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Mexico City Police Arrest Former Wrestler Juana Barraza as the Suspected "Mataviejitas" Strangler

Barraza was caught fleeing a house where an elderly woman had just been strangled. Police had spent months hunting a man they believed dressed as a woman.

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Illustration of police officers talking with neighbors on a residential street of pastel houses in Mexico City. Not an actual scene from the case.

For months, Mexico City police hunted the "Mataviejitas," a killer of elderly women they believed was a man dressed as a woman. On January 25, 2006, they arrested a former professional wrestler, Juana Barraza Samperio.

Barraza, 48, was caught by two patrol officers alerted by a neighbor as she ran from a house in Colonia Moctezuma, in the east of the city, where Ana María de los Reyes had just been strangled. Police said she was carrying a bag with a stethoscope, pension forms and a card identifying her as a social worker; they had long believed the killer got into victims' homes by offering to sign them up for programs for the elderly. Barraza admitted killing Reyes but denied the other killings. "Just because I'm going to pay for it, that doesn't mean they're going to hang all the crimes on me," she told reporters.

Mexico City Attorney General Bernardo Bátiz said there was a 99 percent probability that she had committed 11 homicides and one attempted murder, and that her fingerprints matched those left at some of the other crime scenes. He later said she had admitted killing three other women. She resembled the composite sketches and a sculpted bust police had circulated, and some 300 plainclothes officers had been posted in squares, churches and parks to find the killer. Statistics from the city prosecutor's office counted 48 killings of elderly women over the previous eight years, 38 of them with similar features.

Proceso gave the age of the woman killed on January 25 as 80, while the Associated Press said she was 82.

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