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.
