The case that made Hugo Bustamante 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 centre 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 offences 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-offence sentences from seven years to five.
The last two 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 six times at the Rancagua penitentiary 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 gave her the details. They concerned Isabel Hinojosa and her son Eduardo Paez Hinojosa, killed at Villa Alemana in 1996. The prosecution service reopened the case, forensic work reconstructed it, and in February 2026 he was sentenced to a further ten years, notified on January 30. Her book is titled La nina Ambar.
Five people, three convictions, thirty years. Reporting gives the 1996 double murder as June 27 and as July 27; the surrounding facts are consistent. The two 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.