Unknown Killers Mutilate City's Beautiful Women

JUAREZ, Mexico, Aug. 12, 2006 — -- Norma Andrade used to pick up her daughter after work at an appliance factory, but one night in 2001 she couldn't make it.

Seventeen-year-old Lillia was last seen alive crossing the street headed for the bus.

"I reported it to the police," Andrade said. "They told me she'd probably gotten back with her boyfriend."

Lillia's body was found eight days later, strangled and mutilated.

In 1998, Esther Luna's 15-year-old daughter Brenda disappeared.

"The police said maybe she's with her boyfriend, or lazy," Luna said.

Brenda's body was found beaten, raped and stabbed.

Another woman's daughter was last seen getting on a bus. Another's was 16, raped and killed. Another's was found dead with her head skinned.

Since 1993, there have been almost 400 murders of women in Juarez. At least 90 were similar -- young factory workers, their bodies dumped in fields or the desert, sometimes in groups.

Actress and Mexican native Salma Hayek is one of the voices calling for action in Juarez. ABC News sat down with her this week to talk about her efforts to raise money for victims' families and get U.S. law enforcement more involved.

"They're not just killing women," Hayek said. "They are taking girls that are both 15 to 22 years old. They're all pretty. And they are mutilating them, raping them and burning them. And then, whenever they wish, they throw the pieces in the desert."

Investigations have seemed so incompetent to some of the victims' mothers that some believe the police actually may have been involved.

"The police is completely involved in this, and that's why we don't see anything go forward," said one mother, Vicki Cavrero.

Pink crosses at the city's southern entrance and painted on utility poles are reminders that the murders remain unsolved.

In many cases, the authorities did such a poor job identifying the victims that now an Argentinean forensics team of people who've traveled to the sites of mass murders all over the world are in Juarez trying to identify the victims. They've dug up mass graves of unidentified bodies, some from the city cemetery.

"A lot of these cases could have been solved if there would have been a proper investigation," said Mercedes Doretta, a forensic anthropologist.

Evidence was either not collected or lost. Now, the prosecutor for the state of Chihuahua, Patricia Gonzalez, says she is re-opening more than 100 cases.

"I think we will resolve many of them," she said.

But arrests and dramatic announcements have been made before and come to nothing, with suspects released. So maybe the mystery is about to be solved, or this is just another twist in a long, mysterious tale.

Hayak believes Mexican police need forensic and investigative help from the United States. She argues that 15 years of unsolved murders is unacceptable.

"They are all poor women," Hayek said. "I think that, unfortunately, around the world, these lives are not valued with the same strength as if it was somebody that, I don't know, that was the daughter of somebody important. I mean, in America, a girl disappears, and rightly so, everybody gets shocked and offended and appalled. How about girls that disappear either as they were going to school or as they were going to work?

"They went to work for maybe $4 a week and they never made it back," Hayak added. "I know a lot of the families of the victims, and sometimes they don't even have money to bury them."