OK, let's get into this. I want you to, for a
second, just imagine Mexico City, but not the
one you see in a travel show. I want you to picture
the Distrito Federal, the DF, right at the turn
of the millennium. We're talking late 90s, early
2000s. It's just a sea of humanity. I mean, you
have something like 20 million people all living,
working and breathing in this one massive, sprawling
metropolis. It's organized chaos, really. Absolutely.
And the city back then is in this huge period
of change. It's modernizing like crazy, but you
know, the social safety nets that are supposed
to catch people, they're stretched incredibly
thin. There are cracks everywhere. Big cracks.
And it was inside those cracks that something
really, really dark started to grow. We've got
a whole stack of material here today, police
reports, journalistic deep dives, court records,
and they all tell the story of this wave of fear.
And it wasn't a citywide panic, which is what's
so interesting. It was targeted. It was very
specific and frankly, an often invisible part
of the population. Elderly women, specifically
elderly women who were living on their own. Exactly.
The grandmothers, the abuelitas, all of a sudden
they were being found dead in their apartments.
And this wasn't, you know, old age or sickness.
This was violent. No, this was a predator. A
very calculated, very patient serial killer was
actively hunting in the capital. And the media,
well, they just ran with it. They gave the killer
a name that became infamous. La Mata Viejitas.
The little old lady killer. Which, I have to
say, it sounds almost... I don't know, like a
character from a Grimm's fairy tale. It sort
of diminishes the horror of it. It does sound
like a caricature, but the reality was terrifying.
And our mission today with this deep dive is
to really get behind that name. and unpack the
story of the person responsible. We're going
to be talking about Juana Barraza. And this is
where the story veers from, you know, your standard
true crime narrative into something that feels
like fiction. If you wrote this as a movie script,
I swear the studio would send it back and say
it was too unbelievable. The contradiction at
the heart of it is just staggering. On the one
hand, you have the killer's method, a cold, manipulative
predator who gains trust by pretending to be
a social worker. Right. Quiet. Methodical. On
the other hand. By night, this exact same woman
is a professional wrestler, stepping into the
lucha libre ring. It's just, it's mind -blowing.
Her stage name was La Dama del Silencio. The
Lady of Silence. You cannot make this up. A wrestler
called the Lady of Silence is moonlighting as
a serial killer who preys on the elderly by posing
as a government aid worker. So today, that's
our goal. We need to understand how. How did
she maintain this double life? And looking through
these police files, how on earth did the investigation
get it so wrong for so long? Oh, there's so much
to get into. We have to talk about the victims,
of course, but also the gender stereotypes that
just completely derailed the police investigation.
We'll get to the whole man in a dress theory
later. In the childhood. I mean, her backstory.
It redefines the word tragic. It doesn't excuse
what she did, not for a second. But it shines
a light on where all that rage came from. And
we can't forget the painting. The French painting,
yes. The boy in a red waistcoat. That is a bizarre
detour that you will not believe. It's a whole
mystery in itself. But let's start at the beginning
with the crimes themselves. The foundation of
this deep dive has to be understanding who exactly
Lamatav Yajitas was hunting. Well, to really
get the scope of the crimes, you had a lot to
start with the victim profile. It was incredibly
consistent. Juana Barraza was targeting women
exclusively age 60 and over. But it wasn't just
about age, right? It was their living situation
that made them a target. That's the crucial detail.
These weren't women living in those big multi
-generational family homes you often associate
with Mexican culture, with kids and grandkids
running around. No. No. And that's a really key
sociological point. In a city as dense and crowded
as Mexico City, you can be profoundly isolated.
These were often widows or women whose children
had grown up and moved away, maybe to the suburbs,
maybe they'd emigrated to the U .S. for work.
They were living alone in these older, often
rent -controlled apartments. They were part of
the city's fabric, but they were invisible. Which,
from a predator's point of view, makes them low
-risk. There's nobody else in the house to fight
back or be a witness. Low -risk, exactly. But
also potentially high reward if robbery is part
of the motive. Yeah. An older generation, they
don't always trust banks. They might keep cash,
jewelry, valuable religious items right there
in the home. And the sheer scale of this. I was
looking at the numbers in these reports and it's
just staggering. It's horrific. The authorities,
when they finally connected all the dots, estimated
that the total death toll could be anywhere from
42 to 48 victims. 48. 48 women. That is a massive
number for a single serial killer operating in
one city over a few years. It's almost unheard
of. Now, to be clear, Barraza was ultimately
convicted on 16 counts of murder. But the investigation,
her modus operandi, it was linked to dozens more.
So how does she do it? How does a person get
close enough to kill that many people without
raising alarm bells everywhere? I mean, she's
not breaking down doors in the middle of the
night. No, and that's what's so insidious about
it. It wasn't about brute force to get in. It
was all about deception. She used a disguise
that was practically tailor -made to work on
this specific demographic. She posed as a government
official. A social worker, to be precise. Which
is just... It's diabolically clever. Evil, but
clever. Very. The investigators' reports detail
how she'd show up at their doors, often with
a clipboard and some official -looking documents.
She'd tell them she was there to help them sign
up for new government welfare programs, maybe
a pension increase or food aid. And I want to
just pause on that for a second because you have
to understand why that works so well. Imagine
you are one of these women. You're 80 years old.
You're living on a tiny pension. You're lonely.
Maybe you feel like the world has forgotten you.
Right. And then there's a knock on the door.
And it's a woman which feels less threatening.
And she's holding a badge or an ID card. And
she says, I'm from the government and I'm here
to help you. You're going to open that door.
100 % of the time. It's an exploitation of trust
and need. Barraza weaponized the social safety
net. She preyed on their financial vulnerability
and their loneliness. When someone in a position
of authority offers help, your guard just, it
plummets. We're all conditioned to trust the
person in the uniform, the nurse, the social
worker. She twisted that instinct into a weapon.
She absolutely did. And once she was inside the
apartment, the mask came off. And the violence
described in these files, it wasn't subtle. Not
at all. The cause of death was almost always
bludgeoning or strangulation. This was up close,
physical, hands -on violence. It was brutal.
And she often used items from inside the home.
Here's another key detail. The reports mentioned
things like telephone cords, the victim's own
stockings, scarves, even a stethoscope in one
case. So she's not walking in with a murder kit.
It's not like she has a bag with a hammer and
a rope. She's improvising. It implies a certain
level of confidence, doesn't it? She was either
improvising or she was so sure of her own physical
strength that she knew she could find whatever
she needed to get the job done right there at
the scene. And on the surface, at least initially,
this all looked like robberies that went wrong,
correct? That was the most obvious motive. She
would kill them and then rob them. She'd take
small amounts of cash, maybe some jewelry, religious
icons from their little altars. things she could
easily carry and sell. But if it were just about
money, there are a million easier ways to be
a thief. You don't usually become a serial killer
just to steal a few pesos and a silver crucifix.
Exactly. Burglary doesn't escalate to serial
murder on this scale unless there's a powerful
psychological driver behind it. And that's where
the profiling got really complex. Authorities
later came to believe the motive wasn't financial
at all. Not really. There's something else going
on. A signature. A deep psychological signature.
The prevailing theory among profilers was that
Barraza was projecting. She associated these
elderly, vulnerable women with her own mother,
and in her deeply twisted logic, she believed
she was helping society by killing them. Helping
society? I just, that's a terrifying rationalization.
That's how a person sleeps at night after doing
something so monstrous. It points to a profound,
deep -seated hatred. It wasn't about the women
themselves. They were just stand -ins. They were
symbols of the person she truly wanted to hurt.
Which, of course, brings us to the investigation.
Because when you have a killer leaving a trail
of bodies this long over several years in a major
capital city, you'd assume the police would be
closing in fast. But reading through this timeline,
they were looking for the wrong person entirely.
This is a, I mean, it's a textbook example of
how bias can completely blind an investigation.
The initial profile was put together by Bernardo
Batiz, who was the chief prosecutor for Mexico
City at the time. And he described the killer
as, what, clever? He said the killer had a brilliant
mind, was clever, and careful. Which, to be fair,
was accurate. She evaded capture for years. Okay,
so far so good. But where did they go wrong?
They went wrong on the most fundamental question
of all. The gender of the killer. The authorities,
the media, the public, everyone just assumed
the killer was male. And this was because of
the physical nature of the crimes, the strangulation?
Yes, entirely. The assumption was rooted in the
perceived strength required. Strangling a person,
a resisting adult, is not like it is in the movies.
It takes incredible upper body strength, grip
strength, and sustained force for several minutes.
So the thinking was, a woman couldn't do this.
That was the prevailing theory. It was seen as
a crime of brute force and therefore it had to
be a man. It's a massive oversight rooted in,
frankly, machismo and outdated gender stereotypes.
They literally could not imagine a female perpetrator
being capable of this kind of violence. But what
about witnesses? I mean, with a crime spree this
long, someone must have seen something. Someone
leaving an apartment building, walking down the
street. They did. They had witnesses. And this
is where the story goes from a simple oversight
to just. A painful case of confirmation bias.
Multiple witnesses reported seeing a masculine
-looking woman leaving the crime scenes. A masculine
-looking woman. Or they would describe a large
woman, someone with broad shoulders, maybe wearing
a red blouse, which was a recurring detail. So,
okay, the witnesses are literally telling them
it was a big, strong woman, and the police heard,
what? They heard, it must be a man in disguise.
You have to be kidding me. I wish I was. The
official police hypothesis became that the killer
might be a man dressed as a woman. Or perhaps
a transgender person? They were so locked into
their male killer theory that they invented a
scenario to make the evidence fit instead of
the other way around. And this wasn't just a
theory they kicked around the office. This had
real -world consequences for people, didn't it?
Horrible consequences. This flawed theory led
to what journalists at the time called ham -fisted
police swoops. They started rounding up and harassing
Mexico City's transvestite sex workers. So they're
out there arresting and terrifying a community
that's already marginalized, all because they
couldn't fathom that a biological woman might
be the killer. That's essentially what happened.
They wasted an enormous amount of investigative
time, manpower, and resources. They drew heavy
criticism from human rights groups. They were
terrorizing innocent people, while the real killer...
Juana Barraza, a cisgender woman, was continuing
her spree completely undetected. It's just, it's
infuriating. It's a tragedy layered on top of
a tragedy. You have the victims of the killer
and then you have the victims of the deeply flawed
investigation. And the police were getting so
lost, so confused, that even wilder theories
started to emerge. At one point, they were floating
a two -killers theory that maybe it was a team.
Okay, I could see how they might get there. Then
it gets even stranger. The police started checking
the fingerprints of unidentified bodies in morgues.
Why would they be doing that? It was their suicide
theory. The killings would sometimes stop for
a few weeks or a month, and the police started
to think that maybe La Montevigites had committed
suicide to escape being caught. They were completely
at sea. Grasping at any straw they could find?
Any straw at all. Because their primary profile,
the male killer, was yielding absolutely nothing.
And then, as if it wasn't confusing enough, the
red waistcoat comes into play. When I read this
part of the file, I had to stop and make sure
I wasn't reading a Dan Brown novel. It's one
of those details that's just stranger than fiction.
It's the kind of bizarre coincidence that can
send an entire investigation down a rabbit hole
for months. So, set the scene. What is this painting?
Okay, it's a piece by an 18th century French
artist, Jean -Baptiste Grosse. The painting is
called Boy in a Red Waistcoat. It was painted
sometime around 1775, maybe 1780. A classic piece
of French portraiture. What in God's name does
that have to do with a serial killer in Mexico
City in the early 2000s? Well, detectives on
the case started noticing something very odd.
They found prints. Cheap reproductions of this
specific painting hanging on the walls in the
homes of at least three of the victims. Three.
Three different victims in a city of 20 million
people all happen to own a print of the same
obscure 18th century French painting. Exactly.
And you can just imagine what that did to the
investigation. They were already lost and now
this. They thought it had to be a signature,
a calling card left by the killer. Of course
they did. I would too. It feels like a code.
Was the killer targeting people who own this
specific print? Was it a clue to their identity?
Maybe they worked in an art museum or something?
It was a massive red herring. It completely distracted
the detectives. They spent valuable time investigating
this link, talking to art dealers, looking for
patterns in the art world that just weren't there.
And in reality, what was it? In all likelihood,
it was just a bizarre statistical anomaly. A
complete coincidence. How is that possible? Well,
think about it. Maybe a popular department store,
like a Woolworth's equivalent, had a sale on
these prints five years earlier. Maybe a street
vendor who was popular in those neighborhoods
had a stack of them one day. Or it was the cover
of a popular calendar one year. So it meant absolutely
nothing. As far as anyone can tell, it had zero
connection to the killer's identity or motive.
It was just a strange, random pattern that made
a messy investigation even messier. Wow. So the
police are out there. chasing transvestites,
analyzing 18th century French art, and checking
morgues for a suicide that never happened. And
all the while, Juana Barraza is living this unbelievable
double life right under their noses. And this
is where we have to pivot and really look at
who she was. Because her other life, her night
job, is the key to understanding why the police
were so wrong about the physical strength component.
She was a professional wrestler, a luchadora.
That's right. She was a fixture in the lucha
libre circuit. Her ring name, as you said, was
La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence. Which,
knowing everything we know now, just sends a
chill down your spine. The Lady of Silence. The
irony is profound. Now, for anyone who doesn't
follow Lucha Libre, it's more than just wrestling.
It's a spectacle, a form of theater. And in that
theater, you have very clearly defined roles.
You have the technicos. The good guys, the heroes.
They're flashy. They do high -flying moves. They
play by the rules. And then you have the rudas,
the rough ones. The villains. The heels, as we'd
call them in American wrestling. They're the
brawlers, the rule breakers. They're there to
be booed. And Juana always fought as a Ruta.
She was cast as the villain in the ring. So just
picture this for a moment. On a Friday night,
she's in a wrestling ring, maybe in a sequined
outfit and a mask, body slamming her opponents,
playing the bad guy for a roaring crowd. And
then on Tuesday morning, she's putting on a plain
blouse, grabbing a fake ID card, and going out
to murder a grandmother. The duality is just...
It's hard to process. In the ring, she's performing
violence. It's loud. It's theatrical. It's for
entertainment and applause. But in her private
life, she's committing this incredibly intimate,
silent, real violence. And the wrestling explains
the whole it must be a man theory, doesn't it?
It explains it completely. To be a professional
wrestler, you have to be incredibly strong. It
requires immense core strength, grip strength,
leverage, and a high pain tolerance. She was
a trained athlete. A combat athlete. So the masculine
strength the witnesses saw. Was her strength.
The broad shoulders they described were the shoulders
of a wrestler who spent hours in the gym. She
had literally trained her body to be a weapon.
And the police, in their biased view, simply
failed to consider that a woman could achieve
that level of physical power. But people aren't
just born this way. They aren't born serial killers.
There's almost always a story, a trauma, something
that breaks a person. And Juana's backstory.
I have to give a warning here. It is profoundly
disturbing. It doesn't excuse a single thing
she did. But it does help explain the rage. It's
one of the most harrowing backstories I've ever
come across in these cases. You have to go back
to her childhood. She was born in a small rural
town called Epazayucan in the state of Hidalgo,
north of Mexico City. Her mother's name was Jesus
Amperio. And by all accounts, the mother was
an alcoholic. A severe alcoholic. And the central
trauma of Juana's life, the event that seems
to be the poison well from which everything else
flows, happened when she was just a young girl.
According to the court records and her own testimony,
her mother, Justa, exchanged her for three beers.
I just, I need to stop you there because we need
to let that sink in. Her own mother traded her,
sold her daughter to a man for three bottles
of beer. That is the account. She handed her
child over to a man in exchange for alcohol.
It's the ultimate betrayal. The one person on
earth whose job it is to protect you commodifies
you for a drink. And what happened to her with
that man? The abuse was unimaginable. She was
repeatedly and brutally raped while in this man's
care. She actually became pregnant by him and
gave birth to a son while she was still, by any
definition, a child herself. My God. It's just,
it's a complete failure of family, of community,
of everything. It is. And the tragedy just kept
following her. She would go on to have four children
in total, but her eldest son... The one who was
born from that horrific abuse was later killed.
He died from injuries he sustained in a street
mugging. So her entire life is just bookended
by violence. Violence from her mother, sexual
violence from men, the violence of the streets
that takes her son. Precisely. And if you draw
a line from that past to the present of her crimes,
the motive becomes terrifyingly clear. Barraza
admitted in her interrogations that her motivation
was a lingering resentment. about how her mother
had treated her so every time she walked into
an elderly woman's apartment she was walking
into her mother's apartment she was killing her
mother over and over and over again these victims
were surrogates for her rage she saw these vulnerable
older women and instead of seeing a person to
be cared for she saw the person who had sold
her for beer which makes that helping society
comment even more twisted in her own broken mind
she might have genuinely believed she was ridding
the world of bad mothers it's a very disturbing
but psychologically coherent possibility. It
completely recontextualizes the crime spree.
It was never just about robbery. It was about
revenge. So she's out there killing for years.
The police are chasing their tails with paintings
and flawed theories. How does it all finally
come to an end? Because eventually the luck runs
out. It does. It all ends on January 25, 2006.
Okay, take us to that day. Where are we? We're
in the Venustiano Carranza borough of Mexico
City. And the final victim is an 82 -year -old
woman named Ana Maria de los Reyes Alfaro. And
the method of killing? She was strangled with
a stethoscope. A stethoscope, which fits the
whole medical professional social worker disguise
perfectly. It does. But this time, something
went wrong for Barraza. Things didn't go as smoothly
as they usually did. Barraza would later claim
that she strangled Alfaro after they got into
an argument. An argument about what? Her story
was that it was a dispute over payment for house
cleaning. For maid services. Wait, maid services.
So she had switched up her disguise from social
worker to maid that day. It's hard to know if
that was the truth or just a story she concocted
after she was caught. But whatever the reason,
the result was the same. She murdered her. But
this time, she didn't just melt back into the
city. A neighbor saw her. Saw her leaving the
apartment. A tenant in the building saw her fleeing
the victim's home and immediately suspected something
was wrong. He chased after her and managed to
flag down some police who were patrolling nearby.
So she was caught, basically, red -handed. As
red -handed as it gets. The police intercepted
her just down the street. And when they searched
her, the evidence was damning. She was carrying
the stethoscope used in the murder. She had pension
forms. She had a fake social worker ID card.
The complete toolkit of her deception right there
on her person. And this is the real aha moment
for the police. The moment where the stomach
must have just dropped out of every detective
on that case. When they finally got her back
to the station and looked at her, really looked
at her, they realized she was a near perfect
match. Had a composite sketch they'd had for
years. The one based on witness descriptions
that they'd been ignoring? The very same one.
The close cropped hair dyed blonde. The prominent
facial mole. The broad, strong features. It was
her. The sketch had been accurate all along.
But because their minds were locked on finding
a man, they'd looked right past the truth that
was staring them in the face. They had her face.
They just had the wrong gender attached to it
in their heads. That's it exactly. So she's finally
in custody. The press must have gone absolutely
insane. The little old lady killer is a famous
wrestler. That's a headline from a fever dream.
It was a media firestorm. It was the biggest
story in Mexico for months. It completely shocked
the nation. But then, of course, came the legal
process, starting with the interrogation. And
did she confess to everything? It was. Yeah.
Complicated. She immediately confessed to murdering
Ana Maria Los Reyes Alfaro. I mean, she was caught
right there. And she admitted to three other
murders. Okay, so she gives them four. But they
suspect her of what? Close to 50? Exactly. She
flatly denied any involvement in the other killings
that were attributed to La Mataviejitas. She
tried to draw a line in the sand. It was like
she was saying, yes, I do these specific things,
but I am not that monster from the newspapers.
But the physical evidence tells a different story.
The physical evidence doesn't lie. Prosecutors
were able to link her fingerprints to at least
10 of the murder scenes, maybe more. The forensic
evidence was overwhelming, regardless of what
she was willing to admit. So we fast forward
to the verdict. This was in 2008. Yes. The trial
concluded in the spring of 2008. She was ultimately
found guilty on 16 counts of murder and aggravated
burglary. 16 convictions. And the sentence for
that. The judge handed down a sentence of 759
years in prison. 759 years, which is obviously
a symbolic number. It is. In the Mexican legal
system, there's no death penalty, and there aren't
life without parole sentences in the way the
U .S. has them. The maximum effective sentence
a person can serve is capped. At the time, I
believe it was 60 years. So for a woman who was
in her late 40s when she was sentenced, 60 years
is a life sentence. It's a life sentence. She
will die in prison. There's no question about
that. So justice is served. The case is closed.
The city can breathe a sigh of relief. Officially,
yes. The authorities formally closed the Matavihides
investigation after her conviction. But, and
it's a very big but, that left over 30 unresolved
cases that were initially linked to the same
killer profile. So what happens to those families?
Do they just get told, well, we're pretty sure
she did it, but we can't prove it. So that's
that. That's essentially what happens. It leaves
this lingering cloud of ambiguity for dozens
of families who may never get legal closure.
And you have to remember, Barraza wasn't the
only suspect ever arrested. At one point in 2005,
the police arrested two other people, a man and
a woman, and the media even identified them as
the killer for a time. So it was a messy investigation
from start to finish. A very messy conclusion
to a very messy case. But there was no doubt
that Barraza was the one. She fit the profile,
the fingerprints, the timeline, and the sheer
scale of the crimes. So where is the Lady of
Silence today? She's serving her sentence at
the Santa Martha Acatitl Women's Prison in Mexico
City. And her life behind bars is, well, it's
surprisingly mundane. Mundane, after all that
violence and chaos. According to reports from
inside the prison, she works as a gym instructor
for the other inmates. Well, I guess that makes
sense. She's the wrestler. She knows her way
around a gym. And she also runs a small business.
She sells tacos to other prisoners. I'm sorry.
She sells tacos in prison. She runs a small taqueria
inside the prison to earn money to support her
family on the outside. It's this bizarre return
to domesticity. She's cooking. She's serving
food. She even got married while in prison to
another inmate, though they divorced a couple
of years later. It's just... It is so hard to
wrap your head around that. This person who brutally
murdered at least 16 elderly women with her bare
hands, and now she's known for her tacos and
for running a fitness class. It brings you right
back to the deep irony of her wrestling name,
La Dama del Silencio. The Lady of Silence. She
chose a name that evokes quiet and mystery. Yet
she created more noise, more panic, more media
hysteria than almost any other criminal in modern
Mexican history. And that contrast between the
absolute banality of her prison life, now selling
tacos, and the sheer monstrosity of her crimes.
Yeah. It's jarring. It's a powerful reminder
that monsters don't usually look like monsters.
They look like people. They have jobs and hobbies
and relationships. And sometimes they sell tacos.
So let's try. to pull this all together. If we're
looking for the key takeaways from this whole
dark saga, what are they? I think first, you
have to start with the sheer audacity of the
deception. A professional wrestler convincingly
posing as a caring social worker. It's a masterclass
in manipulation and reading people's vulnerabilities.
And second, you absolutely cannot overlook the
failures of the investigation. The gender bias
was not just a small mistake. It was the central
flaw that allowed Barraza to keep killing for
years. It led to the harassment of an innocent
community and let the real killer walk free.
And finally, there's that tragic, vicious cycle
of violence. A story that starts with a little
girl being sold for three beers. That trauma
doesn't just disappear. It's festered and it
mutated and it turned into a rage that she then
unleashed upon the most vulnerable people she
could find. It's just a tragedy from every single
angle for the victims, for their families, and
in a very different way for the abused child
the killer once was. Exactly. It's a story with
no light in it, really. Before we wrap this up,
I want to leave you, our listeners, with one
final thing to think about. We talked about that
painting, the boy in a red waistcoat. The great
red herring. Yeah. The official line is that
it was a random coincidence. Right. But I keep
coming back to it. Three victims in a city of
millions all owned a print of the same obscure
18th century painting. It does nag at you, doesn't
it? It feels too neat to be random. It really
does. So was it truly just a statistical fluke?
Or could it suggest something deeper, a pattern
in the victim's socioeconomic status or their
taste or even their generation that the killer
was subconsciously drawn to? Maybe she saw that
kind of art as a signifier of a certain type
of lonely older woman. It raises a much bigger
question, which is how many other patterns in
unsolved cases have been missed because they
were dismissed as mere coincidence? And the most
chilling thought of all? How many other cases
are out there right now anywhere in the world
that remain unsolved simply because the person
responsible doesn't fit the neat little profile
the investigators have drawn up in their heads?
That's the thought that will keep you up at night.