Three-way rape

Three-way rape is a phrase that enters the account of the killings in Santa Teresa through the investigation of Monica Posadas, a twenty-year-old woman found dead in a vacant lot. The medical examiner’s findings prompted police to describe her assault as having occurred in three ways; the label then spread among officers, acquiring a kind of unofficial standing in police records and talk. The episode shows how a term ostensibly drawn from evidence can become a vehicle for routine, demeaning humor rather than careful investigation.

Origin in the Posadas case

Monica Posadas was found in a vacant lot near Calle Amistad in Colonia La Preciada. The medical examiner reported evidence of assault in more than one form, including semen in her throat, and this became the basis for the police expression “three-way” rape. The account makes clear that the phrase arose in the context of her case; it does not establish that it was a formal legal or forensic category.

The officers’ discussion quickly strayed from the findings into increasingly extravagant claims about what counted as a rape involving additional “ways.” Their talk treated the victim’s assault as material for one-upmanship and crude speculation. The scene distinguishes the limited fact that gave rise to the label from the stories officers attached to it.

From description to police lore

The phrase did not remain a one-off remark. It spread through the Santa Teresa police and acquired semiofficial status, surfacing in reports, interrogations, and off-the-record conversations with the press. That recurrence matters: a phrase born from one case became part of the vocabulary through which officers discussed violence against women.

Its circulation did not make it more precise. Instead, the account shows a movement from medical findings to police slang and then to repeated institutional usage. The expression’s apparent authority came from its presence in official and unofficial channels, even as the surrounding conversation exposed how readily the case could be turned into a source of grotesque amusement.

Investigative language and its limits

The episode places the phrase within a larger pattern of uncertainty and institutional failure in the killings. In other cases, explanations and evidence could be compromised or lost: the murder of Isabel Urrea was attributed to several competing theories, no autopsy was performed, and the ballistic analysis later disappeared while in transit between courts. Elsewhere, the investigation of Emilia Mena Mena’s killing remained open and was soon forgotten, while officers were reassigned from the stalled Penitent investigation to robberies because their department had limited personnel.

These examples do not prove that the expression itself caused investigative failures. They do, however, place its casual circulation beside a police system marked by incomplete procedures, abandoned lines of inquiry, and uneven attention. The phrase thus functions not as a reliable classification but as evidence of the culture in which the killings were discussed: a culture able to repeat a term born from a victim’s case while failing to sustain consistent, accountable attention to women’s deaths.