The Lady of Silence: The Mataviejitas Murders

By Fiona Plunkett

The Lady of Silence: The Mataviejitas Murders

Between 1998 and 2006, elderly women living alone in Mexico City were systematically murdered by someone who gained their trust by posing as a government social worker. The killer was Juana Barraza Samperio, a professional wrestler known as La Dama del Silencio—The Lady of Silence. Her traumatic childhood, sold by her alcoholic mother for three beers and subsequently sexually abused, created the psychological foundation for her displacement of rage onto symbolic maternal figures. But the investigation was catastrophically flawed. For years, authorities searched for a male killer, unable to conceive that a woman could commit such systematic violence. This gender bias led directly to the wrongful convictions of Araceli Vázquez García and Jorge Mario Tablas Silva, innocent people who were prosecuted based on fabricated forensic evidence while the real killer remained free. Though Barraza was eventually caught and sentenced to 759 years in prison, Vázquez remains imprisoned today despite definitive proof of her innocence, including fingerprint evidence that was falsely attributed to her but actually belonged to Barraza. This meticulously researched account exposes how investigative failures, institutional self-protection, and the systematic persecution of marginalized individuals created injustices that persist decades after the truth became undeniable.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: SilverBack
• Release date: Nov 27, 2025
• ISBN: 9798232560737

Fiona Plunkett

The author is a dedicated scholar with a lifelong fascination for Crime and Punishment. This interest, nurtured since childhood, forms the bedrock of their work. They hold a postgraduate-level education, with advanced studies in the fields of Business and Computing, a background that lends a unique structural perspective to their research. A committed autodidact, the author dedicates their free time to extensive, self-directed study, drawing upon decades of intellectual curiosity to inform their writing.

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​The Lady of Silence: The Mataviejitas Murders

Between 1998 and 2006, elderly women living alone in Mexico City were systematically murdered by someone who gained their trust by posing as a government social worker. The killer was Juana Barraza Samperio, a professional wrestler known as La Dama del Silencio—The Lady of Silence. Her traumatic childhood, sold by her alcoholic mother for three beers and subsequently sexually abused, created the psychological foundation for her displacement of rage onto symbolic maternal figures. But the investigation was catastrophically flawed. For years, authorities searched for a male killer, unable to conceive that a woman could commit such systematic violence. This gender bias led directly to the wrongful convictions of Araceli Vázquez García and Jorge Mario Tablas Silva, innocent people who were prosecuted based on fabricated forensic evidence while the real killer remained free. Though Barraza was eventually caught and sentenced to 759 years in prison, Vázquez remains imprisoned today despite definitive proof of her innocence, including fingerprint evidence that was falsely attributed to her but actually belonged to Barraza. This meticulously researched account exposes how investigative failures, institutional self-protection, and the systematic persecution of marginalized individuals created injustices that persist decades after the truth became undeniable.

Chapter One: The Exchange: Three Beers and a Childhood Destroyed

I. The Geography of Desperation: Epazoyucan and Rural Hidalgo in the 1950s

II. The Bottle: Alcoholism, Gender, and Social Dissolution

III. The Night Everything Ended: Transaction, Trauma, and the Shattering of Childhood

Chapter Two: Growing Up Violated: Trauma, Motherhood, and Survival in Mexico's Margins

I. The Adolescent Survivor: Migration to Mexico City and the Architecture of Survival

II. The Four Pregnancies: Reproduction, Relationships, and the Transmission of Trauma

III. The Death of the Eldest Son: Compounding Loss and Crystallizing Rage

IV. The Psychology of Displacement: How Symbolic Victims Replace the Actual Source of Rage

Chapter Three: The Theater of Violence: Lucha Libre and Mexican Popular Culture

I. The Sacred Origins: Lucha Libre as National Mythology

II. Women in the Ring: Las Luchadoras and the Performance of Femininity

III. The Mask and the Self: Identity, Performance, and Psychological Compartmentalization

IV. The Independent Circuit as Camouflage: Mobility, Anonymity, and the Perfect Cover

Chapter Four: First Blood: The 1998 Beginning and the Establishment of Pattern

I. The Evidentiary Landscape: What We Know and Cannot Know

II. The Threshold Question: From Trauma to Violence

III. Reconstructing the First Victims: María de la Luz González Anaya and the Establishment of Method

IV. The Development of Pattern: Refinement Through Repetition

Chapter Five: The Hunting Ground: Geography, Victimology, and the Psychology of Target Selection

I. The Urban Topography of Vulnerability: Mapping Death Across Mexico City

II. The Demography of Abandonment: Why Elderly Women Lived and Died Alone

III. The Method of Selection: How Barraza Identified and Approached Victims

IV. Sacred Objects and Stolen Faith: The Religious Artifacts as Psychological Trophies

Chapter Six: The Method: Deception, Entry, and Execution

I. The Architecture of Deception: Social Engineering and Institutional Mimicry

II. Inside the Home: The Choreography of Trust and Betrayal

III. The Act of Killing: Strangulation as Intimate Violence

IV. After Death: Robbery, Trophy Collection, and Psychological Integration

Chapter Seven: El Mataviejitas: How Gender Bias Prolonged a Murder Spree

I. The Initial Pattern Recognition Failure: When Deaths Become Statistics

II. The Gender Bias in Serial Killer Profiling: Why Women Disappeared from Suspect Lists

III. The Wrongful Convictions: When Gender Bias Produces Scapegoats

IV. The Imported Profiles: How Foreign Expertise Hindered Local Investigation

Chapter Eight: The Scapegoats: Araceli Vázquez García and the Manufacture of Justice

I. The Perfect Storm: Political Pressure and Investigative Desperation

II. The Arrest and Performance: Creating La Mataviejitas for Public Consumption

III. The Evidence Fabrication: How Forensic Science Served Political Necessity

IV. The Continuing Murders: Evidence Ignored in Service of Conviction

V. The Current Injustice: Vázquez Imprisoned, Barraza Celebrated

Chapter Nine: Jorge Mario Tablas Silva and the Targeting of the Margins

I. The Second Scapegoat: When One Wrongful Conviction Is Not Enough

II. A Life on the Margins: Gender, Sexuality, and Vulnerability in Mexico City

III. The Arrest and Prosecution: Manufacturing Evidence Against Tablas Silva

IV. The Systematic Persecution: Police Raids and the Targeting of Transgender Communities

V. Death in Prison: The Ultimate Cost of Wrongful Conviction

VI. Legacy and Lessons: What the Persecution Reveals About Justice and Marginality

Chapter Ten: January 25, 2006: Capture, Confession, and the End of an Era

I. The Final Murder: Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro and the Moment of Capture

II. The Interrogation and Psychological Evaluation: A Mind Without Remorse

III. Forensic Confirmation: Fingerprints, Crime Scenes, and the Pattern Revealed

IV. The Sudden Silence: When the Killing Stopped

V. The Institutional Response: Celebration Without Accountability

Chapter Eleven: The Trial: Rhetorical Justice and the 759-Year Sentence

I. The Juridical Theater: Setting the Stage for Mexico's Trial of the Century

II. The Prosecution's Case: Building a Narrative of Systematic Predation

III. The Defense's Response: Trauma, Mitigation, and the Limits of Advocacy

IV. The Verdict and Sentencing: Performing Justice Through Spectacular Punishment

V. The Aftermath: Life Imprisonment and the Persistence of Injustice

Chapter Twelve: Unfinished Business: Araceli Vázquez and the Imperative of Exoneration

I. The Paradox at Santa Martha Acatitla: Guilt Celebrated, Innocence Forgotten

II. The Case for Immediate Exoneration: Why Vázquez Must Be Released

III. Institutional Resistance and the Impossibility of Admitting Error

IV. The Broader Pattern: Institutional Failure and the Sacrifice of the Marginal

V. Conclusion: The Call to Action and the Imperative of Justice

Epilogue: The Lady of Silence Speaks: Memory, Media, and the Commodification of Violence

​Chapter One: The Exchange: Three Beers and a Childhood Destroyed

​I. The Geography of Desperation: Epazoyucan and Rural Hidalgo in the 1950s

The state of Hidalgo occupies a peculiar position in the Mexican national consciousness. Located directly north of Mexico City, it has always existed in the shadow of the capital, serving as a supplier of labor, resources, and bodies to feed the ever-expanding metropolis. In the 1950s, when Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio was born, Hidalgo represented one of Mexico's most persistent pockets of rural poverty, a place where the promises of post-revolutionary land reform had largely failed to materialize and where indigenous and mestizo communities struggled against the structural violence of marginalization.

Epazoyucan, the municipality where Juana entered the world on December 27, 1957, exemplified these conditions. The name itself derives from Nahuatl, meaning place where beans are harvested, a linguistic reminder of the area's pre-Columbian agricultural traditions. But by the mid-twentieth century, whatever prosperity those traditions might have sustained had long since evaporated. The municipality sprawled across roughly thirty-three square kilometers of semi-arid terrain, characterized by scrubland, scattered agave plants, and the kind of dust that seemed to settle permanently into the creases of everything—clothing, skin, hope.

The population of Epazoyucan in the late 1950s hovered around six thousand souls, most of whom survived through subsistence agriculture supplemented by seasonal migration to Mexico City for construction work or domestic service. The physical infrastructure of rural Hidalgo reflected decades of governmental neglect. Roads remained largely unpaved, turning to rivers of mud during the rainy season and choking clouds of dust during the dry months. Electricity had begun to reach some of the larger towns in the region, but many outlying communities still relied on kerosene lamps and candles for illumination. Running water was a luxury reserved for the handful of families who controlled local commerce or held positions in the municipal government.

Housing in communities like Epazoyucan typically consisted of single-room adobe structures with packed earth floors and roofs of corrugated metal or traditional thatch. These homes offered minimal protection against the temperature extremes that characterized the high plateau climate—bitterly cold nights, especially during the winter months from November through February, and scorching afternoons during the spring and early summer. Families crowded together in these confined spaces, with privacy an unaffordable luxury. Children often slept on petates, traditional woven mats placed directly on the floor, while adults might claim a simple cot or hammock if resources allowed.

The economic realities facing families in rural Hidalgo during this period were brutally straightforward. Most households engaged in milpa agriculture, the traditional Mesoamerican farming system centered on corn, beans, and squash. This form of cultivation required intensive labor and yielded modest returns even in good years. A family might work several hectares of land, either owned outright through the ejido system of communal land tenure or rented from larger landholders, and still struggle to produce sufficient food to last through the year. The harvest season, roughly from October through December, represented a period of relative abundance, but by late spring and early summer, many families faced the prospect of depleted stores and the need to purchase corn at inflated prices or go hungry.

This chronic food insecurity shaped every aspect of daily life. Children in communities like Epazoyucan suffered from malnutrition at rates that would shock contemporary observers. Protein deficiency was endemic, as families could rarely afford meat beyond the occasional chicken sacrificed for a festival or celebration. The diet consisted overwhelmingly of corn tortillas, beans when available, and chile peppers to add flavor and mask the monotony. Milk was a rarity, cheese even more so. Fresh fruits and vegetables appeared only seasonally, and then in limited quantities.

The social structure of rural Hidalgo maintained traditional hierarchies that had persisted largely unchanged since the colonial period. At the top stood the handful of families who controlled local commerce, often operating small general stores where campesinos purchased necessities on credit at usurious interest rates. These merchant families typically claimed Spanish or criollo ancestry, emphasizing their distance from the indigenous population even when actual genealogical evidence for such claims remained dubious. Below them existed a thin layer of skilled tradesmen—carpenters, blacksmiths, masons—who enjoyed slightly more economic security than subsistence farmers but remained vulnerable to the same forces of poverty and exploitation.

The vast majority of the population occupied the bottom rungs of this hierarchy, families engaged in agricultural labor on their own small plots or working as day laborers for larger landholders. Women in these families bore a particularly crushing burden. They were expected to manage all domestic labor, including the physically demanding work of grinding corn for tortillas, hauling water from communal wells or streams, gathering firewood, and caring for children, all while often contributing to agricultural work during planting and harvest seasons. A woman might rise before dawn to begin making tortillas, spend the day bent over in the fields, and then return home to prepare the evening meal and attend to endless other domestic tasks, collapsing into exhausted sleep only to repeat the cycle the next day.

Into this world of grinding poverty and limited horizons, Juana Barraza was born in the final days of 1957. Her mother, Justa Samperio, fit the demographic profile of rural Hidalgo's most vulnerable women. Details about Justa's own background remain fragmentary, lost to the obscurity that swallows the lives of poor women throughout history, but we can reconstruct the broad outlines of her existence through inference and the social patterns that shaped women of her generation and circumstances.

Justa would have likely been born in the 1930s, coming of age during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas and the intensification of Mexico's modernization project. Like most women in rural communities, her formal education would have been minimal or nonexistent. Schools in places like Epazoyucan operated sporadically when they existed at all, and families that could barely feed themselves saw little practical value in sending daughters to study when they were needed for domestic labor and agricultural work. Literacy rates among rural women in Hidalgo during the 1940s and 1950s remained dismally low, often below thirty percent.

The pathways available to women like Justa were vanishingly narrow. Marriage represented the expected life trajectory, usually arranged through family connections and occurring in the mid to late teenage years. A woman who remained unmarried past her early twenties faced social stigma and economic precarity, as few legitimate avenues existed for women to support themselves independently. The alternative trajectories—migration to Mexico City for domestic service, or worse, involvement in sex work—carried their own dangers and social condemnation.

If Justa followed the typical pattern, she would have entered a union with a man from her community or a nearby pueblo, likely someone engaged in agricultural labor or perhaps seasonal construction work in Mexico City. The relationship might have been formalized through a church wedding if the family could afford the associated expenses, but many rural couples entered into free unions, common-law marriages recognized by the community but lacking official documentation. Such relationships offered women minimal legal protection and left them vulnerable to abandonment without recourse.

The circumstances that led to Justa becoming a single mother with a young daughter remain unclear, but the outcomes were predictable. Whether through widowhood, abandonment, or having never formalized a stable union, Justa found herself attempting to survive as a single woman with a dependent child in a social structure that offered no safety net for such situations. The ejido system theoretically provided land access to male heads of household, but women typically could not claim these rights unless widowed with sons. A single woman with only a daughter faced particular difficulties.

The economic desperation facing women in Justa's position cannot be overstated. Without access to agricultural land, without male family members to provide support, without education or skills that might generate income, a woman's options narrowed to a handful of grim possibilities. She might work as a laundress, taking in washing from slightly better-off families for minimal pay. She might sell food at local markets, assuming she could acquire the capital to purchase ingredients. She might engage in occasional agricultural day labor, though this typically paid even less than what men received for the same work. Or she might turn to the informal economy of pulquerías and cantinas, serving drinks and providing companionship to men, a precarious existence that existed in the gray zone between legitimate service work and prostitution.

The social isolation facing a single mother in a traditional rural community compounded these economic pressures. Mexican rural society in the 1950s maintained strict codes of female respectability tied inextricably to male protection and supervision. A woman without a husband existed in a liminal social space, viewed with suspicion and subjected to gossip. Her daughter, Juana, would have been aware from an early age of her family's marginal status, marked by poverty more severe than even the general deprivation surrounding her.

Children in these circumstances faced particular vulnerabilities. With her mother struggling for survival, young Juana would have experienced profound neglect even before more active forms of abuse entered her life. She would have spent long hours alone or in the minimal supervision of slightly older children while Justa pursued whatever work she could find. Her diet would have been insufficient even by the low standards of rural Hidalgo, leading to the stunted growth and chronic health problems that marked poor children throughout the region.

The psychological impact of such deprivation begins long before a child can articulate understanding. Attachment theory, developed through the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the decades following Juana's birth, demonstrates that children require consistent, responsive caregiving to develop secure attachment patterns and healthy emotional regulation. A mother struggling with her own survival, facing the daily humiliation of poverty, and likely suffering from depression, anxiety, or other undiagnosed mental health conditions, cannot provide this kind of attuned care. The child experiences the world as unpredictable and threatening, internalizes a sense of unworthiness, and fails to develop the basic trust in human relationships that forms the foundation for later social and emotional functioning.

But even this profound early neglect, which would have left lasting psychological scars, pales in comparison to what was to come. The mechanism that would transform Justa Samperio from merely neglectful to actively destructive had already begun to tighten its grip on her life. That mechanism was alcohol, and specifically pulque, the fermented agave beverage that had served as a social lubricant and ritual intoxicant in Mesoamerican cultures for millennia but which, under the conditions of colonial and post-colonial poverty, had metastasized into a social catastrophe.

​II. The Bottle: Alcoholism, Gender, and Social Dissolution

To understand what happened to Juana Barraza on the night she was exchanged for three beers, we must first understand the role that alcohol played in rural Mexican communities during the mid-twentieth century, and specifically how alcoholism manifested differently along gender lines in contexts of extreme poverty and social marginalization.

Pulque, the traditional fermented beverage of central Mexico, occupies a complex position in Mexican cultural history. Derived from the fermented sap of the maguey plant, a species of agave, pulque had served for centuries as a nutritious beverage consumed in moderation as part of daily meals. The Aztecs strictly regulated pulque consumption, permitting drunkenness only during specific religious festivals and among the elderly. The Spanish colonial period disrupted these traditional controls while simultaneously introducing European distilled spirits, particularly aguardiente, a harsh sugarcane alcohol that became the drink of choice in rural areas where it could be produced cheaply and illegally.

By the 1950s, rural Hidalgo had developed a severe alcoholism crisis that affected both men and women, though in different ways and with different social consequences. For men, heavy drinking was normalized and even expected. Cantinas and pulquerías served as male social spaces where agricultural workers gathered after long days in the fields, where seasonal workers from Mexico City returned to spend their earnings, and where the grinding monotony and humiliation of poverty could be temporarily drowned in alcohol. Male alcoholism, while destructive to families and communities, carried relatively limited social stigma. A man who drank heavily might be seen as irresponsible or troublesome, but his masculinity remained intact and his social position largely unchallenged.

For women, the calculus was entirely different. Female drinking violated fundamental norms of respectability in Mexican rural society. The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint and the idealized model of womanhood, represented suffering purity, maternal self-sacrifice, and absolute restraint. A woman who drank, particularly one who drank to excess, transgressed these expectations in ways that placed her outside the bounds of respectable femininity. She became, in the social imagination, a woman without shame, potentially available for sexual exploitation, and fundamentally unfit for the maternal role that represented women's primary social value.

The progression into alcoholism for women in Justa Samperio's circumstances typically followed a predictable pattern. Initial drinking might occur in response to trauma, depression, or the overwhelming stress of trying to survive in impossible conditions. Unlike men, who could drink socially in cantinas, women typically drank alone or in the company of other socially marginal women, hidden from public view but subject to community gossip and condemnation. This isolation meant that women's alcoholism often progressed more rapidly than men's, without the moderating influence of social drinking contexts where some restraint might be maintained for appearance's sake.

The pharmacological effects of chronic alcohol abuse are well documented and devastating. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant that, with repeated use, fundamentally alters brain chemistry. The brain adapts to the presence of alcohol by adjusting neurotransmitter levels, particularly reducing the activity of gamma-aminobutyric acid, which has calming effects, and increasing the activity of glutamate, which stimulates the nervous system. This adaptation means that in the absence of alcohol, the individual experiences severe anxiety, tremors, insomnia, and in extreme cases, potentially fatal seizures. The only relief comes from continued drinking, creating a physiological trap from which escape becomes increasingly difficult.

Beyond these immediate effects, chronic alcoholism produces profound changes in cognitive function and emotional regulation. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control, planning, and moral reasoning, shows measurable degradation in imaging studies of long-term alcoholics. The hippocampus, crucial for memory formation, shrinks. The amygdala, involved in emotional processing, becomes hyperactive, leading to heightened reactivity to stress and increased aggression. Essentially, chronic alcoholism gradually dismantles the neural structures that enable thoughtful, controlled behavior and strengthens those that produce impulsive, emotionally volatile reactions.

For a woman like Justa Samperio, already facing the chronic stress of extreme poverty and single motherhood, alcoholism would have accelerated a downward spiral. Whatever meager income she generated would increasingly be diverted to purchasing alcohol rather than food. Her ability to maintain even basic childcare would deteriorate. Her judgment, already compromised by desperation, would become further impaired. And most critically, her capacity for the kind of protective maternal instinct that might prevent her from harming her daughter would erode.

The social consequences of female alcoholism in communities like Epazoyucan extended beyond individual families. A woman known to be an alcoholic found herself increasingly isolated from sources of support and economic opportunity. Respectable families would not hire her for domestic work or laundry. Neighbors might refuse to assist her during crises. The church, often a crucial source of both spiritual comfort and material aid for the poor, would view her with disapproval. She became, in effect, an outcast within an already marginalized community, pushed toward the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy.

This marginalization made women like Justa vulnerable to exploitation by men who recognized their desperation and lack of social protection. The transaction that would destroy Juana's childhood must be understood within this context of extreme vulnerability. Justa was not simply an alcoholic who made a terrible choice in a moment of intoxication. She was a woman whose alcoholism had rendered her completely powerless, without resources, without social support, and without the cognitive capacity to resist or negotiate when a predatory man made his offer.

The specific details of how Justa Samperio met the man who would purchase her daughter remain lost to history. We do not know his name, his age, his occupation, or his own background. What we do know is that at some point during Juana's early childhood, probably when the girl was between eight and twelve years old based on the documented timing of her subsequent pregnancy, this man entered Justa's orbit. He may have been a neighbor, a casual acquaintance from the pulquería where Justa obtained her alcohol, or a complete stranger who recognized an opportunity for exploitation.

Men who sexually abuse children rarely act impulsively or randomly. Research into the psychology of child sex offenders reveals consistent patterns of grooming behavior, in which the perpetrator gradually positions himself to gain access to potential victims while minimizing the risk of detection or consequences. In cases involving the most vulnerable children—those from extremely poor families, those with alcoholic or absent parents, those already subjected to neglect—the grooming process often involves targeting the parent as much as the child. The offender presents himself as helpful, perhaps offering small amounts of money or assistance, gradually making himself indispensable to a family desperate for any support, and carefully assessing the level of parental protection the child might have.

In Justa's case, her alcoholism would have made her an ideal target for such grooming. A woman in the grip of addiction lives in a constant state of crisis, needing her next drink, unable to plan beyond the immediate moment, willing to make increasingly destructive choices to alleviate the discomfort of withdrawal. A man who controlled access to alcohol or who could provide it would wield enormous power over such a woman. He could gradually condition her to accept increasingly inappropriate arrangements, testing her boundaries, determining how far she could be pushed.

The fact that the transaction was framed around beer rather than pulque or aguardiente is revealing. Beer, introduced to Mexico by German and Austrian immigrants in the late nineteenth century, was more expensive than traditional fermented beverages or cheap distilled spirits. By the 1950s, several major breweries operated in Mexico, and beer had become associated with modernity and upward mobility. To offer three beers represented a significant expense, substantial enough to seem like a real payment rather than a token amount, yet ultimately a pittance when measured against what was being purchased.

The specificity