HARRISBURG, Pa.—A federal prison inmate who allegedly confessed to murdering at least 10 women in Mexico was granted more time Tuesday to build a case against being returned there to stand trial for one of the killings.
U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Andrew Smyser said he had tentatively concluded that Mexican authorities have provided ample evidence to extradite Jose Francisco Granados de la Paz, but extended the hearing until July 31 to give his court-appointed attorney time to prepare a written response.
Granados de la Paz, 29, is a Mexican citizen who is serving time in Lewisburg Federal Prison on immigration charges.
In the extradition request filed earlier this month on behalf of the Mexican government, U.S. prosecutors said he confessed to Mexican and Texas authorities last year that he had been involved in killing at least 10 women in Mexico as “offerings to Satan.”
A short man who wore a white dress shirt and black pants to the hearing at the federal courthouse in Harrisburg, Granados de la Paz put on glasses with thick brown frames and listened intently to a translator who whispered Spanish as the lawyers and Smyser discussed the case.
U.S. marshals escorted Granados de la Paz to and from the hearing and guarded him throughout the proceeding.
James Wade, a federal public defender representing Granados de la Paz, told the judge he needed time to sort out apparent inconsistencies in the documents the Mexican government filed through the U.S. attorney’s office only a few days earlier.
“I don’t have it firmly fixed in my mind how everything adds up,” Wade said.
U.S. Attorney William Behe argued that the Mexican government’s evidence is more than enough to establish probable cause that Granados de la Paz committed the June 2001 slaying of Mayra Juliana Reyes Solis, including his own confession that he stabbed her in the heart.
Reyes Solis’ body was found the following November, along with the remains of four other female bodies, dumped in a canal in Ciudad Juarez, across the U.S.-Mexican border from El Paso, Texas.
In August, Denver police arrested a suspected accomplice, construction worker Edgar Alvarez Cruz, whom Mexican authorities have charged with the killing. Alvarez Cruz owned and was driving the car in which Reyes Solis was killed, according to excerpts from Granados de la Paz’s confession that were included in the extradition complaint.
During the decade that ended in 2003, more than 100 women disappeared in Ciudad Juarez, many of them young women last seen in the city’s downtown area or after boarding buses. The victims’ bodies were often dumped in the desert outside the city.
