THE INVESTIGATION

The Tijuana police force started with no clues. They began their investigation by knocking on doors in the neighborhood where "El Gato" was killed, said Jaime Sam Fierro, the now-retired head homicide detective at the time of the killing. "The first thing we did was to investigate within a radius of 300 meters of the scene of the killing. We went from house to house. The first days we had no success," Sam Fierro said. "Finally we found one person who said, yes, he had seen a Trans-Am. We started from there."

The man who headed the investigation, police director Romero Meza, said two adults and a small boy saw the car. The adults were splashed by the Trans Am as it sped through a deep puddle. None of these three got a look at the driver or his passenger. Two other witnesses did.They were employees working at Romero’s own house, where the Trans Am reportedly turned a corner three blocks from the crime scene. These two witnesses would later identify the two suspects as the men they had seen in the car.

The investigators found people who had seen a black Trans-Am in other spots nearby, and the trailled to Victoriano Medina Moreno, a former state judicial policeman then working as a security guard for the Agua Caliente Race track. Police found Medina’s black Trans-Am in a race track parking garage. "We investigated him, we detained him, and he confessed," Sam Fierro said. "We asked him his motive and he said when he was director of a police station he had been the subject of attacks in the newspaper column and that was why he killed him." Newspaper accounts of the investigation said Medina also wanted to silence the journalist’s criticism of his boss at the race track, Hank Rhon, a member of one of México’s most powerful families. Medina also reportedly said he wanted to avenge attacks in "Un Poco de Algo" that had cost the job of another associate, a state prosecutor.

Police and the journalists at Zeta had begun their search for suspects by reading through Félix’s most recent columns for the names of his favorite targets for criticism. The name of Jorge Hank Rhon stood out as one of the people Félix had attacked with the greatest frequency and the most biting sarcasm. Félix made vague references to cocaine and revealed embarrassing details from Hank’s infamous wild parties. He also poked fun at Hank’s closest friend, Alberto Murguia.

Although Medina said Félix’s columns had been the reason behind the killing, the only other person he implicated in his statement to police was someone who had never been mentioned in "Un Poco de Algo" — race track security chief Antonio Vera Palestina. Vera had served Hank Rhon’s powerful father, Carlos Hank González, for 12 years before 1985. Hank González was a former mayor of México City and served as Minister of Agriculture at the time of the investigation. After working for Hank González, Vera moved to Tijuana when Hank Rhon went there to take over management of the race track, of which his father owned controlling interest. Medina was brought to trial by the Leyva Mortera government, but Vera eluded police.

Immediately after Medina’s detention, Hank Rhon held a news conference on May 1, 1988. He said he did not pay Medina or anyone else to kill Félix. He offered to cooperate with police, inviting them to the race track and saying he had nothing to hide. Despite reports that Vera was hiding out in buildings at the race track, police did not obtain a search warrant and enter the buildings for several days. By the time the police arrived to search the race track facilities, Vera reportedly had fled the region. When police investigators finally searched the race track offices, on May 3, they found little. A shotgun Medina directed them to turned out not to be the murder weapon. In Vera Palestina’s office investigators found two machine guns, two AK-47 assault rifles, a sawed-off, 20-gauge shotgun and a half-dozen other firearms.

The police pointedly said that Hank Rhon was not a suspect and had not been formally questioned. A security guard told police Vera had cashed a $10,000 voucher into pesos on the day of the crime. The race track’s explanation was that the money was to be used to pay security personnel. The investigators dropped the matter, although no satisfactory confirmation of the testimony was sought or found regarding the money.

Among prosecutors, journalists and others with access to details of the investigation, at least two people said Romero Meza told them he would continue the investigation to find out who was the "intellectual author" of the killing . They said he claimed he was investigating the connection of the killers to Hank Rhon, then suddenly dropped the matter and declared the investigation closed. Romero Meza, eight years after the crime, said the press attacks on his investigation had left him angry. He said he never suspected Hank Rhon, although he did think Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then a presidential candidate, may have been involved. In recognition of the satisfactory completion of his duties in the case, Romero Meza said, Gov. Leyva Mortera gave him the 100,000-peso reward.

Both the head homicide investigator, Sam Fierro, and the state’s head prosecutor in Tijuana at the time, Josefina Fregoso de Ezkauriatza, said the only indication available at the time of the investigation and trial of who had been the crime’s "intellectual author" came in Medina’s confession, in which he claimed to be the one who conceived, planned and carried out the slaying. The initial police investigation effectively stopped with the identification of Medina and Vera as the suspects, with no inquiry into whether anyone else could have directed the killers. Since Medina said he had his own motive for the killing, police conducted no investigation to identify or confirm any other suspects. "If he was saying he did it and nobody sent him to do it, we had to base our case on that," Sam Fierro said.

Sam Fierro said that because of questions that arose after the investigation — specifically the accumulation of evidence of a financial link between the race track and Vera after the crime — one could not consider the case completely resolved. However, he said, to go any further would require an entirely new investigation, because the original investigators made no attempts to find out whether others were involved in the planning of Félix’s killing. Fregoso de Ezkauriatza said she could not say whether the investigation — upon which her office’s case was based — was inadequate, because none of the lawyers under her had any direct involvement in carrying out the investigation they had ordered the police to perform. She said she believed that her office had ordered a new investigation, but that it had not been carried out before the next state government took over. The court records made no mention of any new evidence ever being turned up in a newly ordered investigation. No such investigation ever took place. "The ideal would have been for us to have been involved directly in the way the police investigation was handled, but that did not happen in this case, or in any others at the time. I always felt this should be changed, but it was not in my power to do that," she said.

THE FIRST TRIAL

Medina accused the police of beating a confession out of him when he was arrested 10 days after the murder. The confession got him convicted. At the Tijuana prison where he was being held eight years later, he repeated the charge that his early statements were coerced. He said he was innocent, and had no motive to kill Félix. Searches by journalists and police never turned up any mention of Medina in "Un Poco de Algo," although police reported that their suspect had said he wanted Félix dead because of attacks in the newspaper. "The journalist never wrote anything about me," Medina said in a brief interview in a Tijuana prison eight years after the crime.

Testimony that linked Medina to the murder included the testimony of the Romero Meza employees who saw the Trans-Am driving by — slowly, rounding the corner in front of the police chief’s house — shortly after the two shotgun blasts resounded through the neighborhood. The witnesses said they noticed that the Trans-Am was noisy, its muffler hanging down. A race track security guard also reported that Medina had sent him to replace the muffler of his black Trans-Am on the day of the murder. Medina was convicted, and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

THE SECOND TRIAL

Many observers credited dissatisfaction with México’s dominant party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), especially in its record of bringing powerful criminals to justice, with the loss of the governor’s post in Baja California in the election after the Félix murder. Ruffo, mayor of Ensenada at the time of the killing, became the first non-PRI governor in more than 60 years. During the campaign, he had repeatedly promised to find and prosecute everyone involved in the journalist’s killing. He said he never had to bring up the case. Journalists and citizens brought it up at his every campaign stop, so intense in Baja California was the interest in seeing justice done in the Félix case.

Once in office, Ruffo’s newly appointed prosecutors and a newly named team of police investigators set out to catch Vera. Although early police information, as reported by local journalists, indicated that Palestina had been hiding at a ranch owned by Hank González, it was later discovered that he had fled to the United States and was living in Los Angeles. The focus of the police and prosecutors was the capture and prosecution of Vera.

Gov. Ruffo named a pair of experienced police investigators to head his administration’s efforts. "Soon little pieces of evidence came up around the race track," Ruffo said in February 1996, days after announcing his candidacy for the national leadership of the National Action Party. "We kept finding clues about Vera, the head guard of Jorge Hank Rhon. We got to Vera’s lover. In time we learned that this woman was carrying monthly allowances from the race track to this guy in Los Angeles. Once we were sure of the information, we tracked her." Once Vera had been located, Baja California police and U.S. immigration agents worked together to get him back to México for trial. Vera was caught as he boarded a bus. Carrying illegal U.S. documentation, he was expelled. Baja California authorities, waiting for Vera at the border, charged him with the murder of Félix.

Antonio Vera Palestina was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. "The principal piece of evidence that allowed us to convict Vera Palestina was the version, or the statements, made by Victoriano Medina. Medina, from the moment of his arrest, admitting that he caused Félix Miranda’s death, and that he was accompanied by Vera Palestina," said Miguel Angel Barud Martínez, who was the judge in the Vera trial.

Barud said this early testimony was important in Vera’s case despite the fact that Medina later said the confession was beaten out of him by the police. Despite Medina’s retraction, the interview in which Medina had confessed was viewed as important in Vera’s trial, largely because several pieces of corroborating evidence backed it up. Two witnesses placed Vera in Medina’s Trans-Am as it drove away from the scene of the crime immediately after the gunshots, Barud said. According to the former police chief, Romero Meza, these witnesses were the police chief’s own employees who were working outside the house that morning. Another important piece of evidence, Barud said, that supported the police’s case against both Medina and Vera was a taped interview with Vera’s wife, in which she confirmed the suspicions about the two men and intimated that a third man and the race track administration were involved.

The Ruffo administration (1989-1995) ended with no further progress in the case. Prosecutors and police were not able to link the race track money transfers to the crime. Members of the administration suspected Hank Rhon was involved, but they had no concrete evidence. "My prosecutors felt we could try to acquire an apprehension order, but the case was light," Ruffo said. "If there was a planner of this, or if someone gave the order to have ‘El Gato’ slain, it has been rather difficult to prove."

One state prosecutor who served under Gov. Ruffo said there was never sufficient evidence to prosecute anyone other than Medina and Vera. No hard evidence, he said, backed up the commonly held opinion that someone had hired the killers for the crime. "It is a fact that people say it, but that does not make it a fact," Víctor Vázquez said. "We hit a wall. We reached a point where we could not get any further because there was no proof. The problem, if there was one, was in the beginning." The lack of evidence stemmed from the police’s decision not to investigate anyone other than Vera and Medina. Before convicting Vera, Barud, the judge, examined the race track’s accounting records, in an unsuccessful attempt to determine whether the $10,000 Vera cashed the day of the murder really went to pay security guards. He was the first person involved in the case to take the trouble to examine the race track’s accounting books to determine the nature of the payments made to the killers. He was unable to come to any clear conclusions.

The predominant opinion in the Tijuana legal, political and journalistic communities is that someone other than Medina and Vera planned or ordered the murder of Félix. "I do not feel that we reached the bottom of this case, and it is not that I did not want to," Barud said. "I sincerely had every intention to reach the final consequences of the case, but I found myself facing legal and practical limits." The limited scope of the criminal investigation, which essentially halted once Medina told investigators he was guilty, is the widely cited reason for the probe never reached the person ultimately responsible, the "intellectual author" of the murder. Ironically, this same investigation was initially praised by local Tijuana journalist associations and resulted in Gov. Leyva Mortera awarding police director Romero Meza that 100,000-peso reward.

Blancornelas, co- director of Zeta, said the Ruffo administration’s political will to resolve the case dissolved after Vera’s conviction. A concerted effort to track the fugitive was transformed after the trial into a vague mix of veiled accusations and promises to keep pushing for justice. As the country’s lone non-PRI governor, Ruffo had, at best, an uneasy relationship with the federal authorities.

During his administration state and federal police fought a gun battle in which each group was accused of providing protection to powerful drug smugglers. Reports circulated among journalists that Ruffo’s life was in danger. "We maintain and we have published our opinion that the Ruffo government’s political will disappeared when they caught the material author of the crime," Blancornelas said . "After that point they were afraid. The government was afraid of Hank González and of Hank Rhon. That is all there is to it."

THE CASE’S CURRENT STATUS

In February 1996, the head Baja California prosecutor in Tijuana, Jesus Alberto Osuna Lafarga, said that the Félix killing was considered an open case. But there was nothing prosecutors could do until the police brought them new information. The Tijuana police commander, Capt. Antonio Torres Miranda, said he had no personnel working on the case. "Judicially, the case has been closed against the people named in the original investigation. We would need an order from the prosecutor to resume investigation, and then we would have to start over, from the beginning," Torres said. "Without a statement by the men who have been convicted, we have nothing to guide us in any further investigation."

A page appears every week in Zeta under the heading "Un Poco de Algo," asking Hank Rhon why his bodyguard killed "El Gato." Another line directed at the current governor, Héctor Terán Terán, asks whether the current Baja California government will find out who was the "intellectual author" of the murder. The governor declined to be interviewed for this IAPA investigation, and did not respond to written questions submitted to his office. "Morally, and as journalists, we are pushing, but we are not an official accuser," Blancornelas said. "What we can do, and what we have done is a journalist’s investigation. It is so simple. The cars were from the race track. The killers went from the scene to the race track. The weapons used were from the race track. The killers were working for the owner of the race track. If something has the feet of a duck, the beak of a duck, and quacks like a duck... it’s a duck."

Hank Rhon, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this report. His spokesman, Francisco Ramírez Guerrero, also serves as the director of El Heraldo, the daily newspaper owned by the race track company. Ramírez said only Zeta is advancing the theory that Hank Rhon was connected with the killing. Ramírez said that Félix, at the time of his death, was planning to leave Zeta and was involved in angry discussions about money with his colleagues at the newspaper. "Mr. Hank Rhon was called to testify, and he has continued living here in Tijuana. He has never hidden from the authorities," Ramírez said. "The two people convicted were responsible for the crime."

Closure in the judicial case outlined in the original police investigation seemed to satisfy some members of the local press who originally expressed outrage and demanded justice. Other than the weekly notice in Zeta, local and national press attention focuses on the case only occasionally, and parenthetically — whenever an occasion arises to write about the flamboyant and controversial Hank Rhon. Only then do articles mention the frequently-held belief that the man ultimately responsible for the murder of Félix remains free, and that many people suspect that Hank was involved because the two men convicted of the crime were his employees. The daily El Heraldo was purchased by the race track business in the years after the murder. El Heraldo had been among the most aggressive newspapers in reporting the crime and pushing for justice. An El Heraldo journalist now serves as president of the leading local association of journalists.

A close friend of Félix, journalist Oscar Genel, said that he traced the declining interest of other journalists each year at the memorial service held on the anniversary of the killing. "On the first anniversary many people congregated at the site of the crime, including representatives of the journalists’ groups and others. Every year fewer people go. This year I imagine it will just be those of us who knew him well," Genel said. "How is it possible that they kill one of us and the rest remain silent?"

CHRONOLOGY: HÉCTOR FÉLIX MIRANDA

April 20, 1988
Héctor "El Gato" Félix Miranda is murdered in his car on his way to work. Killers shoot him twice at close range with a shotgun.

April 21
Journalists and others march in Tijuana, demanding justice. The IAPA, among other professional associations, demands justice in a communication to Baja California Gov. Miguel de la Madrid.

April 30
Police arrest Victoriano Medina Moreno and charge him with murder. Medina confesses and implicates his boss in the Agua Caliente race track security office, Antonio Vera Palestina, in the crime. Medina is convicted the following year.

May 1
Jorge Hank Rhon, principal owner and administrator of the race track, holds a news conference to deny involvement in the murder. Police declare Hank Rhon is not a suspect.

May 3
Police search the race track and find little evidence.

May 2, 1990
Vera is detained by Mexican authorities after spending two years as a fugitive.

March 28, 1991
Vera is convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Since police never identified anyone nor suspected anyone else as mastermind or financial backer of the crime, the police viewed the case as resolved. Although prose-cutors declared the case still open, they never ordered an investigation into the involvement of anyone other than Medina and Vera.