Distant link in a chain of tragedy

They found her on the bathroom floor, one hand clutching a toilet plunger. The handle of a 14-inch kitchen knife protruded from her neck.

Soon, her lifeless face was staring from tabloid covers all over Mexico City. At least that’s what friends told me. I couldn’t bring myself to look.

Alejandra Dehesa had been my assistant in the Mexico City bureau of Newsweek magazine. She worked from my house, and died there.

Sergio Dorantes, a noted news photographer who was once my colleague and friend, was charged with her murder. A crime of passion, investigators called it. After three years as a fugitive in Northern California, he returned to Mexico last fall to face the charges. He is in a Mexican prison, waiting for a court to decide his guilt or innocence.

Sergio insists he is the victim of an “infamous fabrication,” and his cause has been taken up by human rights advocates and one of the country’s most prominent defense attorneys.

“The false accusation destroyed my career, wrecked my life and is sending me into bankruptcy,” he wrote me recently.

There is no smoking gun or even convincing physical evidence against him. I doubt such a case would ever get to trial in a U.S. courtroom. Yet I have found it difficult to shake the feeling that somehow I set in motion this whole chain of tragic events. Sergio and Alejandra knew each other only because of me.

During my four years in Mexico, I spent more time with them than with almost anyone else.

I realize now that I never really knew either of them.

--

I met Sergio in 1998 in New York. I was preparing to move to Mexico to take over the Newsweek bureau, and he dropped in to introduce himself.

I was 27. He was 52, a freelance photographer in Mexico City. His work had appeared in leading newspapers and magazines. He had covered revolutions and earthquakes and hobnobbed with heads of state.

Now, he was laying on the charm, looking to secure his flow of Newsweek assignments. He told me he was godfather to the children of a colleague who once held my job.

In the beginning, I needed him: He translated in addition to taking pictures. But even after I trusted my Spanish, we worked together all the time.

We once rented a Cessna to deliver us to a rocky mountaintop airstrip in the Sierra Madre to retrace the path of a slain American journalist. We hiked more than 10 hours to the cliff-side village where the alleged killers had once lived. We slept in their empty straw beds.

On the way back to the airstrip, Sergio became so dehydrated that I had to rent a mule to carry him.

The plane arrived on schedule to pick us up, and after we climbed above the mountains, the pilot gave me a few instructions and briefly handed over the controls.

“Look, I’m flying,” I said, turning toward Sergio. A look of fright crossed his face, followed by a smile. I knew then that we were friends.

Up in the mountains, Sergio made a point of telling the Indians we met that his roots were indigenous. Back in his native Mexico City, it was a part of his identity he struggled to transcend.

He was the son of a bus driver and a maid. After dropping out of college in the late 1960s, he moved to Europe and worked as a mechanic on Formula One race car teams.

He wound up in England as a chef, all the while pursuing his first love, photography. Eventually he became a paparazzo. He told me that he once sneaked into Rod Stewart’s house dressed as a British Telecom worker and that he’d been punched by Mike Tyson.

In 1981, he joined a throng of photographers trying to snap a picture of Prince Charles’ bride-to-be at a primary school. Unable to get a good vantage point, he crawled through people’s legs to the front of the pack and shot from ground level.

The next day, a tabloid editor called to congratulate him: His shot captured the outline of Diana’s legs as the sun beamed through her skirt.

Sergio’s big break came after he moved back to Mexico City. A 1985 earthquake killed at least 10,000. His photos of the devastation appeared in publications around the world.

He cast himself as a bon vivant, going on about wine and French food and his Burberry raincoat. He favored foreign women. In England, he had married a Scot. They divorced after six years, but he wound up with a British passport.

“I’m British,” he would insist, displaying the passport as proof that he had escaped the circumstances of his birth.

Sergio never quite fit into the world he aspired to join.

His insecurities could make him hard to be around. I’d seen him berate waiters, airline attendants and other compatriots he felt he had risen above.

When I’d compliment the work of another photographer, he’d respond like a wounded child: “What about my pictures?”

In late-night conversations in remote hotels, he lamented his failed relationships. Once he was engaged to a Canadian woman, he said. They split up after he canceled their wedding to go off on an assignment.

He advised me not to let a good woman slip away if I was fortunate enough to find one.

--

The Newsweek bureau was a room on the first floor of my house, an airy Spanish colonial with bougainvillea tumbling over its courtyard walls. I had one employee: Alejandra.

Her European features and firm command of English hinted at an upper-class heritage. Yet during her job interview, she addressed me in a nervous, formal tone that suggested she desperately needed the position.

The contradiction began to make sense when Alejandra, 42, told me she was a widow. She said her husband had died in a car crash and she was raising their daughter on her own.

Her experience was in marketing, not journalism. I told myself it didn’t matter. I needed somebody to keep the books, make plane reservations and schedule my appointments, not a hungry reporter who would get bored with clerical work.

I soon realized that I had made a mistake. She never grasped the pressure of deadlines or the pushiness sometimes required to track down people I wanted to see.

Yet I couldn’t bring myself to replace her. Eventually, I worked upstairs, communicating with her by intercom.

In the fall of 2002, I left for a year-long journalism fellowship at Stanford University. In my absence, Alejandra reported to work daily. She paid the rent, scanned the newspapers for stories worth clipping and fed the squirrels in the courtyard.

On July 2, 2003, she didn’t come home, and her daughter Christian, then 15, got nervous. Family members visited my house the next night. Her car was parked in the garage. But nobody answered the door.

They stopped a police car on the street and talked officers into breaking in.

The television was on in the office.

As an officer was trying to shake open the locked bathroom door, Alejandra’s relatives spotted a drop of blood on the knob. Inside, police found her body at the foot of blood-spattered walls.

The next morning, I was awakened by one of my editors, calling from New York with the news. I rushed back to Mexico.

Ricardo Sandoval, an American friend of mine working for the Dallas Morning News in Mexico City, had already heard what happened. Knowing that Sergio frequently worked for Newsweek, he called to tell him.

“There was a pause,” Sandoval later told me. “It was a very unusual pause. The pause was the kind of pause after which you’d expect . . . some expression of emotion.”

“But he just said, ‘I can’t talk right now.’ ”

A few hours later, Sergio called back, Sandoval recalled.

“He said, ‘I’m going to tell you something that no one knew about, and I’m going to tell you why I need a lawyer.’ ”

Unknown to me and almost everybody in the foreign press corps, Sergio and Alejandra had been married for the last 2 1/2 years. They had separated seven months before her death.

--

Alejandra had probably let her attacker in the front door, investigators determined. They may have shared some tacos and mineral water.

The killer had grabbed a chef’s knife from my kitchen drawer and jabbed it into her chest several times before slicing her throat and driving the blade into her neck.

At first, it seemed the case would be resolved quickly. Police arrested a 37-year-old taxi driver who occasionally ran errands for Alejandra.

The two of them were in a financial dispute. A month earlier, she had sent him to withdraw 7,200 pesos (about $700) from her bank, but he claimed he was robbed on the way back. Alejandra had been hounding him for the money.

The man told police that he had stopped by the house at 5 p.m. July 2 to pay her 1,000 pesos toward the debt.

A few drops of blood were found on a seat of his taxi, in the trunk and on one of his shoes.

Police never found the 1,000 pesos he said he left in the house. But a few days after his arrest, he was released.

He told police the blood on the seat was his own, from hemorrhoids, and that the rest was from his dog, which had been in heat. There was too little to test whether it matched Alejandra’s blood type, an investigator said.

I was stunned. If the taxi driver was telling the truth, wouldn’t police have found the money he claimed to have left?

The police might have stolen it, an investigator told me.

The authorities had one other suspect: Sergio.

His secret marriage to Alejandra cast doubt on everything I thought I knew about them.

I recall introducing them. Sergio stiffly extended his hand. Not long after, he told me he found her attractive.

“Leave her alone, Sergio,” I said, only partly joking.

From then on, he treated her like a receptionist, at least when I was around.

When Sergio moved into a new house, he’d put off my suggestion that I visit. At the same time, Alejandra told me her home phone was out of service.

The truth was that she and her daughter Christian had moved in with Sergio, and nobody wanted me to know.

--

A month after the killing, a 22-year-old messenger appeared in the prosecutor’s office with a story to tell: On the night of Alejandra’s death, he had been looking for an address in the neighborhood when a man in a dark suit stormed out of my house and crashed into him. Breathing hard, the man hopped in a car and nearly collided with another vehicle as he sped away.

The messenger gave a description that fit Sergio perfectly, down to his acne scars.

In January 2004, prosecutors issued a warrant for Sergio’s arrest. Immediately, he disappeared.

Sandoval received an e-mail the following week: “Please Rick, I might not be a perfect man but I did not commited any crime.”

Like many of the e-mails Sergio would send to friends (though not me) over the next few years, it was labeled “From: JAMES BOND” and signed “Mozart.”

Occasionally I would talk with old friends about the case and check out www.sergiodorantes.com, on which Sergio, wherever he was, argued that he was being framed.

Several years passed, and I came to accept that I might never know the truth. Then on Feb. 20, 2007, U.S. marshals arrested Sergio in the apple-growing town of Sebastopol in Northern California.

He was living with a woman named Barbara Dunham. Twenty years earlier, he’d met her at the Mexico City Airport and taken her with him on an assignment. Over the years, they stayed in touch. She was 63, six years his senior, when he arrived at her door. He grew a ponytail and goatee to disguise himself.

Several months later, they got married.

Sergio enthralled his wife’s friends with stories of photographing Fidel Castro and the Chiapas uprising. Eventually, Sergio and Barbara broke the news to their friends that he was a fugitive. The friends rallied behind him, portraying the case as the persecution of a crusading journalist.

Sergio had applied for asylum, arguing that in Mexico he would be tortured until he confessed. Word leaked to the Mexican government, which demanded his arrest and extradition.

The week Sergio was picked up, a year-old police videotape surfaced on which the messenger recanted his story. He said an investigator had bribed him to implicate Sergio. After six months in an Alameda County jail, Sergio was freed on bail after Barbara and two friends pledged $1.72 million in equity in their homes.

The extradition case took bizarre twists. For a time, Mexican officials denied in court that the messenger had recanted, even as authorities back home were investigating an investigator for allegedly bribing the witness.

Last fall, the messenger returned to his original story, prompting Mexican prosecutors to arrest him for lying about having lied. The U.S. judge in the extradition case ordered Sergio back to jail.

Instead, he voluntarily returned to Mexico in October to face the charges.

--

Soon after, I paid a visit to Sergio’s San Francisco lawyer to see the evidence in the case: three file boxes of witness statements, forensics reports and other records.

The files reveal a nest of ambiguities, conflicting accounts and gaps in evidence. Police officers and news photographers tramped through my house for hours after Alejandra’s body was found, compromising the crime scene.

Sergio’s lawyer, Alonso Aguilar Zinser, said it is difficult to trust even the official time of death -- around 7 p.m. on July 2, 2003 -- which was determined by a crime-scene technician, not a doctor.

The prosecution’s case against Sergio is circumstantial: a strained relationship, his inability to produce an airtight alibi, his initial refusal to submit DNA samples, his flight from the country.

Sergio says he was home sending e-mails on the night Alejandra was killed, a claim his lawyer is trying to document.

Bloody footprints found in the house do not match any of Sergio’s shoes that police examined. As for the suspicious taxi driver, he vanished after the messenger recanted.

Still, an unflattering picture of Sergio emerged from the case file and from interviews I conducted with Alejandra’s friends and family.

Within months of their wedding, Alejandra was complaining about him to Monica Gutschi, a Mexico-based Canadian journalist she had befriended years earlier. Gutschi, who was never interviewed by police, told me that Alejandra said Sergio had threatened to “break her knees” if she ever tried to leave him.

There is nothing to indicate Sergio ever hit Alejandra. But relations became tense enough that she and Gutschi devised a plan for her to leave him in case it ever became necessary. By Gutschi’s account, Alejandra went so far as to tell Sergio that their friendship had ended, so he would not look for her at Gutschi’s house.

My most disturbing interview was with Christian, now 21. She said Sergio had subjected her and her mother to daily “psychological and emotional violence.”

She described tiny cruelties he would use to exert his dominance: picking his nose and placing the contents in Christian’s soup, or shaking a dirty broom over her head after she bathed.

On several occasions, she said, Sergio locked her in an empty room for hours.

“She was really afraid of him,” Christian said of her mother. “She couldn’t help me.”

Sergio, in a recent letter to me from prison, said that “I never had the sort of behavior that Christian attaches to me.” He suggested that she was being manipulated by her family.

Christian told police that during one fight, Sergio warned her that she would end up like her father. He told her something she had never heard before: that her father did not die in a car accident, as Alejandra had long maintained.

Her father, a manic-depressive, put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

--

Being on foreign soil can make you feel as vulnerable as a child. People like Sergio were my navigators. I trusted him. But perhaps we were merely serving each other’s interests.

“I think it is natural that you did not know many things about us, you were not close with us,” Sergio wrote me.

Asked why he had kept his marriage to Alejandra a secret, he said I had left him with the impression that he would not get any more assignments from Newsweek if he became involved with her -- a message I never intended to convey.

If his explanation was true, it was sadly enlightening -- of the power I wielded over the two of them, and of the distance between us.

“Don’t feel guilty,” Christian said when I asked her if I should have sensed something amiss. “There is nothing you could have done to stop it.”

--

As I read the letters sent in Sergio’s defense to the judge in his extradition case, one jumped out.

Carole Craig, an American living in Dublin, asserted that Sergio could not receive a fair trial in Mexico. She added: “I have known Sergio for 23 years. We have a child together.”

I vividly recalled Sergio confiding in me that he regretted never having become a father.

Craig told me she met Sergio in Mexico City in the early 1980s, when he was a swashbuckler in snakeskin cowboy boots and she was a freelance journalist. The relationship lasted just a few months.

“Intimacy scared him so much that if he felt it, he would deliberately say something to piss you off,” she said.

Though they fought often, she said she never felt physically threatened.

When Craig became pregnant in 1985, Sergio demanded that she have an abortion, she said. “He felt it would be a horrible drag on. . . . his career.” Craig moved back to Dublin, gave birth to a daughter, Gabrielle Alexandria Craig, and raised her on her own.

The daughter, now a circus acrobat living in London, goes by Alex. In her 23 years, she’s seen Sergio just a few times. Her earliest memory is from a Dublin playground when she was about 6. She wanted him to push her on a swing, but he didn’t want to dirty his shoes.

After becoming a fugitive, Sergio reached out to her.

“You need to know that despite the distance and silence, I do love you!” he wrote in an e-mail in April 2006. “I do regret not having been a good father to you. I live full of regrets.”

Alex was living in San Francisco at the time of his arrest, and she visited him in jail. He said he was innocent and that he hoped she believed him.

“You are an amazing person,” he kept telling her.

Alex didn’t know how to respond, considering that he was essentially a stranger.

“I don’t know him,” Alex said. “But at the same time you get a certain feeling about people. I don’t think he would kill somebody.

“You know him better than I do,” she said to me. “You don’t think he was capable of doing it, do you?”

--

alan.zarembo@latimes.com