The Old Lady Killer
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During the early 2000s, Mexico City was terrorized by a serial killer. And not just any serial killer. A killer who was targeting elderly women. Women over 60 years old. Women who lived alone. Women just like your grandmother and my grandmother.

From 2002 until 2006, almost 50 elderly women in and around Mexico City had been brutally murdered inside of their very own homes. Someone disguised as a nurse knocked on these women's doors and once inside either strangled or beat their victims to death. But what was even more terrifying than a serial killer on the loose was

was that police started to suspect that the killer they were hunting was a female herself. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 34, The Old Lady Killer. ♪

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Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.

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please consider supporting the show on Patreon. Now, let's talk about the woman simply known as the old lady killer. Hey guys, as always, I hope you as well as your family, your friends are all staying safe and healthy. I've got a really interesting and just flat out crazy case this week.

It's the story of Juana Barraza, better known as the old lady killer. Now, if you told me that I'd be covering a case that features a former female professional wrestler turned serial killer, I would have thought you were completely nuts. But hey, here we are. So let's just jump right into it.

Juana Barraza was born on December 27, 1957, in a really rural part of Mexico, just north of Mexico City. Now, to say that Juana had a difficult childhood would be a massive understatement. Her mother, Justa Sampario, was an alcoholic for Juana's entire life.

And her biological father, Trinidad Barraza, worked as a police officer. When Juana's parents met, her mother was working as a prostitute. And just three months after Juana was born, her mother left with her and they moved in with a man by the name of Rufio Sampario.

Now, this man would become not only Juana's stepfather, but he became really the only father figure that she ever knew growing up. As a kid, Juana didn't attend school on a regular basis. She didn't even know how to read or to write. And she always had a really rocky relationship with her mother.

By the age of just 12 years old, Juana's mother began pimping her out to a man named Jose Lugo. Now, in exchange for her daughter, Lugo would pay Juana's mother for two to three beers. Now, if that's not terrible enough…

On two of these occasions, when her mom exchanged her daughter for sex, basically, in return for two to three beers, Juana became pregnant, once at 13 years old and then again at 16. And both of these pregnancies resulted in miscarriages.

A couple years later, Juana's mother becomes ill and she dies from cirrhosis from all of the drinking over the years. So that's when she decided to up and move down to Mexico City.

In Mexico City, Juana had a number of different failed relationships. She even got married to a couple different men that she would just meet along the way. And she would go on to have a total of four children with these men. Now, one of these children, her firstborn, would actually later on in life be killed.

So Juana had dreams of making it as a female professional wrestler. She started training and taking odd jobs to be able to pursue her wrestling career in Mexico City. She had a really strong interest in Lucha Libre, which, no, is not just a movie. It's a form of Mexican masked professional wrestling. She wanted to become a professional wrestler.

She wanted to make a career out of wrestling. As a professional Mexican wrestler, she adopted the ring name of, okay, here goes my Spanish, La Dama del Silencio, or the Lady of Silence. She said she picked this name to reference her own shy and quiet personality, which I

Seems a little surprising to me when you're a professional wrestler that you have a shy and quiet type personality, but hey, that's what she chose. So during the 1980s through the 1990s, Juana Barraza was pretty much a pioneer in Mexico's history of female professional wrestlers.

There really weren't too many other female wrestlers out there, especially when it came to Mexican masked wrestlers. The problem was that she wasn't able to make a full-time living as a professional wrestler. So she continued working these odd jobs on the side. But...

Odd jobs weren't the only thing Juana started doing to make up for the lack of income in professional wrestling. In 1995, shortly after the birth of her fourth child, she was really struggling for money to support herself and her kids and, frankly, just to be able to make ends meet.

So she started to steal things from local shops in Mexico City. Now, at first, she started small, stealing things that she could just easily put inside of her pocket. But then she started graduating to breaking into people's houses. A year later, so this is now 1996, she hatched a plan with a friend of hers, Araceli Martinez.

to start stealing from old ladies. The two of them figured older women would have some money and that they would be easy, vulnerable targets to steal from. So Juana and her friend would dress up in all white and they would pretend to be nurses.

They would go to old ladies' houses, pretend to be nurses, basically in order to gain access to the inside part of the house. And then they would steal things from the women. Specifically, they would target elderly women who lived alone, who would have no idea that they were being robbed.

Araceli Martinez and Juana Barraza continued targeting and stealing from elderly women who lived alone until Araceli turned against her friend.

So apparently, Juana and Araceli weren't the greatest of friends after all. Because shortly after they started their plan to rob old ladies together, Araceli and her boyfriend, Moses Flores Dominguez, who just so happened to be a highly corrupt federal police officer, concocted a plan to extort Juana.

Araceli's boyfriend, again, a highly corrupt federal police officer, waited outside a house Juana burglarized one night. On this particular occasion, Juana was by herself. Her friend Araceli wasn't with her. So as Juana left the house after stealing a number of different items, including cash from inside, Moses confronted Juana.

He demanded that Juana give him 12,000 pesos in return for not arresting her for the robbery, which, again, corruption at its finest. Here we have a federal police officer who is in a relationship with Juana's sidekick in all of these robberies.

And here he is extorting her for money in exchange for not arresting her for it. So Juana, having nothing else to do, she turns the money over to Moses and knows that her friend Araceli has completely turned against her. And she's also completely broke.

So by this point, Juana was only making anywhere from 300 to about 500 pesos at the very most for each of her wrestling matches. And it just wasn't enough to financially support herself. And remember, she's got a family of four children. So she was becoming increasingly desperate and in need of some serious money.

Juana's increasing desperation for money led to her first murder victim. On November 25, 2002, Juana showed up disguised as a nurse to the house of Maria de la Luz Gonzalez Anaya, an elderly woman who lived alone in Mexico City.

Once inside the apartment, Maria, the homeowner, started making some comments that Juana thought were derogatory. She didn't like what Maria was talking about. Infuriated by these comments, Juana began beating her. Several moments into the beating, Juana placed her hands around Maria's neck and strangled her to death.

After Maria's murder, the people of Mexico City were shocked. Who would go inside an elderly woman's home and murder her? And murder her with their own hands? Mexico City police had no suspects or really any persons of interest in the case. So people were left wondering who would target and kill an old single lady.

Elderly women grandmothers have a very special place not only in the Mexican culture, but practically every culture around the world. We love our grandmothers. So over the course of the next several months, Juana, again disguised as a nurse, entered into single elderly women's houses and murdered them.

Juana was murdering old lady after old lady all over Mexico City. With each victim, she followed pretty much the same MO. She was disguised as some sort of social worker or nurse to gain access to the house. And then once inside, she would murder and rob them. By November 2003, so we're about a year into the killings,

Mexico City police had enough evidence to suspect that there is a serial killer on the loose who's targeting elderly women. Several of the murders had eyewitnesses who described the individual that was coming and going around the time that the murders were happening as a tall person. But that was it.

Juana was nowhere near police radar as a possible suspect. In fact, when we throw around the term serial killer, I think we all picture a male. I don't think any of us, when we hear serial killer, automatically picture a female. Police suspected they were dealing with a serial killer because all the victims had so many similarities. All the victims were female victims.

over the age of 60, and many of the victims lived alone. All victims had been bludgeoned to death or strangled, and valuable items, including cash, had been taken from the house. So it's pretty obvious that the same person or persons are committing these crimes.

The theory that the killer who was targeting older women might be disguised as a nurse or at the very least some sort of social worker emerged pretty quickly in the case.

So Bernardo Batiste, the chief prosecutor in Mexico City at the time, profiled the killer as having, quote, a brilliant mind, quite clever and careful, end quote. Batiste made public his theory that whoever the killer was, was careful to gain the victim's trust, which allowed him or her to gain access to the house.

Because women over the age of 60, living alone, aren't just going to let anyone inside of their house. So this person had to be extremely smart and clever to gain that trust from their victims. But it wasn't just a theory that it was a person disguised as a nurse or a social worker.

They also thought that maybe it was someone posing as a government official or maybe even a police officer. But police had no idea that their killer was a woman herself. Along the way, police were able to recover unknown fingerprints inside of the victim's home.

In at least 10 of the victims' homes, police recovered the same unknown fingerprint, which confirmed the police's suspicion that they were hunting a serial killer, that all of these murders of elderly women were committed by the same offender. Even though the fingerprints matched and were consistent in at least 10 of these cases, the

they had no suspects to match the fingerprints to. They didn't have any known offenders in their database with similar prints. So until they could get a match, the fingerprints found inside of many of the victims' houses wasn't a big help in the investigation, at least in the early stages. But let's be completely clear here.

Anytime police can get their hands on forensic evidence like an offender's fingerprints, that could be extremely helpful in the investigation somewhere down the road. Just because they couldn't match the fingerprints right away doesn't mean they won't ever be able to match them.

Fingerprints are great for cases like this because it places the killer inside of the victim's home and we all have our own unique fingerprints. We can't say, oh, those fingerprints, they don't belong to me. It doesn't work like that. And it also doesn't look like Juana Barraza is going to stop killing any time soon.

So as long as she keeps killing and leaving behind forensic evidence along the way, the closer she is to getting caught. Juana continued to target and murder elderly women throughout Mexico for the next couple years.

By November 2003, so that's two years after her first victim, police finally got their hunch that their suspect may just be a female herself.

The Mexico City police received many witness statements about seeing someone wearing women's clothing come in and out of the victim's houses around the time the murder would have occurred. Now, although none of the eyewitnesses could tell if they were female or not, many of them recalled seeing this person in women's clothing.

So in one case in particular, an eyewitness reported to police that they recalled seeing a woman wearing a red blouse leaving one of the murder victim's house not long before the body was discovered. This information was huge. Not only do police suspect that there is a serial killer running around Mexico City,

But now, it's possible that the serial killer they're hunting is a woman. A female serial killer targeting and killing other women. Although police didn't know the killer's actual name yet, two years into the killing, the police and the media started referring her as Mata Villahitas.

or the old lady killer. By mid-2005, Juana, who the police have no idea is the old lady killer, started dating a taxi driver by the name of Jose Francisco Torres Herrera, whose nickname is, wait for it, El Frijol, or The Bean. But,

Jose doesn't just become her lover or her boyfriend. He also becomes her new sidekick. Juana and Jose started working together, and the attacks on elderly women started to increase in both frequency and in range. They no longer targeted and killed their victims during the daytime. They also switched to killing at night.

On September 28, 2005, 82-year-old Carmen Camila Gonzalez-Miguel was home alone inside of her upper-class home. She was actually the mother of Mexico's prominent criminologist, Luis Rafael Moreno-Gonzalez.

That night, Juana and her boyfriend Jose broke into the house and they both brutally murdered her. This murder signaled to police that the old lady killer wasn't afraid to target wealthy and upper class women.

So the murder of Carmen in September 2005 spurred the Mexican police into launching a special operation to try and find out who the old lady killer is. By 2005, the old lady killer is suspected to have killed dozens of women. So the operation was referred to as Operation Parks and Gardens.

The plan was to place police officers in and around the areas where the killings seemed to have increased. They also put out pamphlets basically warning elderly women to be careful, especially around strangers. And they also distributed a number of different possible sketches that they had of the old lady killer.

So this must have just been a really scary time for any woman in Mexico City, especially if you fit the mold, right? If you're over the age of 60 and you're somebody who lived alone, you must have just been really, really scared, right?

But what's interesting is that the police didn't refer to their suspect as a woman, at least not in the eyes of the public. In this new operation, they refer to their suspect as possibly being a transvestite or maybe a homosexual man.

Now, this move by the police would later on be highly criticized by the public once the identity of the killer is revealed. After the launch of the special operation to try and find and identify the old lady killer, police arrested and questioned almost 50 transvestite prostitutes in Mexico City and the surrounding neighborhoods.

But remember, police had the killer's fingerprints from at least 10 of the murders, and none of the prostitutes that police arrested matched the fingerprints from the murder scenes. So they were all ruled out as possible suspects. Over the next couple months, the killings seemed to completely stop.

The sudden halt in killings made police suspect that the person they were hunting may have actually been killed themselves or they possibly committed suicide and that's why the murder stopped.

So at this point, the police even began checking the fingerprints of bodies in the Mexico City morgue to try and find out and confirm if maybe their suspect really is dead or has committed suicide. Even though police didn't get anywhere with this search of the morgue, they wouldn't have to wait very long for their next big break in the old lady killer case.

A major break in the case came on January 25th, 2006. Juana broke into the house of an 82-year-old woman who lived just outside of Mexico City. Now, this was just like any other victim. She was going to gain access to the house by way of a disguise that made her victim feel safe.

Once inside, she would strangle or beat the woman to death. Again, just like what she did every single time. This time though, after she killed the woman, she was seen by another tenant in the building. The tenant saw a woman running away from the victim's house.

Now keep in mind here, everybody, I mean everybody in Mexico City and the surrounding areas knew about the old lady killer. She'd been terrorizing this community for the last several years. So here's the tenant who knows that she has an elderly woman neighbor. She sees a woman fleeing from the place.

Well, this just looks odd. So the tenant immediately calls the police and she reports what she saw. And the police don't waste a single second here. This is the first solid lead they've received in the case since the discovery of the unknown fingerprints. So they needed to jump on this tip right away.

Patrol officers are immediately dispatched to the surrounding area, hoping that the old lady killer is still on the run and that they're still close by. Sure enough, one of the officers who were dispatched to the area sees a woman who just so happens to match the description provided by the tenant.

Police stop the woman and find out that her name is Juana Barraza. When police stop Juana, they quickly realize that she's illiterate. She can't read, she can't write, but they are pretty sure that they have finally identified the old lady killer.

Juana is quickly taken into custody so officers can immediately get to her house and begin searching it. Inside her home, police find what they would later on describe as a trophy room. The room was filled with newspaper clippings of the murders, several objects that were taken from inside of the victims' homes.

And they also found an altar of two folk saints commonly worshipped by Mexican criminals. When it was announced that a suspect who is believed to be the old lady killer is finally in police custody, people are completely shocked to learn that the suspect is a female.

Police say they have a suspect and it's 48-year-old Juana Barraza, the female professional wrestler known by her ring name, The Silent Lady. People were also shocked that just one week before she was taken into custody, Juana was interviewed on a television program about her wrestling career.

Juana matched the eyewitness descriptions from many of the murder scenes. She was described as a kind of masculine looking woman, and she closely resembled many of the composite sketches that had been drawn up over the years. So when Juana was arrested, she had in her possession a stethoscope, pension forms, and

and an ID card identifying her as a social worker, perfectly matching the profile and the description of the suspect. The only thing police needed to do to finally prove that Juana was in fact the old lady killer responsible for terrorizing Mexico City for years was

was to finally test the fingerprints found at at least 10 different murder scenes. Mexico City prosecutors announced that the fingerprint evidence found at 10 of the murder scenes was a perfect match to Juana.

This was only a small fraction of the total number of murders believed to have been committed by the old lady killer, which is over 40 murders over the course of just a couple years.

In the spring of 2008, prosecutors alleged that Juana is responsible for anywhere from 42 to about 48 murders of elderly women throughout Mexico City.

She was originally charged with 30 counts of murder, to which Juana admitted to only one, the murder of her final victim, the one that she was ultimately caught and was seen running from. She denied her involvement in any of the other 30 to 40 murders.

So on March 31st, 2008, the old lady killer was found guilty of 16 murders and 12 counts of robbery. Even though it's pretty clear that this woman is responsible for so many more murders, police and prosecutors were only able to link her through forensic and fingerprint evidence to 16 of them.

The old lady killer was sentenced to 759 years in prison. She would later reveal that the motive behind the single murder she confessed to was out of pure resentment towards her mother. She would approach her victims either on the street or she would knock directly on their doors.

She pretended to be a city council nurse or a social worker in order to gain entry into the women's house. At first, she dressed herself in all white, but later on, as she got a little more sophisticated, she dressed herself in genuine nursing attire. Once inside her victim's home, she would offer her victims massages that

or help in obtaining medication. Once her victim became distracted, she would beat or strangle the woman to death. Then finally, she would rob them for money, for jewelry, anything that caught her eye. Some of the items and money she would keep for herself. Others were used as trophies.

Juana Barraza, a former professional wrestler, turned into one of Mexico's most notorious female serial killers. A woman believed to have killed close to 50 elderly women from 2002 until 2006. She's currently serving her sentence in a prison in Mexico.

The story of the old lady killer has been featured in a lot of different Mexican and American TV series. The case was on investigation discovery series Deadly Women, which is one of my absolute favorite shows. Her story was also partially the inspiration for an episode of Criminal Minds.

Even though it's believed the old lady killer is responsible for almost 50 murders, fingerprint and forensic evidence was able to link her to 16 of them. The old lady killer, Juana Barraza, will likely spend the rest of her life behind bars.

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Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.