On the morning of Tuesday, April 16, 2024, Cassandra Calles stepped out of her apartment in a small building on Primera Cerrada 16 de Septiembre, in the La Cruz Coyuya neighborhood of Iztacalco, Mexico City. Her 17-year-old daughter, María José, stayed home alone. When Cassandra came back from the corner store, she found a neighbor from the same building in her daughter's room. He stabbed her as she fought him. Neighbors heard the screams, kept him from getting away and called the police, who arrested him on the stairs with a knife. María José was dead.
The man was Miguel Cortés Miranda, 39, a pharmaceutical chemist. Within three days, Mexico City prosecutors had searched his apartment, found human bones, notebooks and the identification cards of women, and announced that they might be dealing with a serial case of femicide going back years. Over the next twelve months they connected him to six deaths and one attempt and brought him before a judge on several of them. He was never tried. On April 13, 2025, the day a judge was to hear two more cases against him, he died after a fall in prison.
This page follows the record as Mexican prosecutors and the Mexican and American press reported it. Everything said here about his part in the deaths of these women is an accusation. He was charged, never tried, and no court ever ruled on the evidence.
Mexican news outlets that looked into his life after the arrest described a man who appeared successful and sociable. He was a graduate of the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the national polytechnic institute, and worked as a pharmaceutical chemist (químico farmacobiólogo). Uno TV reported that he worked as a chemist at a hospital in the south of the city; other outlets said he worked in a laboratory or at various clinics. N+ reported that he had also studied at a technical high school, CECYTE No. 6.
On Facebook he described himself as an animal rights activist and a vegan, posted photos from protests against animal cruelty and said he acted in independent theater. He posted photos of trips in Mexico and abroad, and he was reported to speak three languages. N+ wrote that his social media also showed support for feminism and LGBTQ rights. The journalist Antonio Nieto reported that he had received an award as a chemist. Neighbors told the newspaper Milenio, as quoted by Telemundo, that he was a quiet, introverted man who often went unnoticed. Uno TV also reported that people who had known him described him as reserved and as having a violent temper.
He lived in La Cruz Coyuya, a neighborhood in the borough of Iztacalco in the east of Mexico City. According to the Santa Ana, California, family of María José, as told to the ABC station KABC, his apartment was on the third floor of the building where she and her mother lived. Prosecutors said the women they later connected to him were people close to him: girlfriends, friends and coworkers. All of them had been reported missing, and in each case, N+ reported, he said he did not know where they were.
María José Castillo Calles was 17. TV Azteca reported that she was a student at the Colegio de Bachilleres No. 3 in Iztacalco. She lived in the building at No. 18 Primera Cerrada 16 de Septiembre with her mother, Cassandra, and her sister, María Fernanda, according to Expansión and Telemundo.
Her aunt, Angela Calles, who lives in Santa Ana, California, spoke to KABC a few days after her death. "She was a very, very smart kid," she said. "She was lovely with her mother. She and her mother were very like that bond of mother and daughter." Speaking through tears, she said that her niece should have been studying for school. Her father told Telediario Televisión, as quoted by Telemundo: "They took my baby from me, they took my life."
The account of the attack comes from police, prosecutors and the family. A security video that circulated on social media, reported by Uno TV and SDP Noticias, appeared to show the man walking in the street and waiting until María José's mother had left the house before going to the apartment. Prosecutors said in a statement that "the individual may have entered the home to sexually assault the victim and take her life."
Cassandra told her sister from intensive care that she had come back from the corner store and found him over her daughter's body. "He tried to push her down the window," Angela Calles told KABC. Cassandra held on to the curtains, and he threw her back onto the bed. She was stabbed several times; Telemundo, citing Milenio, said five times, with wounds to the neck. María Fernanda came home to find her mother on the sofa with stab wounds and her sister dead. "The first thing I saw was a bloodstain," she told Milenio.
The Mexico City public security department (SSC) said its officers went to the building after a neighbor reported hearing screams. On the landing of the stairs they found a woman with blood on her face, who told them that a man had been attacking her daughter and had cut her at the neck when she tried to defend her. She pointed to the man as he ran upstairs. The officers called for paramedics and arrested him, a 39-year-old man, and took a knife from him. SDP Noticias reported that neighbors had held him until the police arrived. Cassandra was taken to hospital in serious condition and survived.
On Friday, April 19, 2024, Cortés Miranda appeared before a judge in the courts beside the Reclusorio Oriente, the men's remand prison in the east of the city. After a hearing that lasted about three hours, the judge bound him over for trial (vinculación a proceso) on charges of femicide for the death of María José and attempted femicide for the attack on her mother. He was ordered held in justified preventive custody, and prosecutors were given six months to complete their investigation.
The family's lawyer, Arturo González, told reporters that he was calm in the hearing and had accepted "part of the responsibility." "He was very aware of everything he had done," González said, according to El Financiero. Expansión reported the lawyer's account as an admission of guilt. It was not a plea or a conviction; it was the victims' lawyer's account of the hearing. The site's own April 2024 news page reports that Cortés Miranda told the court he was a biologist and described his work.
The search that changed the case was carried out on the night of Thursday, April 18, under a court order. Telemundo reported that prosecutors searched three properties connected to him. Ulises Lara, the acting head of the Mexico City Attorney General's Office (Fiscalía General de Justicia, FGJ), told the press on April 19 what they had found: bone remains, biological traces, a saw, notebooks, women's official identification cards, bloodstains, cell phones, compact discs and a memory stick.
"The evidence located at the site by ministry personnel, investigative police and experts from the femicide prosecutor's office clearly points to the existence of a possible serial femicide case, connected to the disappearance of several women reported to the missing persons prosecutor's office," Lara said. The Fiscalía said the notebooks appeared to be diaries or logs in which he wrote details of attacks, including watching the women beforehand.
Reports of what was in the apartment differed widely in the first days. El Financiero and Milenio reported five skulls and some twenty human remains. Publimetro later reported seven skulls; La Razón reported three. Telemundo noted that at first it was not known whether the remains were of women or men, or whether the people had died violently. None of these counts came from an official inventory, and the Fiscalía did not publish one.
In the first days the press also reported that he might be linked to as many as 20 deaths. Prosecutors rejected that figure.
On April 25, 2024, Lara gave the Fiscalía's first full account. Studies in criminalistics, photography, odontology, medicine, psychology and pathology, along with interviews and technical analysis, had led investigators to seven cases: "six fatal victims and one attempted femicide, not 20 as some versions have claimed without basis." In four of the cases, he said, investigators had found specific items belonging to the possible victims and had approached their families for genetic comparison. They were working to identify two further sets of bone remains. He said the evidence dated from 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2024, besides the attack of April 16.
He added that five people whose identification cards had been found in the apartment had been located alive and well.
The Fiscalía also announced an internal investigation into leaks. Parts of statements Cortés Miranda had given investigators had been published, and the office warned that this could stop them being used as evidence. A statement of that kind, it said, had legal value only if it was spontaneous, transcribed in full and signed by the accused.
On May 8, 2024, Lara said that forensic work had confirmed the identity of three of the women whose remains were found in the apartment, and that their families had been told. He did not release their names. He said investigators had obtained a DNA sample from Cortés Miranda through a court hearing and had conducted a lengthy ministerial interview with him, which he signed in the presence of his defense lawyer. The interview, Lara said, had "confirmed new lines of investigation."
Prosecutors kept most names private out of respect for the families. Some names came from families and the press, and the clearest list is the one the families themselves gave in April 2025, when the relatives of four women issued a joint statement through the collective Juntas Somos Fuertes. Each woman's case below is an allegation; none was tried.
Amairany Roblero González was 18 when she disappeared on August 1, 2012, in Iztapalapa. She was about to start a degree in business engineering at the Tecnológico de Iztapalapa. Classmates last saw her outside the Tecnológico, on Avenida Telecomunicaciones, as she headed for CETis 42, the technical high school where she had studied business administration. According to SDP Noticias, she was believed to have gone with Cortés Miranda to the school to pick up her graduation photos. He turned up in her phone records, and he told investigators at the time that he had seen her that day, that she had spent a long time inside the school and that they had then argued. He was the last person known to have seen her, and he was not investigated further. Her mother, Cecilia González, searched for her for twelve years. In 2024, DNA showed that remains found in his apartment were hers. "Yes, it is positive, positive that it is my daughter," she said.
Frida Sofía Lima Rivera was from Yautepec, Morelos. She was 22 when she was last seen on February 7, 2015, on Calle Hortaliza in the Granjas México neighborhood of Iztacalco, a few streets from his apartment, according to the Fiscalía's missing person bulletin as reported by Telemundo and Uno TV. Photos of the two of them together circulated after his arrest, and several outlets reported that they had been in a relationship. ABC's KABC, citing investigators, described her as a former girlfriend. TV Azteca noted that she disappeared less than three kilometers from where María José was killed.
Viviana Elizabeth Garrido Ibarra was a biochemical engineer and the mother of a young girl. She was last seen on November 30, 2018, at the entrance to the Ermita metro station. Uno TV reported that she was 32 when she disappeared and had been a coworker of his; Telemundo, citing an anonymous post reported by Excélsior, said they had worked together in a laboratory. Her family went to the Fiscalía days after his arrest to learn whether any of the remains were hers.
Wendoline Belén Ibarra Espino is named by her family among the four families who signed the April 2025 statement. No source opened for this page gives her age, the date she disappeared or the case prosecutors connected to her.
On July 20, 2024, the Fiscalía said that remains found in the apartment had been identified as those of a young woman last seen on March 16, 2024, when she left a home in El Cortijo, in Tlalnepantla de Baz in the State of Mexico. Prosecutors said he had probably contacted her online and arranged to meet her at the apartment. The press named her as Gabriela Abril. She disappeared one month before María José was killed.
In February 2025, the families of Amairany, Frida Sofía and Viviana said they were still waiting for the forensic identification reports that would allow their daughters' remains to be returned to them. In April 2025, the families said that the remains of the identified women had not all been recovered.
The first charges concerned only María José and her mother. More followed as the identifications came in.
On Saturday, July 20, 2024, detectives served two new arrest warrants on Cortés Miranda in prison, and a judge bound him over for a second time. One warrant, sought by the femicide prosecutor's office, was for the femicide of the woman from Tlalnepantla; prosecutors alleged that he took her life at the apartment and dismembered her body to hide evidence. The second, sought by the missing persons prosecutor's office, concerned the disappearance and death of the young woman last seen on August 1, 2012, in Chinampac de Juárez, Iztapalapa, whose description matched Amairany. He remained in preventive custody, with a new six-month period for investigation. The search of the building went on: on August 26, 2024, the Fiscalía and the National Search Commission went over the property with ground-penetrating radar.
On November 4, 2024, a judge bound him over again, this time for the killing of a woman last seen alive in 2015, on a warrant sought by the missing persons prosecutor's office and served in prison. The Fiscalía did not name her. Its statement, as reported by La Razón and Publimetro, described the charge as taking a woman's life. The broadcaster adn40 described the same hearing as concerning the unlawful deprivation of liberty of a victim in September 2015, and gave the victim's name as Amairani. The sources do not agree, and the bound-over charge cannot be matched with certainty to Frida Sofía, who disappeared in February 2015.
In January 2025, investigators returned to the building with police detectives, forensic experts, firefighters and crews from the city water system, who used heavy machinery to open the drains and pipes in search of more remains. According to the sports and news site Récord, an intermediate hearing was held on January 21, 2025, at which prosecutors asked for the maximum sentence. No other source opened for this page reports that hearing, and it is not clear which case it concerned.
In February 2025, the families of Amairany, Frida Sofía and Viviana protested outside the Fiscalía. They said that he was then being prosecuted only for homicide, and they asked for the investigations to be completed so that he could be tried for femicide and disappearance. They blamed delays on repeated changes of the prosecutors assigned to the case. "We are dead in life after 12 years," one mother said, "and now that we found her, they did not investigate."
By April 2025, the Fiscalía said, he was in custody for crimes against seven women: femicide, attempted femicide and disappearance committed by private individuals. A hearing to bind him over in the cases of two more victims was set for Sunday, April 13, 2025.
The case raised a direct question: had the authorities missed chances to stop him? Families, lawyers and politicians said they had.
Amairany's case is the clearest example in the record. SDP Noticias reported that he appeared in her phone records in 2012, admitted seeing her the day she vanished and said they had argued, and was not investigated further.
The brother of Claudia Andrea, a young woman who died in December 2019, told the journalist Azucena Uresti that his sister had been in a relationship with Cortés Miranda from October to December 2019. She was found dead in her apartment in Azcapotzalco on December 27, 2019, and her death was ruled to be from natural causes, a respiratory arrest. Her brother, who gave his name as Ángel, said things in the apartment were out of place, that her phone was never returned to the family, and that when he complained, a police commander pointed a gun at him and told him to leave. SDP Noticias reported that her death was being looked at again. No charge was ever brought in her case, and no source opened for this page shows that the Fiscalía connected her death to him.
In late April 2024, Verónica Juárez Piña, a Senate candidate for the PAN, PRI and PRD opposition parties, filed a complaint against Ernestina Godoy, Mexico City's attorney general until shortly before the arrest, alleging that the office had known since 2020 who he was and where he worked and had not acted. The complaint was made during an election campaign. Godoy replied on April 26, 2024: "He is a femicide offender who is very hard to detect. You have seen it: he was someone who led a normal life, who worked. For a prosecutor's office, for an authority, he is someone with a different criminal profile." No source opened for this page reports the outcome of the complaint.
Speaking a year after her daughter's death, Cassandra Calles asked for justice against the officials "who were involved in the earlier case files, who let Miguel operate." Her family's grief was mixed with anger at how long the pattern had gone unseen. In April 2024, Angela Calles had told KABC that if the authorities had acted years earlier, her niece might still be alive.
On April 15, 2025, two days after his death, the victims' lawyer, Erendali Trujillo, said that Cortés Miranda had telephoned María José's family from prison two days before he died. According to Trujillo, he called María José's sister and said: "I know it is going to be a year since what happened to your sister, and I just want to tell you that I do not regret anything." Trujillo said the call was recorded. She also said he had called from a telephone booth inside the prison, not a cell phone, and asked how he had obtained a victim's phone number, which should have been protected.
María Fernanda told N+ that he said there were more victims than the seven or eight the news had reported. "I went into shock, and the call was very short," she said. Publimetro reported that he also called María José's mother, and quoted Trujillo as saying he told the family that he had enjoyed what he had done. The accounts of who received the call and what was said come from the family and its lawyer. The Fiscalía did not publish the recording.
On the morning of Sunday, April 13, 2025, prison guards at the Reclusorio Preventivo Varonil Oriente reported that he had fallen and suffered a contusion. He was taken to the prison's medical service and then to the Hospital General de Iztapalapa, where, the SSC said, "after evaluation, he was diagnosed without vital signs, from a possible cardiorespiratory arrest." The SSC said he had been under constant watch by a guard and was taking prescribed controlled medication supervised by the prison medical service. The hearing set for that day was postponed because he had been taken to hospital, and hours later the Fiscalía was told he had died.
The Fiscalía opened an investigation into his death. It said it would carry out forensic studies in the prison, toxicology tests and an autopsy at the city's Institute of Forensic Sciences (INCIFO), and that the victims' legal advisers would be given access as witnesses.
On April 22, 2025, at a press conference marking her first 100 days in office, the attorney general, Bertha Alcalde Luján, gave the cause of death. "It was determined that the cause of death was head trauma resulting from this man's fall from a two-meter bunk in the prison," she said. "However, we cannot rule out that he ingested substances that led him to fall." The toxicology results were not yet available. She said that the other inmates in his cell and the prison staff present had been interviewed, and that nothing pointed to a homicide.
That account did not match everything said in the first days. Early reports, citing prison authorities, said he had collapsed in his cell, and some reported a heart attack. Trujillo told reporters that he was held in an isolated area and had no contact with other inmates, while the attorney general referred to people who were in the cell with him. Trujillo said the families' doubts were so deep that they wanted the autopsy reviewed to be certain the dead man was Cortés Miranda.
Mexico City's head of government, Clara Brugada, said the Fiscalía would investigate so that there was "no doubt" about how he died.
Trujillo said she and her clients learned of the death from the news. "Cassandra is the only survivor of Miguel," she told N+, and the authorities had not told them, "even as a matter of humanity." The mothers of the other victims said in their statement that the Fiscalía had kept them informed of his health and told them of his death.
"This is not justice," Trujillo said. "Justice was for him to be sentenced and to serve his sentence in prison." She also said that a public defender had told her, while she was working on his criminal profile with two experts, that he had close to 30 victims, women who were not even listed as missing. That figure was never confirmed by the Fiscalía.
On April 15, 2025, the families of Wendoline Belén Ibarra Espino, Frida Sofía Lima Rivera, Amairany Roblero González and Viviana Elizabeth Garrido Ibarra issued their statement. They asked the attorney general to continue investigating their daughters' deaths and his own. They asked for the forensic identification reports so that their daughters' remains could be returned with dignity; for the belongings found in his apartment to be shown to families and returned; for a search for the remains that had not been recovered; for all the digital evidence to be processed and the remaining witness statements to be taken; and for sanctions against officials who, they said, had failed to act and had denied them access to the case files. They asked the press to avoid coverage that made victims suffer again or put the attention on him. "Dignity and respect for those who have been victims must be the priority," they wrote.
On April 16, 2025, one year after her daughter's death, Cassandra Calles spoke publicly for the first time, after a memorial Mass. "The State has to have some measure that gives us justice," she said. María José's father wrote a letter saying that neither his daughter nor the other women would receive the justice they had waited for.
Bertha Alcalde said that his death did not end the work. "The process does not end here, not the process of reparation, nor the process of searching for the truth," she said, and she said the Fiscalía would go ahead with a dedicated unit to determine whether there were other victims.
Miguel Cortés Miranda died on April 13, 2025, charged, never tried. At his death he had been bound over for trial in the death of María José and the attack on her mother, in the deaths of the woman from Tlalnepantla and the young woman from Iztapalapa last seen in 2012, and in the death of a woman last seen in 2015. A hearing on two more victims was never held. No court ever heard evidence against him at trial, and no verdict was ever reached. Under Mexican law a criminal case against a defendant ends with his death, though no source opened for this page reports the formal closing of his cases.
As of the April 22-23, 2025 reports by El Universal and SDP Noticias, the Fiscalía said it was waiting for toxicology results on his death and that investigations into each of the deaths attributed to him, and into possible further victims, would continue. A search for later reports in October 2026 found no published toxicology result, no report of remains being returned to the families and no report on the dedicated unit.
His guilt was never tested in court. The six deaths and one attempt are the Fiscalía's count, based on remains, belongings and documents found in his apartment, DNA comparison and its investigations, as of April 2024.
The early figure of 20 deaths, repeated by El Financiero, Vanguardia and others in April 2024, was rejected by the Fiscalía. The "close to 30" figure comes from the victims' lawyer, who said a public defender told her. The claim in the prison phone call that there were more victims comes from the family. None of these was confirmed.
The number of skulls found was reported as three, five and seven by different outlets; the Fiscalía never published an inventory.
A poem titled "Te extrañaré" ("I will miss you"), which he posted on Facebook, circulated after his arrest. Social media users said its date matched Frida Sofía's disappearance and read it as a description of a death. SDP Noticias reported this as speculation by Facebook users. Nothing in the record shows prosecutors treated it as evidence.
The journalist Carlos Jiménez published a list of possible victims in April 2024, with first names and ages: Frida Sofía, Viviana Elizabeth, Norma Elena, Cinthia Vanesa, Laura and Claudia Andrea. Apart from Frida Sofía and Viviana, whose families later took part in the case, the authorities never confirmed any of these women as victims. Claudia Andrea's death was officially ruled natural; her family disputes that.
The press called him the "Mexican Dahmer." That was a newspaper nickname, not a finding.
The case at the November 4, 2024 hearing is described differently by different outlets (a killing in 2015, or an unlawful deprivation of liberty in September 2015 involving a woman named Amairani). It is left here as the Fiscalía described it: the killing of a woman last seen in 2015.
August 1, 2012: Amairany Roblero González, 18, last seen in Iztapalapa.
February 7, 2015: Frida Sofía Lima Rivera, 22, last seen in Granjas México, Iztacalco.
November 30, 2018: Viviana Elizabeth Garrido Ibarra last seen at Ermita metro station.
December 27, 2019: Claudia Andrea found dead in Azcapotzalco; death ruled natural (her family disputes it; no charge).
March 16, 2024: A young woman named in the press as Gabriela Abril last seen in Tlalnepantla de Baz.
April 16, 2024: María José Castillo Calles, 17, killed at home in La Cruz Coyuya; her mother stabbed; Cortés Miranda arrested.
April 18, 2024: Court-ordered search of his apartment and other properties.
April 19, 2024: Bound over for femicide and attempted femicide; held in the Reclusorio Oriente.
April 25, 2024: Fiscalía says the evidence points to six deaths and one attempt, not 20.
April 26, 2024: Former attorney general Ernestina Godoy says he was "very hard to detect" after a complaint is filed against her.
May 8, 2024: Fiscalía says three women have been identified from remains in the apartment.
July 20, 2024: Bound over a second time, for the femicide of the Tlalnepantla woman and the disappearance and death of the 2012 Iztapalapa woman.
August 26, 2024: Ground-penetrating radar search of the building.
November 4, 2024: Bound over for the killing of a woman last seen in 2015.
January 2025: Search of the building's drains with heavy machinery; an intermediate hearing reported on January 21.
February 2025: Families of three women protest at the Fiscalía over delays.
About April 11, 2025: He telephones María José's family from prison, according to the family's lawyer.
April 13, 2025: Dies after a fall in the Reclusorio Oriente, on the day of a hearing on two more victims.
April 15, 2025: Four families issue a joint statement of demands.
April 16, 2025: Memorial Mass on the first anniversary of María José's death.
April 22, 2025: Attorney general gives the cause of death as head trauma from a fall from a bunk; toxicology pending.