The Medical Student Who Killed His Own Family for Money

Medical Student Opens Door with Hammer, Knife, Machete Inside His Bag: The Eight Murders of Alex Maquera

December 20, 2004. Police arrive at a house in Tacna after a disappearance report and find a twenty-five-year-old medical student standing at the door with a canvas bag. Inside: a hammer, a knife, a machete, a sharpener. Inside the house: the body of Fidel Mina Mamani, beaten forty times. The contradiction that haunted investigators for years: did he kill for money, or was money just the excuse?

In this episode, we trace the documented timeline of Alex Maquera's homicides across 2004 and beyond. We examine the collision between his own confession-that he killed for theft and addiction-and the evidence that defies that logic: his murder of his own sister Priscila, her husband Rafael, and their four children in a single night, hours after the money was already secured. We explore the psychiatric profiles, the family history of violence, and the system failures that allowed the crimes to escalate and continue even after his arrest and imprisonment.

Victim: Fidel Mina Mamani (and seven others)
Date: December 20, 2004
Location: Tacna and Lima, Peru
Status: Convicted; serving sentence

- Police found the body of Fidel Mina Mamani with forty blows from a hammer, along with signs of strangulation and a slit throat.
- Maquera confessed calmly to seven additional homicides without apparent pressure, including the murder of his own sister Priscila, her husband, and four children buried in their backyard.
- Excavations of Priscila's home revealed six bodies wrapped in blankets, decomposed, with skulls fractured by repeated blunt-force trauma, matching Maquera's detailed confession.
- Fifteen years later in 2019, Maquera killed two more people inside Pocoyai prison using the same hammer and a knife, including Carmen Olmedo Moreno, who was sixteen weeks pregnant.

Alex Maquera, Tacna, Lima, Peru, December 2004, serial killer, psychopathy, hammer murders, family homicide, investigation, true crime English

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