The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

dead, face down on the floor of his home with his shirt up around his neck and his trousers down around his ankles. His face was blue and disfigured, and the police thought that the 71-year-old Pacciani had died of a heart attack. But the post-mortem revealed that a combination of drugs had caused his death. The investigating magistrate, Paolo Canessa, believed that Pacciani was silenced in case he revealed more details about the murderous cult at his retrial.

On 24 March 1998, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti were sentenced for their involvement in five of the double murders. Vanni got life; Lotti 26 years. Giovanni Faggi was acquitted.

That should have been the end of it. But in 1994 Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, had attended Pacciani’s trial and he set his third Hannibal Lecter book Hannibal in Florence. While this was being filmed in the city, it stirred memories of the Monster of Florence and people began to ask, if Pacciani had been murdered, surely the Monster of Florence himself, if he was an individual, or another member of one of the gang, if he was not, was still at large. As it is, the case remains officially unsolved.

Mexico’s Juarez Ripper

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, directly across the border from El Paso, Texas, there is a killing spree that has lasted for more than a decade and shows no sign of abating. In February 2005, Amnesty International put the body count at over 370, with more than 400 potential victims listed as missing. That year alone the death toll topped 28, according to the BBC. Even so, in August 2006, Mexico’s Federal Government dropped its investigation.

The first official victim of El Depredador Psicopata—or “the Juarez Ripper”—was Alma Chavira Farel, whose body was found on 23 January 1993 in an empty lot in a middle-class neighbourhood of Campestre Virreyes. She had been raped both vaginally and anally, beaten and strangled. There was a bruise on her chin and she had a black eye. She was wearing a white sweater with a design on it and short blue pants. No mutilations were reported at the time, but later victims were said to have suffered slashing wounds to their breasts similar to those of Chavira. In all likelihood she was not the killer’s first victim at all. Juarez is a city of transients where disappearances exceed recorded homicides each year.

No one is sure how many people live in Ciudad Juarez. Official estimates hover around one million, while there are probably more like two million people there at any one time. Many are street people who don’t show up in the official statistics. For others, it is a stopping-off place on their way to the US which lies just across the Rio Grande. It is also home to numerous drug traffickers and other criminals who use it as a temporary base for cross- border operations.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has set up over 330 maquiladoras in Juarez. These are factories that use cheap labour to produce goods to sell over the border. The wages range between US$3 and US$5 a day. Nevertheless thousands of young uneducated female workers from southern Mexico, known collectively as maquilladoras, flock to work in these factories. The owners prefer hiring women because they are less trouble. They also put up with the squalid work conditions, sexual harassment and violent shanty towns where they are forced to live. Some 70 percent of the labour force is female.

This piques Mexican men’s traditional Latin machismo. It also drives men into crime or to find work in the other traditional male preserve—the police force. However, the police earn so little that bribery is an accepted practice and there is enough drug money flowing through the city to ensure that the legal system is thoroughly corrupt. Any offence can be overlooked for the right price. Largely individual murders are overlooked, but it was hard to hide that the overall murder rate for women in Juarez is twice that of Mexico as a whole. The rate for women aged between 15 and 24 in Juarez is five times that of the rate in Tijuana, another border town, and more than ten times that of El Paso on the US side.

In May 1993, a second victim was added to the Juarez Ripper’s list when a body was found on the slopes of Cerro Bola, a hill that carried a sign saying: “Read the Bible.” She had been raped and strangled. A third corpse appeared in June; she had been stabbed and the body set on fire. On the 11th, another anonymous victim was found partially naked in the playground of Alta Vista High School on the way to a dirt road at the edge of the Rio Grande. She had been tied to a stake, raped, stabbed and had her head beaten in.

By the end of the year, 16 more murders had been added. The last, on 15 December, was “solved”, along with three others—though the Juarez police had an unfortunate reputation for torturing confessions out of innocent suspects. In the dozen cases that remain unsolved, five of the victims remain unidentified. At least four were raped. Four had been stabbed to death and four strangled. One had been shot and one beaten to death. In two cases, the body was so badly decomposed that a cause of death could not be established.

The following year the Juarez police had eight unsolved murder cases involving women. In three other cases they named “probable suspects”, but none of them were arrested. Three of the victims remain unidentified today. The ages of those identified ranged from 11 to 35. In the cases where the cause of death could be determined, one was beaten to death, one burned alive, two were stabbed and six strangled. At least four of the victims were also raped. State criminologist Oscar Maynez Grijalva was already warning that, in at least some of the cases, a serial killer was at work.

His words would be remembered the following year when a killer began to reveal a signature. Three of the four bodies found in September 1995 had their left nipple bitten off or their right breast severed. By then, at least 19 women had been slain—making 1995 the worst year yet. Eight of the victims are still unidentified. At least four had been raped. Where the cause of death was established, one was shot, one stabbed and six strangled. Again in two cases, “possible suspects” were named and the police claimed to have “solved” one of the murders. In October, they arrested Abdul Latif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist living in one of Juarez’s wealthier neighbourhoods.

Sharif was arrested in 1995 after a prostitute accused him of raping her at his home. She claimed that Sharif also threatened to kill her and dump her corpse in Lote Bravo, a desert region south of town where the bodies of other victims were found. But these charges were dropped after the police had discovered that Sharif had dated 18 -year-old Elizabeth Castro Garcia, who had been found raped and murdered in August.

In custody Sharif allegedly confessed to five El Depredador Psicopata murders. But publicly he has always maintained that he was innocent.

“They are pinning this all on me because I am a foreigner,” he claimed. “I’m just a drunk, I’m not a murderer.”

Sharif was born in Egypt in 1947. Later, he claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, sodomized by his father and other male relatives. In 1970, he emigrated to America and settled in New York City. He was known for drunken womanizing. Lovers thought him charming and funny. Years after the event, it was said he had an obsessive interest in young girls.

Sacked for suspected embezzlement in 1978, he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. A former friend there named John Pascoe claimed that, on a deer-hunting expedition, Sharif tortured a wounded buck. Pascoe also claimed that girls seen in Sharif’s company often disappeared later, though no missing person reports tied to Sharif ever surfaced. The friendship ended in 1980, Pascoe said, after he found possessions of a “missing” girl in Sharif’s home and a spade caked in mud on the porch.

By 1981, Sharif had moved to Palm Beach, Florida. A talented chemist and engineer, Sharif was hired by the oil company Cercoa Inc., who gave him his own department. But then on 2 May 1981 he beat and raped a 23-year- old woman neighbour, later claiming that it was consensual sex that got a little rough. Afterwards, he showed remorse, saying: “Oh, I’ve hurt you. Do you think you need to go to a hospital?”

Cercoa hired a top lawyer for Sharif’s defence who plea bargained the rape charge down to sexual battery and five years’ probation, though the law called for the deportation of aliens conviction of crimes involving “moral turpitude”. On 13 August, the night before he was to plead guilty, he attacked a second woman in her home in West Palm Beach. This time he kicked and threatened to kill her, before asking her to fix him a drink and for another date the following night.

The prosecutor of the first case was not informed of the second and, as soon as Sharif was paroled, he was rearrested, then bailed again. On 11 January 1982, Sharif was sentenced to 45 days in jail for the second attack and Cercoa finally sacked him.