The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

Sharif moved to Gainesville, Florida, where he set up a company and was married briefly. The short-lived marriage ended in divorce when he beat his bride unconscious. On 17 March 1983, he beat and repeatedly raped a 23-year-old college student who answered his ad for a live-in housekeeper, telling her: “I will bury you out back in the woods. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” He was arrested and held without bail pending trial. Sharif escaped from the Alachua County jail, but was soon recaptured. However, other women who had told the police that he was terrorizing them now refused to co-operate further in case he escaped again. On 31 January 1984 Sharif was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for rape. The prosecutor told local reporters that Sharif would be deported when he was released, though the authorities were seeking to tie him to unsolved murders in Florida and New Jersey. In January 1977, the body of a pretty 30-year-old brunette called Sandra Miller had been found at the side of the road. She had been killed by a single stab wound. Sharif worked at a chemical plant just two miles from the remote farmhouse where Miller lived with her five-year-old daughter and Sharif and Miller used the same bar. He was a prime suspect in the case

However, when Sharif was paroled in October 1989, he was not deported. Instead, he moved to Midland, Texas, when he got a job with Benchmark Research and Technology. His work there was so exceptional that the US Department of Energy singled him out for praise, and he was photographed shaking hands with US Senator Phil Gramm.

Sharif was arrested again 1991, this time for drink driving. It then came to the attention of the authorities and Sharif was liable for deportation. Hearings dragged on for two years. Then Sharif was arrested for holding a woman captive in his home and repeatedly raping her. His lawyers cut a deal. Sharif would leave the country voluntarily if the charges were dropped and, in May 1994, Sharif moved across the border to the exclusive Rincones de San Marcos district of Ciudad Juarez and worked at one of Benchmark’s maquiladora factories.

On 3 March 1999 Sharif was convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia, though six other murder charges were dropped. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The police named Sharif as the Ciudad Juarez serial killer, but the murders continued—even escalated—after his arrest. Between Sharif’s arrest in October 1995 and the first week of April 1996 at least 14 more female victims were slain in Ciudad Juarez. Their ages ranged from ten to 30. In cases where the cause of death was established, one had been shot, one strangled and ten stabbed. At least four had been mutilated after death. Significantly, one—15-year-old Adrianna Torres—had her left nipple bitten off and her right breast severed. The scale of the slaughter was staggering. The police admitted that of the 520 people who had disappeared over the past 11 months, most were adolescent females. The populace was terrified.

The police then came up with a bizarre theory to explain why the killing continued while Sharif was in jail. After the raped and mutilated body of 18-year-old Rosario Garcia Leal was found in 8 April 1996, they picked up members of a street gang called Los Rebeldes—“The Rebels”. One of them, Hector Olivares Villalba, said that the gang’s leader Sergio Armendariz Diaz—aka El Diablo—had half a dozen Rebels rape and murder Rosairio Garcia Leal on 7 December 1995. Although Olivares’ confession was made under torture and he later recanted, the police used it to moved against Los Rebeldes, raiding their club and arresting some 200.

Armendariz, Juan “El Grande” Contreras Jurado, Fernando Guermes Aguirre, Carlos Barrientos Vidales, Romel Cerniceros Garcia, Erika Fierro, Luis Adrade, Jose Juarez Rosales, Carlos Hernandez Molina and Olivares were all accused of being in the pay of Sharif. The police said that he had hired them to rape and murder at least 17 women in copycat killings to make it look as if the original “Ripper” was still at large. Juan Contreras told police Armendariz had sent him to collect “a package” from Sharif in prison. It contained $4,000 in cash. Then, Contreras said, he had joined Armendariz and other Rebels in the rape and murder of a young woman known only as Lucy. Contreras also later recanted, and the charges were dropped against suspects Ceniceros, Fierro, Guermes, Hernandez and Olivares. However El Diablo remained in jail serving a six-year sentence for leading the gang-rape of a 19-year-old fellow inmate in February 1998.

It was said that the Rebels liked torturing their victims on a sacrificial slab before stoving their heads in. Several victims had bite marks on their bodies. Chihuahua’s medical examiner claimed that dental casts from Armendariz match bite marks found on the breasts of at least three of the victims. However, the Rebels claimed they were tortured by police and displayed burn marks on their bodies caused by cigarettes and cigars. And in 1999, a Mexican court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to charge Sharif with conspiracy in any of the murders attributed to Los Rebeldes.

By then the police theory was already looking distinctly threadbare as the murders continued despite the round-up of the Rebels. Between April and November 1996, at least 16 women were killed. Three were shot, five stabbed and one was found in a drum of acid. In some cases advanced decomposition made it impossible to determine cause of death or whether the victim had been sexually assaulted. Eight could not be identified.

The following year there were another 17 unsolved murders involving females aged from 10 to 30 years. Sexual assault was confirmed in only four cases, but other corpses were found nude and in positions that suggested that there had been a sexual motivation for their killing. Where the cause of death could be established, three were shot, three strangled, five were stabbed and two beaten to death. Seven of the dead were never identified.

The murder rate continued to climb. In 1998 there were 23 unsolved murders following the same general pattern. There was the usual mix of shootings, stranglings, stabbings, beatings and burnings. Six remained unidentified. Not only were the police helpless but complicit. On 21 September 1998, Rocio Barrazza Gallegos was killed in a patrol car in the parking lot of the city’s police academy by Pedro Valles, a cop assigned to the Ripper case.

The spate of murders in Ciudad Juarez was now attracting media attention internationally. In May 1998, the Associated Press reported more than 100 women raped and killed in Ciudad Juarez. In June they put the figure at 117, while the women’s advocacy group Women for Juarez said it was somewhere between 130 and 150.

On 10 June 1998 Mexico’s Attorney General Arturo Chavez told the Reuters news agency that, with Sharif still safely behind bars, “police think another serial killer may be at work due to similarities in three crimes this year”. The story was taken up again by AP who reported on 9 December 1998: “At least 17 bodies show enough in common—the way shoelaces were tied together, where they were buried, how they were mutilated—that investigators say at least one serial killer is at work. And 76 other cases bear enough similarities that investigators say one or more copycats may be at work.”

However a team of three profilers from the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, spent a week reviewing the cases and concluded that “the majority of the cases were single homicides… It is premature and irresponsible to state that a serial killer is loose in Juarez.”

The first quarter of 1999 began with eight more victims. Then while Sharif went on trial for the rape and murder of Elizabeth Castro Garcia in March 1999, another suspect emerged. Before dawn on 18 March a 14-year-old girl named Nancy arrived at a ranch on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. Sobbing and covered with blood, she said she had been raped, strangled and left for dead. Miraculously she survived. The attacker, she said, was the bus driver who had picked her up when she left work at the maquiladora at 1 a.m. When he had dropped off all the other passengers, he drove out into the desert and stopped, claiming the bus had mechanical problems. Then he grabbed her by the neck and asked her if she had ever had sex. The last thing she remembered before she lost consciousness was him telling her that he was going to kill her.

The bus driver’s name was Jesus Guardado Marquez, aka El Dracula. A check of the records revealed that 26-year-old Guardado had a previous conviction for sexual assault. But by the time police went to arrest him, he had fled with his wife. Guardado was arrested a few days later in Durango, some 550 miles to the south. He claimed that he was beaten by the police when he was returned to Ciudad Juarez. However, the police said that Guardado confessed to a number of the murders and named four accomplices who were also maquiladora bus drivers—Victor Moreno Rivera (El Narco), Bernardo Hernando Fernandez (El Samber), Augustin Toribio Castillo (El Kiani) and Jose Gaspar Cerballos Chavez (El Gaspy). Together they were called Los Choferes—“The Chauffeurs”. More sinisterly, they are also known as Los Toltecas—“The Toltecs”—who were the blood-thirsty forerunners of the murderous Aztecs. Moreno was the leader of the gang, the police said, and he too was in the pay of Sharif.

They were charged with 20 murders, but protested their innocence. The only evidence against them was their own confession which had been extracted by torture. Sharif denied having any contact with the Chauffeurs and