Julio Perez Silva was a construction worker at Alto Hospicio, a poor town on the plateau above the port of Iquique in northern Chile.
Between 1998 and 2001 fourteen girls and young women, most of them between fourteen and eighteen, disappeared from Alto Hospicio. He picked them up as they walked to school or to work, raped and killed them, and threw the bodies down disused mine shafts in the desert around the town. Chilean reporting called him the Psychopath from Alto Hospicio.
The girls and young women named in the record are Graciela Saravia, seventeen; Sara Gomez, eighteen; Ornella Linares, fourteen; Daysi Castro, sixteen; Ivon Carrillo, fifteen; Macarena Sanchez, fourteen; Angelica Alcayata, twenty-four; Laura Zola, fifteen; Catherine Arce, sixteen; Patricia Palma, seventeen; and Macarena Montecinos.
The behaviour of the authorities is the case. For three years the Carabineros and local officials maintained that the girls had run away, had gone to Iquique to work as prostitutes, or had left with boyfriends. The families, who were poor and largely of Aymara descent, were told this repeatedly and publicly. A regional governor said so on television. Posters put up by the mothers were removed. The Chilean press has since described it as an official position adopted because of who the families were.
It ended in 2001 when a girl escaped from Perez Silva's vehicle and went to the police. The bodies were recovered from the mine shafts.
He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on February 26, 2004. The case produced a formal apology, an inquiry into the conduct of the police, and lasting changes to how missing persons reports are handled in Chile.
Chilean life imprisonment is not whole-life either. The qualified form requires forty years to be served before release can be considered and the simple form twenty, and the accessible reporting does not say which was imposed here: which means the entry cannot say when, or whether, he becomes eligible.