On the night of May 7, 2021, neighbors in Chalchuapa, a town in western El Salvador, heard a young woman crying for help in the street and called the police. The woman was Jacquelinne Palomo Lima, 26. She had come to a house in the town with her mother, Mirna Cruz Lima, 57, and both women died there that night. The man who lived in the house, a former police officer named Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chávez, was arrested and charged with their deaths. In June 2022 a specialized court in Santa Ana convicted him of two femicides and sentenced him to 70 years in prison, 35 for each woman.
His arrest opened a much larger case. Forensic teams dug at the property from May to July 2021 and returned the remains of 12 people to their families that October. Estimates of how many more people might have died there ran from about 30, the figure a prosecutor gave, to more than 40, a figure attributed to Osorio himself in local press reports and one the Attorney General called unproven. Osorio became the prosecution's cooperating witness against nine other people. A judge acquitted all nine in May 2023 after finding his testimony unreliable; an appeals chamber annulled that verdict, and at a retrial in October 2023 six were convicted and three acquitted. No charges against Osorio himself for those deaths have been reported. In November 2022 he received a further 18 years in a separate case concerning a girl.
Osorio joined El Salvador's National Civil Police in 1997, according to an AFP report from May 2021. He was separated from the force in 2005 after he was accused in a case involving a minor, and he was in prison until 2011, the agency reported. The national police chief, Mauricio Arriaza, told Reuters that Osorio had been removed from the ranks about 15 years before the 2021 killings after a criminal conviction, and that he had served a five-year sentence. AFP also reported that he had a criminal record and that at the time of his arrest in 2021 he was already wanted by the authorities on a separate charge.
AFP and Reuters both gave his age as 51 in 2021. Diario El Mundo described him as 53 at his sentencing in June 2022. Little else about his early life was reported. He lived in the house where the killings took place, in the Las Flores neighborhood of Chalchuapa, a town of Santa Ana department roughly 73 to 90 kilometers west of San Salvador, depending on the report. Prosecutors later said the house did not belong to him but to a third party.
Mirna Cruz Lima worked at a store alongside her daughter, Jacquelinne Palomo Lima, according to Reuters, which spoke to the family in Chalchuapa at the end of May 2021. AFP gave the daughter's name as Jackeline Cristina Palomo, and Diario El Mundo, reporting from the trial, called her Jackeline. The family was from Santa Ana.
The two women were looking for Mirna's son, Alexis Palomo Lima. Reuters described him as a fourth-year medical student who planned to travel to the United States to work and to save for a house in El Salvador. AFP gave his age as 24. To pay for the journey the family had raised $7,000 by mortgaging the home of Mirna's father, and they had dealt with Osorio's brother, who, according to the family, worked as a smuggler of migrants. When Alexis did not arrive, the women sought news of him. According to the account the grandfather gave Reuters, Osorio told them that Alexis had been kidnapped and that he knew where he was being held. The two women got into his car and went with him to the house.
Police said that Osorio killed Alexis at the house, Reuters reported, and that Jacquelinne was also killed that night. Her cries for help brought the call to the police. "If it had not been for her, I would still be looking for them," her grandfather, then 79, told Reuters in July 2021. Asked in May whether he could forgive, he said he could not judge Osorio and that God would judge him. "My soul has left me," he said.
When officers arrived they found the bodies of the two women and of two men, AFP and EFE reported. AFP's report of May 28, 2021, named the men as Alexis and another man, and said the second was Osorio's own brother; President Nayib Bukele had said publicly that Osorio killed several people, including his brother. In those first weeks Osorio was charged with killing two women and two men, Reuters reported. The two convictions reported against Osorio do not cover the death of Alexis, and the outcome of the charges over the two men was not reported.
AFP reported that Osorio was detained on May 8, after neighbors alerted the police, and was held at first over the deaths of the woman and her daughter. AFP's later account of the case and the reports from the trial place the events and the arrest on the night of May 7. On May 12 he was charged with two counts of femicide, the offense in Salvadoran law for the killing of a woman for reasons of gender, and two counts of homicide were added later, according to Reuters.
He was held in the maximum-security prison at Zacatecoluca, in La Paz department, AFP reported in May 2021. Officials quickly called him a psychopath. The Minister of Justice and Security, Gustavo Villatoro, used the word in public, and told reporters, according to EFE, that the case did not reflect the country's general pattern of disappearances. Investigators told AFP that he had found victims through social media by offering jobs or help to migrate, and Reuters reported that he was alleged to have targeted mostly poor women and girls with such promises.
The authorities also moved against others. By May 20, 2021, a magistrates' court in Chalchuapa, the Juzgado Primero de Paz, ordered provisional detention for 11 people linked to Osorio, on charges of aggravated femicide and aggravated homicide, AFP reported. Villatoro welcomed the order. AFP's report of May 28 said that at least ten alleged accomplices were in custody and that prosecutors were working on at least 11 cases of aggravated femicide.
Forensic teams from the Fiscalía General de la República, the attorney general's office, and the Institute of Legal Medicine began digging at the property after the arrest. By May 20, Villatoro said, about 14 bodies had been identified separately in the excavations, and AFP and EFE reported that the remains of at least 14 people had been recovered. Villatoro said genetic testing would begin and that the Institute of Legal Medicine would use DNA samples from residents searching for missing relatives. Israel Ticas, a forensic criminologist working for the prosecution, told AFP that the work could last more than a month.
It did. Villatoro announced the end of the exhumations on July 14, 2021, without giving a total, Reuters reported. Officials offered different counts over those weeks. Reuters reported that Ticas had been sanctioned after he suggested there were at least 40 victims, and that the Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, called that figure unproven. EFE reported that, according to local media, Osorio had said in a statement that more than 40 bodies could be found at the house.
On October 7, 2021, the Institute of Legal Medicine handed over the identified remains of 12 people to eight families, EFE reported. Two of the 12 were minors, and one family received five relatives, two of them children. The families had been taking part in a prosecution program for victims and had received psychological and social support. Graciela Sagastume, the prosecutor who led the femicide unit, said the exhumation had run from May to July, and estimated about 30 bodies in all, though she said an exact figure was hard to give. "What is certain is that we have delivered 12 bodies," she said.
Reporting on the human cost reached beyond the property. Reuters spoke in July 2021 to a woman searching for her granddaughter, missing since April 2020, who said she hoped the girl was alive. Reuters set the case against the government's account of falling homicide rates and cited a women's organization's count of 59 women murdered in the first four months of 2021, a rise on the year before.
On May 21, 2021, it became known that Osorio had been given benefits in exchange for testimony against alleged accomplices, EFE reported. The arrangement, a criterio de oportunidad, was partial: the prosecutor Max Muñoz said it covered only nine cases. Reuters reported that prosecutors had offered him a deal in exchange for testimony in nine cases and gave no further details.
In June 2021 the magazine Revista Factum published what it described as his confession. A court ordered the article taken down two days later, according to Reuters, which said it could not verify the account; Diario El Mundo later reported that a judge had ordered its removal for breaching the confidentiality of the case. The prosecution's file stayed under reserve, and much of what was later known about his testimony came from the hearings against the people he accused.
Osorio's own trial over the deaths of Mirna Cruz Lima and her daughter was heard by the Juzgado Especializado de Sentencia para una Vida Libre de Violencia de Santa Ana, a court that hears cases of violence against women. He followed the proceedings by video link from the prison in Zacatecoluca. On June 10, 2022, the court convicted him of both femicides. The prosecution had asked for 50 years for each, the maximum, or 100 years in all. The court imposed 35 years for each victim, 70 years in total, and tied the figure to the life expectancy of 70 years for Salvadorans in United Nations Development Programme figures, Diario El Mundo reported.
The judge also 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 collective reparation covering health, safety, housing and other rights, so that the elderly relatives who had depended on the two women could live their old age with dignity. The prosecution did not speak to reporters at the courthouse; on its official Twitter account it said it had proved his guilt and that it was committed to the victims so that such cases did not go unpunished.
Mirna's father attended the sentencing. "They gave him 35 years for my daughter and 35 years for my granddaughter," he said, according to Diario El Mundo, adding that the sentence did not heal the wound, "because they were my daughters."
On November 11, 2022, the Tribunal Primero de Sentencia de Santa Ana sentenced Osorio to 18 years in prison in a separate case concerning a girl, with other charges, Diario El Mundo reported. He appeared from Zacatecoluca. A relative of the girl was convicted in the same case and sentenced to 36 years; prosecutors said he had taken her to Osorio's home and had not intervened. The judge weighed expert and documentary evidence from the prosecution. Diario El Mundo dated the offense to July 2020; El Diario de Hoy placed it in 2019. With the new term, his sentences were reported as 88 years in all.
The prosecution built a second case on Osorio's testimony. Diario El Mundo reported in January 2023 that ten people, seven men and three women, were being prosecuted for nine aggravated femicides and three aggravated homicides, covering 12 victims whose remains had been recovered at the house; three of the victims were minors. Osorio was not among the accused. He was, according to journalistic investigations cited by the paper, the witness.
On January 23, 2023, the Juzgado Especializado de Instrucción para una Vida Libre de Violencia contra la Mujer de Santa Ana sent the case to trial after two days of hearings and admitted all of the prosecution's evidence. Nine defendants stayed in custody. The tenth, Raúl Lisandro Quiñónez Melgar, had been on alternative measures, had stopped reporting to the court, and was declared in default with a warrant out for his arrest; El Diario de Hoy gave his middle name as Alejandro. According to El Diario de Hoy, Osorio had named all of the accused and described the part each had played. The paper noted that the prosecution had charged deaths of 12 of the roughly 40 people it said had been found, and that the others appeared not to have been identified.
The trial opened on April 26, 2023, before the specialized sentencing court in Santa Ana, partly closed to the press. The prosecution described the case as covering eight victims of femicide and five of homicide and said the nine were being tried as direct perpetrators; according to the prosecution, the victims had been deceived and taken to the house. Prosecutors asked for the maximum penalties, up to 50 years for each count. Osorio testified under a code name.
On May 8, 2023, after a public trial of about 15 days, Judge Lidia del Carmen López acquitted all nine. She found that their part in the killings had not been proved and gave little weight to Osorio's testimony, El Diario de Hoy and Diario El Mundo reported. During the trial he lost his protected status, and his identity as the witness became public. Diario El Mundo reported that a La Prensa Gráfica investigation published the same day said police records contradicted the accusation, and that his testimony was the only direct evidence.
The prosecution reacted at once. Graciela Sagastume said in a video that the ruling rested on a partial assessment of the evidence and left out corroborating material, and that the office would appeal. The Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, called the nine accomplices and said they had paid Osorio to end the victims' lives. The office's Twitter account named the judge. The next day another judge, Juan Antonio Durán, criticized the office for exposing her to what he called media lynching, and said that disagreements with a ruling belonged in the appeals process, not in media pressure.
On May 11, 2023, the day the acquitted defendants were due to go free, their lawyers were told they would stay in custody. The National Civil Police said they had been detained for unlawful association and that the arrests were not linked to the state of exception then in force. Justice Minister Villatoro said that Osorio and the others had formed an illicit group. On May 24 the prosecution notified them of charges of unlawful association and enforced disappearance of persons, and on May 27 a Santa Ana court ordered six months of provisional detention for eight of them and put the case under total reserve, El Diario de Hoy reported. Defense lawyers said the new charges rested on the same cases and the same evidence, and relatives called them a reaction to the acquittal. The outcome of that second set of charges has not been reported.
The prosecution filed its appeal on June 5, 2023. In August the Cámara Especializada para una Vida Libre de Violencia para las Mujeres de San Salvador annulled the acquittals and ordered a new trial on seven aggravated femicides, five aggravated homicides and a count of complicity, covering 13 victims. The retrial began in Santa Ana on September 18, 2023, and lasted about two weeks.
On October 6, 2023, the specialized sentencing court in Santa Ana convicted six of the nine and acquitted three, El Diario de Hoy reported. José Ernesto Sigüenza Martínez received 110 years for four homicides; Henry Aníbal Olivares Perdomo, 90 years for three aggravated femicides; Juan Francisco Zarceño and Ernesto Ramírez Álvarez, 20 years each for femicide; Lorena Miranda Vásquez, 30 years as the author of an aggravated homicide; and Cindy Gabriela Mendoza Godoy, 20 years as an accomplice in an aggravated homicide. The judge ordered the institutions concerned to enforce their protocols on reports of missing people, especially women and children.
On June 5, 2024, El Diario de Hoy reported that the same Santa Ana court had sentenced Raúl Lisandro Quiñónez Melgar, tried as a fugitive, to 45 years for an aggravated femicide in the case known as "La Flaca." The victim's remains had been recovered in Chalchuapa on May 8, 2021; the authorities did not identify her publicly. A protected witness had described the crime and the defendant's role, and the court found that the testimony matched the other evidence. Orders for his capture remained in force.
The Fiscalía seized the house on January 19, 2023, under an order of the Juzgado Especializado de Extinción de Dominio in San Salvador, and handed it to the national council that administers seized assets, CONAB, El Diario de Hoy reported. The proceedings named Osorio and a second person as affected parties. On April 28, 2023, prosecutors asked the court to transfer the property to the state on the ground that it had been used to commit crimes. A prosecutor acknowledged that it belonged to a third party, not to Osorio, and sought forfeiture anyway. In early May 2023 the court accepted the prosecution's evidence and ordered the house transferred to the state, El Diario de Hoy reported on May 13.
When reporters visited the street in October 2022, a resident said that living nearby was unpleasant and that families kept their children away from the house.
The number of people who died at the property has never been settled. AFP and EFE reported 14 sets of remains by May 20, 2021; Reuters reported 14 bodies at the property besides the three people found dead on May 7; the prosecutor Sagastume estimated about 30; and Ticas's estimate of at least 40, like the figure attributed to Osorio in local press, was called unproven by the Attorney General. El Diario de Hoy later referred to about 40 bodies, mostly of women. Only 12 sets of remains were reported as identified and returned, in October 2021.
The killings charged against others are not his in law. Osorio was convicted of two femicides committed on one night. The deaths in the case of the nine were charged against other people, with Osorio as the witness; a first judge found his account unreliable and acquitted everyone, and a second trial convicted six. Prosecutors and ministers described him as the central figure, and the Attorney General said the accused had paid him to kill, but no court finding to that effect against Osorio was reported. One newspaper described the killings as the work of a group he led.
Some details differ between reports. AFP gave the detention date as May 8, 2021, while later accounts put the events and arrest on the night of May 7. The daughter's name appears as Jacquelinne Palomo Lima, Jackeline Cristina Palomo and Jackeline. The second case against Osorio is dated to 2019 by one paper and to July 2020 by another. The fugitive defendant's middle name appears as Lisandro and as Alejandro.
In November 2022 Osorio appeared at his second sentencing by video from the prison in Zacatecoluca. Reports through 2023 and June 2024 described him as serving the 70-year sentence for the two femicides and the 18-year sentence in the second case.
1997: Joins the National Civil Police, according to AFP.
2005: Separated from the police after an accusation in a case involving a minor; later serves a prison term, reported as five years, and is in prison until 2011, according to AFP.
May 7, 2021: Mirna Cruz Lima and her daughter Jacquelinne Palomo Lima are killed at the house where he lives in Chalchuapa; neighbors call police after hearing the daughter's cries.
May 8, 2021: Detained, according to AFP.
May 12, 2021: Charged with two femicides; homicide counts over two men are added later.
May 20, 2021: Remains of at least 14 people reported recovered; a Chalchuapa court has ordered provisional detention for 11 people linked to him.
May 21, 2021: His cooperation arrangement becomes public.
June 2021: Revista Factum publishes an account of his confession; a court orders it removed two days later.
July 14, 2021: Exhumations end.
October 7, 2021: Remains of 12 people returned to eight families.
June 10, 2022: Convicted of two femicides in Santa Ana; sentenced to 70 years.
November 11, 2022: Sentenced to 18 years in a separate case concerning a girl, with other charges.
January 19, 2023: House seized by the Fiscalía; preliminary hearing against ten defendants.
January 23, 2023: Ten defendants sent to trial; one declared a fugitive.
April 26, 2023: Trial of nine opens in Santa Ana; he testifies as the prosecution's witness.
May 8, 2023: Judge Lidia del Carmen López acquits all nine.
May 11, 2023: The acquitted are re-arrested for unlawful association.
May 2023: Asset-forfeiture court orders the house transferred to the state.
June 5, 2023: Prosecution appeals the acquittals.
August 2023: San Salvador appeals chamber annuls the acquittals and orders a retrial.
October 6, 2023: Six defendants convicted and three acquitted on retrial.
June 5, 2024: The fugitive defendant is reported sentenced in absentia to 45 years for an aggravated femicide linked to the property.