On October 5, 2007, the family of Alejandra Galeana Garavito, thirty-two, a mother of two, reported her missing in Mexico City. Neighbors had last seen her with the man she had been seeing for several months, José Luis Calva Zepeda, who lived in apartment 17 at 198 Mosqueta Street in the Guerrero district. On October 8 police came to the apartment. He tried to escape by going out the window and fell to the sidewalk, suffering a head injury and a concussion, and was taken to the Xoco hospital, where he gave his first statement.
Inside, investigators found her dismembered body. Parts were in the refrigerator and in a cereal box, the rest in a wardrobe, and on the stove was a frying pan holding cooked flesh seasoned with lime, beside a plate and cutlery. The prosecutor, Gustavo Salas, said it led them to presume he had eaten it. Calva admitted killing her after a fight, saying he had been drunk and on drugs, but denied eating any of her; he said he had cooked the remains to feed to stray dogs as a way of getting rid of the body. Reports of the time said the two had quarreled because she refused to have a child with him.
He was born in Mexico City on June 20, 1969, and styled himself a writer, playwright and poet, courting women with flowers and verses. In the apartment were horror stories, a pirated DVD of Hannibal and manuscripts, one dedicated to himself as the greatest creation of the universe, and a text described as an autobiography. The press called him the cannibal of the Guerrero and the cannibal poet, and the material fed a good deal of speculation.
Investigators linked him to two earlier deaths of women found dismembered. Verónica Consuelo Martínez Casarrubia, thirty-one, a former girlfriend, was found in Chimalhuacán in the State of Mexico, and investigators believed another man had helped cut up her body. A woman believed to be a sex worker, known only as La Jarocha or La Costeña, who had visited him on Mosqueta Street, was found in April 2007 on Lerdo Street in Tlatelolco, packed in two plastic bags. Neither case was brought to trial.
On October 24, 2007, prosecutors formally charged him with the aggravated homicide of Alejandra Galeana Garavito and the desecration of her body, and he was held at the Reclusorio Oriente, where he was shown at the court's window to hear the charges and sign his statement. Some accounts say he was accused of all three killings and some that he was later sentenced to fifty years; the record is that he faced a possible fifty-year sentence and was never tried.
On December 11, 2007, he was found hanged with his belt in his cell. The official finding was suicide, but the autopsy showed cocaine in his system and bruises on his body, and his sister maintained that other prisoners had killed him. "I don't wish death on anyone, but I feel this is divine justice," Alejandra's mother, Soledad Garavito, told the Associated Press.