2 DEATHS HAUNT SLEUTH IN MEXICAN MURDER CAPITAL

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Death was once a science for Irma Rodriguez Galarza.

As the lead forensic investigator in this murder capital on the United
States-Mexico border Ms. Rodriguez reconstructed the faces of missing
people from jigsaw shards of bone. She identified burned bodies by picking
teeth from ashes and flesh. By measuring a trail of scabs on the buttocks
of a boy, Ms. Rodriguez identified which parent was responsible for biting him.

Then the police sirens that regularly pierce the night came blaring for
her. Two bodies kept in the morgue's refrigerator were the people Ms.
Rodriguez loved most -- her husband and her 17-year-old daughter. On a
night last July, while her husband and daughter sat on their front porch
eating melon, death turned personal.

"Even though I worked in the nightmare of violence every day, I somehow let
myself believe that it would never touch my family," said Ms. Rodriguez, 47.

"But look what happened," she added. "It came to my home."

Her daughter, Cinthia, her common-law husband, Alejandre, were killed and
her 23-year-old son, Vladimir, was seriously wounded. The police have said
the attack was not aimed at Ms. Rodriguez; they cannot find the gunmen. Her
family, investigators say, got caught in the all too common bursts of
cross-fire between warring drug traffickers that marks much of the border.

The violence visited Ms. Rodriguez after her stunning rise from part- time
cab driver and oral surgeon to police commander and author. Short and burly
with a masculine hair cut, Ms. Rodriquez said she has tried to stay strong
through the tragedy, but her demeanor gives away her pain.

The erect bearing and forceful voice of a police commander has been
replaced by slouched shoulders and heavy sighs. She said her cigarette
smoking has doubled and her blood pressure has soared. She is harassed by a
pounding cough that sometimes makes her vomit. She cannot sleep. Her hands,
which once could wield a scalpel with the precision of a cosmetic surgeon,
can barely tear meat from a piece of chicken.

She tries to relax by working on a watercolor painting of her daughter. But
mostly she sits in front of her computer typing letters to newspapers about
the man she believes brought death to her doorstep.

Like a good cop, she has pored over crime files, studied photographs of the
crime scene and autopsy reports. She has memorized the positions of each
body on the sidewalk and the directions from which they were shot. She has
watched for links to other shootings around the city, struggling to crack
the most important case of her life.

"Witnesses are too afraid to come forward," she said about murder cases
generally. "The dead tell more than the living."

At Ms. Rodriquez's computer, an urn with her daughter's ashes sits next to
the monitor. She is not religious, she said, but sometimes she hears her
daughter shouting at her to keep up the search.

"I play the scenes over and over in my mind, trying to figure out how my
daughter's death is connected to the rest of the world of violence," she
said as her trembling fingers struggled to trace the outlines of the mauve
flowers painted on the urn.

Living in this parched city of shanties, strip clubs and American-owned
assembly plants has not been easy for a long time. Brutality and
lawlessness have raged for so long that it barely makes headlines.

"This is a corrupt and broken place," said Esther Chavez Cano, director of
a rape crisis center called Casa Amiga. Spreading like a wildfire on the
banks of the Rio Grande, Ciudad Juarez has grown by an average of 1,000 new
residents a week. Families fleeing poverty and underemployment across
southern Mexico come to work in modern "maquiladora" assembly plants that
produce everything from auto parts to underwear for export to the United
States.

But the city's industry has not produced prosperity for most of its people.
Factory workers earn in a day what their American counterparts earn in an
hour. A short bus ride away from the gleaming factories, Mexicans live in
shacks of cardboard and tin, without running water, paved streets or sewage
lines.

For generations, outlaws have used the city as a gateway, first for
smuggling liquor, then guns and now drugs and immigrants into the United
States. Law enforcement officials say the mafias operate with almost
complete impunity, as police agencies remain plagued by corruption.

Drug traffickers sometimes discreetly settle scores by kidnapping their
targets, torturing them and dumping their bodies in the desert. Other
times, they make a show of it.

In a single week last month, at least six people were gunned down in
various drug disputes. Steven Slater, the state public safety adviser, said
there have been 25 execution-style slayings this year.

Short of murder, brutality is widespread, directed mainly at women,
spurring a powerful women's movement. Since 1993, dozens of women have been
abducted, raped and murdered each year in Ciudad Juarez.

Many victims were teenagers, struggling to start independent lives by
taking $5-an-hour factory jobs. Others are the wives and girlfriends of men
whose abusive rage spirals into rape and murder. Ms. Chavez, at the rape
crisis center, said that some 18 women have disappeared in Ciudad Juarez
this year.

"The evil comes from need," Ms. Rodriguez said. "Poverty degrades human
beings into delinquents."

For four years, Ms. Rodriguez labored quietly in the eye of the storm of
violence, matching skeletons with faded photographs sent to her by the
relatives of the missing. She covered skulls with putty and painted them
new set of eyes to discover the secret of their identity. Information about
the way people lived often gives clues about the way they died, Ms.
Rodriguez said.

She came to her craft in an unusual journey. A daughter of teachers, she
married her first husband at 17 and dropped out of school. When he died
suddenly she had two children and needed a job.

Ms. Rodriguez drove a cab while studying to get her degree as an oral
surgeon. But when a friend told her that there were job openings with the
state police, with regular pay and benefits, she rushed to apply.

"I thought they wanted secretaries," Ms. Rodriguez recalled. "But I did so
well on the exam, they told me they wanted me as an officer."

She rose quickly through the ranks, becoming one of the first women police
commanders in the Chihuahua State Judicial Police, and later, after a
period of study devoted to forensic investigation, was appointed director
of the state police academy in Chihuahua.

More than two months after the attack on Ms. Rodriguez's family,
investigators say they are at a dead end.. The violence occurred when a man
ran for cover into the Rodriguez home just after midnight on July 25. Ms.
Rodriguez's daughter and husband were sitting out front when two other men
approached and began firing.

Sotelo Alejandre Ledesma, 45, died within moments, as did Cinthia Paloma
Rodriguez. She was a big girl, taller and heavier set than everyone else in
the family.

"She was somewhere between dolls and hard rock music and make up and love
letters," Ms. Rodriguez said. "We fought all the time. But she was my most
important companion."

The man who was being chased by the gunmen, a former homicide detective
named Sergio Rodriguez Gavaldon (no relation to Irma Rodriguez) escaped
with minor injuries. And although he is a key witness in the case,
investigators have been unable to locate him.

"I keep searching for some clue that will explain why it all happened," Ms.
Rodriguez said. Profoundly shaken, she has decided to return to teaching at
the police academy where she once studied. "The pain is devastating. But I
have to reconstruct this if I am ever going to survive."