Excélsior later noted that the film was nominated for an Ariel Award. In July 2026 Excélsior reported that HBO Max was making a scripted series, "Mataviejitas," a psychological thriller directed by Humberto Hinojosa with J.M. Cravioto, with no premiere date yet. In September El Financiero reported that Mónica Jiménez would play Barraza and Mayra Hermosillo an agent who pursues her.
The scholarly work has gone further than the screen. Lewis, Vargas Cervantes and the Hidalgo researchers have each used the 2005 raids as a case study in how assumptions about who could kill, fed by television and by prejudice about gender and class, steered an investigation away from the person witnesses had described. The UNAM researchers took a different lesson: their analysis of the crime locations found the killings far from her home but near the Arena Coliseo, where she worked, and concluded that her capture owed more to luck than to investigation.
How many women died. The court convicted Barraza of sixteen homicides. In January 2006 prosecutors linked her by fingerprints to ten or eleven deaths; in November 2005 Sales had put twenty-four of thirty-two recent deaths down to one killer; La Jornada counted forty-nine killings of elderly people from 1998 to 2005; the UNAM researchers estimated thirty to fifty. None of the larger figures has been proven against her.
When it began. Expansión reported that the former 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," and Notimex said the crimes in the 2008 case spanned four years.
Whether she acted alone. Investigators released a portrait of a possible accomplice in 2005, and Bátiz said in 2006 that one could not be ruled out. The UNAM researchers concluded from the pattern of the crimes that she acted alone, and the reports of her sentencing mention no accomplice.
The earlier arrests. M.T. and A.V.G. were sentenced in killings of elderly women before Barraza was caught. One of M.T.'s cases was moved to her in 2006; the attorney general said his two other convictions stood. No court ruling clearing either of them has been reported.
• December 27, 1957: Juana Barraza Samperio is born in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo.
• March 2003: Guillermina León Oropeza is found dead in the Cuauhtémoc borough, the first case La Jornada links to the recognized pattern.
• October 9, 2003: María Guadalupe González is killed; the case is later linked to Barraza by fingerprints.
• December 2003: police release a first sketch of the suspect.
• March and September 2004: A.V.G. and M.T. are arrested in separate killings of elderly women.
• August 2005: composite sketches go up across the city’s seventy police sectors.
• September 2005: one hundred officers are assigned to the case.
• October 2005: police detain transgender sex workers for fingerprinting; none match.
• November 2005: Renato Sales Heredia says one killer may be behind twenty-four of thirty-two recent deaths.
• January 2006: French police officers train about one hundred Mexico City agents.
• 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 tie her to ten homicides and one attempt.
• February 5, 2006: the first case files are reported sent to court.
• April 2006: the María Guadalupe González case is moved from M.T. to Barraza.
• March 31, 2008: Barraza is convicted of sixteen homicides and twelve aggravated robberies and sentenced to 759 years; she says she will appeal.
• June 26, 2015: she marries a fellow inmate; about a year later she asks for a divorce.
• July 2023: she breaks a femur in a fall; the Netflix documentary "La Dama del Silencio" is released.
• January 2024: in a television interview from prison she denies the killings.
• 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.