The suitcase had wheels. In the first days of January 2006, or the last of December, a man wheeling it along a street in Mexico City's Colonia Asturias grew visibly nervous as a patrol car passed, and a passer-by watched him leave it and walk away. The passer-by opened it and found the dismembered body of Victor Angel Ivan Gutierrez Balderas. The police followed the tracks of the wheels to an apartment building, watched it for days, and on January 23, 2006 federal agents arrested Raul Osiel Marroquin Reyes for kidnapping and murder.
He had been born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, on September 1, 1980, the son of Roberto Marroquin and Gloria Reyes. His father was described as cold, authoritarian and violently hostile to gay men. After secondary school he joined the Mexican Army in January 1999 and rose to first sergeant in the 15th Infantry Battalion. He studied medicine at a university in Mexico City while he served, and dropped out, saying he could not afford it. He left the army in May 2004; an earlier account says he deserted.
That same month he was arrested in Tamaulipas for armed robbery, and he served fourteen months. He came out in August 2005, angry about the time he had done, and moved to Mexico City, where he and a partner, Juan Enrique Madrid Manuel, took an apartment in Colonia Asturias and robbed people at gunpoint.
His hunting ground was the gay bars of the Zona Rosa. He was twenty-five, and he told an interviewer years later that it had been easy because he was attractive to them. He shaved and dressed carefully before he went out, pretended to be gay, and made sure nobody saw him leave with anyone.
The first man he took survived. Juan Carlos Alfaro Alba, twenty-eight, met him in the Zona Rosa on October 21, 2005 and went with him to a motel, where Marroquin and Madrid kept him for a week, beat and tortured him, and demanded a ransom from his family. When the money did not come they left him injured in the room and warned him not to identify them.
A week later Jonathan Razo Ayala, twenty-one, met him at the Neon bar and went back to the apartment. The two men tied him, blindfolded him and held him for sixteen days, putting a bag over his head until he passed out and bringing him round to abuse him again. Marroquin demanded fifty thousand pesos. Razo's family asked for time and raised a large sum, and on November 12 Marroquin strangled him anyway and left him in a black suitcase near the Chabacano metro station. One account gives his age as twenty.
Ricardo Lopez Hernandez, twenty-three, worked at a cafe; an earlier report said a television company. He went with Marroquin on November 30 and was held for days while his family paid twenty-eight thousand pesos. On December 9 Marroquin strangled him, he said, because he was tired of the whimpering, cut his forehead and body to make the killing look ritual, and left him near Chabacano. He was found the next day, and federal investigators opened an inquiry into both deaths.
Four days later he took Jose Ricardo Galindo Valdes, whose mother begged him to spare her son because she could not raise what he asked. Hours later he drove Galindo out of the area and let him go. Why has never been established.
On December 16 he went to the Zona Rosa twice. In the afternoon he brought back Armando Rivas Perez, twenty-five, beat him for his family's phone numbers, took a part payment and killed him the same day, the only one killed on the day he was taken. That night he brought back Victor Angel Ivan Gutierrez Balderas, and for six days tortured him and bargained with his family, who paid eight thousand pesos against a demand of a hundred and twenty thousand. He killed him on December 22. A few days later the two men dumped Rivas near Chabacano.
Genaro Garcia Luna, head of the federal investigation agency, announced the arrest, and said Madrid had got away. Marroquin was carrying the voter identity cards of the men he had killed. He kept them with him everywhere he went. His arrest came two days before that of Juana Barraza, the Mataviejitas, and overshadowed it.
He did not deny the kidnappings or the killings. At first he said he was not homophobic, then that he had picked gay men because they were easy prey, promiscuous and too trusting, and that he had done society a favor. He said he had never thought about the suffering of the men themselves, and regretted only the grief of their families. He denied being gay himself or having any relationship with Madrid. The Mexican press called him el sadico, the sadist, and el asesino del arcoiris, the rainbow killer, and the case is remembered in Mexico as a notorious example of homophobia.
He was convicted of the four murders, six kidnappings and a hate crime, and sentenced to a nominal term that Mexican reporting gives as 280 years, 290 years, or almost 300. The figure is arithmetic across ten counts rather than a period anyone serves. Article 33 of the penal code of Mexico City fixes a maximum duration for imprisonment, seventy years as it now stands and possibly fifty when he was sentenced. Which cap governs his sentence has not been published. Counted from his arrest, the lower figure would put his release in the 2050s and the higher in the 2070s.
He was held at the Reclusorio Oriente and moved in 2010 to Santa Martha Acatitla. A 2023 report placed him in its high security Centro Diamante, working as an artisan and painter and describing himself as a craftsman rather than a killer. A Mexican broadcaster reported in April 2025 that he was still serving his sentence at Santa Martha.
What he says about the killings has changed, or has been reported differently. In 2006 he said he did not regret what he had done. In a filmed interview in 2023 he expressed remorse, yet a Puebla newspaper writing the same year said he still took pride in the killings, and one Mexican outlet writing in 2020 said he had never shown any remorse at all.