Twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Martínez Cigarroa met the man at a bar in Tijuana where she worked. He was an American, she told her family, and he had invited her on a Valentine’s Day date.
But after she met him, she disappeared, and her dead body was found on Feb. 17 in Tijuana in the back of her abandoned truck. She showed signs of having suffered violence, local news reported.
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Now, nearly a year later, authorities in Tijuana, in Baja California state, have alleged that Martínez is one of at least three women murdered by the same man, a U.S. citizen they compared to notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.
The suspect has “criminal tendencies associated with violent and psychopathic behavior,” Baja California Attorney General Iván Carpio Sánchez told local reporters.
In a country where women are regularly murdered with impunity, the comparison to Bundy immediately stood out. Bundy confessed to murdering at least 30 women across the U.S. before his execution in 1989. Charismatic and manipulative, he lured his victims—sometimes using props to pretend he was injured—before raping and killing them.
Similar to Bundy, Carpio Sánchez said the American suspect approached vulnerable women, won their confidence, and then took them to places where he attacked and killed them. He and other Mexican authorities have declined to give the man’s name, saying they don’t want to release information that could jeopardize his capture.
The FBI and U.S. Justice Department are collaborating with Mexican authorities to find and arrest the suspect, Carpio Sánchez said, adding that he’s seeking the man’s eventual extradition to Mexico to face charges.
Martínez’s younger brother, Francisco Cigarroa, told the Punto Norte news outlet in February that his sister met the suspect at Hong Kong Gentlemen’s Club, a well-known strip club in Tijuana where she worked as a dancer. Martínez felt uneasy about going out with the man, Cigarroa said, but decided to go anyway. Local media reported that the pair went to a Brazilian restaurant, citing waiters who saw them.
Cigarroa said the last his family heard from Martínez was that she had gone to a hotel near the beach with the American man. They began getting worried hours later when she didn’t check in, as was her custom.
After authorities began investigating, they linked Martínez’s murder with two other women in Tijuana who also worked in bars and had been murdered under similar circumstances, suggesting all three had been victims of the same serial killer. Investigators haven’t ruled out additional victims.
High rates of femicide—the killing of women because of their gender—has triggered widespread outrage and protests across Mexico. More than 70 percent of women in Mexico over the age of 15 said they have experienced some form of violence, according to INEGI, Mexico’s national statistics institute. Nearly 35 percent said they’ve experienced physical aggression.
In one of the most scandalous cases this year, 18-year-old Debanhi Escobar was murdered shortly after leaving a party. Authorities in Nuevo Leon state initially claimed she died after falling into an abandoned water tank, sparking indignation from her family. Subsequent autopsies showed she had been violently killed.
