On July 19, 1971, residents of a neighborhood in southern Mexico City asked a sanitation worker to remove a foul-smelling sack from a vacant lot. What police found inside would turn a local street food seller into a criminal legend.
Two years later, a restaurant owner in Buenos Aires took the life of a man who lived behind her business and dismembered his body.
The stories continued to grow darker. Throughout the 2000s, rumors and urban legends about spurned women taking brutal revenge on men who had terrorized them spread across Latin America.
Then, in 2009, authorities arrested a tamale seller after a series of homicides. That’s when they understood these were part of a pattern.
They all turned their victims’ human meat into filling for street food they would later sell to unsuspecting buyers.
A foul smell led police to a tamale seller in Mexico City
Image credits: magnific/wirestock (Not the actual image)
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of dismemberment
For days, a putrid odor had drifted through Sur 71-A in the Justo Sierra neighborhood. Residents initially blamed a nearby chicken farm. By July 19, 1971, the smell had become impossible to ignore.
A sanitation worker approached the vacant lot and found a sack more than a meter long. Printed on its side were the words, “Conasupo. Corn and beans. Capacity: 90 kilograms.”
He tried to open it, but the odor forced him back, so he called the police.
Officers arrived and found two severed legs and a headless torso inside. A human foot still wore a blue sock.
The head was missing.
Image credits: Gaurav Ranjitkar/Pexels (Not the actual image)
Fingerprints identified the victim as 53-year-old barber Pablo Díaz Ramírez, a man with a criminal record who used several aliases. Police files described him as athletic, about 1.8 meters tall, with little formal education and a strong interest in boxing and lucha libre.
Forensic examiners concluded that a hacksaw, an axe, and a knife had been used. They also believed his legs had been severed while he was still alive.
The violence was so extreme that investigators initially assumed at least two people had participated.
Ruiz turned her partner into food after enduring years of domestic violence
Image credits: Criminalista Nocturno/YouTube
Detectives soon learned that Díaz Ramírez lived with María Trinidad Ruiz Mares, a street vendor known for selling tamales outside La Tapatía bakery at the corner of Ermita Iztapalapa and Emiliano Zapata.
When officers reached her home on Pirineos Street, Ruiz Mares said her husband had left for work the previous Saturday and had not returned. Police then told her he had lost his life.
They expected tears or shock. Instead, one officer later recalled that she remained detached.
At police headquarters, Ruiz Mares first suggested that her husband had enemies connected to illegal substance dealing. She said he had been arrested three times and threatened after trying to leave the trade.
Under further questioning, she began describing the violence inside their home.
Díaz Ramírez was her second partner. Her first marriage had ended after her husband cheated on her in their home.
Image credits: Criminalmente/YouTube
They moved in together, but the arrangement deteriorated over three years. She said he mistreated her children, rarely worked, and took almost all the money she earned from selling around 200 tamales a day, with sales increasing on Sundays.
From the 120 pesos she made, he allegedly left her 15 for household expenses. At night, he went to the cinema, boxing matches, or wrestling events. She also believed he spent her earnings on another woman.
Ruiz confessed to having used the meat of her ex partner’s legs as filling for her tamales
Image credits: Criminalmente/YouTube
The final confrontation came on Saturday, July 17, 1971.
Ruiz Mares said Díaz Ramírez beat the children and sent them to bed without dinner. When she confronted him, he told her he was tired of them, ordered her to leave with the children, and said he would find another woman.
At about 11:30 pm, he fell asleep after watching television. Ruiz Mares picked up a bat she kept inside the home.
“I heard him groaning, almost like he was snoring, but he could no longer move,” she later confessed. “Then I hit him in the head again, and he looked d**d. I was out of my mind.”
When she tried to place his body in the Conasupo sack, it would not fit. She retrieved an axe borrowed for chopping wood and began cutting off his legs. According to her statement, he was still groaning.
Ruiz Mares insisted she acted alone. She severed the head, stitched the sack closed, and placed the head in a pot to boil. Because she regularly made noise at night while preparing tamale dough, neighbors noticed nothing unusual.
She cleaned the blood, hid her clothing beneath the mattress, and scrubbed the tools.
At about 5 am on Monday, she placed the sack on her tamale cart and pushed it to the vacant lot. She passed women walking to buy milk, but none appeared to recognize her.
The most disturbing part of Ruiz Mares’s confession concerned the food she sold afterward. She said she removed pieces of flesh from the legs and used them as filling in tamales.
Image credits: Bill Salazar/Pexels (Not the actual image)
Police doubted that she could have dismembered Díaz Ramírez alone. They arrested her adult son and son-in-law, both of whom denied knowing anything. Authorities offered Ruiz Mares a 20-year sentence instead of 40 if she identified accomplices.
“I am the only one responsible,” she replied. “Punish me with 40 years or however many you want. My son and my son-in-law had nothing to do with this.”
Medical experts found her mentally competent and described the incident as an act of “maternal rage.” She was convicted of aggravated homicide, clandestine burial, and desecration of a body.
Ruiz Mares passed away in prison in 1995. By then, “La Tamalera” had become a Mexican legend.
A restaurant owner was arrested after dismembering her landlord
Image credits: Testigos del Horror/YouTube
Less than two years later, another case linked cooking, dismemberment, and a woman’s retaliation against a man.
Emilia Basil had arrived in Buenos Aires from Beirut during the 1940s. Like many Middle Eastern immigrants, she was called “La Turca,” or “The Turkish Woman.”
She spent years working in a meatpacking plant before she and her husband opened Yamile, a restaurant in the San Cristóbal neighborhood.
The restaurant stood on the 2200 block of Garay Avenue, near the former Teleonce television station, whose employees became regular customers.
Image credits: Todo Noticias/YouTube
Basil and her husband had bought the building from José Petriella, an Italian plumber, but still owed him money. Their agreement allowed Petriella to remain in a rear room until the debt was paid.
The arrangement created constant tension. Basil later said Petriella harassed her and that the debt left her unable to force him out.
On March 24, 1973, Basil rose at about 4 am and prepared breakfast for her husband, who left for construction work half an hour later.
Once she was alone, Petriella approached her.
Basil turned her violent landlord into food after enduring months of unwanted advances
Image credits: Relatos, mitos y misterios de Buenos Aires/Facebook (Not the actual image)
Basil said he harassed and groped her as he had before. She let him continue long enough to reach a nylon cord, then wrapped it around his neck and pulled until he stopped breathing.
That morning, she opened Yamile and cooked for customers as usual.
Over the following nights, she dismembered Petriella’s body and boiled the remains in pots. Four days later, a crate of waste sat outside waiting for sanitation workers who never arrived. The odor reached the neighbors first.
Image credits: Ramon Karolan/Pexels (Not the actual image)
One of Basil’s daughters heard a complaint about the smell and told her mother.
“Call the police,” Basil answered.
Officers found Petriella’s torso among the waste. A search of the property revealed human remains in several locations. His head was inside a cooking pot.
Basil had used parts of Petriella’s body in dishes served at Yamile.
Basil spent only a decade in prison
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Appearing before Judge Juan Carlos Liporace, Basil confessed and cleared her family.
“My husband and my daughters had nothing to do with it. They knew nothing,” she said. “I acted alone. I did it, and I would do it again a thousand times.”
Her only stated regret concerned the disposal of the body.
Image credits: Todo Noticias/YouTube
“That was my misfortune,” she said of not owning a car. “Otherwise, I can assure you they would never have found me.”
Basil received ten years in prison for simple homicide as the claim of her serving human remains couldn’t be proved in court. In a surprising twist of events, she was released for good behavior in November 1979.
Image credits: Todo Noticias/YouTube
She had lost the restaurant, the property, and her family. Someone later saw her standing at the corner of Garay Avenue, staring at the former Yamile. When asked how she was doing, she answered, “What the hell do you care?”
She then disappeared from public view.
In 2009, the “cannibal tamale seller” became a Mexican urban legend
Image credits: Chilango
The Ruiz Mares and Basil cases created a recognizable formula: an ordinary woman, a violent act near a food business, a dismembered man, and the suspicion that customers had eaten the evidence.
That pattern resurfaced in a story associated with Nezahualcóyotl, State of Mexico, in 2009.
According to reports circulated in 2009 and 2010, a woman named Anabel Gómez López took the life of her husband, dismembered him, and used human remains in tamales sold throughout her community.
Image credits: Chilango
Later accounts called her “the cannibal tamale seller” and claimed investigators linked her to additional victims.
Neighbors who had bought food from her for years were described as horrified. The reports said Gómez López faced accusations of homicide and cannibalism and that the case became one of Mexico’s most disturbing crime stories.
Unlike the detailed Ruiz Mares prosecution and Basil case, however, the Gómez López story lacks the same clearly documented judicial trail. It is safest treated as unconfirmed, part of the urban mythology that grew around the earlier crimes.
Prime Video used the horrific true crime stories as inspiration for a black comedy
Image credits: Prime Video/YouTube
In July 2023, the same fear returned in fictional form through Prime Video’s The Horror of Dolores Roach.
Inspired by Sweeney Todd and adapted from a podcast of the same name, the series follows Dolores Roach, played by Justina Machado.
Dolores returns to Washington Heights after serving 16 years for substance trafficking. Gentrification has transformed the neighborhood, leaving her with few connections and limited options.
Her friend Luis shelters her in the basement beneath his restaurant, “La Empanada Loca.”
Image credits: Prime Video/YouTube
The setup closely echoes Emilia Basil’s case in Argentina. Both stories center on a woman who says a man cornered her inside a food business before she strangled him, leaving his remains near the place where meals were prepared.
The Horror of Dolores Roach turns that old suspicion into fact: Dolores takes the life of her violent landlord during a massage, and her partner dismembers the body and uses the flesh to fill empanadas, beginning a cycle in which she attacks people and he cooks.
Machado said Latin American audiences are particularly attracted to horror stories
Image credits: Prime Video/YouTube
Machado said she was drawn to playing a Latina woman outside the usual restrictions placed on such characters.
“It is very exciting to be part of something different, where we have not been put into boxes,” she told EFE.
The role also placed a Latina character at the center of horror. Nielsen data cited at the time found that Latinos accounted for 35 percent of the US audience for horror productions despite representing about 21 percent of the population.
Image credits: Prime Video/YouTube
“Our people love horror, and we also love to laugh, but we rarely see ourselves represented in those worlds,” Machado said. “Usually, we are the victims who d*e quickly.”
At the time, The Horror of Dolores Roach ranked as Prime Video’s third most-watched series in the United States and seventh worldwide.
Machado, then 50 and known for One Day at a Time, Jane the Virgin, and Six Feet Under, said the reception carried particular weight after decades of work.
“It is exciting to know that audiences have appreciated my work after so many years of effort,” she said. “I feel successful and grateful.”
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