Neighbors on the Estévez alley in Chalchuapa, in western El Salvador, heard a young woman screaming on the night of May 7, 2021. Salvadoran press accounts say she was trying to get out of the house of a former police officer, Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chávez, where her mother had already been killed, and that he caught her and killed her too. One account says police took seventy minutes to arrive after the calls. Officers found blood at the entrance and the bodies of the two women inside, and at the back of the property two more bodies in a pit.
The women were Mirna Cruz Lima, fifty-seven, and her daughter, twenty-six, whose name is given in the Salvadoran press as Jackeline or Jacquelinne Palomo Lima. They died inside house 11A on the alley, in the Las Flores neighborhood. Mirna’s father, José, sat through the sentencing a year later. “They gave him thirty-five years for my daughter and thirty-five years for my granddaughter,” he told reporters as he left the courtroom in tears. "That doesn't heal the wound, because they were my daughters." Besides the prison term, the judge ordered psychological treatment for the women's close relatives and directed the state, through the national council for the care of older adults, to provide health care, safety and housing for the elderly relatives the two women had supported, so that they could grow old with dignity.
The excavation went on for weeks. On October 7, 2021, five months after the arrest, the Institute of Legal Medicine handed the identified remains of twelve more victims to their families, and officials said they believed at least thirty more bodies were buried at the property. Reporting at the time put the recovery at fourteen bodies; the Salvadoran press later gave the total at around forty, mostly women, with men and children among them. One of the graves was inside a room and had been sealed with a slab of cement.
He was born in Chalchuapa in 1970 and had served in the Policía Nacional Civil. His career ended in the mid-2000s after a sexual offense involving a minor; one account says he was convicted in May 2005 and sentenced to five years, another that he was dismissed in 2006 after being accused of statutory rape. When he was arrested in 2021 he was wanted on charges of aggravated rape.
On June 10, 2022, with Osorio following the proceedings by video link from the maximum-security prison at Zacatecoluca, the specialized sentencing court for a life free of violence against women in Santa Ana convicted him of two femicides and imposed thirty-five years for each victim, a figure the judge tied to Salvadoran life expectancy of seventy; the prosecution had asked for the maximum fifty on each count. The court found the killings had been committed with misogynistic intent. In November 2022 he received a further eighteen years for raping a girl with a disability in 2019. Prosecutors said a relative of the girl, Douglas Antonio Hernández Recinos, had taken her to Osorio’s house and left her alone with him; Hernández Recinos received thirty-six years for his own abuse of her.
By then Osorio had become the prosecution’s witness. Under a cooperation arrangement he named others as having taken part in the killings and said some had paid him. In June 2022 the Attorney General’s office charged ten people over twelve of the deaths, seven counted as femicides and five as aggravated homicides; nine were in custody and one, Raúl Alejandro Quiñonez Melgar, was never found. A Santa Ana court sent them for trial in January 2023. After fifteen days of evidence, on May 8, 2023, Judge Lidia del Carmen López acquitted all nine. She found, according to the prosecution’s own account of the ruling, that the pattern in the killings indicated Osorio had acted alone, and a defense lawyer said she had questioned the decision to give a man like him protected-witness status.
The Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, said publicly that those acquitted were accomplices who had paid Osorio to kill, and that his office would appeal. On May 11, the day they were due to be released, eight of them were re-arrested on charges of unlawful association and enforced disappearance, which their families called retaliation for the verdict and lawyers described as the same cases on the same evidence. A serving judge, Juan Antonio Durán, publicly criticized the prosecution service for naming the judge who had acquitted them, calling it a media pressure campaign of the kind international standards on judicial independence prohibit. In February 2024 La Prensa Gráfica reported that a judge had convicted defendants in that second case, under a headline saying they had been convicted for being Osorio’s neighbors or friends.
English-language accounts commonly say he was convicted of fourteen murders. The Salvadoran courts and the prosecution service say otherwise: the seventy-year sentence covers two femicides, and the further eighteen years a rape. He is held at the prison in Zacatecoluca. In May 2023 the specialized asset-forfeiture court in San Salvador seized the house and forfeited it to the state.
Around forty people were taken out of the ground at one address, and two of those deaths have been proved against him. The remainder are not unsolved in the ordinary sense: an investigation identified them, named suspects on the word of the man convicted, took the case to trial and lost, and the prosecution service has said it lacked the capacity to examine more than half of them.