Crime Junkie - CONSPIRACY: The Women of Juarez

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

Since 1993, women in Juarez, Mexico have been dying violent deaths. Is this the work of one killer or multiple? Also, why did the state police work so hard to convince the public that it was the work of a man who was incarcerated, while many of the murders were still being committed? For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/conspiracy-women-of-juarez/    

Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of Crime Junkie. I'm Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. Thank you to everyone who's been supporting us on Patreon. Your donations have been amazing. Yes. Britt and I started Crime Junkie completely out of pocket. And I don't know if I mentioned this before,

but we're actually using the funds to launch a second podcast. So we are going to keep Crime Junkie going, but we have an opportunity to do a second show. And we're trying to raise funds to make sure we can do that show right. So if you guys love Mondays because of Crime Junkie and you want to hear another show from Britt and I, then I suggest going to patreon.com slash crimejunkie

and donating so we can make that second show a reality. MUSIC Crime Junkies, today our case is a suggestion from Lordus. And thank you for pronouncing your name for me on the Google form because I totally appreciate that. But it's one of the episodes that I had never heard of again. And I love doing stuff like this. Again, we love talking about these cases

that not a ton of other people are talking about. With that, though, I want to give a little bit of a disclaimer. We do our best with these unknown cases. And we are not journalists. Britt, you and I are storytellers. Our only goal is to get people talking about these cases, get them interested in cases that maybe they never heard of. So we are going to do our best.

We're going to be talking about a case where literally hundreds of women have been murdered. So we're doing our best with names and dates and times. And I hope you guys will just be forgiving and know that there's a lot of conflicting information out there. And I really encourage everyone to. There's a book. There's articles.

Dig into this case for yourself because it's a ton of information that I think everyone really needs to know about because something is happening to the women of Juarez. And in this town in Juarez, Mexico, it's a border town to the US. And hundreds of women, like I said, have gone missing or been murdered.

And the question of who or what is responsible is partially unanswered to this day. To give you a little background on this area, border towns can often be notoriously dangerous. Not always, but there are a good number of them that suffer from violence because of gangs or cartels wanting to control the border in order to transport drugs or goods from one side to the other.

Now, the first victim that is so often referenced in relation to this case is a young woman named Alma. She was found beaten, raped, and strangled in 1993. No area is completely free of violent crime, so it wasn't this one murder that began to raise alarm bells. It was the many, many murders to follow. Now, there was a drastic change that happened after Alma's murder.

In 1994, Juarez was drastically affected by the NAFTA agreement. In the early 90s, there were over 700 factories in the Mexican border towns, which drew people from all over for steady work. And often, these factories were drawing young women because the conditions were so good. There was no heavy lifting, they were air conditioned,

and sometimes they even provided meals. But one thing to note is that these companies who were planting their factories there were providing work, but they weren't required to pay any local taxes, which meant that they were drawing hundreds of thousands of people to these cities, but not actually contributing any money through taxes back into the city structures. This forced people to live on the outskirts of the town

and sometimes just in shacks. And again, there was no city infrastructure in these places, so there was no public transportation, and often women would have to walk to and from their homes to get to work. Now, while there wasn't a ton of city infrastructure, there were a ton of bars and restaurants that popped up around these factories.

And now, when I say a ton, I mean like thousands. So women would often find work in these factories, or they would find work in the bars and restaurants surrounding the factories. But the factory jobs were always considered to be the safer option because of all the violent crime that already existed in those areas. Now, with all of these new jobs for women,

it really flipped everyone's world upside down, because previously, it was very common in Mexico for the men to work and the women to stay home, even in the late 80s, early 90s. And this new structure allowed women a lot more independence, but they were almost shamed for this, and they were accused of being essentially like hussies who were just out to cheat on their husband just because they

wanted to get a job and help support their family and have a little bit of independence. Like, with any big cultural shift, there was a ton of backlash for these women. Now, after Alma is murdered in 1993, another 16 women are murdered. Some are shot, some are stabbed, beaten, raped. And after the factories come to Juarez,

the violence just escalated. And then in 1994, the number of murders absolutely skyrockets. At first, eight women are found and not all killed in the exact same way, but some were sexually assaulted, some were strangled, beaten, stabbed, just like the women in 1993. After that, another two women were found and identified.

And when I say identified, we might come back to that later because there's kind of a question mark around that. But these two women were 29-year-old Elizabeth and 27-year-old Irene. Then sometime before September of 1994, another cluster of 18 women were found. 18? 18.

We see the same thing again with the variances in how they were murdered. But this time, on some of the victims, we start to see that some of them had their hands tied or their hair cut or even their breasts mutilated, which would become a hallmark of this case. Another hallmark of this case is the type of women

that went missing and how they went missing. All the young women usually were from their mid teens to their early 20s, but there were a couple of outliers who were as young as 10 or as old as their mid 30s. They all had dark hair, all were slender, and all had dark skin with brown eyes. Now, when they went missing, it was found that they were usually traveling alone.

Often by foot, they were either walking to their factory or to their restaurant job or they were walking to a bus stop because eventually these factories had direct buses that would go from the factory to these different shanty towns on the outskirts. So they were either picked up waiting at their bus stop or they were picked up while they were walking.

Many of them were found raped or brutalized. They were often mutilated, pre or post-mortem and dumped just outside of the town and hardly ever were they buried. They were just discarded, sometimes within yards of businesses or busy streets. And all of these women who are being found aren't just appearing from nowhere.

They weren't loners who nobody knew. Almost all of them had loved ones who were looking for them, waiting for them to come home one day when they didn't. Often these women and girls had been reported missing by their families, but police weren't taking these missing person reports seriously. The police were suggesting

that these types of quote, working women were loose. And basically they accused them of just living a double life. And surely they just ran off or got mixed up in the wrong thing. So they really kind of tied this back to the culture of the time. They really did.

They didn't even really do any investigating. No, they basically said, listen, these are these crazy independent women. Look what this has made them do. It's made them leave their families and they're clearly gone crazy and tied up in drugs. Nothing bad could actually be happening. It's all their fault for wanting to be independent.

So police were just writing all of this off and not alerting any kind of higher authority. So the families took it upon themselves to contact the state police. But unfortunately, they got about the same response from the state police. And often days, weeks, or even months after the girls were reported missing,

their bodies would be found somewhere in the desert. And even after their bodies were found, the police were still victim blaming like crazy. Basically saying that these women probably just got mixed up with something dangerous. And that's just that. And when the families of the younger victims would point out like, hey, our daughter is 10 or 11.

She's not working bars. She's not getting mixed up in any prostitution. Nothing like that. Then the police would kind of just turn it around and point the finger at the family saying, well, you probably just weren't a good mother. You probably weren't loving your daughter. And she was going to get-

What? Yeah. They said that she was probably going to get affection from somebody else. And that person just took advantage of that. I'm sorry. I'm kind of speechless. Yeah.

And you know what? My biggest problem with all of this is even if a young daughter, son, whoever was in a family where they weren't getting the love and attention they wanted and they did look to somebody else who took advantage of that, why is that not the police's problem to like find that child?

Especially if the family is looking for them. Yes. So they were doing a terrible job. And by the time 1995 rolled around, there were more than 40 confirmed murdered women in Juarez. Citizens of the city were like, hello, is anyone going to do anything? We clearly have a problem here.

I mean, same. You same. But police just kind of shrugged their shoulders and were like, meh, we live in the murder capital of the world. This is what you get. Which is actually a thing. It was the murder capital of the world for a while.

But they were basically just chalking it up to gang activity and saying like, look, there's men being murdered too. And yes, there were men being murdered too. But the belief is a lot of those murders were drug or gang related because there was a big difference between the murdered men in Juarez

and the murdered women in Juarez. All of the men had been mostly shot. Shot once, not a ton of torture. These women had been raped. They'd been brutalized. Their bodies had been mutilated. It was a lot more sadistic than just a fight over drugs or human trafficking

or cartel stuff. This was so much more. Even with these 40 confirmed murders, as more women continue to go missing and more families come forward, police are still pulling the same stunt in saying they should wait and just see if they come back home.

The murders aren't stopping. And in 1995, they find another eight bodies all in one area. And about this time, there's one man who's really stepping up and taking notice. It's a forensic investigator from the state's attorney's office named Oscar. He had access to all of the reports

that weren't so readily available to the public. And he started drawing connections between some of the cases. And he concluded that yes, some of these women are likely the victim of a serial killer. He took his findings to his supervisors and they said, okay, this is super duper.

Thank you for your hard work. We're just gonna file this report away and goodbye. So Oscar eventually became so frustrated that he ended up resigning from his position. And even after his report was released, throughout the rest of 1995, there were more murders that fit the exact same pattern that he had outlined.

And each time the killings were getting more brutal and the girls were experiencing more torture. At this point, there are over 100 total victims when police, who aren't really looking for answers, get a huge break that just drops in their lap. In October of 1995, a woman went to police and reported that three days prior, she had been kidnapped, raped,

and held captive for the entire time. And she'd spent the last three days with her captor who threatened to kill her if she tried to escape. But somehow she was able to find a way to free herself and get to police. When she took police to where the man had held her, it was the home of an Egyptian engineer named Abdul. He was arrested, but he ends up getting released

on the charges because the woman who had accused him recanted her statement and ended up leaving the city. What? Yeah, I don't know if she got scared. I don't know, I think it's unlikely that she made it up, but I mean, when you think about the way they were treating women there, it's not surprising at all to me

that people probably would have accused her of being a hussy, a prostitute, all the names that they were calling women, and she was just terrified and wanted to get out. Knowing all the stuff that are happening, women are dying and she got away, I would get the hell out too. Well, and even the police are acting like

this is probably not true when it comes to the other cases. I could even see that being a case where they say, you know, you're gonna have to testify, this is gonna be a lot of, like a big thing in your life. Do you really wanna do it? Yeah, so he ends up being let off, but the rumor mill had already started churning and police were anxious to find someone to blame

for some or all of the homicides in the city. When they look into Abdul's background more, they find that he had a history of assault in the U.S. And after asking around, different sex workers claimed they saw him with some of the murdered women before they went missing. And when yet another girl is found murdered shortly after this, police have their number one suspect.

And they find a woman who says she saw Abdul with the most recently murdered girl and this is enough for them to arrest him. And the public immediately names him the Juarez Ripper. Even though he's only charged with one crime, everyone is convinced that he committed all of them. Now, I kind of understand why. Like you want to believe that you're safe,

you want to believe that it is just this one man, this one man is caught and you can go to work and be safe, but I think police should have known better. And this is where this kind of turns into more of a conspiracy rather than a case of just one serial killer or even a case of negligence by the police. They get Abdul in jail and for a minute, the murders stop, but just like a hot minute.

He is arrested in October of 1995 and until April of 1996, there don't seem to be any related murders. So at first, everyone is sure that they have their guy and the city will be safe once more. But by spring, the real ripper or someone is back at it and seven more bodies are found. And then eventually nine more throughout the year and at least 17 more in 1997.

A lot of these fit the same pattern as the now dubbed Juarez Ripper. So now the public is pissed that police don't have the actual guy or at least they don't have the only guy and they aren't looking for anyone else. And of course, Oscar is quick to point out like, hey guys, if you would have paid any attention,

Abdul wasn't even in the country when these murders started. So maybe he killed this one girl, maybe he definitely abducted the other, but I don't know that you can say he did all of them. So do police take a step back and reevaluate what crimes Abdul might be guilty of? I don't have high hopes.

No, they doubled down. The police concoct this plan is the best way you can describe it and they do a gang roundup. And when they round up all of these members of one of these big gangs, one of the members confesses to killing one of the now 170 victims. And police take this guy in for questioning

and they end up like beating and almost torturing him until by the time he comes out, he confesses to killing more. And magically he also says, by the way, not only did I kill a bunch of these girls, but Abdul had hired all of us in the gang to do it. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, so what he said or basically what the police say

is that Abdul was in prison and he wanted to make his own defense. So what he did was hire this other gang to keep the killings going to make him look innocent. And that is the story that police are telling. Of course, Abdul is saying he's never met these guys before. In his life, he's still in prison at this point and says he's never hired them for anything,

but of course his word means nothing. I should mention in Mexico though, it does not work like the US. In the US, you are presumed innocent and when you go into court, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you are guilty in order to send you to prison. In Mexico, when you go into court, you are presumed guilty

and your defense attorney has to prove that you didn't do it and there's no jury of your peers. It goes right to a judge. And I can't imagine when you think about how he was probably set up for a lot of this by police when you have the whole system against you and now the burden of proof is on you. That is very intimidating.

Again, not that this guy was like a nice guy. He was accused of assault, but also probably not the war as a ripper. Well, and you have to imagine that this is happening to actual innocent people as well as actually guilty people. Exactly, and we will get to those actually innocent people here in a little bit.

So all of these guys are locked up for the murders and their gang activity and you shouldn't be shocked by this next part, but the murders still continued. I mean, these gang members, even if they killed a couple of people, they didn't kill all 170. They probably weren't hired by Abdul.

And the people of Juarez are wising up to this too and they're outraged at this point. Clearly, the police don't have all the answers, but they're just calling the ripper case closed. With all the public backlash, the authorities decide, okay, we will call in one of the OG FBI profilers whose name is Robert

and we're gonna have him help us and see what he says. Robert was literally one of the first ever behavioral analysts for the FBI and he had retired and was working as a consultant when he came in to help the state police. He basically concluded that of all the murders that had taken place since 1993, he could conclusively say that 76

were linked by a common pattern. He believed there to be one or more serial killers operating in Juarez and he really believed that it was someone from the US who had spotted easy prey and was coming over the border and just using Juarez as a hunting ground and with a country divide in between him, he felt that he was safe from his crimes.

Now, Oscar, that forensic analyst in Juarez, agreed on some points, but he firmly believed that they were dealing with someone in their own backyard. He felt like this guy knows the place well. He's comfortable dumping these women in different places. He has to know the area and Oscar believed that he was just blending in with everyone else like in the day to day.

I don't know how many US citizens were often in Juarez. I heard that because it was a border town. It was often visited by a lot of college kids. So I can also see if it was someone from the US, them blending in as well. But I think at the end of the day, people kind of like see what they wanna see if that makes sense.

I know these guys are professionals, but you have the forensic analyst in Mexico who believes it's a Mexican guy and you have the forensic analyst in America who believes it's an American guy. It's just what they know, you know? Yeah, they're most familiar with it. So of course they're going to be drawn

towards that sort of stereotype, if you will. Right. So after Robert gives his report, the police do a very familiar thing. Almost the same thing they did to their own and they say, okay, thank you for coming. We're just gonna file this away. Goodbye.

And now part of the reason it got filed away was because there was a new state's attorney coming in who wanted to do their own investigation. The problem was when she went to do a reinvestigation, she found that over a thousand pieces of evidence from crime scenes related to the cases had been burned. They had nothing and they had to start from scratch. Oh my God.

And when you start from scratch, in killings that were poorly investigated and have no evidence, there's really nothing to do. There's nothing there. Right, there's nothing to go on. So years go on and the killings just continue even after Abdul is convicted. Not that anyone believes he's the ripper at this point.

But finally, around 1999, the federal government stepped in and got four FBI behavioral analysis like on loan from the United States. And now these guys have a totally different opinion of the case. They say it's too early to say that there's a serial killer and they might actually be single homicides. Um, I'm ready to say there's a serial killer

when there's like one person missing. I know. What? They have hundreds of women at this point. And again, I get that they're not all killed the same way, but when you are dealing with hundreds of women and you do have a subset of them that are raped and strangled and stabbed

and they have their breasts mutilated and their nipples removed, like that feels very specific. Yeah. I mean, even in cases like Liske, there are a lot of differences and there are people still in the camp of it's one killer. Right.

And again, I like, I think this is like a third party that's outside that wouldn't be part of this bigger conspiracy. So maybe they know something that we don't. One of the things I will mention though is that Oscar firmly believed that when Robert came in and maybe even when the new FBI agents came in, he thinks it was super unlikely

that the authorities would have given them all of the information to work with. He said it was just their MO to hold stuff back. So maybe both of them, A weren't working off of full information and it's likely that maybe both of them actually got different information. Just days after the FBI leave, another girl is abducted,

but this time she lives. Yes. The story she tells them is incredible. She says that she ends her shift at work at around one in the morning. She boards one of those buses provided by the factories that drives to all the shanty towns. And as they're driving one by one,

the passengers start to depart and she's the last stop on the bus. And as they're driving, all of a sudden she realizes that the bus driver is going in the wrong direction. He's not driving towards any shanty town. He's not driving towards her house. He's driving her out into the desert. And the driver tells her he's having

some kind of mechanical issues and he needs to find a service station, which again, still doesn't make sense to me. Why are you driving in the desert? But he pulls off of this dirt road and he begins to laugh and he asks her, are you scared? Oh my God. And she's only 14 years old.

And he then asks her if she's ever had sex before. He approaches her, grabs her by the throat and that's the last thing that she remembers until she wakes up lying somewhere in the desert, beaten and bloody. And she crawls and walks and makes it to a home barely conscious and gets those people to call for help and she is rushed to a hospital.

She gives this information to police and police are able to arrest the bus driver. And this bus driver tells police that this is just a thing that him and his bus driver buddies are doing. There's four of them in total. So they arrest all four men and these four men are tried with seven of the murders

and you aren't going to believe what the police do next. Police don't just say like, okay, these guys are guilty of killing seven women. Let's just figure out the rest of the cases. No, the police say, okay, we've got these four bus drivers on these seven murders. We are gonna say that Abdul hired these guys as well. They are still trying to track everything back to Abdul

to make it look like they had their Juarez Ripper years ago. And this guy somehow is just continually meeting and paying people in prison who have connections outside to keep the murders going so he looks innocent. I'm sorry, this is an insane theory. Right, I mean, I get you believe one guy's the Ripper. I even can kind of understand their theory

of the second one. Like if you're really not looking, you're just being a little bit lazy and you fit the pieces together and make yourself believe it. But after a second time to say, no, maybe we have a couple of different killers. And Abdul doesn't have to be innocent.

Like Abdul could have killed one girl and him these seven. I don't know why they're trying to place all of these murders on Abdul. Well, and at this point, we have, I feel terrible, but I've honestly lost count. We're at a lot of women killed at this point, yes? Yes. What is Abdul getting from this

other than losing money paying people? If his MO is to kill women in this really sadistic way, and like you said, let's say he covers his tracks once with the gang or whatever. Why would he need to cover his tracks more with the bus drivers?

Like again, I don't know if, because again, I think we're thinking of it as through like the US lens. But if his whole goal is to prove his innocence because they think he's guilty, I mean, I can get why it seems like the police like think this would be a good theory is because Abdul could, as part of his defense,

say, look, these murders are still going on. The murders are still going on after you arrested the gang. The murders were still going on. And then there's these bus drivers. The prosecution doesn't have to actually prove anything. Right. But Abdul is in jail at this point. The gang members are in jail at this point.

Now the bus drivers are in jail and the murders still don't stop. But police have their eye now on bus drivers in general. And one night, a local bus driver was sitting at home with his wife when men in ski masks come barging into his home. They beat the bus driver, take him away, and his poor wife thought that he had been kidnapped.

But she found out a couple of days later that he'd actually been arrested. And when she sees him next, he is in court with another one of his friends who's a bus driver. And both of them had been beaten. They've been burned. They've been tortured in a number of different ways. And after all of that,

the men had given confessions to killing a recently found group of eight women. Now, when police ask how they got to these guys, they say that they had been monitoring them for some time because they had been on this track of bus drivers. If they were monitoring them, how did these bus drivers kill eight women? Were the police watching?

Okay, so here is the craziest part to me. So the police say, well, we were only watching them part time because- What? Yeah, because they said, you know, we were so sure that these were our men and we felt like if we watched them full time, they might stop murdering women. So the police stopped watching them

so the potential murderers could keep murdering? Exactly. Which was an outrage to everyone. If you really thought these guys were your guys, you're gonna take time off intentionally to let them kill, to hopefully trap them. It seems like a really bad plan. I mean, even if I get that it takes a lot of manpower,

but if you can keep all of the women in Wara safe because according to you guys, these guys are responsible, but all you have to do is watch these two guys. It seems like a better plan than whatever they're doing now. Yeah, I kind of feel like no dead women is a good goal. Yeah, let's try for no dead women. Geez. So finally in 2000, Mexico got a new president

and in 2001, the killings finally received some recognition at a federal level. The new president orders an investigation into these murders and what they start uncovering is basically there were seven prosecutors assigned to the case. Through all seven, there were no real changes ever made to investigations, to anything

that would actually like move the cases forward. They saw that there was a ton of victim blaming, not only by the police, but by the prosecutors as well. There was like a crazy quote by one of the prosecutors that said something to the effect of like, yeah, well, what do you expect? These women were putting themselves like in bad situations. They were going to bars and they were hanging out with gangs.

And I think the comparison he made was like, you can't go outside when it's raining and expect not to get wet. Oh my God. Basically saying like, yeah, if you're going to hang out with these guys, you should expect to be brutalized and murdered. They also found within these investigations

that families weren't kept informed even when bodies were found. And this is kind of what I had alluded to earlier. They also had found at some point that bodies had been misidentified. And like drastically, like one girl who had been identified, it actually wasn't her. It was some girl who was like four inches taller

than her, a different age. So to this day, we don't even know if the names that we do have, which are far and few between, are actually accurate. Families don't know if the women that they buried are their daughters or their sisters or their wives. And I'd like to make a small point here that most of our listeners know that we're really

about putting the focus on the victims and victim advocacy. And we try to use the victims' names as much as possible. And we can't in this episode because of this issue. Exactly, exactly. It's one of the biggest problems with this. And when people do marches, it's amazing because they bring out pictures of these women. They do marches with pictures of the sisters and wives

and girlfriends that they've lost. And they have to do that because there is such a lack of names, lack of identities. They are really known as the women of Juarez. Like I said, we have a couple of names. We don't even know how sure, though, that those names are real because they rarely ever used DNA to identify these women.

They wouldn't let the families come in and identify these women. The police basically just said, somehow, they knew exactly who it was. And they would just release the remains afterwards to the family without ever doing any kind of real identification. I just got really sad, full body chills, thinking about it being my sister or my niece or my mom and never knowing.

Right. And even thinking you knew and then finding out later. It was wrong? Or yeah, and it's just a big question mark where you just don't know. Is the person that I buried, is that grave that I go visit, is that my sister or is that somebody else's sister? And they don't have any closure either.

And no one has closure now. So when they find out all of this stuff, the federal government refocuses their investigation not to look into the women of Juarez, but they decide there needs to be a serious investigation into the state police themselves. There was a federal prosecutor appointed to the investigation. And when all was said and done, there

were more than 125 state police who were found guilty of abuse of power, torture, and negligence in the investigations. This federal prosecutor, to go back to show you what a bad job they did, it was not just ignorance, but intentional negligence because of the 205 files that were reviewed in the Juarez murders. 101 of them never even passed the investigative phase.

There was no activity into lead generation. And because of their negligence and their inactivity, it resulted in a loss of all the evidence. The cases end up stalling out. In 29 of these 205 files that they looked into, the police never even collected anything at the crime scenes. And they didn't interview a single witness, including the people who were actually discovering the body.

So you could actually go to the police and be like, hey, look, there's a dead body that I'm standing next to. And the police would be like, thank you very much. See you later. Oh my god. While they were doing this investigation, they even found dead bodies in the backyard of one

of the law enforcement officers. What? Yes. And now these weren't the women of Juarez. These were actually men. But it shows you what close ties they had with the gangs in the area. And that was basically the result of this investigation.

It's not only were these guys corrupt, were they negligent, and doing a bad investigation, they also had ties to a lot of the gangs and the drug cartels at the time. And during this big bust, a couple of informants had come forward and said that the men in these gangs were partly responsible for some of the women in Juarez. And this informant said that these men would rape and murder

women as celebration of a successful shipment of illegal items to the US. And it was said that some of them liked to wear the victim's nipples like chains around their neck as like a victory necklace. And that's what this was for some of them was just a way to celebrate by taking human life. I'm totally serious.

I might throw up. Now, I don't know if the actual police officers part took in any of this, but at a very minimum, they were protecting men who did this. And I have to wonder about the level of knowledge they had, were people continually getting framed and used as scapegoats by police because they were lazy? Or were they framing people and using them as scapegoats

as a full blown conspiracy to cover for themselves or to cover for people paying them? And do they still know to this day who's responsible for every crime? Now, Abdul died in jail in 2005 of cirrhosis. Of the two bus drivers at the end, one died in prison under suspicious circumstances and the other actually had his conviction overturned.

And according to Amnesty International, since 1993, more than 800 women have been brutally mutilated, murdered, and their bodies dumped in the city's nearby deserts. And for all of the women found dead, there are more that are still missing to this day. There are still all kinds of theories. There is a local FBI agent in the US

just across the border from Juarez who thinks like Robert did. And he thinks that it's an American that's responsible for some of these murders. And he said, quote, this would be an ideal killing field for a serial murderer given the nature of the law enforcement response to these murders on the Mexican side of the border.

And some people in Mexico still think that the killer is local to Mexico and that he's gotten away with it for so long for almost the very same reason. Like law enforcement isn't doing anything. So whether they're coming from the US or whether they're in Mexico, they probably feel really comfortable

because no real investigative work is being done. So it could be one, it could be both. It could be one guy who started and then someone saw that, oh, they're not catching this guy. Like I could probably get in on this too, right? And really now we are so far down the line and so much has been lost in actual evidence and time

that those poor women and their families may never know justice. So I encourage you guys to, we'll put some links on our website to articles, share these articles with people, tweet about them, post about them, just start talking about them. Because again, this was something

that was kind of publicizing the 90s that I had never heard about and these cases are so important to keep in the light. Yeah, these women definitely need advocates like our crime junkies. Again, if you want those articles, you can go to our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com and be sure to follow us on Twitter at crimejunkiepod

and on Insta at crimejunkiepodcast. And don't forget you guys, we have extra episodes on Patreon. And if this was a really heavy case and you guys need something a little bit lighter, stay tuned for Preppet of the Month. Privy. CrimeJunkie is written and hosted by me.

All of our sound production and editing comes from Britt Praywat and all of our music, including our theme, comes from Justin Daniel. Crime Junkie is an audio check production, so what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Okay, Ash, I still have full control over Prophet of the Month because you can't stop crying. I know. I'm gonna get it back one day. I will tell another Prophet story. Okay, so today we have another Foster Fail, and this one actually is, I think,

a legitimate fail based on your requirements. And we are talking about Bob. Oh, I think I briefly saw Bob's submission and I cannot wait to hear the full story. I am so excited about Bob. Bob was found along the side of a street in the high desert of California, and I think this is my favorite part about his gotcha story is he was wearing a sweater. In the heat? In the heat. But my favorite part of this is the sweater said player on it. Oh, but I like, oh, that makes me so mad for Bob's previous owner. Right, so he had no collar, no tags, no chip, but a sweater that said player. And here's the thing, he was a senior dog and had the, what, I can barely say it without tearing up,

he had a little frosted muzzle with all the gray hair. I have such a soft spot for senior dogs, like, you know, everyone's a sucker for a puppy belly, but there is something so, so precious about dogs in their old age when like you've grown up with them and like they've grown up with you and you've spent years and you're like, I don't know, I feel like they're just so grateful, especially the adopted senior dogs. I'm gonna cry again. I'm gonna cry again. Well, and I think you and I have talked about it before. I have two dogs, you have one. One of my dogs is dark and is starting to gray around the muzzle. Charlie will live forever, but he's just move on. Okay, but my other dog is white. And so my like greatest

fear is I will never think he's old. And like the thing that will happen that I cannot even say. So Bob is found in the desert. Bob is found in the desert in this sweater that says player, and he's got the gray, the gray muzzle, and he he's also very underweight. So the shelter takes him in and no one claims him. And no one wants to adopt him either because he's older. And he his time was running short. I'm not even gonna say what their plans were. So his family offered to foster him and try to find and like they're gonna foster him and find him a family. And mind you, they hadn't met him in person. They just saw him on the internet and thought this this dog needs this dog deserves a family who loves him and like bless you Bob's

parents and like his in like this not popular time in his life he really needs he really needs some love. And so they contact the shelter and they line it all up to foster him. And they drove three hours both ways to go get Bob. Are you serious? Yes. Just to make sure that and like just to make sure that he was good and they were going to be able to foster him but get this he had hours left. Wait they like they saved him like literally right before? Like the day. Oh my god. And they say that she could not get his face out of her head once she saw him on Facebook. Like it was it was kismet it was serendipitous. So six hours round trip and they say that Bob was with them for two days and she knew he was already home and would stay with them for life.

And he has this really gentle temperament that won them over immediately. He's become their young son's best friend. He's even worked his way into the heart of their other dog who is a crabby little chihuahua princess and as we all know that's no small feet. Bob has been with them for a year and a half and has actually helped them foster a lot of other dogs. So he's been like this kind of rock for foster dogs who are coming into their home to be like yo it's cool. And he's helped them with a ton of issues help that help other dogs feel safe and comfortable because he just has this really calm demeanor and friendly nature. Oh my god. I'm like I'm you're still crying aren't you? Yeah because I just think

it's so sweet. I mean again super soft spot for for senior dogs but I love the stories of like the dogs who get a second chance. They're literally like on their way to the executioner and somebody finds it in their heart to go in and I just oh I don't know how you put down a dog like that's the worst job in the world. Okay. Hey let's okay. I know I'm just saying like best people in the world Bob's owners are angels. I'm so happy that you guys saved Bob. The pictures of Bob I saw were absolutely adorable. Yeah I cannot wait till all of our listeners see them because he is like he looks like the grumpiest old man in the world but clearly he's like like an angel in a dog body and he is super social and makes friends human and animal everywhere he goes

and why his family his original owners never came for him. Because they're monsters. I'll never understand but yeah they're totally monsters and Bob's family said that it is 100% his first family's loss and their gain and one thing they wanted to add was that the rescue that stepped up to help Bob was the sake animal rescue out of San Fernando California so if you want to help the people who helped Bob definitely check them out if you're in the area volunteer if not look into donating I think Bob would really appreciate that and so would I. And if you guys have extra space in your home always look for preps that need need a home themselves even the senior guys especially the senior guys. And even if it's not forever foster families are super important to shelters.

Oh love it and again you can go to our website we'll have a blog article with Bob's picture if you want to take a look at that sweet grain muzzle.