Juana Barraza

"When I saw them I felt much anger, and more when they acted uppity or believed that because of their money, they could humiliate me."

Juana Barraza is a Mexican Serial Killer and the most prominent perpetrator of the Mataviejitas ("Little Old Lady Killer") murders in Mexico City.

Background
Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio was born in rural Hidalgo, Mexico in 1957. Her parents were Trinidad Barraza, a police officer, and Justa Samperio, an alcoholic prostitute. Three months after Juana's birth, Justa abandoned her husband to begin an adulterous relationship with Refugio Samperio, a married man that was also Justa's step-father, and would become Juana's own father figure.

Juana Barraza never learned to read and had a rocky relationship with her mother, to whom she barely spoke in her infancy. At age 12, Barraza's mother pimped her to one José Lugo in exchange for three beers. She continued to sleep with Lugo for four years, suffering two miscarriages at ages 13 and 16, until her mother died of cirrhosis and she left for Mexico City. There she married and divorced several times, and had four children. Her firstborn died in a gang shooting when he was 24. During the 1980s and 1990s Barraza held a variety of jobs and toured central Mexico as a masked wrestler named La Dama del Silencio ("The Lady of Silence"), an alias she chose in reference to her own shy, silent personality. In 1995, short of cash after the birth of her fourth child, she began to steal in shops and later to burglarize homes.

In 1996 she hatched a plan with a friend, Araceli Tapia Martínez, to steal from the elderly. The two dressed in white and pretended to be nurses in order to gain access to lone old people's homes, robbing them once they were inside. However, Tapia was also in a relationship with a corrupt Federal, Moisés Flores Domínguez, and the couple concocted a parallel plan to extorsionate Barraza. Flores met Barraza after a burglary that she had committed alone and demanded 12,000 pesos in return for not arresting her. In 2000, the then 43 years old Barraza retired from wrestling, where she earned 300 to 500 pesos per fight, and her situation became desperate.

Case History
Murders of elderly people in Mexico City began to increase in 1998, fueling press speculation about the existence of a serial killer dubbed El Mataviejitas (use of "El" indicating a presumed male perpetrator). However, Mexico City police denied any connection between the crimes, and a number of people were imprisoned for some of the murders.

Barraza's first victim was María de la Luz González Anaya, 64 on November 25, 2002. Once in her apartment, González made comments that Barraza considered derogatory; she got angry and beat González before strangling her with her hands. Barraza did not kill again for three months and might have been inspired to do so by stories about the Mataviejitas, rather than the other way around. The crimes increased sharply afterwards. By November 5, 2003 police had enough evidence and witness testimonies to believe that a serial killer was really involved, and that it was a tall person with rough factions that was posing as a city council nurse or social worker to gain the victims's trust. However, police was reluctant to make it public because the Mataviejitas was now a weapon in the fight between Mexico's federal government (controlled by PAN) and the capital's city council (PRD), moreso after Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador became the PRD candidate for the 2006 Mexican presidential election. PAN attacked López Obrador claiming that criminality had increased during his term, and that his recently implemented public healthcare plan for residents over 70 years of age was to blame for the killings because the murderer was a nurse. PRD in turn denied that the Mataviejitas existed and accused PAN-related media of sensationalism. In December, the police released a "Wanted" poster with two eyewitness sketches of the Mataviejitas, one more female and another more male-looking, that identified them just as persons of interest with no mention of their clothing. It wasn't until the following year that the police finally admitted that there was a serial killer.

In mid-2005, Barraza began a relationship with taxi driver José Francisco Torres Herrera, alias El Frijol ("The Bean"), who became her accomplice. The attacks increased in range and frequency, and the time changed from day to night. The killing of 82-year old Carmen Camila González Miguel on September 28, 2005, an upper class woman and the mother of prominent Mexican criminologist Luis Rafael Moreno González, made police launch a special operation under the name Operación Parques y Jardines ("Operation Parks and Gardens"). Patrols in the areas where the killer was active increased, pamphlets advising the elderly to "not trust strangers" and new sketches were distributed, and police even paid elderly women to act as bait in park areas. In a very criticized move, police also announced that they were looking for a homosexual man, "transvestite or transgendered", and arrested 49 transvestite prostitutes that were released when their prints didn't match the collected in the crime scenes. They also requested collaboration from the French police under the belief that the killer was similar to Thierry Paulin, "The Monster of Montmartre". The lack of murders after October made police consider that the killer had committed suicide, but on January 25, 2006 Barraza was seen by a tenant as she left the murder scene of landlady Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, 84, and was arrested by a passing police patrol. Though Barraza was iliterate, a search of Barraza's home found a "trophy room" with newspaper clippings of the murders, along with objects taken from the victims and an altar to Jesús Malverde and Santa Muerte, two folk saints often honored by Mexican criminals. Barraza was also made to pose next to a bust and eyewitness sketches of the Mataviejitas, in a move criticized as misleading the public to think that the police had been in the right trail to catch Barraza. In truth, Barraza had been previously at a police station and had been interviewed on a TV program about wrestling just one week before her arrest, yet she was never recognized.

In 2008 Barraza was charged with 30 murders and found guilty of 16 (plus 12 robberies), mostly the ones she could be tied to through fingerprint evidence, and was sentenced to 759 years in prison. She will be paroled in 2058, at age 100.

Modus Operandi
Barraza approached her victims on the street or knocked on their door, pretending to be a city council nurse or social worker. Earlier she would disguise herself by simply dressing in white clothes, but later she acquired a real nurse's uniform. Depending on her victims' wealth, she would gain their trust and access to their homes by offering them massages or help in obtaining medicines and subsidies. If her victims were distracted she strangled them directly; if not, she would beat them first, using moves learned in her wrestling career. Though she carried a bag with medical tools as part of her disguise, Barraza usually killed her victims manually or with a ligature taken from the victim's own home, which she would leave at the crime scene. She then proceed to rob her victims, which was her main motive. Barraza was inactive around Christmas season because she passed it with her children.

Profile
Mexico City police used two at times contradictory profiles of the killer. A physical one based on eyewitness accounts described the killer as "a man, dressed as a woman, or a robust woman, dressed in white, height between 1,70 and 1,75 meters [5' 6"-5' 7"], robust complexion, light brown, oval face, wide cheeks, blonde hair, delineated eyebrows, [and] approximately 45 years old". A psychological one elaborated by the Department of Justice after examining cases of serial killers that targetted elderly women in France and Spain, instead called for the arrest of "a man with homosexual preferences, victim of childhood physical abuse, [who] lived surrounded by women, he could have had a grandmother or lived with an elderly person, has resentment to that feminine figure, and posses great intelligence".

Possible Victims

 * 1995-2001: undetermined number, only robbed
 * 2002, November 25: María de la Luz González Anaya, 64
 * 2003:
 * March 2: Guillermina León Oropeza, 84
 * July 25: María Guadalupe Aguilar Cortina, 86
 * October 9: María Guadalupe de la Vega Morales, 87
 * October 24: María del Carmen Muñoz Cote de Galván, 78
 * November 4: Lucrecia Elsa Calvo Marroquín, 85
 * November 19: Natalia Torres Castro, 85
 * November 28: Alicia Cota Ducoin, 76
 * 2004:
 * February 20: Alicia González Castillo, 75
 * February 25: Andrea Tecante Carreto, 74
 * March 20: Carmen Cardona Rodea, 76
 * March 26: Socorro Enedina Martínez Pajares, 82
 * May 24: Guadalupe González Sánchez, 74
 * June 25: Esthela Cantoral Trejo, 85
 * July 1: Delfina González Castillo, 92
 * July 3: María Virginia Xelhuatzi Tizapán, 84
 * July 19: María de los Ángeles Cortés Reynoso, 84
 * August 31: Margarita Martell Vázquez, 72
 * September 29: Simona Bedolla Ayala, 79
 * October 24: María Dolores Martínez Benavides, 70
 * November 9: Margarita Arredondo Rodríguez, 83
 * November 17: María Imelda Estrada Pérez, 76
 * 2005:
 * January 11: Julia Vera Duplan, 60
 * February 10: María Elena Mendoza Vallares, 59
 * April 13: María Elisa Pérez Moreno, 76
 * April 14: Arturo Patiño Barranco, 74
 * April 19: Carolina Robledo, 79
 * April 20: Ana María Velázquez Díaz, 62
 * June 17: Celia Villaliz Morales, 78
 * June 29: María Guadalupe Núñez Almanza, 78
 * July 5:
 * Julia Vargas, 64
 * Mario Cruz Flores, 84
 * July 20: Emma Armenta Aguayo, 80
 * August 9: Emma Reyes Peña, 72
 * August 11: Carmen Sánchez Serrano, 76
 * August 15: Dolores Concepción Silva Calva, 91
 * September 28:
 * María del Carmen Camila González Miguel, 82
 * Guadalupe Oliver Contreras, 85
 * October 18: María de los Ángeles Repper Hernández, 92
 * 2006:
 * January 25: Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, 84

On Criminal Minds
Though never mentioned in the show, Barraza served as the primary inspiration for Pablo Vargas, a serial killer appearing in "Machismo". In both cases, the killers were active in Mexico, had rocky relationships with their mothers, targetted lone old women, gained access to their homes by posing as a nurse or social worker, used objects taken from the house to kill their victims, took trophies, and were captured while fleeing the home of their last victim. Also in both cases, law enforcement was criticized by the media for refusing to admit that a serial killer was involved at first, and later for centering their suspicions on a transvestite prostitute despite having little reason to do so. However, unlike Barraza, who was only believed to be a transvestite male before her capture, Pablo really was one. Since the episode aired for the first time on April 12, 2006, a little over two months after Barraza was apprehended, it is likely that it was produced when the identity of the killer was still unknown.