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were uncooperative, Irma found some help in the night watchman. The hired security guard was crying the night he told Irma that her daughter had been brought to the PAN offices that Thursday night by a female employee of the shoe store. He told her that he thought it strange that the employee would drive so far out of her way to drop off the young woman. She lived more than forty minutes away on the opposite side of town.
     
     
The night watchman resigned shortly after Olga Alicia disappeared, and the legal aide who had been helping Irma was refusing to take her calls. It was said he had been threatened. Irma had no idea by whom, and was too ill to follow up on any more leads.
     
     
As in the case of the Morales teen, several days after Olga vanished, Irma got an anonymous call from someone claiming to know the whereabouts of her daughter. The caller provided an address. Irma's sister volunteered to investigate. Posing as a social worker, she rang the bell of the two-story residence on Fraccionamiento Almita. She found a house full of children as if a nursery school or day care center was in session. There was no sign of Olga Alicia.
     
     
Still, Irma continued her search. She paid regular visits to the morgue as part of her vigil, waiting in the reception area to learn if there had been any news. The notification she'd been dreading finally came one Saturday morning, when she arrived at the medical examiner's office for her daily update. Shocked that no one had called her, Irma listened as authorities told her there was not sufficient material to conduct DNA testing. But they assured her the body was that of her only daughter.
     
     
To console Irma, officials explained that many of the victims had been leading double lives— lives that they kept hidden from their mothers. They insinuated that the dead girls had been furtively working as prostitutes or dancers in the seedy downtown clubs of Ugarte Street. Perhaps Olga Alicia had been one of those girls leading a secret life, they suggested.
     
     
Irma fumed. She was well aware that a number of the dead girls were very young— nine, ten, eleven years old. How could officials possibly fabricate a double life for those girls?
     
     
The authorities had an answer for that too. They blamed the victims' mothers. They were lazy, uncaring; they didn't take proper care of their children. That's why the girls turned to strangers for care and attention.
     
     
Irma later learned that the female chaperone who'd been taking her daughter to the political dances was a friend of the detectives assigned to investigate Olga Alicia's case.
     
     
Interestingly, there had been a number of stories circulating of women befriending young girls, enticing them with a chance to socialize at dances with other young people. These women were purportedly acting as agents for various men, selling these unwitting young girls for sex.
     
     
There were also reports of women disappearing while waiting in line for a job at the city's maquiladoras. Several prospective employees related stories of managers snapping their pictures, purportedly as part of the job interview process. Various accounts reported that a number of these women had either vanished or were turning up dead.
     
     
Ramona Morales was told by some of her neighbors that a man had been driving the streets of her colonia, taking pictures of the young girls who lived there.
     
     
The accounts were frightening, yet officials were unable to substantiate any of the stories. Nor were they able to stop the murders. From August to November of 1995, the bodies of seven young women were recovered from the vast wastelands in Lote Bravo not far from where the bodies of Silvia Morales and Olga Alicia Pérez were found.
     
     
Four of the corpses, including that of Silvia Morales, conformed to a precise pattern: each one had been raped, stabbed, and strangled. All of them were found with a broken neck, a severed right breast, and the left