Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – Claudia Gonzalez, a 20-year-old whose looks won her fourth place in a local beauty contest, missed the beginning of her factory shift on Oct. 10, 2001, by just two minutes and was turned away for being late. The last time anyone saw her alive was when she was walking away from the factory gates.
Laura Ramos, 17, left her father’s house to make a phone call 50 yards away. She was setting up a time for friends to pick her up when the phone card she was using ran out. Her mother believes she went to buy another card, but she can only guess, because Laura never returned home.
And so the stories go – the stories of disappearance and death in this border city, stories now linked by Mexican authorities to an illegal immigrant who lived in Denver.
The victims, all young women, left for appointments, headed off to school or went to meet friends. The next news their families had of them came when police discovered their bodies – first a group of eight in a trash-strewn field, and then six more in a shantytown near a famous statue of the crucified Christ.
As the years without justice passed, the two sets of cases – known as the Cotton Field and Cristo Negro murders, dating from early 2001 through the start of 2003 – became emblematic here of something larger.
They were symbols of the danger faced by women trying to lead a normal life in this sprawling industrial city. And they came to represent a system either incapable or unwilling to protect the innocent and find those responsible.
Last week, Mexican authorities said they were confident that they have finally cracked the case. And they place at its center a 30-year-old Denver concrete worker named Edgar Alvarez Cruz, who grew up in Ciudad Juárez, then moved to Colorado in 2001.
Alvarez Cruz was detained in Denver on Aug. 15 by immigration officials after Mexican authorities asked for help in locating him. Wednesday he was marched across a bridge from El Paso into Mexico, where Mexican authorities arrested him.
At a news conference last week and in interviews, the attorney general of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juárez is located, laid out the case’s outlines. Among the evidence is a wrecked car, black plastic sheeting and a key witness who has confessed to participating in the crimes.
It also includes a portrait of Alvarez Cruz that is dramatically at odds with the one sketched out by family members.
He is a deadly and skilled stalker of women, prosecutors say, who drew others into his orbit with drugs and intimidation and managed to orchestrate one of Mexico’s most chilling series of murders virtually undetected until police got a crucial break.
If that’s true, the prosecution of Alvarez Cruz will help put to rest the specter of violence that has haunted this city’s women for nearly a decade and a half.
But first authorities must get past the doubts.
“We don’t want scapegoats. We don’t want torture … or lies,” said Josefina Gonzalez, whose daughter was the one who died after missing her shift.
“What I want is the truth,” she said.
The authorities’ explanation of the case against Alvarez Cruz has surprised many here, especially because it’s long been assumed that the killings couldn’t have been done by isolated psychopaths or lone-wolf killers.
At least 93 homicides in Juárez since the early 1990s bear similar signs of strangulation and rape, including the cases now linked to Alvarez Cruz.
A series of botched prosecutions and red herrings make many here believe the murders must have been done by a large group with power over the city’s police and the money and resources to act with impunity.
Other investigations have linked the murders variously to organ traffickers, a group of Satan worshipers and the violent Juárez drug cartel.
But the case laid out last week paints a picture of just two men – Alvarez Cruz and Jose Francisco Granados – who cruised the streets of this city, hunting, raping and killing women. While Alvarez Cruz so far has been charged with only one murder, Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez said authorities had linked the men to 17 killings.
“These cases appear to be isolated,” Gonzalez said. “We don’t have information that connects these two (men) to something larger.”
She said the break came March 24, when Granados, who is related to Alvarez Cruz by marriage, was interviewed by a Texas Ranger in a U.S. prison. Some details were confirmed by a third man, Alejandro Delgado, who appears to have had knowledge of the crimes and is being treated as a protected witness.
Prosecutors said Granados admitted killing several women with Alvarez Cruz – at least two in the back of a red Renault car that Alvarez Cruz once owned. Police found the car in a Juárez junkyard and discovered traces of human blood on the driver’s side and in the back seat.
Among several little-known details that he provided, Granados said the two men wrapped one of the bodies in black plastic, which corresponds to the corpse of Mayra Juliana Reyes Solis, 17, the only homicide with which Alvarez Cruz has so far been formally charged.
During successive interviews with authorities, Granados sketched out a map of where some of the bodies were dumped and spoke obliquely of a gang to which he and Alvarez Cruz belonged, based in the poor Juárez neighborhood of Salvarca where they grew up.
But he also claimed that Alvarez Cruz was the main force behind the killings, threatening, cajoling or plying Granados with drugs to get him to participate.
“It was Edgar who really said, ‘We’re going to get this or that girl to get in the car,’ and once they were in the car, it was Edgar who made the decision … to kill them,” the attorney general said.
But in a city that has been waiting for justice for years, the response to the arrests has been cautious, even subdued.
“We’ve lived through this before,” said Marisela Ortiz, founder of May Our Daughters Return Home, a victims-rights group in Ciudad Juárez.
“There have been so many times when they detain someone then try and blame all the crimes on him so they don’t have to investigate any deeper,” she said.
Those doubts have been amplified by what appear to be significant holes in aspects of the case.
Attempts to get a usable DNA sample from the blood in the Renault have so far failed, which means there is no way to tell whose blood it is.
Beatriz Sanchez, Alvarez Cruz’s former common-law wife and now a permanent U.S. resident, said the couple bought the car in 1993 but sold it to a friend a year later to pay for the medical bills of their disabled son. When that friend got into an accident in the car, Alvarez Cruz bought it back, hoping to fix it up.
But the foreign parts proved too expensive, Sanchez said, and the car sat on blocks until it was sold for junk a few years later.
The injuries from the accident may explain the blood, she said.
“That is just the most unbelievable claim,” Sanchez said of the Renault’s alleged role in the murders. “That car didn’t even run after ’95.”
Alvarez Cruz also seems to have been working in Colorado during the time many of the murders occurred.
Records from All Phase Concrete Construction of Denver show that he worked for the company from mid-July 2001 through the end of November 2001 and from mid-April 2002 to 2004. Those dates put him in Colorado for all but five of the first 14 murders to which Alvarez Cruz was linked by authorities.
Reyes Solis, in whose murder Alvarez Cruz was charged last week, disappeared June 25, 2001, a Monday on which All Phase’s records show he was working for them in Denver.
“That’s something we’re looking at. There are some differences there, but he has to prove (his whereabouts) in front of a judge,” Gonzalez said.
Oscar Maynez, regional head of forensics at the time of the Cotton Field murders, said he still remembers the morning five years ago when the first of the bodies were found.
He said all the women appeared to have died by strangulation, and there was no evidence of blunt trauma that would explain the blood in the Renault.
And the idea that these two men acted alone is practically impossible, Maynez said.
“I just don’t think these people had the resources to do this for so long and to go undetected,” he said.
Benita Monarrez, whose daughter Laura died after going out to make a phone call, said she’s not sure the recent arrests make sense to her, either.
Monarrez, 44, said that no one in the area remembers any struggle and that her daughter wouldn’t get into a car with a stranger without a fight.
And after Laura’s disappearance, the family found photos of Laura with acquaintances later identified by police as known drug smugglers – photos that Monarrez said disappeared from her daughter’s police file.
“I want to know who it was – who could do such a horrible thing not just to her, but to so many,” Monarrez said, sitting in the front room of a small house on the city’s outskirts.
“We’re asking for justice,” she said, “but we also want proof.”
Monnie Nilsson of the Denver Post Research Library contributed to this report.
Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-954-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.
