Ecatepec Couple Arrested With Human Remains in a Baby Stroller
Mexican prosecutors said the man could have killed at least 10 women since 2012; he told investigators the number was 20, and the couple had sold one victim's baby.
Published
They were pushing a baby stroller. On Thursday, October 4, 2018, police in Ecatepec de Morelos, the sprawling municipality north of Mexico City in the State of Mexico, stopped a man and his wife on a street near their home and found that the stroller held human remains. The couple, identified at first only as Juan Carlos "N" and Patricia and later named as Juan Carlos Hernández and Patricia Martínez, had already drawn investigators' attention. Detectives had been looking at them over the disappearance of three women earlier that year, one of them taken along with her two-month-old daughter.
What the State of Mexico prosecutor's office described in the following days made the arrest one of the most notorious in the country. State prosecutor Alejandro Gómez said dismembered remains had been found in plastic bags in the couple's refrigerator and in buckets filled with cement. Prosecutors said that between 2012 and his capture the man could have killed at least 10 women in Ecatepec, one of the municipalities with the highest number of femicides in Mexico. He himself told investigators the number was 20.
The baby had not died with her mother. Prosecutors said the couple had sold the two-month-old girl, reportedly for 15,000 pesos, to another couple, who were also arrested. The child was recovered and placed in the care of her grandmother.
A recording of the man's statement to prosecutors leaked to the press within days, and its words shook a country already numbed by violence. "If I get out, I'm telling the officers right now that I'm going to keep killing women," he said, giving as his reasons a voice that would not let him sleep and the hatred he felt for them. Prosecutors described him as a sociopath with sadistic traits and his wife as easily manipulated, and said both could tell right from wrong. Reports at the time also said he was suspected of selling his victims' bones; no official account of that claim was published.
The first charges were narrower than the killings he described. A judge opened criminal proceedings against both spouses for offenses against respect for the dead and violations of the laws on burial and exhumation, which kept them in custody while prosecutors built the homicide cases. At that hearing, in the Chiconautla prison, dozens of people whose daughters and sisters had gone missing gathered outside. The couple's house became a stop for the curious.
What the reports established. This account rests on the reporting of Pulse News Mexico and the Spanish news agency EFE in the week after the arrest; the State of Mexico prosecutor's own releases could not be opened, so the prosecutor's statements are given as those outlets reported them. The couple's full surnames come from later coverage. Officials did not name the women in these reports, so no victim is named here, and the sum of 15,000 pesos for the baby is the couple's own account as reported.
Sources
- El "Monstruo de Ecatepec" se perfila como mayor asesino serial del siglo en México, Montevideo Portal (EFE)
- Grisly Murders by Mexican Couple Take Gruesome Twist, Pulse News Mexico