Dancing for Pay, Dying by the Hand of a Demon

The stranger at Mike’s nightclub seemed a daydream made flesh.

To the men, rural Mexicans newly arrived seeking work, he had all they longed for themselves: manly good looks, fine cowboy clothes, the confidence of a rich man or maybe an Anglo. Unlike the other patrons, he didn’t appear to be paying the woman beside him. He never even asked her to dance.

Eyeing the light-skinned stranger from bar stools, the women just hoped he’d ask them to dance. They liked the way he sipped Coke instead of swilling himself blind with beer. They noticed his wavy hair, slicked like singer Ricky Martin’s, and his eyes glinting green under the bare lights. Even a woman here strictly to work, a woman frantic to feed several children, could dream about someone like this.

But the stranger who showed up at Mike’s last summer may have been too dangerous to dream of. He was, police think, a killer. Sometime after midnight, he escorted his companion, 23-year-old Olivia Hernandez, out the door. The next day, she was found strangled and naked, carelessly tossed near a public thoroughfare.

Six months earlier, police say, the stranger had left a similar club with 19-year-old Maria Perales. She too was found the next day, her strangled nude body flung near a train track. Both women, witnesses say, left with the stranger willingly.

So lean and handsome, so striking was he in the murky bar light, the stranger was quickly described by one witness after another, says Dallas police Det. Jesse Trevino.

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. Because, for generations, in nightclubs like these, Latinas have been telling their own stories of a handsome stranger.

In these folk tales, he’s always the same: tall, well dressed, with fair skin and light eyes, irresistible. Each time, he lures a dancer into his arms. And to each one, he’s a dream come alive until she suddenly, appallingly, understands who he is.

In the stories, the stranger is Satan.

$12 Buys a Dance and an Embrace

Folk tales are far from most people’s thoughts on a typical evening at Mike’s. 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. Here, within its rough walls, a Mexican laborer with $12 can buy a dance and a woman’s embrace. 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.

It was into this world of desire and desperation that the stranger with green eyes appeared early last spring. He looked to be in his 20s, witnesses say, and he stood out, exuding a glamour Mike’s patrons saw mostly in telenovelas. Both his beauty and the taxi club culture, it seems, conspired to help him commit murder.

Catering mostly to recent immigrants, taxi clubs offer a haven for the newcomers’ rituals, tastes and anxieties. Fluttering near the dance floor, meseras, or waitresses, offer service as paid drinking or dance partners. Unlike women at Anglo strip bars, they interact closely with clients, re-creating the mood of a thousand weekend dances in Mexico. 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.

The killer, police think, must have known this culture, known how to twist it to his advantage. 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. Though he wore Western attire like the rest of the club’s rural clients, the stranger’s clothes were immaculate and enviably new.

“His clothes matched his personality: well groomed, well kept. He stood out,” Trevino says.

“We’re looking,” he says, “at a particularly attractive young man. We’re talking physically and personality. You might have a bunch of good-looking women and then you have one that’s a head-turner. It was the same with this guy. [The women] are thinking, ‘When’s he going to ask me to dance?’ ”

The stranger’s only imperfection, Trevino says, might have been his right hand. Some witnesses remember him wearing a cast; others recall the hand was scarred or perhaps twisted.

So as dark turned to dawn, it was not surprising that Olivia Hernandez walked out the door with him. Solemn-mannered and graceful, Hernandez had started at Mike’s only four months earlier. Hernandez, other dancers say, likely didn’t work as a prostitute, as some women did. She didn’t need to.

“It would have taken quite a silver-tongued devil to get her to go voluntarily,” Trevino says. “She’s not going to go out with some 40-year-old construction worker that, instead of bathing, just slapped on some Aqua Velva.”

The day after Hernandez left with the stranger, her corpse was found at a Dallas building site. On her arms, the once-delicate skin was so torn her sister swathed them in white evening gloves before sending the body home.

Six months earlier, 19-year-old mesera Maria Perales left another club, the Tapatio Ballroom, apparently with the same stranger. Her body was found the next day. DNA evidence shows both women had had sex with the same man before dying. By the time the two cases were linked, the stranger had vanished.

A Choice Between Dignity, Hunger

For 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. 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. But her round eyes dart fretfully.

“This is purely work,” Sandra says in a soft voice. “I only drink mineral water, and the bartender tints it with a little beer. . . . My husband drops me off and picks me up right at the door.”

Does he mind that she works here?

“He used to,” she says. “Then things got tight. He doesn’t say anything now.”

Other meseras, such as 26-year-old Elia, strike a balance between pleasure and the knowledge they’re here by necessity.

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. The young guys are nice. They always treat me respectfully.

“But a lot of older guys come too,” she adds, mouth twisting. “They propose foul things while you’re dancing. I don’t let them touch me.”

Dance halls charging a small sum for a spin aren’t anything new, of course. Popular in Gold Rush San Francisco and 1920s Chicago, taxi clubs recently have seen a small renaissance in downtown Los Angeles.

But among Mexicans and Mexican Americans in border towns, taxi dancing has thrived at least since the 1920s. Two decades ago, as Mexicans and Central Americans began migrating north in great numbers, the clubs followed, now popping up as far north as Oregon.

While it’s never been hard to buy sex at these clubs, their purpose is more subtle than those of brothels, strip clubs or singles’ bars. Taxi club owners, who sometimes include former dancers, generally don’t employ the dancers directly, instead encouraging their presence because it boosts attendance and drinking. To lonely minimum-wage-earning males, sleeping in shifts in crowded apartments, sometimes a dance and a conversation is really enough.

Club culture varies from city to city. In Dallas, for example, men often tip after each dance. But for the mesera, the real money comes when she gently leads her partner to the bar, where the house typically pays her 30% each time a man buys a $12 beer.

At Houston’s Fiesta Ballroom, though, women work only the dance floor. Younger and generally more sophisticated than the dancers at Mike’s, they wear cocktail dresses, Lycra bodysuits, midriff tops. A disco ball whirling above them, the house musicians motor through absurdly short songs, mixing accordion-based nortenos with hectic cumbias. After each tune, men in crisp Western shirts hand their partners folded bills.

“The majority of the guys here are lonely, single and want to embrace a woman while dancing,” says Jose around midnight one Saturday. A hotel worker who visits Fiesta each weekend, he’s savoring a smoke under the club’s big neon sign.

“Here,” he says, “it doesn’t matter how you look or if you have money. It doesn’t matter if you’re tall or short, skinny or fat.”

Unlike most at Fiesta, Jose has lived in the United States almost two decades. But despite his pleated pants and loafers, like most of Texas’ Latino immigrants, Jose comes from rural stock. He still comes here, he says quietly, because “it seems easier to have conversations here, for money.”

Well known to male immigrants, Fiesta first entered the consciousness of Anglo Houston last fall, when activist and former nun Mary Jo May alerted police that several 14- and 15-year-olds she mentored had been creeping out nightly to taxi dance.

Mostly second-generation Latinas whose parents work long hours, the girls saw a limited range of female role models, May says. In at least one case that police found, a girl was introduced to the clubs by her mother. Though the teenagers liked taxi dancing for pocket money, they also did it for the attention and the thrill, May says.

In the wake of the findings, a horrified City Council outlawed taxi dancing with anyone younger than 21. Admitting they have no idea of taxi dancing’s prevalence in Houston’s hundreds of licensed dance halls, members of a new city task force fashioned a survey asking students about the practice. And in September, a new state law will go into effect to punish club owners who permit underage taxi dancing by rescinding their licenses.

Desperation Drove Her to Club

When Olivia Hernandez first arrived in Dallas from Chihuahua eight years ago, it was meant to be just a visit. But, says her sister, 36-year-old Maria Martinez, somehow the visit dragged on. Hernandez worked in a bar. She got pregnant; the boyfriend ran. She bore a second child by an older man; he was in jail on drug charges months after she gave birth.

With her husband in jail and two babies to support, Hernandez went to Mike’s out of desperation, her sister says. She always left early, earning about $80 a night before slipping home to collect the children from their sitter.

Not even her sister, a Dallas beautician, knew of Hernandez’s taxi dancing until police told her.

“As a girl, she was very tranquil, very retiring. She always played alone,” Martinez recalls. In Dallas, she adds, “nobody knows what Oli suffered. She was alone by day and night with just the kids.”

When Martinez sent the body home to Mexico, she told her mother her sister had died in a car accident.

Maria Perales, on the other hand, was strong-willed, daring, educated and didn’t care who knew what she did for a living. She attended private schools before starting work as a hostess in Acapulco nightclubs at 17, says her sister-in-law, whose name is also Maria Perales.

Her parents, middle-class Mexicans who previously had lived in the United States, allowed Perales to stay in Mexico when they and their three other children came to Dallas three years ago. Delighted when Maria joined them here last year, they soon found themselves embroiled in fights over the taxi clubs.

“She was a show person. She just liked to go out and wanted to do her own thing,” her sister-in-law says. Taxi dancing “appealed to her.”

Five feet tall and bewitchingly slender, Perales loved the attention she got with her refined features and waist-length black hair. When she went clubbing, dressed in silks and short skirts, she’d carry a huge makeup case but no purse. “She was very outgoing; she had a lot of charisma,” her sister-in-law recalls. But, she adds, Perales also was utterly trusting.

So it’s easy to see how, late on a summer night, the dance floor churning with couples, a romantic teenager might think the handsomest man in the room was meant to be hers.

And it would take little more, in such a place, music washing the darkness like tropical rain, to make other errors, see other visions.

From California to Wisconsin, the tale is similar. In the 1970s, the story surfaced so often in South Texas that anthropologist Jose Limon wrote a book, “Dancing With the Devil.” And as recently as two years ago, some dancers say, the devil showed up in Dallas.

“It was Halloween, at the Casino Dallas nightclub,” Sandra recounts from the doorway at Mike’s. “My aunt was there. A gorgeous man asked a woman to dance, then she looked down and saw his feet. He had one chicken foot and one goat foot.”

Maria, owner of a nearby cantina, heard the same thing.

“I heard the woman levitated three or four feet,” Maria says, one eye on the men drifting through the door. “She opened her eyes, he let her go, and she fell to the floor. When they took her to the emergency room, her arms were full of scratches and burns. They say she died.”

The story whipped through the East Dallas community, and within months, the club’s clientele had ebbed nearly to nothing. Today, Casino Dallas is shuttered, driven from business.

Limon, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has studied dozens of such tales. In some of them, Satan just vanishes in a puff of blue sulfur. Sometimes the story’s flavor has a tantalizing ambivalence.

So he has goat feet. But he’s so handsome! In one South Texas dance hall, the women joked that if the devil asked them to dance, they’d just get him some little socks.

To sociologist Avelardo Valdez of the University of Texas at San Antonio, it makes perfect sense that a stranger from folklore resembles a real-life murder suspect. Those folk tales, Valdez thinks, are an indirect way dancers warn themselves of the sort of man to whom they’re most vulnerable.

“There’s a metaphor here, right?” says Valdez, who has studied taxi clubs along the border. “It doesn’t have to be the devil per se. It can be . . . somebody’s who’s psychotic, who’s charming and glib, who’s superficial. It’s the personification of the kind of devil who’s going to charm these ladies out of that place.

“That’s how these kinds of tales develop. There’s a validity to them if you take it as a warning.”

Limon agrees but thinks the tales also voice the romantic dreams of women forced to put their emotions aside. Taxi dancers may serve the needs of men, Limon says, but the women he interviewed would “like to meet a guy. They’d like to be married and have kids. The devil seems to be, in that conjunction, a projection of their desire.”

The consistent reference to light skin, Limon thinks, may express Latinos’ tension facing a white majority. Even in Mexico City, where the story also has surfaced, the description is similar, suggesting the menace and allure European faces have held there since Aztec times. By the same token, the stranger’s coloring could simply echo Mexicans’ modern-day idealization of green eyes and fair skin, seen every day in telenovelas.

Det. Trevino, for his part, looks mildly startled when told that his prime suspect in the slayings of two Dallas women sounds like nothing so much as an urban myth. Although he heard about the Casino Dallas episode a few years back, Trevino was unaware that it fit into any larger folkloric pattern.

A robust, talkative man, Trevino is far more interested in the real-life investigation. Progress has been vexingly slow, he says. Last month, after tracking one suspect over a year, police finally found him. The man was fair-skinned, green-eyed, a Mexican national. But DNA tests ruled him out.

The stranger, Trevino thinks, will return.

“I really believe this individual is killing for personal satisfaction,” he says. “And it’s for the hunt as much as the kill.”

As for the dancers, few either in Houston or Dallas had heard of devilish visitations anywhere else. But, anthropologists point out, that’s the nature of urban myths. Predatory men and vulnerable women, though, are familiar to anyone who makes a living in nightclubs.

Twenty-seven-year-old Susana, in skintight denim and indigo eyeliner, says she’s heard all about the handsome stranger. Everyone at Mike’s has.

“They’ve told me various women have died,” Susana says, shaking her head as if to fling out the images. “I don’t like to hear the story because it scares me.”

But, Susana insists, she is secure because she would never go home with a stranger. This is work; she doesn’t enjoy it, she says, thinking of men complaining about wives, work, their own loneliness. A single mother living alone and supporting three children in Mexico, Susana just focuses on the $200 she can earn on a good night.

And when it’s slow, a $50 night like tonight, she can lose herself in the dark, in the cumbias and the clopping merengues, and maybe dream a bit.

There’s no danger in that.