The investigation began with a missing child. In 2010 Jesús Octavio Martínez Yáñez, ten, disappeared from Nacozari de García, a mining town in northeastern Sonora, and his mother and her boyfriend reported him gone. For a time investigators thought he might have been taken by traffickers, because of sightings of a boy begging near the Arizona border. That line was dropped. It took until March 2012 for the search to reach the household of the boy's grandmother, Silvia Meraz Moreno, where his body was found buried beneath the floor of a bedroom, and for her family to describe to the police an altar to Santa Muerte and three killings carried out in front of it.
Meraz was born in Hermosillo in 1968 and grew up in severe poverty in a poor quarter of Nacozari. She had her first son, Ramón Omar Palacios Meraz, at sixteen, three more children with her first husband, Martín Barrón López, and a last daughter when she was twenty-nine. By the time of the killings she was living with a man five years younger, Eduardo Sánchez Urrieta, who had a son from an earlier relationship. At some point, according to the accounts given after the arrests, she became convinced that human sacrifice to Santa Muerte would bring her money and protection, and she drew the household into it.
The first to die was Cleotilde Romero Pacheco, fifty-five, a friend of Meraz who sold popsicles in the town and had no close relatives. She was found dead in December 2009. Meraz later said that she told Romero to pick up a twenty-peso note from the ground and struck her in the neck with an ax as she bent down. The blood was offered at the altar, and the body was decapitated, burned and buried near the family's house.
The second was Martín Ríos Chaparro, ten, the son of Eduardo Sánchez and treated by Meraz as her own. He was killed in the middle of 2010, in June by one account and July by another. Meraz said she had got the boy drunk and that her youngest daughter, then thirteen, stabbed him at least thirty times; in a ritual held while he was still alive his veins were cut and his blood spread around the altar. The third was her grandson Jesús Octavio, the adopted son of her son Iván Martín, killed in July 2010. Meraz held him in front of the altar while one of her daughters killed him. Prosecutors said three small children, aged five, two and one, were present in some way, at the least as witnesses. A daughter of one of the women charged later said Meraz had threatened to kill them if they did not take part.
Eight people were arrested at the end of March 2012: Meraz; her son Ramón Omar, twenty-eight; her daughters Francisca Magdalena, twenty-one, and Georgina Guadalupe, twenty; her youngest daughter, then fifteen; her father, Cipriano Meraz Aguayo, eighty-three; Eduardo Sánchez Urrieta, thirty-nine; and a woman of forty-five, Zoyla Hada Santacruz Iriqui. According to the state prosecutor's office, the detainees themselves named Meraz as the intellectual author of the killings. The bodies of the first two victims were recovered from open ground northeast of the town, near the house.
Meraz was reported sentenced to a total of 180 years in prison, although some summaries give life. The adults convicted with her received sixty years each, and her youngest daughter was sent to a juvenile detention center. Psychological evaluations described the girl, who had been part of the household's devotions from early childhood, as treating the practices as normal.
Santa Muerte, the skeletal folk saint the family prayed to, has millions of devotees in Mexico and beyond, and the Mexican press of 2012 reported the case under headlines about a satanic sect. The killings themselves rest on the bodies, the family's own statements and the convictions.