The body of 17-year-old Lilia Alejandra Garcia was found mutilated just 300 feet from her maquiladora in February 2001, and since then her case has come to embody the incompetence and corruption of police and prosecutors from Ciudad Juarez to the state capital in Chihuahua City and south all the way to Mexico City.

Garcia, the mother of a 5-month-old baby and a 2-year-old child, apparently was kidnapped just after she left work. She was held in captivity for a week, repeatedly beaten and raped, and then strangled. Then-prosecutor Suly Ponce told the Juarez newspaper El Diario that Garcia was the first woman of the year to be murdered and raped in this area of the city -- even though two days before, the body of an unidentified woman was found naked just blocks away.

When an FBI leak revealed witness testimony linking Lilia Garcia's killers to drug dealers, Suly Ponce dismissed it, calling it erroneous. She instead blamed workers in a circus across the street from the strip mall where Garcia was last seen. When circus managers claimed that Ponce offered them money to blame co-workers, she dropped the investigation.

According to a July article in the El Paso Times, former Chihuahua state forensic chief Oscar Maynez Grijalva said Garcia was killed in a similar manner as three of the eight women found in the cotton field with Claudia Ivette Gonzalez in November 2001. Curiously, local authorities behaved just as evasively in that investigation as in Garcia's.

When Gonzalez and the seven other women's bodies were found in November 2001, ex-Chihuahua Attorney General Arturo Gonzalez Rascon immediately fingered two local bus drivers as the culprits. Yet doubts about their guilt arose, especially after Grijalva -- who was Rascon's evidence expert at the time -- resigned from his post, citing pressure to fabricate evidence against them. And the head of a local prison was forced from office when he documented signs of torture on the accused men after they had returned from Rascon's office.

Four months later, in February 2002, a search-and-rescue team combing the cotton field found Claudia Ivette Gonzalez's overalls in a plastic bag, along with strands of hair and other crucial pieces of evidence that Rascon's investigators had failed to discover. In response, Rascon offered his opinion to the El Paso Times: "The state police have done a thoroughly professional job. I have no doubt about that." But on Oct. 28, DNA results revealed that Rascon's investigators had properly identified only one of the eight dead women -- Gonzalez.

Stuck with a far more dubious task than catching one madman or replacing one feeble leader, Juarez's fractured civil society has been paralyzed. A cynical mood is palpable just by speaking to citizens on the street, who unanimously express fear and distrust of law-enforcement and government officials. Some local cops are just as cynical.

"We can't just sit around in deserted places waiting for someone to drive up and dump bodies off," said one municipal police officer seated in an idling paddy wagon who refused to give his name for security reasons. "There are too few of us and the city's too big ... We don't get much support from the federal government. Judicially, we are not protected like cops in the U.S. Plus, the arms they give us are weak and the bulletproof vests don't really stop bullets. It's not just that, though. I have a young woman in my home so I can put myself in the place of the parents who have lost their daughters. But it's a question of society. We need their support and they need them to be more conscious if it is going to get any better here."

The scope of the crime is so enormous, and there has been so little success in stopping it, that suspicion breeds on itself. The litany of theories as to who the killers are and what their motive might be suggests that Juarez has become a breeding ground for every imaginable predator. And yet, nobody knows. Nothing is certain. And that feeds the climate of paranoia.

Garcia and Gonzalez's murders are rumored to be the work of a serial killer with possible ties to drug dealers. Yet Garcia was found with marks on her wrists that, according to local forensics experts, were identical to those made by police handcuffs. And upon the discovery of her daughter's overalls, Josefina Gonzalez told the El Paso Times that someone powerful was undoubtedly responsible for the murder.

Many in Mexico's law enforcement community agree that a ring of rich men are behind some of the killings, but they have no evidence to support the theory. Some suggest that some young men from the local aristocracy are responsible, but are being protected by their parents. A persistent theory holds that the murders -- or a significant subset of them -- are linked to powerful narcotraficantes who have co-opted segments of the local ruling class.

And the cynicism has been exacerbated by the fact that of the 17 men and one woman accused as serial killer masterminds of the murders, only one has been convicted, Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist and resident of Texas at the time of his extradition to Mexico in 1995. Currently, Sharif is awaiting sentencing for allegedly paying a drug trafficker named Victor Manuel Rivera Moreno to carry out about a dozen murders. However, evidence against Sharif is suspect and charges against him have been changed repeatedly. Once he was even charged with killing a woman, Elizabeth Ontiveros, who showed up later at police offices to prove she was alive.

In 1996, Sharif was accused of paying the gang Los Rebeldes to kill 17 women. Then, in 1999, he was charged with hiring five bus drivers and an El Paso man from his jail cell to kill seven women. Officials claimed Sharif hired the killers to deflect blame from himself. By 1999, judges had cleared him of all charges, citing an absence of concrete evidence and the possibility of witness intimidation by prosecutors.

Suly Ponce, who supervised the case, has yet to make a compelling case against him. In a 1999 radio interview, rather than presenting hard evidence, she claimed Sharif was aggressively hostile toward women because of his Egyptian background. Now she says that the case against Sharif hinges on Moreno's declaration that Sharif paid him to carry out the killings with money he earned from 13 patents he developed for Benchmark Research and Technology. But according to an article in the El Paso Times, Benchmark has never paid employees for patent development. In a telephone interview last week with Salon, Ponce said she hadn't known this. Angela Palaveras, the current special prosecutor, declined to discuss Sharif's case or any aspect of the investigations.

Many local residents scoff at the notion that the killers have been caught. "We don't believe that the guys they have arrested are the killers," says Miguel Angel Jaramillo, a mid-level manager for the Lear Corp. "It's obvious that they're just scapegoats."

Yet Ponce remains ardent in her belief that Sharif is at the center of the murders. "Today the killings continue because there are many imitators," she told Salon last week. "But after Sharif was caught, there were almost no homicides for a year." But according to the Juarez daily El Diario, the year immediately after Sharif was jailed -- a period spanning from October 1995 to October 1996 -- 28 young women were found murdered.

Meanwhile, the theories flourish and become more and more paranoid, reflecting a breakdown in public trust. By one popular theory, the women are being murdered at blood rituals for a cabal of wealthy, powerful men. Another theory posits a financial motive for murder. "We're finding a lot of girls that are mutilated in the same way," says a young municipal police officer who declined to give his name. "Someone's probably killing them to take their organs to sell them for a lot of money in the U.S." When asked if there was any evidence to support the theory, the officer replied that it was only a hunch.

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