From sex strangler to model citizen: Mexico's most famous murderer and the defeat of the death penalty

Abstract

Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández was Mexico's most infamous serial killer. After he confessed to killing four young women and burying them behind his home, he became the darling of the crime pages and criminological experts alike, and his case provoked a lively debate over the reinstatement of the death penalty in congress. The following essay uses his story, the policy debates it provoked, and his broader institutional odyssey in La Castañeda mental asylum (1943–1947) and Lecumberri prison (1948–1976) to explore how issues that affected Mexicans across the social spectrum were discussed and settled in a political system that was neither a dictatorship nor a democracy.