Denis Reanez was looking through her daughter’s things when she found a handwritten song she had been penning on a sheet slipped inside her bible. But Eliannys Martinez would never sing it. She was murdered on February 21 in La Mision in Venezuela’s western Portuguesa state, aged just 17 when she became one of the two victims of a sexual predator who sowed terror in the village of 5,000. Murders of women have surged in Venezuela in the past year, and the killings in La Mision have embodied the fear, pain and anger that many in the Latin American country have felt as a result. “They found her dead, in panties, no clothes, face down, her mouth open, it was horrible. It fell like my chest was being torn open,” said a tearful Reanez about her daughter. The last time Reanez saw Martinez, the oldest of her eight children, was the morning of her murder, as they sat side by side in church. Afterwards, Martinez — who played the keyboard — stayed behind with friends to rehearse. She never returned home. Her grandfather Pedro Reanez went out into fields of beans and tomatoes to call out her name over and over again. Acting on advice from police, the family searched the abandoned sheds of a former tobacco factory now covered with vegetation. Martinez was known to use a shortcut along a sandy path that passed by the dilapidated buildings and where many people would stop under the shade of mango trees to catch a telephone signal. That was where she was killed. When her grandfather found the body, he covered it with his shirt to protect the crime scene before police arrived. “The shoes were placed” next to her, and she had broken “purple nails,” he remembers. The very next day, a few blocks away, 20-year-old Eduarlis Falcon was found dead. She disappeared the day before, after heading to the gym some three kilometers (two miles) from her home. “She didn’t deserve this,” said her mother Mileidys Torrealba, 39, whose voice was weak from crying. In her phone, she has some photos of her daughter’s last birthday celebration. Paper flowers arranged in the shape of the number 20 adorn a piece of furniture next to Falcon’s bed, from the celebrations last September. The killer was arrested on February 27, after he was turned in by his wife, and faces the maximum 30-year sentence.