In 2015 Rosario Alfonso R. was a fisherman at the Las Arenitas fishing camp near Eldorado, in the municipality of Culiacán. That year he set out in a panga with two companions for Comondú in Baja California Sur. The boat broke up. He drifted for thirteen days on a piece of the hull before the Mexican Navy found him; the two others died at sea. The Sinaloa press, when his name resurfaced five years later, called him el Náufrago, the castaway, and the name stuck to the case.
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 cancelled.
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.