Susana Vargas Cervantes - The Little Old Lady Killer: The Sensationalized Crimes of Mexico’s First Female Serial Killer

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The Little Old Lady Killer: The Sensationalized Crimes of Mexicos First Female Serial Killer

Susana Vargas Cervantes

Susana Vargas Cervantes

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vargas Cervantes, Susana, author.

Title: The little old lady killer : the sensationalized crimes of Mexicos first female serial killer / Susana Vargas Cervantes.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Alternative criminology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045002| ISBN 9781479876488 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479853083 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Barraza Samperio, Juana Dayanara, 1954 | Women serial murderersMexicoCase studies. | Serial murdersMexicoCase studies.

Classification: LCC HV6535.M4 V37 2019 | DDC 364.152/32092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045002

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

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Para Sergio Vargas, con amor, admiracin, y agradecimiento.

To Will Straw, with gratitude.

On Friday, February 3, 2017, I traveled to the prison in Santa Martha Acatitla, on the outskirts of Mexico City, to visit Juana Barraza, who is serving a sentence of 759 years for the homicides of sixteen elderly women and twelve robberies. Police officials and news media have declared Barraza to be La Mataviejitas, or the (female) killer of old ladies. To date, she is the only serial killer ever officially identified as such before capture to be arrested and tried in Mexico City. From late 2003 to early 2006, as police struggled to find out who had been killing a number of elderly women, they focused their efforts on identifying El Mataviejitas, or the male killer of old ladies. This search was the first (and thus far, the only) time in Mexican history that a serial killer was deemed worthy of being hunted down by a dedicated task force. The serial killer was nicknamed, profiled, and trackedand eventually caught, convicted, and sentenced.

Eleven years before my visit to the prison, on January 26, 2006, Juana Barraza Samperio was arrested as the presumed La Mataviejitas as she was fleeing the scene at which a woman (aged eighty-two or eighty-nine, depending on the source) had been strangled with a stethoscope. A renter had come home in the middle of the afternoon to find his landlady, Ana Mara Reyes Alfaro, strangled and lying on the floor. Having just encountered another woman exiting the house who had immediately started running away, he cried out for help and started to chase her. Two police officers patrolling the area heard the tenants calls for help, saw a woman running, and, after a short pursuit, captured Barraza. Newspaper headlines the next day read Cae Mataviejitas tras consumar otro de sus crmenes; es mujer (Mataviejitas falls after committing another crime: It is a woman), Atrapan a la mataviejitas: es mujer y es luchadora (The [female] Mataviejitas is caught: is a woman and a wrestler), and Luchadora de 48 aos fue detenida luego de estrangular a una mujer. Cae presunta mataviejitas (48-year-old wrestler was caught after strangling a woman. Alleged Mataviejitas falls).

Figure I.1. Oscar Herrera, Icela Lagunas, and Rubelio Fernndez, Luchadora de 48 aos fue detenida luego de estrangular a mujer. Cae presunta mataviejitas, El Universal, January 26, 2006.

Barraza was in fact also a professional lucha libre wrestler. Lucha libre is a sport-theater spectacle that has been enormously popular in Mexico since the 1930s. Under the stage name of La Dama del Silencio, Barraza fought as a ruda, meaning she employed no proper wrestling technique. As La Dama del Silencio, she wore a bright pink Power Rangerlike suit with silver details along the legs and shoulders and pink-and-silver knee boots. A pink-and-silver butterfly mask covered her face. A photograph of La Dama del Silencio that circulated in newspapers immediately after her identification as La Mataviejitas shows Barraza with what purports to be a World Womens Wrestling Championship belt draped across her shoulder and waist, striking a pose with one hand on a hip, showing off her muscular arm, and the other hand in front of her torso (fig. I.2). Her tall stature (she is 1.75 meters, or five-foot-nine) and athletic physique have been characterized by criminologists as masculine, serving as proof of her innate criminality. When she was arrested, Barraza was forty-eight years old and had three children: a sixteen-year-old daughter and two sons, one eighteen and the other twenty-one.