Killing has become an international enterprise. One murderer seems to have been at large in the US, then moved his activities on to Portugal and at least four other European countries. This has a long history. Suspects in the Jack the Ripper case went on to kill in the US and Australia. Indeed, one even seems to have commuted back and forth across the North Atlantic.
It is not just free societies that are prone to having killers on the loose. Countries that have suffered political oppression seem to have spawned a particularly vicious variety. Russia has its own serial killers, with several at large. And in South Africa there seems to have been an epidemic. Again the police force, perhaps still infused with the old ethos of apartheid, has a poor record when it comes to dealing with killers who seek out black women as their victims.
In Latin American counties, particularly those that have suffered divisive civil wars, it is almost open season in women. In Guatemala, for example, almost every murder case goes unsolved. The police neither have the resources nor the incentive to investigate. In fact, some of the killers at large seem to be in the police force itself.
But worse is Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. The pandemic of murders there has come to the attention of the English-speaking world because Juarez is just over the border from El Paso, so the killings are reported the papers in Texas. In Juarez so many vulnerable young women have been raped and killed in the most horrible ways that the term “femicide” has been coined. The allegation is that Latin machismo culture and general border-town lawless had combined to create a murderous war on women. In the eyes of women’s rights activists, all men in Juarez are potentially killers at large.
Argentina’s Highway Maniac
Since 1996 a serial killer has been at large in Buenos Aires State, Argentina. Known as the “Highway Maniac”, he has killed at least five times. The victims—largely prostitutes—all had their throats slit or were strangled. Their naked bodies were found along the main road around the eastern city of Mar del Plata, on the Atlantic coast some 240 miles from the capital. One victim had the word “
The first victim was 27-year-old Uruguayan Adriana Jacqueline Fernandez. She was strangled with a cable and her naked body was found in a culvert alongside Highway 226 on 1 July 1996. She worked as an artisan in Mar del Plata and was the only victim who was not thought to be a prostitute.
The next victim was 35-year-old Maria Esther Amaro. She too had been strangled and her naked body was found alongside Highway 55 on 29 November 1996. Marks on her wrists indicated that she had been manacled and those on her knees showed that she had been forced to kneel. She had worked as a prostitute in the La Perla district of Mar del Plata and, after she was dead, the killer had carved the word “
In mid-January 1997, 26-year-old Vivian Guadalupe Spindola disappeared from La Perla. On 20 January, two legs and an arm, severed at the wrist, was found near Los Acantilados, eight miles south of Los Acantilados. Two days later and ten miles further down Highway 88 a lorry driver found a torso. A tattoo in the pubic region identified the corpse as that of Vivian.
The mutilated body of 27-year-old Mariela Elisabeth Gimenez was also found along Highway 88, around 30 miles from Mar del Plata. She had last been seen boarding a bus on 4 May. Her thighs had been cut open and her left arm was missing. A post mortem revealed that these mutilations had been made after she was dead, but other wounds indicated that she had been tortured before she had been killed.
The bodies of these first four victims had been carefully posed, but after that the killer changed his modus operandi. From then on, he sought to conceal the bodies. On 20 October 1998, two kids found a bag under a black coat on a vacant lot on the outskirts of Mar del Plata. In it were the thighs of a woman, neatly severed at the knee and hip. Two ligatures—one of nylon, the other cotton—were found nearby. The following day, three bags of bloody clothes were found less than 50 yards away. It was quickly established that these belonged to 26-year-old Maria of Carmen Leguizamon, who worked as a prostitute in the port area of the city. She was a native of Rosario, 175 miles north of Buenos Aires and 400 miles from Mar del Plata, where her parents thought she was a waitress. Chief investigator Jorge Luis Acosta thought the killer had changed his MO because he had almost got caught.
Around that time, a number of other prostitutes had simply gone missing. Mother of four Ana Maria Nores, aged 26, was two months pregnant when she disappeared on 19 July 1997. After she disappeared, someone called the police and told them to look along Highway 88, but nothing was found. Another anonymous call to the local newspaper, the
She had told colleagues in the La Perla district where she worked that she feared that she would be the next victim of what the
Checking their records, the police discovered that another prostitute was also missing from the area. On 23 February, 36-year-old Patricia Prieto—aka Dark Patricia and
On 20 October, 26-year-old Silvana Paola Caraballo was reported missing by the superintendent of her apartment block after he discovered her six-year-old daughter alone and crying because her mother had not returned from work. Silvana Caraballo was working as a prostitute in La Perla to support her family and put herself through an architectural course.
On 14 January 1998, 25-year-old Veronica Andrea Chavez’s mother reported her missing when her daughter did not return from work. Veronica Chavez had no arrest history for prostitution and her mother said she worked as a cleaner for a law firm and a hat-check girl at a club. The police discovered that she did not work in either place and, although friends denied that she worked as a prostitute, she was friends with a number of the girls from La Perla.
On 1 March 1999, 30-year-old Claudia Jaqueline Romero vanished from her usual patch. Her husband said that she had had problems with some of the other girls, but would not have run away voluntarily as she loved her family. She left a three-year-old daughter and was three months pregnant when she disappeared. Soon after, 39- year-old Mirta Adela Bordon also vanished.
On 11 September, 26-year-old Sandra Carina Villanueva, a prostitute with a history of arrests, disappeared from the centre of Mar del Plata. Then on 30 October, 33-year-old mother-of-four Mercedes Almaraz went missing from La Perla. That Saturday night she left home in the barrio Las Americas on the outskirts of the city at midnight, wearing a denim miniskirt, violet top and sandals. She was last seen on the corner of Espana and 11 de Setiembre in La Perla in daylight. She often left her four boys, aged between one and five, in the care of a babysitter for days on end as she also worked as a mule for a drug-smuggler.
The city prosecutor Fabian Fernandez Garello blamed his own policemen for not catching the killer. Prostitution is one of the sources of greater police corruption, he said. He also denounced District Attorney Marcelo Garcia Berro, who became a “person of interest” in the case when his name was found in Veronica Chavez’s phone book. She had also been seen getting into his car the night before she disappeared. Berro admitted knowing her but could not explain why she had called him over 20 times on his mobile phone and in the office over the preceding days.
Veronica had dealings with three other policemen, two of whom were involved in the investigation of the cases of Ana Nores and Silvana Carabello. Nores’ mother claimed that the police wanted her daughter to act as bait to catch the killer. The families of the two women also alleged that the police used their daughters to sell drugs. There is also speculation that the killer is a policeman who extorts protection money from the prostitutes.
In March 1999, the governor of Mar del Plata offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the Highway Maniac. Soon after, an anonymous informant accused the son of a wealthy family who had been locked away in an insane asylum 30 years before after he had killed three prostitutes in Buenos Aires, dressed in women’s clothing. Although diagnosed as a dangerous schizophrenic, the man had been released shortly before the
