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Colombian Prosecutors Link Two Brothers to 11 Killings of Older People and a Teenager in Rural Risaralda

Juan Carlos Villa Cardona, jailed in the killing of three older people near Santa Rosa de Cabal, accepted responsibility for 11 deaths dating to 2012, prosecutors said.

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Illustration: a dirt road through a hillside village in Colombia's coffee region

In late September 2023, the case against Juan Carlos Villa Cardona concerned one crime: the killing of three older people in a rural district outside Santa Rosa de Cabal, in Colombia's Risaralda department. By December, prosecutors were telling a judge it concerned eleven. At a hearing that month, the Fiscalía, Colombia's national prosecution service, presented Villa Cardona, known as "el Enano," and his brother José Alfredo Villa Cardona as the possible perpetrators of six more attacks in which eight people died, the earliest in March 2012. Juan Carlos accepted responsibility for all 11 deaths, and a judge confirmed that both brothers would stay in jail on aggravated homicide charges.

The case began in the rural district of La Paloma, where María Isabel Giraldo, 82, her brother Bernardo Giraldo, 84, and his wife, Mérida González, 82, were killed between August 20 and 24, 2023. Prosecutors said the killers won their trust by playing on their sympathy; Infobae reported that Juan Carlos pretended to be deaf and mute. Germán Ramírez Muñoz, the director of the Fiscalía in Risaralda, said at the time that the attackers had apparently tortured the three for information about money supposedly kept in the house and, when they found none, attacked them with a knife.

Juan Carlos was arrested on September 27, and on September 28 the Fiscalía announced that a judge had ordered him held in jail for the La Paloma killings. His brother was in custody days later; El Tiempo reported that José Alfredo turned himself in on October 1 and that both men accepted the charges in the Santa Rosa de Cabal case.

Eleven years, five towns

The prosecutor's account of the first killing put it on March 24, 2012, at about 7 p.m., inside a house in the countryside of Marsella. There, the prosecutor told the court, Juan Carlos stabbed a married couple again and again and then a teenage boy, attacking people who had no means of defending themselves in a house too isolated for anyone to come to their aid, and then went through their belongings for money and valuables. El Tiempo named them as Francisco Javier Gaviria Valencia, 61, his wife, Fanny Ortiz Cruz, 58, and their grandson, Juan David Aguirre Gaviria. People from the community found the bodies. According to El Tiempo's account of the Fiscalía's case, Juan Carlos committed those killings with his father, who has since died, to steal money the grandfather had earned from his work.

The list the Fiscalía laid out after that ran across a decade. In May 2013, José Israel Osorio, 61, who sold cheese in downtown Pereira, was killed on a dirt track between Pereira's Kennedy neighborhood and the Comuneros neighborhood of Dosquebradas. In late October 2021, Holmes Giraldo Restrepo, 66, was found in a room in Llano Grande Alto, outside Pereira, where he kept materials for a house he was building; his belongings were gone. In May 2023, Henry López Giraldo, 60, was killed in La Florida, in rural Pereira; prosecutors said the brothers had wanted to steal 40 meters of copper cable from him. In August 2023, Gustavo Loaiza Ríos, 80, was killed at his farm in El Tutui, in the municipality of Santuario; a neighbor who came to visit found his body about two days later. The last, on September 23, 2023, was Juan Bautista Restrepo, 66, found dead on a farm in Dosquebradas four days before Juan Carlos was arrested.

The method, as the prosecution described it, rarely changed. The brothers apparently picked out older people living in the countryside, watched them, and approached them pretending to need help. Once a victim was alone, Ramírez said, they forced their way into the house, attacked, and killed. The prosecutor told the court that Juan Carlos moved through the rural areas of Pereira, Dosquebradas, Santa Rosa de Cabal, Marsella and Santuario passing himself off as a man with a disability, gathering what he could about the people who lived there, and coming back later to kill them and take whatever they had: cell phones, jewelry, radios, money, tools, even food.

The two later cases in Pereira and Santuario were the ones the Fiscalía attributed to José Alfredo, and El Tiempo reported that he accepted his part in them. The case passed to a prosecutor in the Fiscalía's collective-homicides unit, and investigators said they were still examining whether the brothers were responsible for other killings in the department.

Accounts of the hearing differ on several points. The prosecutor quoted by Infobae described the youngest victim of the 2012 attack as a 14-year-old; El Tiempo gave Juan David Aguirre Gaviria's age as 13. Infobae gave the ages of the two victims in José Alfredo's cases as 64 and 81; El Tiempo named Henry López Giraldo as 60 and Gustavo Loaiza Ríos as 80. El Tiempo attributed the 2012 killings to Juan Carlos and his late father; the prosecutor's words as Infobae quoted them name only Juan Carlos. Infobae described both brothers as captured in October 2023, while El Tiempo reported that Juan Carlos was arrested on September 27 and that José Alfredo surrendered on October 1. Accepting responsibility at this stage was not a conviction, and none of the eight later killings had been tried when these hearings took place.

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