The Sinaloa press called him el Náufrago de Las Arenitas, the castaway of Las Arenitas, and the name stuck to the case. That nickname needs a caution. It is also, and more commonly, the name of Jesús Eduardo Vidaña López, a fisherman from the same Las Arenitas camp who survived one of the longest recorded drifts at sea and whose name has appeared in the Sinaloa press for twenty years. Whether Rosario Alfonso survived a shipwreck of his own, or whether the press attached an existing local nickname to him, is not something the reporting consulted here establishes. What is established is that he was a fisherman from that camp and that the papers used the name for him.
On December 19, 2018 the body of Cecilia Guadalupe B., twenty-one, from Culiacán, was found in irrigation canal 35 in the Costa Rica syndicate south of the city. On December 11, 2019 Lucía Mariana M., seventeen, a preparatory student at the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, disappeared; she was found dead 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.
He was arrested in January 2020 and bound over for the Ana Karen case first. In September 2020 the state prosecutor added charges for Cecilia Guadalupe and Lucía Mariana, and on September 8 a fourth, for Melissa Angélica E., killed in 2019 at the Panteón Civil cemetery. 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 considering a plea in abbreviated proceedings, which would have brought a shorter sentence than the eighty-eight-year minimum lawyers estimated at trial. 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 judge of 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 Ana Karen and eighteen each for the other two, seventy years in total, with reparations of 1,274,967 pesos divided among the three families.
Three convictions, one acquittal. This archive counts three. The method of the killings is not fully described in the published reporting and is not supplied here.