The case that made Hugo Bustamante Perez notorious in Chile was the second one. In January 2005 he killed his former partner Veronica Vasquez, forty-nine, and her nine-year-old son Eugenio Honorato, known as Quenito, and concealed both bodies in a metal drum filled with lime, water and plaster. The Chilean press called him el asesino del tambor, the drum killer. He was sentenced to twenty-seven years.
He served eleven of them. In 2016 he was released on parole, a decision that became the center of a national argument five years later.
In July 2020 Ambar Cornejo, sixteen, went to the house in Villa Alemana that Bustamante shared with her mother, Denisse Llanos, to collect the maintenance money her father sent each month. She did not leave. She was reported missing and her remains were found under the floor of the house on August 6, eight days later, after her mother, at first treated as a witness, told police that Bustamante had killed her and where the body was.
The trial ran at the oral criminal court in Vina del Mar. On November 26, 2021 both were found guilty: Bustamante of rape with femicide, Llanos of rape with homicide, and both of repeated sexual offenses against Ambar's younger brother. Judge Rocio Oscariz found that they had acted with premeditation, having agreed to attack and kill her, and that Bustamante had subdued, raped and asphyxiated the girl in her mother's presence. Bustamante was acquitted of illegal burial on the ground that concealing the body formed part of the crime he had already been convicted of. Both received presidio perpetuo calificado in December 2021, the heaviest sentence Chilean law allows. The Supreme Court confirmed it in June 2022 and reduced one of his sexual-offense sentences from seven years to five.
The first killings came to light through a book. The journalist Ivonne Toro Agurto spent four years on the Ambar case, interviewed more than a hundred people, and visited Bustamante at the Rancagua penitentiary over some eight months between June 2023 and January 2024. In August 2023 she asked him whether he had killed anyone else. He told her she was treating him as a person and that he therefore had a gift for her, and wrote: "About your question, write this down: Isabel Hinojosa and her son, Eduardo Paez." The book is titled La nina Ambar: Cronica del horror de un psicopata y las fallas del Estado.
The prosecution service reopened a case that had lain in the files for almost three decades. In 2024 bones were found buried at Bustamante's former house in Villa Alemana, and on September 2 of that year the local chief prosecutor, Osvaldo Basso, said DNA tests by the human rights section of the Legal Medical Service in Santiago had identified them as Eduardo Paez Hinojosa, twenty-seven, and his mother, fifty-five. The court record and most reports name her Elena or Helena Hinojosa; Bustamante's note, and some reports, called her Isabel.
The judgment, dated January 30, 2026, and made public in mid-February, was given by Judge Javiera Opazo of the Villa Alemana court under the old criminal procedure that applied to crimes of that date. It found that on June 27, 1996, he and Eduardo Paez, who knew each other well, argued over money Bustamante owed him; accounts differ on whose house it was. When Bustamante refused to pay, they fought, and he struck Paez on the head with an iron bar and killed him. Hours later Paez's mother arrived, knowing nothing, and after another argument he asphyxiated her. He tied both bodies with wire and dropped them into a well on the property. The court convicted him of two aggravated homicides and, because the old rules allowed a single sentence for several crimes, gave him ten years and a day, with lifelong disqualification from public office. One report dates the killings to July 27, 1996.
Five people, three convictions, thirty years. The 1996 killings were unsolved for twenty-seven years and were not solved by an investigation. They were solved because a journalist writing about his last victim asked him a question and he chose to answer it.