On May 18, 2019, the night was buzzing in Polanco, the luxurious heart of Mexico City. Five close friends—Sofía, Clara, Mariana, Jimena, and Lucía—left the exclusive restaurant “La Joya de Polanco” at 11:47 pm. They had celebrated Sofía’s birthday, toasting with expensive champagne and immortalizing the night in Instagram stories. While Sofía ordered a ride-sharing car, the others waited with the valet.
They never made it to the car.
In an instant, in one of the most heavily guarded areas of the country, five women vanished. No witnesses. No security camera footage. No bodies. They simply disappeared, leaving a void that became a living hell for their families for two long years.
The capital was paralyzed by the mystery. Sofía’s boyfriend, Mateo Garza, the charismatic and handsome heir to a real estate empire, became the public face of the tragedy. He wept at press conferences, offered a reward of millions of pesos, and organized vigils that filled the Angel of Independence monument. He was the image of devout grief, a man who refused to lose hope.
But hope was dashed the day Raúl Méndez, an excavator operator with 23 years of experience, felt his machine hitting the wrong thing. He was breaking up old foundations for a new luxury tower in Santa Fe when he noticed the concrete in one section was different. It was newer.
The excavator ripped it open like an eggshell. Through the hole, Raúl saw fabric. Blue silk. And he knew, with a terror that chilled his blood in the heat of May, that he had found someone.
Police cordoned off the area. Forensic experts descended into the pit, but what they discovered wasn’t old. They were the bodies of five young women. “They’ve been here for a while, but not decades. Maybe two years,” said the lead technician.
Inspector Elena Reyes felt a tightness in her chest. Two years. May 2019. She knew exactly who they had found before the expert shouted from downstairs: “We found a wallet. Identification. Clara Castillo.”
The call reached Daniela Castillo, Clara’s sister, in her Monterrey apartment. Daniela was a doctor; she lived in a world of facts, not the esoteric theories her mother tried to console herself with. But this time, her mother’s voice wasn’t one of tears. It was something worse. “They found them, Mija. They’ve been there the whole time… under cement.”
Daniela drove the ten hours back to Mexico City in a trance. The search was over. The limbo of uncertainty had transformed into the certainty of a nightmare.
In the morgue, the smell of disinfectant and death was familiar to Daniela from her anatomy classes, but this time it was personal. It was Clara. She needed to see her. Through the glass, she saw the shape beneath the sheet. The coroner pulled it back just enough. The face was unrecognizable, but the silver earrings Daniela had given her for her 21st birthday were still there. “It’s her,” she managed to say.
Then, Inspector Reyes showed her a bag of evidence. “We found this in his hand. He was holding it when he died.”
Inside was a piece of fabric. A scrap from an expensive light blue Oxford shirt, with part of an embroidered monogram: “Ma…”. The rest was torn off. Daniela said she didn’t recognize it, but her mind raced. It was a lie. She had seen Mateo Garza wear that shirt dozens of times.
While Reyes was dealing with Commander Romero, the original investigator on the case who had closed it six months later suggesting that the girls “probably ran away of their own free will,” Daniela began her own investigation. Romero insisted that Mateo had been “fully cooperative” and had a solid alibi: the doorman at his building in Las Lomas and security cameras confirmed that he had arrived home at 10 p.m. and hadn’t left.
But Daniela knew that the service entrance of that luxury building did not have cameras.
The first lead she pulled was Javier, Mariana’s boyfriend. “She was supposed to come to my house,” Javier told her, his eyes sunken from years of insomnia. “But she texted me at 11:48 saying that Sofia wasn’t feeling well and that Mateo was picking them all up.”
It was strange. Why would all five of them need to be there? Javier also revealed the motive: “Sofía was going to break up with him. She’d finally had enough of his jealousy, of him showing up everywhere, of him checking her phone.” Sofía’s birthday dinner wasn’t just a celebration; it was a party of freedom.
Daniela searched through Clara’s laptop. The last conversation in the “Las Inseparables” group chat was about dinner. But it was in Jimena’s Instagram story, posted at 11:15 pm from the restaurant, where Daniela found the first crack in Mateo’s alibi. In the background, visible through the window in the valet area, was Mateo’s black BMW. The same car that, according to him, had been in his mansion’s garage all night.
Daniela’s investigation led her to a private Facebook group. Three weeks before she disappeared, Lucía had posted an anonymous question: “A friend needs advice. Her boyfriend installed tracking apps on her phone… She wants to break up with him, but she’s scared.” The last comment was from Mariana: “We support her. Planning an intervention. She’ll be okay.”
Inspector Reyes, now convinced, found more. All the girls’ phones stopped transmitting simultaneously at 12:23 a.m. Mateo’s phone was in airplane mode or turned off from 11:15 p.m. until 2:47 a.m., a black hole in his alibi. And then, the strangest piece of evidence: in Sofía’s pocket they found a receipt from a hardware store in Iztapalapa, dated two days before the disappearance. The purchase: cement mix, plastic sheeting, and a shovel. Paid for in cash.
Daniela confronted Mateo. He stuck to his story until she mentioned the receipt. “What receipt?” he asked, and it was a fatal slip. The police hadn’t revealed that detail. Cornered, Mateo threatened her in a low voice. That night, someone broke into Daniela’s childhood home and vandalized Clara’s room, writing “Stop it now” on the wall with Clara’s lipstick.
Commander Romero continued to obstruct the investigation, protecting the influential Garza family. But Javier found the key. He remembered a cloud account that Mariana kept secret. Inside, there was a folder called “EVIDENCE.”
It contained screenshots of texts between Sofía and Mateo, revealing his chilling manipulation (“If you leave me, I’ll kill myself”). And Sofía’s last text, on the morning of May 18: “It’s over. I’m fed up.” There was also a video from the night before. The five friends were in Sofía’s apartment, planning their escape. “We have a plan,” Clara said. “Tomorrow we’ll celebrate your freedom.”
Romero dismissed the evidence as “fruit of the poisonous tree,” obtained illegally. But Javier and Mariana’s sister, Emma, found physical copies of emails in a safe deposit box. They were from Mateo to a friend, a month earlier: “If I can’t have her, nobody will.”
The case was about to fall apart, but the final piece came from the most unexpected source: Catalina Garza, Mateo’s sister.
“I know what he did,” Catalina whispered, trembling, at the Dolores Pantheon. She recounted how Mateo had strangled her cat, “Princesa,” when they were children and had pretended to help her look for it. She handed Daniela a USB drive. It contained security footage from Catalina’s building on the night of the murder, showing Mateo arriving at 3 a.m., covered in dirt and cement dust.
“He has a trophy room,” Catalina said. “In my parents’ basement, in Las Lomas. Behind a false wall. He keeps mementos… and videos.”
Daniela contacted a friend at the Attorney General’s Office (FGR). Agent Raquel Morales took charge, finding federal jurisdiction. While searching for Catalina, who had been kidnapped by Mateo after discovering her betrayal, federal agents raided the Garza mansion.
They found the false wall. Behind it was a shrine to horror. Photos of dozens of women. Labeled jewelry boxes. There was Sofia’s emerald necklace, marked “S. May 18, 2019.” And on a laptop, there were the videos.
The truth was worse than any theory. Mateo had drugged their champagne at the restaurant. He picked them up, lying about an accident involving Sofia’s mother. He drove them to the construction site in Santa Fe. When Sofia realized the deception and tried to grab the steering wheel, he shot her. Then, he hunted the other four, drugged, terrified, and confused, around the site.
Catalina was found, wounded but alive; she had stabbed Mateo with a pen and escaped from a family-owned cellar. Mateo fled. It was Daniela who remembered the Cold War-era “panic room” Mateo had boasted about. They found him there, delirious from the fever caused by his wound.
As they arrested him, he looked at Daniela. “They were going to leave. They were going to take her away from me.” And then, with an icy smile, he dropped the final bombshell: “Check the artwork again. There are more than five.”
Ground-penetrating radar found three more bodies. Rebecca Chen (2017). Lisa Rodriguez (2015). Sarah Peterson (2013). All ex-girlfriends who had “mysteriously moved away.” Mateo Garza wasn’t a crime of passion; he was a serial killer with a decade’s worth of victims. The investigation ultimately identified fourteen victims, though it was suspected there were more.
The trial was a media spectacle. Commander Romero quietly “retired.” Inspector Reyes was promoted. The defense tried to portray Catalina as mentally unstable, but she was unwavering on the stand. “Yes, I was hospitalized,” she told the jury. “Do you know why? Because I was living with a sociopath who killed my cat and threatened to kill me.”
Mateo, in a fit of arrogance, testified. The prosecutor tore him apart. “You killed five women because you couldn’t control one.” The jury deliberated for less than three hours. Guilty. The sentence: life imprisonment in the Altiplano maximum-security prison.
Mateo tried to negotiate the placement of four more bodies in exchange for benefits. In an agonizing decision, the families accepted a modified agreement only to bring closure to other families, but ensuring that he would never be released.
Family games
At the sentencing hearing, Daniela confronted him. “Clara was 23 years old. She wanted to be a teacher… You took that away from the world. Not because you loved her, but because you couldn’t possess her. You are not a monster. You are worse. You chose this.”
Five years later, Daniela visits the cemetery where the five friends are buried together. The construction site in Santa Fe is now a luxury shopping mall. But the girls’ legacy endures. The case led to new laws against gender violence.
Now Captain Reyes meets Daniela there. She shows her something she kept from the report: Clara’s last draft of the text, written in the car that night, never sent.
“Danny, something’s wrong… If anything happens, know that I love you… Some people are just broken. We try to help. Remember us for that, not for how it ends.”
Even in their final moments, terrified, Clara and her friends fought on. The FGR video showed that they died protecting one another. Mateo thought he was burying his crime. Instead, he preserved the evidence of their connection.
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