![]() I don’t let them touch me.”ĭance halls charging a small sum for a spin aren’t anything new, of course. “They propose foul things while you’re dancing. “But a lot of older guys come too,” she adds, mouth twisting. Sorting her makeup in the ladies’ room at Houston’s Fiesta Ballroom, the Salvadoran office-cleaner says: “I like it here because you can earn a living without doing anything bad. Other meseras, such as 26-year-old Elia, strike a balance between pleasure and the knowledge they’re here by necessity. My husband drops me off and picks me up right at the door.” “I only drink mineral water, and the bartender tints it with a little beer. “This is purely work,” Sandra says in a soft voice. A tiny woman in stiletto heels, zip-up top and inch-long nails, she chats with other dancers as if they’re homemakers on a night out. By the time the two cases were linked, the stranger had vanished.įor Sandra, a 32-year-old Honduran with three kids and an unemployed husband, each night at Mike’s is a negotiation between hunger and dignity. DNA evidence shows both women had had sex with the same man before dying. Six months earlier, 19-year-old mesera Maria Perales left another club, the Tapatio Ballroom, apparently with the same stranger. On her arms, the once-delicate skin was so torn her sister swathed them in white evening gloves before sending the body home. The day after Hernandez left with the stranger, her corpse was found at a Dallas building site. “She’s not going to go out with some 40-year-old construction worker that, instead of bathing, just slapped on some Aqua Velva.” “It would have taken quite a silver-tongued devil to get her to go voluntarily,” Trevino says. ![]() Hernandez, other dancers say, likely didn’t work as a prostitute, as some women did. Solemn-mannered and graceful, Hernandez had started at Mike’s only four months earlier. So as dark turned to dawn, it was not surprising that Olivia Hernandez walked out the door with him. Some witnesses remember him wearing a cast others recall the hand was scarred or perhaps twisted. The stranger’s only imperfection, Trevino says, might have been his right hand. are thinking, ‘When’s he going to ask me to dance?’ ” You might have a bunch of good-looking women and then you have one that’s a head-turner. We’re talking physically and personality. “We’re looking,” he says, “at a particularly attractive young man. “His clothes matched his personality: well groomed, well kept. Though he wore Western attire like the rest of the club’s rural clients, the stranger’s clothes were immaculate and enviably new. From the cadences of his Spanish, he was clearly Mexican though witnesses couldn’t place his exact origins, he addressed women bartenders in a quiet, courtly way that to Trevino suggests he left Mexico recently. The killer, police think, must have known this culture, known how to twist it to his advantage. The men may try groping in the crush of the dance floor but show the reserve of small town suitors when they approach a partner for the first time. Unlike women at Anglo strip bars, they interact closely with clients, re-creating the mood of a thousand weekend dances in Mexico. Fluttering near the dance floor, meseras, or waitresses, offer service as paid drinking or dance partners. Both his beauty and the taxi club culture, it seems, conspired to help him commit murder.Ĭatering mostly to recent immigrants, taxi clubs offer a haven for the newcomers’ rituals, tastes and anxieties. He looked to be in his 20s, witnesses say, and he stood out, exuding a glamour Mike’s patrons saw mostly in telenovelas. ![]() It was into this world of desire and desperation that the stranger with green eyes appeared early last spring. And here, surrounded by music from home, a woman with high heels and maybe some dreams of her own can at least earn enough to survive. Here, within its rough walls, a Mexican laborer with $12 can buy a dance and a woman’s embrace. Tucked in a barren corner of East Dallas, Mike’s is a traditional taxi club, where women rent their time, taxi-like, song by song. And to each one, he’s a dream come alive until she suddenly, appallingly, understands who he is.įolk tales are far from most people’s thoughts on a typical evening at Mike’s. Each time, he lures a dancer into his arms. In these folk tales, he’s always the same: tall, well dressed, with fair skin and light eyes, irresistible. Because, for generations, in nightclubs like these, Latinas have been telling their own stories of a handsome stranger. What Trevino didn’t know is that he could have assembled an almost identical profile listening to whispers at dance halls and cantinas throughout the Southwest.
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