On the afternoon of September 26, 2015, a Mexican Navy crew found a man in the open sea near Isla Espíritu Santo, off Baja California Sur, clinging to a piece of a fishing skiff. He was Rosario Alfonso, twenty-seven, a fisherman from the Las Arenitas camp at Eldorado in Sinaloa. He had set out on September 13 with his uncle Ramón, fifty, and a third man he did not know, bound for San Carlos in Comondú. Three hours out, he said, the stern broke and the three were left clinging to the overturned hull. His uncle died days later. Of the other man he said that he fell asleep one day and when he woke the man was gone. He was taken to hospital in La Paz with severe dehydration and burns on his legs, and went home to Las Arenitas a survivor. One later report places the rescue near Isla San José; the date and the island differ between accounts.
Three years later women began to be killed in Culiacán. On December 19, 2018 the body of Cecilia Guadalupe B., twenty-one, from Culiacán, was found in irrigation canal 35 in the Costa Rica district south of the city. On February 18, 2019 Melissa Angélica E. was found dead in a Culiacán cemetery, reported in some accounts as the municipal cemetery 21 de Marzo and in others as the Panteón Civil. On December 11, 2019 Lucía Mariana M., seventeen, a preparatory student at the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, disappeared; she was found five days later on a dirt road near the ejido San Rafael, also in Costa Rica. On January 26, 2020 Olga Ana Karen, nineteen, from Hermosillo in Sonora and living in Culiacán, was found dead in a room at a motel on the southern edge of the city. One prosecution statement dated the last killing to February 2020.
The victims were between seventeen and twenty-four. According to the state prosecutor, two had been strangled and two had had their throats cut, and his DNA was found on all four. The mothers came from Culiacán, from Elota and from Hermosillo.
He was arrested in January 2020 and bound over first for Olga Ana Karen’s death. In September 2020 the prosecutor added charges for Cecilia Guadalupe and Lucía Mariana, and on September 7 a fourth, for Melissa Angélica. It was the first time in Sinaloa, local reporting noted, that the state had charged a single person with several femicides since the crime was defined in law. Before one of those hearings he cut his left wrist in the Culiacán prison; the injury was not serious. The four cases were joined, then stalled for months when the state judiciary suspended activity during the pandemic. In September 2021 he was reported to be ready to plead guilty to all four in abbreviated proceedings, which would have brought a shorter sentence. One of the mothers, who asked not to be named, said the families had been coming to court for more than a year to watch hearings canceled.
The plea did not happen. He went to oral trial, and on October 21, 2022 the trial judge at the Culiacán criminal court, zona Centro, found the evidence proved his responsibility for the deaths of Cecilia Guadalupe, Lucía Mariana and Olga Ana Karen, and did not prove it for Melissa Angélica. He was acquitted of her killing. The sentences were thirty-six years for Olga Ana Karen and eighteen each for Cecilia Guadalupe and Lucía Mariana, with reparations to the three families of 439,612 pesos, 407,836 pesos and 427,519.40 pesos. The prosecutor announced the total as seventy years. The three terms as reported add to seventy-two, the figure a later television account used, and the published reporting does not reconcile the two.
Three convictions and an acquittal. The DNA the prosecution said it had found on all four women was enough for the judge in three cases and not in the fourth, and the published reporting does not explain the difference.