Modern Criminal Investigation

Modern Criminal Investigation enters the story as a discarded manual rescued from the Santa Teresa precinct by Lalo Cura. He reads it at home by a single bulb or in the early light from his window, and its prescriptions for investigation stand in sharp contrast to a police system that repeatedly loses, misclassifies, or sets aside cases involving murdered women.

Discovery and Edition

Around the time Florita Almada’s televised trance drew attention to the killings, Lalo found eight unread books on top of shelves of forgotten reports and files. At first he took only three, including Modern Criminal Investigation, by Harry Soderman and John J. O’Connell; after telling Epifanio Galindo, who explained that the books had been sent from Mexico City or Hermosillo and were never read, Lalo brought home the other five as well.

The copy was the tenth edition, published in 1992, but the book’s history reached further back: its first Mexican edition had appeared in 1965. In a reprinted preface to the fourth edition, Soderman lamented the death of his collaborator, Inspector General O’Connell, and the loss of his inspiration, experience, and assistance in revising the book. The manual thus arrives bearing its own record of accumulated revisions and professional absence.

Lalo’s Reading

Modern Criminal Investigation was the first of the recovered books that Lalo read and the one he liked best. He returned to it in the dim light of his tenement room at night and in the first sunlight through the open window. The book’s age did not make it useless to him: its instruction held his attention, sometimes provoking laughter and sometimes leaving him stunned.

Lalo’s reading is not presented as proof that he has mastered the manual or applied a particular technique. Rather, the book becomes a source of concentrated study for a young policeman whose surroundings offer little dependable institutional guidance. Its careful, instructional form contrasts with the disordered files above which it had lain, and with a department where cases can be displaced simply because investigators are scarce.

Investigation and Institutional Failure

The gap between a manual devoted to criminal investigation and Santa Teresa’s actual procedures appears in several cases. Isabel Urrea’s murder was initially explained as a failed robbery, the work of a mentally unstable person or drug user, or possibly a Central American veteran seeking money to travel north. No autopsy was conducted at her family’s request, and the ballistic analysis was never made public before it was lost in transit between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. The competing explanations did not produce a secure account of the crime, while a key piece of forensic evidence disappeared.

The handling of Emilia Mena Mena’s murder offers another instance of an investigation that stops short of resolution. Police treated her boyfriend as the main suspect, but he had left before they arrived. His father and two brothers were briefly detained; officers followed the reported lead to Ciudad Guzman but found no trace of him. The case remained open and was soon forgotten. The sequence makes the distinction between a formally unresolved case and sustained investigative attention painfully clear.

Scarcity also shaped which investigations received police labor. Juan de Dios Martinez was told to stop working on the Penitent case and take up a series of armed robberies. Officials maintained that the Penitent investigation had not been closed, but said the suspect seemed to have vanished, the inquiry had stalled, and the limited number of investigators required attention to more urgent cases. Officers who had been watching churches around the clock were reassigned. The manual’s presence among neglected files sharpens the irony: instruction in investigation exists, but institutional priorities determine whether an investigation can continue.

Evidence, Publicity, and the Cases

The book’s importance is also framed by the failure to connect public attention with durable accountability. When Klaus Haas called reporters to the prison in January 1996, he asked how murders could continue while the supposed killer was behind bars. He drew attention to matching knots in the ropes used to bind Michelle Requejo and Estrella Ruiz Sandoval, and specified that Estrella was the only victim known to have had direct contact with him, through her interest in computers. A novice crime reporter read the case file on the flight to Hermosillo, including the stories by Sergio Gonzalez; Gonzalez himself remained in Mexico City, where he was writing about contemporary Mexican and Latin American fiction.

In the same month, the Santa Teresa branch of Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace held a press conference about the degrading treatment of victims’ families and presented letters it intended to send to the state governor and the attorney general. Neither letter received an answer. The organization grew from three local members to twenty activists and supporters, yet that growth and the renewed press attention did not resolve the larger failures. Against this recurring pattern, Modern Criminal Investigation signifies not a solution but a measure of what the police institution fails to sustain: attention to evidence, continuity between cases, and accountability for the women whose deaths are repeatedly made visible and then allowed to recede.