We were having breakfast. And then I looked up and thought “Is my wife a serial killer?”. I know, it sounds nuts, but just hear me out. I’ve been noticing some strange changes in her behaviour; like she’s not as present as before, not as attentive. She used to shower me with gifts and compliments, and now I can’t remember the last time we even hugged. Sure, we’ve been together for quite a while, and relationships tend to die down if you don’t keep the flame alive. It’s just that she’s been so busy with work lately… But I’m the person who knows her the best, and I am usually the one person who can see her tender, loving side. The one she keeps only for me.

No one knows exactly when it started, everything moves so fast in Mexico City. All I know is everyone started talking about the “Mecate Killer”. Women’s bodies were showing up all over town, mostly in low-income neighborhoods, and they were always tied up. At first he tied them up to restrain them, but I guess it got really easy for him because he would just tie the mecate (which is a specific type of rope in Mexico) around the head once, across the mouth. Mecate is a relatively thin type of rope, so it wouldn’t have been used to silence them. It is also the most common type of rope in Mexico, so it really can’t be traced. Then they also found he started to tie it only after they were dead. Around the wrist, like a bracelet, or around a single finger, like a ring, or the neck. I saw a picture of that once. They said it resembled a noose, but to me it was more like a leash. Yes, he got cocky, and quite rightly if I may say so, because there wasn’t a single lead or suspect the police were going after. 

It was like chasing a ghost. He started killing in poor neighborhoods but very quickly moved on to the rich parts of the city too, even though this proved more difficult for him because rich women are usually more protected. He (because everyone just assumed it was a he) was seen a couple of times, dumping bodies in the trash, or leaving them at playgrounds at night so kids would look at them the next day. Sightings described a tall figure, strong enough to be able to move the bodies, but (and here’s where my hypothesis begins) they were also described as slender and with wide hips. I know everything points to a misogynistic killer, but who said women can’t be misogynists?

One day, the killer started communicating, as all celebrity serial killers do. A couple of red pills were left very neatly next to a body, so journalists, influencers and the common folk started to speculate. Isn’t the red pill an important symbol in incel culture? But even if this was true, the police were no closer to catching them, because the online community is huge, and the Mexican authorities haven’t really caught up to investigating digital crime or tracking online communications. So they were back where they started. Looking for a needle in a haystack.

Anyway, the killer got pissed and sent a letter to the Mexican tabloids, which are known for publishing “red news”, like reporting on brutal crimes or accidents along with photographs of bodies and gruesome details. The letter read something like “I am well beyond that”, which underestimated the incel movement but put themselves in a god-like category. For them, it was as easy as throwing out the trash, disposing of women and their lives.

A lot of people in social media said some incel must have taken credit for one of the bodies. After all, they were everywhere and it was so common it was easy to get close to them because everyone else was looking away. Others said, if the killer was an incel, they would have communicated over the internet. But they did so the old fashioned way, through a letter, like the serial killers of the seventies.

The letter got all over the internet and the printed red media in the city. It was a single piece of paper, torn off from the kind of ruled notebook every child in secondary school writes on, so it was virtually untraceable. The message was clear, the killer was pissed off, but what stood out to me was, despite the many (too many if you ask me) spelling mistakes, the letter itself looked pretty. The penmanship was cute, like a girl’s, it was almost beautiful. There wasn’t a single smudge, the ink looked expensive, not from the kind of pen you can buy anywhere, and there was just an overall attention to detail that told me it couldn’t have come from a man. Not a Mexican man, anyways.

And yes, by this time, my wife had started to spend more and more time away from home. She would come home, sleep, take a shower and leave again. At first, I thought she was having an affair, of course. But then one day she came home smelling like trash. Not sweat, or the smell that riding the subway all day (even though she never rides the subway) leaves on your hair, but actual trash, like a dumpster. I asked her about it, but she went into the bathroom, took a shower, and the next day she threw the clothes away. She didn’t want me to clean them, which is usually my job, she just threw them straight into the dumpster downstairs, and didn’t even use the trash chute.

Then there’s this other hypothesis. The way the victims were killed suggested it was very easy for the killer to have access to them. Sometimes they didn’t even have to abduct them. The victims trusted them fully. When talking to the families of the victims that were killed at home, they said there were no signs of forced entry. The neighbours heard the usual yelling but nothing that suggested a brutal killing, like in the movies. So the killer had been invited in, like it was their own home. 

Some other relatives and friends talked about how the victims had recently made a new friend, which was almost always a woman, and that makes sense. Women trust other women. We share everything with each other, even if we just met. Have you ever been to a Mexican salon? By the time I leave I have three new close friends whose full name I don’t even know, and their phone numbers. Then there are reports of some of them starting to date someone new, a woman of course. Did I mention I am a lesbian?

I know, this is not enough evidence to say someone is a killer, let alone a serial one, that’s a pretty big accusation to make against someone. I don’t really think my wife could kill somebody. And hell, we don’t even know the killings have been perpetrated by the same person. After all, who’s to stop every single man in this city from killing women around them and using mecate as a calling card?

But I wish there was a better explanation for why there’s this distance between us. Something’s changed. It used to be us versus the world. When we first started going out we had to hide from our families, because they’re both catholic, but that only brought us even closer. It was like an adventure. We’d go out on road trips and visit new places. She was always happier when we were alone. Everyone else saw her as this snobbish, irritable girl, but I always saw through that. When she was with me, which was almost all the time, she’d be tender and caring.

It all started to change when we got married. I always said I wouldn’t get married, because I had the worst example growing up in my parents’ marriage, but something inside me told me I was ready, that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes as them. So I bought a ring and popped the question one night, in a secluded cabin in the middle of a forest halfway across the world. She said yes.

So our new adventure was marriage, and it included moving to another country. Everything was new. The city, the people, the language; even being called by her last name instead of mine. We moved because of her job, so the paperwork was directed to her, the apartment was leased to her, as well as the car. It was just easier that way, because this new country didn’t recognize same-sex marriage. And because of that, I was there as a tourist, and was not able to work.

But we’d always been a team and that wasn’t going to stop us from being a proper family. So we went old-fashioned, and I took care of the house while she was working. That’s when she started talking about blood. She was fascinated by it. Specifically, the many ways you can take it out of people. She’d come home talking about blood patterns, about how if you hit someone in the head with a bat in this or that way the blood pattern would change dramatically. She used to talk about the fastest and cleanest ways to drain blood from a human body, just like in her favorite TV show. It was quite a productive way to look at it.

But that didn’t scare me, I was glad she had a special interest, because there wasn’t much else to do in that new city. Eventually she got bored and asked for a transfer back to Mexico City, which her office granted, because she was quite successful and made a lot of money for the higher-ups, so they didn’t care where she did that, as long as she kept it coming. That’s when I noticed she just wasn’t the same anymore. She’d always had a bad temper, but this was different.

At first it was small stuff, like she started hitting the wall whenever we fought, which by that time was very frequent. She was obsessed (or is the word enamored?) with true crime documentaries. She started following more and more women on social media, people she didn’t even know. I asked her about it once, but she said I was crazy jealous, and that she was entitled to her privacy. I mean, she was right, we all have the right to privacy, but there was something very dark about the way she looked at them. Whatever it was, I could tell it had reached the farthest corners of her mind.

One night I woke up to the sound of her voice, which was not unusual. Every time she has a big meeting I can hear her rehearse in her sleep. But this time she started swinging at nothing, until her fist landed on my face. I yelled and shook her, trying to wake her up, but nothing worked. Then she started choking me, and I only got her to stop until I punched her in the stomach. That was the weirdest morning we ever had. She wouldn’t stop apologizing, saying it wouldn’t happen again, that she was under a lot of stress at the office. I only remember being numb. That night I asked her to go to therapy, maybe get seen by a psychiatrist, but she said she was fine. She promised to exercise more and get more sleep, but that only lasted a few days.

I am doing everything I can to get her through this, because I made a commitment to my family, and it always comes first. It’s just hard to fight the feeling that she might have another home by now, and she might leave any day, or ask me to do so.

I know this doesn’t amount to a serial killer, but last night I found a piece of mecate on her night stand.