Juana Barraza, "La Mataviejitas"

The victims

From the late 1990s until early 2006, older women in Mexico City and its surrounding metropolitan area were being killed in their own homes. The victims had much in common: most were over 60, many lived alone, and there were no signs that anyone had forced their way in, which suggested that each woman had opened her door to her killer. Valuables were taken from the homes. The last victim was Ana María Reyes Alfaro, an 82-year-old woman killed in January 2006. For years the press referred to the unknown offender as "La Mataviejitas," roughly "the killer of little old ladies."

How the killings were carried out

Investigators later concluded that the killer won the confidence of the women before entering their homes, using false identities. According to reporting on the case, she presented herself as a nurse or a social worker, or offered help in exchange for money. Once inside, she killed the women and stole from them. The method relied on the trust that elderly people living alone often place in someone who appears to offer official help or care.

An investigation shaped by assumptions

Police were slow to acknowledge that the deaths were connected and at first played down talk of a serial killer as media sensationalism. Once they accepted the pattern, witness descriptions of a tall, strongly built person with broad shoulders led detectives to assume they were looking for a man, possibly one dressed as a woman. Officers rounded up and questioned cross-dressing sex workers, and investigators even considered whether two people were involved. Sociologist Susana Vargas Cervantes, who wrote a book on the case, has argued that deeply held ideas about gender made it hard for investigators to imagine that a woman was responsible. A neuropsychologist, Feggy Ostrosky, was consulted during the hunt in 2005.

Arrest and conviction

On 25 January 2006, Juana Barraza Samperio was detained as she left the home of Ana María Reyes Alfaro. Officers were reportedly surprised to find that the suspect was a woman. Barraza was a former professional wrestler who had performed in lucha libre under the name "La Dama del Silencio" (The Silent Lady). Items taken from victims and newspaper clippings about the killings were later found at her home.

Her trial concluded on 31 March 2008. She was found guilty of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies and given a combined sentence of 759 years in prison. According to the Associated Press report on the sentencing, Barraza, then 50, acknowledged four of the killings and said she had acted out of anger toward her mother, but denied the others; prosecutors said her fingerprints linked her to the remaining cases. Her interviews with Ostrosky after the arrest pointed to a turbulent childhood relationship with her alcoholic mother.

The total number of deaths remains uncertain. Barraza was convicted of 16 murders, and outlets commonly describe her as responsible for at least 16. Some accounts of the wider series, however, put the number of similar killings of elderly women during those years in the 40s. Only the 16 cases were proven in court, and the higher figures should be read as estimates rather than established findings.

Life in prison and recent developments

Barraza has served most of her sentence at the Santa Martha Acatitla women's prison in Mexico City. In 2023 she was taken to the Xoco general hospital after fracturing her femur in a fall inside the prison. On 24 May 2026, aged 68, she was moved to a hospital in the Iztapalapa borough for treatment of kidney failure; Mexico City's security secretary, Pablo Vázquez Camacho, later confirmed that she had been discharged and returned to custody. In September 2026 a video showed her using a wheelchair at the Tepepan women's prison in Mexico City during a donation visit by a local legislator. She remains in prison; no appeal or release was reported in the coverage reviewed.

Why the case matters in Mexico

The Mataviejitas case is often described as Mexico's first widely recognised case of a female serial killer, and its 759-year sentence was reported as the longest handed down in the country. In practical terms, BBC Mundo noted, Mexican law would allow her to seek parole only after 50 years, when she would be about 100. Beyond the numbers, the case exposed how expectations about who commits violent crime can steer an investigation in the wrong direction, while vulnerable victims remain at risk. Vargas Cervantes has also pointed out that the murders of elderly women, who hold an especially respected place in Mexican family life, drew a level of public outrage that many other violent crimes in the country did not.