Getty Images hide caption. More than women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in recent years. The border city, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is experiencing a unique series of offenses. Horrific crimes are being committed against women, many being found raped, mutilated, their bodies dumped in the desert.
Largely, the killings remain unsolved. For Univision correspondent Teresa Rodriguez, drawing attention to what many consider a failed police response has become an obsession. The former local news anchor conducted her own investigation into the killings and seeks to give an eye-opening account of the Ciudad Juarez murders in her book The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border.
I don't feel safe because once I step out on the street, I don't know if the second step I take will be my last. She was determined to be at the bus stop when her daughter, Silvia, arrived after a long day of school and work. In the last thirty-six months, there had been a series of brutal sexual attacks against young women in and around the Mexican border city, all of them fatal.
Ramona wanted to make sure her teenage daughter didn't become the next victim. She had noticed short stories about the killings in the newspaper. Many of the victims had disappeared on their way to or from work, often in broad daylight; their lifeless remains were found weeks, sometimes months later, in the vast scrublands that rim the industrialized border city.
What the newspapers hadn't reported would have frightened her even more. The victims bodies exhibited signs of rape, mutilation, and torture. Some had been bound with their own shoelaces. Others were savagely disfigured. One young girl endured such cruelty that an autopsy revealed she had suffered multiple strokes before her assailant finally choked the life from her.
