Juan de Dios Martinez

Juan de Dios Martinez is a Santa Teresa inspector whose inquiry into the Penitent moves between patient observation, tentative diagnosis, and institutional retreat. Reputed to be capable and discreet, he pursues a man who desecrates churches and threatens those he encounters there; but even as Martinez seeks to understand the acts, the investigation is redirected and the city’s dead women remain part of a larger, unresolved crisis. His story shows how an investigator can collect clues without gaining certainty, while the cases competing for official attention continue to multiply.

Identity and investigative method

Martinez is introduced as an inspector trusted with a difficult case because he is considered capable and discreet. Some policemen associate that discretion with religious faith, a characterization that frames him as someone able to listen to incompatible accounts without immediately adopting either one. After an attack in a church, he interviews the priest, elderly women, and the injured sexton. Their descriptions differ sharply: the priest sees an ordinary-looking man, while the women call him the devil. The sexton supplies a more detailed account of a disheveled, intoxicated-seeming stranger whose crying and laughter appeared to overlap. Martinez tests what can be established against these impressions rather than treating the most dramatic testimony as fact.

The investigation proceeds through ordinary police procedures and their practical limits. Martinez consults the Santa Teresa asylum, where two patients might fit the description, but neither is known to be violent. He asks the director to let him take them to the hospital for an identification; she refuses without a court order. Rather than force the issue, he accepts the refusal and asks her to make sure neither patient leaves the asylum. The exchange reveals both his interest in moving quickly and his willingness to stop when the legal basis is challenged. He leaves the meeting with an unresolved question, not a suspect.

The Penitent investigation

A later call brings Martinez to San Tadeo church, where the same man has entered at night, urinated, and smashed religious statues, including images of Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe. No one has been injured in this incident. A witness description matches the earlier account, strengthening the connection between the church episodes without establishing the perpetrator’s identity. At the scene, Martinez examines the damaged plaster and speaks with Inspector Jose Marquez and the priest. The fragments and the smell of urine make the desecration concrete, but neither observation explains the man’s motive or whereabouts.

Martinez and the police chief consider how the Penitent might operate outside the churches. Martinez reasons that the man may behave like anyone else when away from a church, and that he could change clothes before returning home. The chief asks how to stop him. Martinez proposes placing an officer in each church and waiting for the next incident. The proposal is a practical response to a pattern of unpredictable appearances, but it depends on sustained surveillance and gives the police no means of locating the man between attacks.

The asylum director later leaves Martinez a message identifying the behavior as sacraphobia. She describes this as fear or hatred of sacred objects, especially those belonging to one’s own religion. When Martinez discusses the diagnosis with reporter Sergio Gonzalez, he stresses that, in his view, the Penitent does not enter churches with a premeditated intention to kill: the man wants to vent rage on sacred images, and deaths occur accidentally. This is an explanation offered by Martinez, not a confirmed finding about the perpetrator. The director has searched asylum records for a comparable case but has found none; she only supposes that a man of the Penitent’s apparent age may previously have been institutionalized.

The distinction between explanation and proof remains essential. The proposed diagnosis makes the repeated attacks intelligible as hostility directed at sacred objects, but it does not identify the offender, establish his history, or settle the circumstances of every injury and death associated with the case. The investigation has a name for the apparent pattern, but no verified person to attach it to.

Reassignment and unresolved cases

Martinez is eventually ordered to stop working on the Penitent case and investigate armed robberies in Colonia Centeno and Colonia Podesta. He is told that the church investigation is not formally closed, but that it has stalled because the Penitent seems to have vanished and Santa Teresa has too few investigators to keep officers watching churches around the clock. Martinez accepts the reassignment without protest. The case therefore remains open in principle while losing the personnel and attention that had been devoted to it; no capture or definitive resolution is reported in the evidence here.

The limits of police attention are set against the continuing discovery of murdered women. One morning, while Martinez is at the station preparing reports and selecting officers, a stretcher carries the body of Emilia Mena Mena through the hallway. The people around him do not notice. Her body was found at El Chile, an informal dump near Calle Yucatecos and the Hermanos Corinto brick factory. The examination records rape, stabbing, and burning, but does not establish whether the stab wounds or burns caused death, or whether the burning took place before or after death. Because fires were common at the dump, the report cannot rule out an accidental fire. The location itself has no formal name because it is not supposed to exist; its informal name marks a place where evidence and even the circumstances of death are difficult to secure.

Other cases show how everyday routes and working conditions shape the record without identifying a killer. Margarita Lopez Santos, sixteen, disappeared after a third-shift job at K&T, a maquiladora in El Progreso industrial park. The shift ended at five in the morning; lighting, paving, and drainage were inadequate along the route she would have walked home. Her mother reported her missing, but after more than forty days her body was found near a shack in Colonia Maytorena. The medical examiner could not determine the cause of death. The details establish the conditions surrounding her disappearance, not a proven explanation for it.

The same uncertainty attends the disappearance of Lucy Anne Sander, a twenty-six-year-old visitor from Huntsville, Arizona. After a night out in Santa Teresa with her friend Erica Delmore, Lucy Anne got out of the car in the plaza and ran across the grass; Delmore could not find her afterward. The plaza was still occupied by couples and children, and Delmore did not experience it as threatening. She searched, called out, and went to the police station at dawn to file a missing-person report before seeking help from the American consulate. The episode places a disappearance amid familiar public space rather than presenting danger as readily visible in advance.

A later report describes Rosario Marquina, nineteen, whose body was found behind the Kusai maquiladora in Colonia San Bartolome. She had disappeared while out dancing; her parents and she all worked at the same factory. The initial examination identifies strangulation, and the medical examiners report that she was raped before her death. These cases differ in their known circumstances and in what investigators can establish. Together they show why a single diagnosis or a single stalled investigation cannot account for the city’s wider pattern of violence.

Institutions, attention, and narrative significance

Martinez’s investigation also enters a media landscape where attention comes in short cycles. Chucho Flores describes the killings as a story that grows when the numbers rise, then melts away as public interest returns to work. In another strand, Oscar Fate asks his editor for time to investigate the murders, connecting them to possible serial killing, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s rapid growth. The editor insists that Fate is in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, and later tells him to finish that assignment and return to New York. The parallel is not that Martinez and Fate have the same role, but that both encounter priorities that narrow what can be pursued: limited investigators in the police department, and limited interest or budget in the newsroom.

The murders’ evidence is repeatedly translated into administrative language—identification, examination, cause of death, and a place in a list—while important facts remain unavailable. Some victims are identified; others are not. Reports leave causes uncertain, and missing-person histories end without a recovered explanation. Martinez’s careful questioning can clarify aspects of the Penitent’s recurring conduct, but his inquiry cannot resolve every uncertainty, and institutional reassignment does not make the unresolved cases disappear. His arc gives the novel a local investigator’s view of a city where patterns become visible in fragments, while the people and resources needed to follow them are repeatedly pulled elsewhere.