Free The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border by Teresa Rodriguez, Diana Montané

participating in Leal's murder, which he said took place in December 1995. Police said that Olivares claimed he had committed the crime in concert with other gang members, including its supposed leader, Sergio Armendáriz Díaz, also known as El Diablo, or the Devil. Perhaps this new lead would prove Sharif's claims of innocence.
     
     
Acting on this new information, officers stormed the clubs of Mariscal and Ugarte Streets, including the one where Armendáriz was employed as a security guard. Over the next several days, investigators interrogated the detainees. While they released a majority of the young men and women, at least ten of the gang members, including Armendáriz, were held and subsequently charged with some of the murders, raising questions about Sharif's role in the murders. But his culpability would soon be solidified with a startling revelation by state officials.
     
     
In the days ahead, police claimed that during subsequent interrogations, Armendáriz and his cohorts confessed to the killing of at least eight women under orders from the jailed Egyptian, Sharif Sharif. That the clever foreign-born scientist could have hatched such a plot from his jail cell seemed unthinkable. Yet authorities said the gang members had provided intimate details of their arrangement with the Egyptian.
     
     
According to police, Sharif had agreed to pay in the neighborhood of one thousand pesos for the murders of two women a month. The killings were to be carried out in a similar fashion to those of which he was accused— to prove police had the wrong man in custody and to leave the public with the impression that the "real" killer was still on the prowl.
     
     
The money was allegedly exchanged during prison visiting hours, with Sharif slipping an envelope of hard currency across the table. The first installment was said to contain the equivalent of three thousand dollars. The cash payments were reportedly delivered to a local pool hall, where they were handed over to Armendáriz.
     
     
Based on their confessions, police subsequently indicted ten members of Los Rebeldes on at least seven of the homicides. The individuals were Sergio Armendáriz Díaz, Juan Contreras Jurado, Carlos Hernández Molina, José Luis González Juárez Rosales, Héctor Olivares, Fernando Guermes Aguirre, Luis Andrade, Carlos Barrientos Vidales, Romel Omar Ceniceros García, and Erika Fierro, the woman who had earlier claimed to have arranged "dates" for Sharif. In testimony given that April before ministers of the court, Fierro explained that she was at a bar called La Tuna with a female friend she called "Mausy," whom she described as the girlfriend of a man who sold hamburgers on the street near Joe's Place, when Sergio Armendáriz signaled her over.
     
     
"Sergio Armendáriz, El Diablo, the leader of the gang Los Rebeldes, said he wanted me to introduce her [Mausy] to him," Fierro reportedly testified. "She didn't want to talk to him. But I insisted and she went. Later, I didn't see her again. I knew he was going to kill her, but I couldn't do anything else because he had threatened to kill me."
     
     
Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez was pleased and appeared before the media that month to boast about the "FBI-style" investigation that had led to the arrests.
     
     
In the days ahead, news reports gave several versions of the alleged killings; one claimed that the gang members had tortured their victims on a sacrificial block of concrete before slaughtering them and dumping their corpses in remote locations outside the city. Other stories maintained that the girls were taken to cheap motels where they were raped and murdered and then cast in the desert. Forensic examinations showed that several of the corpses displayed bite marks over portions of their bodies, and a number of the young women were found to have crushed skulls.
     

 
Police later linked the jailed gang members to even more of the killings, a total of seventeen,