Julio Pérez Silva was arrested on October 4, 2001, in the far north of Chile, after a girl who had survived an attack reached the Carabineros and told them what had happened. Within days he had confessed to killing fourteen girls and women from Alto Hospicio, a fast-growing settlement on the plateau overlooking the port city of Iquique. In February 2004 a judge in Iquique convicted him of fourteen aggravated homicides and of the attempted homicide of the girl who survived, with other charges. On appeal his sentence was raised to qualified life imprisonment, which requires at least forty years in prison before any benefit can be sought, and the Supreme Court ratified it in October 2006.
The case is remembered in Chile for more than its death toll. For close to three years, as girls disappeared on their way to or from school, police and senior officials told their families that the girls had probably run away from troubled homes. Investigators searched for them in Peru. A senior official spoke of poverty and family breakdown. The families, most of them poor, said they had been treated with contempt because of where they lived. Their complaint was later accepted by the government, which apologized, and by a congressional human rights commission, which acknowledged that the young women had been stigmatized. In March 2026 the mausoleum where most of the victims are buried, in Iquique, was declared a national monument.
Little has been published about Pérez Silva's early life. The Chilean channel Canal 13 described him in 2018 as a native of Puchuncaví, a coastal district in central Chile. Inter Press Service gave his age as 38 when he was arrested in October 2001. Meganoticias reported in 2021 that he was 58, and El Dínamo gave his age as 62 in March 2026. One report of the 2004 sentence gave a much younger age; it also misprinted his surname once, and it appears to be a slip.
He earned his living as a "taxi pirata", an unlicensed taxi driver, in Alto Hospicio. The 2004 judgment ordered his car confiscated.
Alto Hospicio sits on the desert plateau behind Iquique, the capital of the Tarapacá Region. The declaration that made the victims' mausoleum a national monument in 2026 describes how, in the late 1990s, the town grew quickly through social housing and through families moved up from Iquique, while roads, utilities and public transport lagged far behind. Many of the victims' families lived in informal settlements known as tomas, El Desconcierto reported in 2018. The girls disappeared while walking between home and school, in their school uniforms, Cooperativa reported in 2006.
Cooperativa, Chile's main radio news network, reported that the killings for which he was convicted took place between September 12, 1998 and August 23, 2001. Meganoticias and T13, in later retrospective reports, dated the first killing to April 1999, and Inter Press Service, writing in October 2001, said the girls had begun to disappear in November 1999. The judgment itself, as summarized by Cooperativa, is the basis for the earlier date.
The national monument decree of March 2026 lists fourteen victims by full name. As printed there they are Graciela Monsterrat Saravia Tapia, Ornella Dallana Linares Cepeda, Ivón Alexandra Carrillo Lefno, Macarena del Carmen Sánchez Jabre, Gisela Ivonne Melgarejo Navarro, Sara Marisol Gómez Cuevas, Angélica Lily Lay Alcayaga, Laura Andrea Zola Henríquez, Katherine Elizabeth Arce Rivera, Patricia Edith Palma Valdivia, Macarena Cecilia Montecino Iglesias, Viviana Melisa Garay Moena, Deysi Sara Castro Mamani and Angélica Miryam Palape Castro. Most were teenagers; the oldest, Angélica Palape, was in her forties. Meganoticias counted eleven adolescents and three adults among them. The ages printed in the decree differ by a year or two in several cases from those given in press reports of the 2004 sentence, and some surnames are spelled differently in the news coverage, such as Ivonne Carrillo, Laura Sola and Macarena Montecinos.
Graciela Saravia was found dead near Caleta Chanavayita in September 1998, the mothers told El Desconcierto in 2018. They said she had been placed in a home run by Sename, the national child protection service, shortly before. They said the families wrote to authorities in February and May 1999 asking for an investigation, and that nothing came of it.
Viviana Garay disappeared on June 30, 2000, El Desconcierto reported. She wanted to become a detective. Her father searched for her for more than a year. He later recalled that he had once believed he saw her in a passing car, and said nerves had made him think so. In 2018 he told the paper that the families should have received compensation and psychological care from the state, and that he still kept her portrait in his room.
Macarena Sánchez disappeared on November 23, 2000, according to her mother's account to El Desconcierto. Her mother said police told her the girl was probably begging in Iquique or enjoying herself in Tacna, across the border in Peru. Eighteen years later she still kept her daughter's clothes, her stuffed toys and her hairbrush, and visited her grave every week. Macarena's father became a spokesman for the families. He called the 2004 sentence far too light, and in 2005 he told reporters that a book on the case told the truth and that judges should read it.
Ivón Carrillo, fifteen, was known to friends as "la dulce Popi" and helped run a children's reading corner at a library, El Desconcierto reported. Her mother searched for her for three years and said officials would not take her missing-person report. Her mother and sister were among those who asked, in January 2025, that the mausoleum be protected as a national monument.
Of the three oldest victims, Gisela Melgarejo was in her thirties, Angélica Lay in her twenties and Angélica Palape in her forties, according to the decree and the 2004 reports. Little more has been reported about their lives.
The disappearances became a public case on July 12, 2000, when, as Cooperativa later recounted, it was described as the loss of five girls over nine months. The first explanation offered by the police was that the girls had left of their own accord. Cooperativa reported that the early police theory had the girls running off to Peru, and Meganoticias reported that police searched for them in Tacna without finding any trace. Other theories, including that the girls had been taken by a trafficking ring, were raised and also proved false, Inter Press Service reported.
The families heard the same message from officials. Jorge Tapia, then the regional governor of Tarapacá, suggested that the girls had serious problems at home and did not want to return, Meganoticias reported. Jorge Burgos, then undersecretary of the Interior in the government of President Ricardo Lagos, said in 2001 that the disappearances were probably linked to family violence and extreme poverty, among other factors, and that some of the cases might not be forced disappearances at all, El Desconcierto reported in 2018. A police report sent to the family commission of the Chamber of Deputies, insisting that the girls had left voluntarily, was made public in 2001, according to Inter Press Service.
Parents said the police treated them with prejudice. The grandmother of one victim told Inter Press Service that the families were described as loose-living, and that officers searched their homes and measured the distance between beds. Parents asked the courts again and again to appoint a special investigating judge, but the requests were denied on the strength of police reports. In 2001 the Iquique Court of Appeals still refused to appoint one, while the files were spread across four different courts, Cooperativa reported.
From July 18, 2000, clothing and belongings of the missing girls began to turn up around Alto Hospicio, according to Cooperativa. Even then the line of inquiry did not change. Ricardo Leiva, a journalism professor who wrote a book on the case, told Meganoticias in 2021 that it had been a failure of judicial investigation.
On October 3 and 4, 2001, Pérez Silva attacked a girl who survived. She reached the Carabineros about five hours later and reported what had happened, Cooperativa reported, and her account led to his arrest the same day, October 4. Inter Press Service reported that her description led police to him.
Meganoticias reported in 2021 that he confessed to the fourteen killings on the night of his arrest; Cooperativa reported in 2006 that he confessed after intense interrogations. On October 5, the day after his arrest, he told investigators where the bodies of three of the victims were, Cooperativa reported. The State Defense Council lawyer in the case, Cecilia Latorre, said in 2004 that she had taken part in reconstructions of the crimes with him and that he had admitted them during the proceedings.
T13 reported in 2024 that another young woman had survived an attack by him in April 2001 and later recognized his voice. The 2004 judgment included convictions for that case as well.
The day after the arrest, President Ricardo Lagos was in Iquique, and the families confronted him there, Cooperativa reported. Inter Press Service reported that Lagos called the case "very sad" but defended the recent abolition of the death penalty, which had been replaced that year with effective life imprisonment, even as residents demonstrated for the execution of Pérez Silva. Cooperativa reported that Lagos apologized to the families in Iquique. Claudio Huepe, a minister in the Lagos government, apologized publicly on the government's behalf for police attempts to discredit the victims, Inter Press Service reported.
The families announced a lawsuit against the state and the police for social discrimination. In November 2001, according to the mothers' account to El Desconcierto, they filed a criminal complaint against the then Justice Minister, an undersecretary and the minister's chief of staff, saying their letters of 1999 had gone unanswered. The case was provisionally dismissed.
Burgos later said he regretted having spoken on the basis of "una simple información policial". He apologized publicly to the families after he was named defense minister, BioBioChile reported, saying police officials had misinformed him at the time. The mothers objected to his appointment.
The case predates the adoption in the region of Chile's oral, adversarial criminal procedure. Judgment was given by a judge of the Iquique Court of Appeals assigned to the case as ministra en visita.
During the proceedings Pérez Silva was held in the Iquique prison from October 5, 2001. In mid-2003 he was moved to the Acha prison at Arica, Cooperativa reported. On January 19, 2004, he attempted suicide in his cell at Acha and was afterward kept under watch around the clock.
On February 26, 2004, Judge Eliana Ayala convicted him of fourteen aggravated homicides and of the attempted homicide of the surviving girl, with other charges. She sentenced him to simple life imprisonment for the killings, twenty years on the other charges and ten years for the attempted homicide, and ordered his car confiscated. Cooperativa reported that he was to be moved under special security to the high-security prison at Colina, outside Santiago.
The families' lawyer, Juan Pablo Mandaleris, called him the biggest serial killer in Chile. Cecilia Latorre, for the State Defense Council, said the attempted homicide conviction was a point the council had won, since it had not been part of the original case. She said he had acted alone. Asked about the early police errors, she said everything that could be investigated had been investigated.
Simple life imprisonment allowed a prisoner to apply for conditional release after twenty years. Latorre said the chance that a parole commission would approve release for a man convicted of such crimes was practically nil, and that she knew of no case in which it had happened. She said he would in practice spend the rest of his life in prison.
The families saw it differently. The day after the judgment, about forty relatives and neighbors protested outside the Iquique Court of Appeals and blocked part of the road between Iquique and Alto Hospicio, Cooperativa reported. Neighbors said they feared he could be released in twenty-five years and kill again. A former Justice Minister, José Antonio Gómez, said he was surprised that qualified life imprisonment had not been imposed given the number of killings. Senator Jaime Orpis of the Tarapacá region said many people felt justice had not been done, since with the death penalty abolished they had expected the forty-year qualified life sentence, and he predicted the appeals court would change the ruling.
The plaintiffs appealed. In July 2005, when Leiva's book was published, the families were still awaiting the decision of the Iquique Court of Appeals and asking for the maximum penalty, Cooperativa reported.
In September 2005 the Iquique Court of Appeals raised the main sentence to qualified life imprisonment. It replaced the twenty-year and ten-year terms with two prison terms of nine years each. The Supreme Court ratified the sentence, Cooperativa reported on October 16, 2006. Under qualified life imprisonment he must serve at least forty years before he can apply for any prison benefit. At the time of the ruling he was held under strict security at the Acha prison in Arica.
Alejandro Espinoza, a lawyer for the families, said the case had forced the authorities and the public to change how they saw it. Ramón Suárez of the Fundación Amparo y Justicia, which supported the families, said they were satisfied because the sentence matched the gravity of the crimes.
By October 2021 he was held at the high-security prison Colina I, Meganoticias reported, and T13 reported the same in June 2024. In March 2026 El Dínamo reported that he was serving qualified life imprisonment at Colina 1.
In January 2026 the Justice Minister, Jaime Gajardo, warned that a Senate bill allowing older or seriously ill prisoners to serve their sentences at home could benefit Pérez Silva, T13 and El Dínamo reported. The bill, presented by opposition senators in January 2025, was approved in general by the Senate in March 2026, according to El Dínamo, which listed him among the prisoners who might apply. Whether he would qualify under the final text had not been settled.
In October 2003 Senator Orpis proposed compensation for the families, saying they had been stigmatized and mistreated by state agents, police and senior officials. Orpis and Senator Fernando Flores gave the Interior Minister a bill for lifelong reparation pensions for the families, Cooperativa reported in 2004; Orpis said the pension the government proposed was too small.
The Chamber of Deputies set up a human rights commission on the case, which acknowledged the stigmatization of the young women, according to the 2026 decree. The decree also states that the officials who first blamed the disappearances on the girls' own choices later revised what they had said.
The victims were buried in Cemetery No. 3 in Iquique, and a mausoleum of twelve niches was built for them in 2002. It became known as the "Reinas de la Pampa", the queens of the pampa, and condolence books left at the mausoleum were kept by the relatives. In 2018 one mother told El Desconcierto that she visited it every three days and opposed a municipal proposal to move the graves to a new cemetery in Alto Hospicio. On February 25, 2026, the National Monuments Council voted 17 to 0 to protect the mausoleum, with the support of the Municipality of Iquique, and the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage declared it a historic monument by a decree of March 6, published on March 24, 2026. The council cited its value for memory and reparation, the families' long organizing, and the fact that the case came before Chilean law explicitly recognized femicide.
The mothers continued to meet the press as the Agrupación de Madres y Familiares de Víctimas del Psicópata de Alto Hospicio. A psychologist from the Fundación Amparo y Justicia had worked with them since 2002, El Desconcierto reported.
Ricardo Leiva, a journalist and professor at Universidad Diego Portales, published "Reinas del desierto" with Planeta in July 2005. Cooperativa reported that the book examined the police errors and the discrimination the families faced, and reconstructed the case through the story of the girl who survived. Leiva said it contained no fictional passages and that he had found no evidence that anyone else took part, although no hypothesis should be ruled out.
Rodrigo Fluxá's 2015 book "Los malos" was the basis of "La Cacería: Las niñas de Alto Hospicio", an eight-episode miniseries that Mega began airing in July 2018. The mothers objected strongly. They said the series portrayed their daughters in degrading ways, as drug users and delinquents among other things, and stigmatized all of Alto Hospicio, and that some mothers had been driven to despair by it. On July 25, 2018, they wrote to the National Television Council, which had co-financed the series, asking that it be taken off the air, BioBioChile and El Desconcierto reported.
Pérez Silva was the only person charged in the fourteen killings, and the State Defense Council and Leiva both said he acted alone. Some relatives have never accepted that. After Jorge Burgos was named defense minister, Deputy Hugo Gutiérrez of Tarapacá, with child protection groups, asked the Supreme Court to reopen the case, BioBioChile reported, arguing that possible links between Pérez Silva and members of the armed forces and police had never been clarified. In October 2016, on the fifteenth anniversary of the discovery of the crimes, mothers of at least two victims said they would ask the Supreme Court again, citing a false name in the case file and witnesses who wanted to speak. No court ruling on these requests was reported.
Relatives of five other missing women have asked that the courts examine whether any of them were also his victims, BioBioChile reported. He did not include them in his confession, and T13 described him in 2024 as a suspect in those disappearances. He has not been charged in any of them.
Accounts also differ on some details, including several of the victims' ages. In January 2026 a government minister described the youngest victim as thirteen, and El Desconcierto gave Macarena Sánchez's age as thirteen; the decree lists her as fourteen. The forty-year minimum term dates from the 2005 appeal ruling; the 2004 judgment imposed simple life imprisonment.
September 12, 1998: start of the period of the killings in the 2004 judgment, as reported by Cooperativa.
September 1998: Graciela Saravia found dead near Caleta Chanavayita.
February and May 1999: families write to authorities asking for investigations, by the mothers' account.
June 30, 2000: Viviana Garay disappears.
July 12, 2000: the disappearances become a public case, described as five girls missing over nine months.
July 18, 2000: clothing and belongings of missing girls begin to be found around Alto Hospicio.
November 23, 2000: Macarena Sánchez disappears.
2001: the Iquique Court of Appeals refuses to name a special judge; Undersecretary Jorge Burgos suggests some cases are not forced disappearances.
April 2001: a young woman survives an attack; the case is part of the 2004 judgment.
August 23, 2001: end of the period of the killings in the judgment.
October 3 and 4, 2001: a girl survives an attack and reports it to the Carabineros.
October 4, 2001: Pérez Silva arrested.
October 5, 2001: he tells investigators where three bodies are; held in the Iquique prison; families confront President Lagos in Iquique.
November 2001: mothers file a complaint against senior Justice Ministry officials; it is later provisionally dismissed.
2002: mausoleum built in Cemetery No. 3, Iquique.
Mid-2003: moved to the Acha prison, Arica.
October 2003: Senator Jaime Orpis proposes compensation for the families.
January 19, 2004: suicide attempt in his cell at Acha.
February 26, 2004: convicted by Judge Eliana Ayala of fourteen aggravated homicides and an attempted homicide, with other charges; simple life imprisonment.
February 27, 2004: relatives and neighbors protest outside the Iquique Court of Appeals.
July 21, 2005: Ricardo Leiva's book "Reinas del desierto" published.
September 2005: Iquique Court of Appeals raises the sentence to qualified life imprisonment.
October 2006: Supreme Court ratifies the sentence (reported October 16, 2006).
October 2016: mothers announce a new request to reopen the case.
July 2018: Mega airs "La Cacería"; on July 25 the mothers ask the National Television Council to halt it.
October 2021: held at Colina I.
January 2026: the Justice Minister warns that a Senate home-detention bill could benefit him.
February 25, 2026: the National Monuments Council votes to protect the "Reinas de la Pampa" mausoleum.
March 2026: Senate approves the bill in general; he is held at Colina 1, aged 62; the mausoleum decree is published on March 24.