The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border by Teresa Rodriguez, Diana Montané
Authors: Teresa Rodriguez, Diana Montané
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failed to contact family members or alert them when she had come to headquarters the previous day to check for news.
Less than thirty minutes had passed when Paula spotted her son exiting the building. His face told her what she already knew: the dead child was her baby girl.
According to authorities, Sagrario had been strangled and stabbed, three times in the chest, twice in the back. The wounds were shallow and did not penetrate any vital organs. The police believed she had also been raped, but her body was too decomposed to determine for certain.
Officials said the teen was still wearing the white smock typically worn by female workers at the city's factories when her body was discovered. Paula had embroidered her daughter's name on the uniform the day she brought it home from the factory, never expecting that it would later serve as a tool for the family to identify Sagrario's disfigured corpse.
News accounts were reporting that about one-third of the murdered girls were maquiladora workers. Now Sagrario González had been added to the rising statistics. Her body was in such an advanced state of decomposition that it was difficult to know if it really was Sagrario.
For identification purposes, her brother Juan was shown the white smock found on the body and some items of underwear that he believed belonged to his sister. For humanitarian reasons, he was shown a portion of his sister's arm and a reconstruction of her skull, rather than Sagrario's actual head and face, which had decayed into an amorphous mass of putrid tissue.
To alleviate some of the horror of the identification process, authorities had begun creating reconstructions of a victim's skull and face. They used those reconstructions rather than a cleaned skull, as they had been doing in past cases. The new technology was not yet available when mothers including Ramona Morales and Irma Pérez were asked to identify their daughters.
Chihuahua was one of the first of the country's states to employ facial reproduction techniques. Using the bones of the face and cranial measurements, the state's pathologist, Irma Rodríguez, was able to "give a face" to a cadaver, which was often nothing more than a skeleton with some tissue that was bloated and black from decomposition when it was brought in. The process normally took fifteen days from start to finish.
Dr. Rodríguez had been working the cases of the murdered young women since the mid-1990s. A woman of about forty with a cherubic face and short styled hair, she had a direct, forthright manner that brimmed with efficiency. She had been summoned to dozens of crime scenes, including that of Ramona Morales's daughter, Silvia. Back then, the state's crime lab had not been as sophisticated, and the families were made to view the actual decaying body parts of their murdered children. In many cases, recovered skulls were in such advanced states of decomposition that they looked like scary Halloween goblins, with their mouths open wide as if they were screaming in fear, hardly a comforting image for a grieving relative. Worse, the field rats that roam the desert have a predilection for nasal and auditory cartilage and often devour them from the faces of the victims within twenty-four hours.
Advances in forensic technology had now made it possible for experts to reconstruct a face from skeletal remains. Once the body was received at the morgue, Rodríguez and her team evaluated all the facial characteristics in order to implement the technique of facial reproduction, or what experts in the field call "giving a semblance of a face." She kept meticulous records of the crime scenes in a binder with explicit drawings and notes about the forensic examinations of the bodies and the state in which they were found.
Sagrario González's image had been reconstructed from odontological profiling. The new technology was also making it possible to identify
Less than thirty minutes had passed when Paula spotted her son exiting the building. His face told her what she already knew: the dead child was her baby girl.
According to authorities, Sagrario had been strangled and stabbed, three times in the chest, twice in the back. The wounds were shallow and did not penetrate any vital organs. The police believed she had also been raped, but her body was too decomposed to determine for certain.
Officials said the teen was still wearing the white smock typically worn by female workers at the city's factories when her body was discovered. Paula had embroidered her daughter's name on the uniform the day she brought it home from the factory, never expecting that it would later serve as a tool for the family to identify Sagrario's disfigured corpse.
News accounts were reporting that about one-third of the murdered girls were maquiladora workers. Now Sagrario González had been added to the rising statistics. Her body was in such an advanced state of decomposition that it was difficult to know if it really was Sagrario.
For identification purposes, her brother Juan was shown the white smock found on the body and some items of underwear that he believed belonged to his sister. For humanitarian reasons, he was shown a portion of his sister's arm and a reconstruction of her skull, rather than Sagrario's actual head and face, which had decayed into an amorphous mass of putrid tissue.
To alleviate some of the horror of the identification process, authorities had begun creating reconstructions of a victim's skull and face. They used those reconstructions rather than a cleaned skull, as they had been doing in past cases. The new technology was not yet available when mothers including Ramona Morales and Irma Pérez were asked to identify their daughters.
Chihuahua was one of the first of the country's states to employ facial reproduction techniques. Using the bones of the face and cranial measurements, the state's pathologist, Irma Rodríguez, was able to "give a face" to a cadaver, which was often nothing more than a skeleton with some tissue that was bloated and black from decomposition when it was brought in. The process normally took fifteen days from start to finish.
Dr. Rodríguez had been working the cases of the murdered young women since the mid-1990s. A woman of about forty with a cherubic face and short styled hair, she had a direct, forthright manner that brimmed with efficiency. She had been summoned to dozens of crime scenes, including that of Ramona Morales's daughter, Silvia. Back then, the state's crime lab had not been as sophisticated, and the families were made to view the actual decaying body parts of their murdered children. In many cases, recovered skulls were in such advanced states of decomposition that they looked like scary Halloween goblins, with their mouths open wide as if they were screaming in fear, hardly a comforting image for a grieving relative. Worse, the field rats that roam the desert have a predilection for nasal and auditory cartilage and often devour them from the faces of the victims within twenty-four hours.
Advances in forensic technology had now made it possible for experts to reconstruct a face from skeletal remains. Once the body was received at the morgue, Rodríguez and her team evaluated all the facial characteristics in order to implement the technique of facial reproduction, or what experts in the field call "giving a semblance of a face." She kept meticulous records of the crime scenes in a binder with explicit drawings and notes about the forensic examinations of the bodies and the state in which they were found.
Sagrario González's image had been reconstructed from odontological profiling. The new technology was also making it possible to identify
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