Episode 139: The Little Old Lady Killer

Hello      Welcome back This is survived with Sophie and LexiWe started telling our survived story (in college) and we are moving on to being you guys moreThrough many different topics Mexico's first female serial killer Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio entered the world on a chilly winter morning, 27 December 1957, in the dusty hamlet of Epazoyucan, Hidalgo, north of Mexico City. She would one day become infamous as La Mataviejitas—“The Little Old Lady Killer”—a moniker as chilling as the crimes that led to her 759-year prison sentence for the brutal slayings of sixteen elderly women. Although the first murder attributed to her has been backdated by investigators to the late 1990s and some pinpoint a specific victim on 17 November 2003, whispers in the press and police corridors claimed the true death toll swelled to between forty-two and forty-eight senior citizens. Even after Barraza’s capture, more than thirty cold cases were quietly shelved when authorities officially declared the Mataviejitas saga closed. In 2005, two additional suspects—Araceli Vázquez and Mario Tablas—were briefly branded by media and police as accomplices under the same grisly nickname.