In late August 2023, relatives of María Isabel Giraldo began to worry. She had traveled from Ibagué on August 18 to visit her brother, Bernardo, and his wife, Mérida, at their home in La Paloma, a rural district (vereda) in the hills above Santa Rosa de Cabal, in the Colombian department of Risaralda. Three or four days went by with no word. A cousin who lived in town went up to the house and found the doors shut and no one around. She climbed in through a window. The rooms had been turned over, drawers and cabinets opened, mattresses moved. All three were dead.
Prosecutors later said the killings at La Paloma were the last of seven attacks over eleven years in which eleven people died, ten of them older adults and one a boy of thirteen. Juan Carlos Villa Cardona accepted responsibility for all of them and was sentenced in March 2024 to 45 years and 5 months in prison. His brother José Alfredo Villa Cardona was charged in five of the deaths. The prosecution described a series of thefts from people who lived alone and far from help, in which killing was the method. Juan Carlos, interviewed from prison in 2025, offered a different account of why he did it. Both accounts are given below, and kept apart.
Little about the brothers' early lives has been reported from records. Juan Carlos Villa Cardona was known as "el Enano" and "Juancho," the names the Fiscalía (Colombia's national prosecution service) used for him; Semana added "Caliche." Noticias Caracol's Séptimo Día described him as short and athletic, and reported that he worked as a recycler, collecting material to sell. He lived in the Corocito neighborhood of Pereira, the departmental capital.
His own account of his childhood comes from interviews he gave from prison in 2025 to Séptimo Día and to a podcast, Más allá del silencio. He said his parents left him with his grandparents in Marsella, Risaralda, when he was seven, and that this left him with lasting resentment, which he said he directed at older people. He also said he had stabbed another child when he was eleven. No record confirming any of it has been reported; it rests on his word alone.
The family was larger than the two brothers named in the charges. El Tiempo reported that prosecutors placed his father, who has since died, at the first killings in 2012. The Fiscalía later charged a third brother, José David Villa Cardona, in one of the 2023 killings. A fourth, José Mauricio Villa Cardona, is named by Séptimo Día as the brother who gave the police the tip that led to the arrest. Their mother, interviewed by the same program, said she knew what her son had done and did not report him because she was afraid of him.
According to the Fiscalía's account as reported by El Tiempo, Vanguardia and El Universal, Juan Carlos moved through the rural districts of Pereira, Dosquebradas, Santa Rosa de Cabal, Marsella and Santuario passing himself off as a man with a disability. He carried a handwritten note saying he was deaf and mute and asking for help for his sick mother. Older people who lived alone in isolated houses gave him food, money and sometimes a place to sleep. Prosecutors said he used those visits to learn who lived where and what they had, then came back. Once the victims were alone, Vanguardia reported, the attackers forced their way in and stabbed them. What was taken was often small: cell phones, jewelry, radios, cash, tools and food.
In the La Paloma case, Germán Ramírez Muñoz, director of the Fiscalía in Risaralda, said the attackers had won the victims' trust by passing themselves off as sick men, and the Fiscalía said the two had pretended to be unable to speak or hear. The agency's summary of the case, as quoted by the Agencia de Periodismo Investigativo, put it in five words: "Tras ganarse su confianza las sometió" ("After winning their trust, he subdued them").
The first attack the Fiscalía attributed to Juan Carlos took place in March 2012 in a farmhouse outside Marsella, west of Pereira. Francisco Javier Gaviria Valencia was 61. His wife, Fanny Ortiz Cruz, was 58. Their grandson, Juan David Aguirre Gaviria, was with them. El Tiempo, Semana and El Universo gave the boy's age as 13; reports based on the Fiscalía's December 2023 statement said 14.
According to the prosecution as reported by Vanguardia and El Universal, the attack took place on March 24, 2012, in the vereda San Carlos; El Tiempo placed the house in the vereda El Salado, and Semana gave the date as March 3. All three were stabbed. People from the community found the bodies. Afterward, the Fiscalía said, valuables and cash were taken from the house. El Tiempo reported that prosecutors said Juan Carlos did this with his father, to take money the grandfather had earned from his work. The case went unsolved for eleven years.
On a dirt track between the Kennedy neighborhood of Pereira and the Comuneros neighborhood of Dosquebradas, José Israel Osorio, 61, was killed in May 2013. He sold cheese in downtown Pereira. El Universo gave the date as May 20.
More than eight years passed before the next killing the Fiscalía attributed to Juan Carlos. Holmes Giraldo Restrepo, 66, was found in late October 2021 in a room in the vereda Llano Grande Alto, outside Pereira, where he stored materials for a house he was building. His belongings were gone. El Universo dated it November 2021.
The sources do not say whether either killing was investigated at the time, or what the families were told.
The pace changed in 2023, and so, according to the prosecution, did the team. Henry López Giraldo, 60, was killed on May 7, 2023, in the corregimiento of La Florida, in rural Pereira. El Tiempo reported the Fiscalía's account that the brothers had set out to steal forty meters of copper cable from him. This was one of the two killings the Fiscalía attributed to José Alfredo.
The other was that of Gustavo Loaiza Ríos, 80, at his farm, El Espinazo, in the vereda El Tutui, in the municipality of Santuario. A neighbor who came to visit found his body about two days after he died. The date is given as August 7 (Vanguardia, from the Fiscalía), August 8 (El Universo) and August 10 (El Tiempo). Reports based on the Fiscalía's statement gave the ages of the two victims in José Alfredo's cases as 64 and 81; El Tiempo named them as 60 and 80.
Bernardo Giraldo was 84 and his wife, Mérida González, 82, according to El Universal's report at the time; Semana gave their ages as 83 and 81 and her full name as Mélida González López. They lived in the vereda La Paloma. Noticias Caracol described them as well known in the area for their country life and for helping others. They had recently sold their rural property and were staying on at the farm only until they moved into the town of Santa Rosa de Cabal, Noticias RCN reported. Their youngest daughter, Carmen, has lived with schizophrenia since she was fifteen, and her parents had cared for her; she had been taken into the hospital days before they died. A granddaughter, Jesica Buendía, later spoke for the family.
María Isabel Giraldo, Bernardo's sister, was 82 (86, according to Semana). She had left the countryside young, lived for years in the 7 de Agosto neighborhood of Ibagué, and raised five daughters there. Her family, quoted by Q'hubo Ibagué, described her as devoted to others, strong and fond of plants. She often came to stay with her brother and his wife.
Investigators later learned that a stranger had been seen in La Paloma: a man of medium height, carrying a paper that said he was deaf and mute. Séptimo Día reported that Bernardo had been suspicious of him at first and warned his neighbors, but later let him stay at the house.
The Fiscalía placed the killings between August 20 and 23 or 24, 2023. Prosecutors said the attackers tortured the three to make them say where money was supposedly hidden in the house and, finding none, stabbed them. Police found the bodies in the kitchen and the bathroom. The family disputed the robbery theory: they told Noticias RCN that the money from the sale was in a bank certificate of deposit, not in the house, and that the attackers had taken only groceries. Few people had known of the sale, and at first the family suspected the buyer.
The discovery was reported to the police on Friday, August 25 (Semana, which names the cousin who reported it as Diana Cecilia Saldarriaga) or Saturday, August 26 (El Universal). The Risaralda police commander, Colonel Simón Eduardo Cornejo, said investigators already had initial lines of inquiry. A reward of 30 million pesos was announced; Séptimo Día later said it was made up of 20 million from the department and 10 million from the municipality. María Isabel Giraldo was buried in Ibagué. Bernardo Giraldo and Mérida González were buried in Santa Rosa de Cabal.
On September 23, 2023, according to El Tiempo, Juan Bautista Restrepo, 66, was found dead on a farm in Dosquebradas. His valuables were missing. Noticias RCN placed the farm in the vereda El Nudo; Semana said an older man's body was found in the vereda La Fría about four weeks after La Paloma. A Fiscalía release in June 2024 dated the killing of a 66-year-old man on a farm in rural Dosquebradas to September 21, 2023, and said Juan Carlos had again posed as a person in need to get into the house, then stabbed the man and took valuables, while his brother José David kept watch. The release does not name the victim, but the age, place and month match Juan Bautista Restrepo.
Noticias Caracol and Noticias RCN later reconstructed the investigation from interviews with the police. Elmer Andrade, an investigator with the Sijín (the police criminal investigation unit) in Risaralda, took over the case. At first it was treated as a robbery that had gone wrong. Andrade told Séptimo Día that the number of wounds made investigators doubt that. At the scene an investigator found a bloody footprint left by a rubber boot. Neighbors described the man with the note, and police released composite sketches of two men.
In early September a caller gave the police a phone number and an address. Intercepted calls led investigators to the suspect's family. In those calls, according to Séptimo Día, a relative said that José Alfredo was frightened and sorry for what had happened; the program said investigators concluded from the mother's calls that Juan Carlos had pushed José Alfredo into taking part. Using the national civil registry and the sketch, police identified the man with the note as Juan Carlos Villa Cardona. Witnesses picked him out in photographs. The Risaralda police commander, Héctor García, described him to Séptimo Día as stealthy and calculating, a man who studied his victims.
According to Séptimo Día, arrest warrants for both brothers were requested on September 23, 2023.
Police raided Juan Carlos's home in the Corocito neighborhood of Pereira. El Tiempo and Paragrafo.co gave the date as September 27, 2023; Semana said September 25; Noticias RCN said the early hours of September 28. Investigators seized rubber boots, handwritten notes and pamphlets in which he presented himself as deaf and mute and asked for help for his gravely ill mother, and, according to Noticias en Línea, the knives they believed had been used. Andrade told Noticias RCN that Villa Cardona said he had been waiting for the authorities over what happened in Santa Rosa de Cabal. He could hear and speak.
On September 28 the Fiscalía announced that a prosecutor from its Collective Homicides Group had charged him with aggravated homicide and torture over the La Paloma killings, that he had accepted the charges, and that a judge had ordered him held in jail. José Alfredo turned himself in at the Santa Rosa de Cabal police station on October 1, 2023. El Tiempo reported that he too accepted the charges in the La Paloma case.
According to Semana, Juan Carlos told police after his arrest that he had killed eleven people since 2012, mostly older adults, some of them with his father and his brother.
The Fiscalía went back to court in December 2023. Semana dated the hearing to December 6; the Fiscalía's account was reported from December 8 onward. Before a judge of control de garantías (the judge who supervises the investigation stage), the prosecutor added six more incidents to the aggravated homicide case: the Marsella killings of 2012, José Israel Osorio, Holmes Giraldo Restrepo, Henry López Giraldo, Gustavo Loaiza Ríos and Juan Bautista Restrepo. Together with La Paloma, that made seven attacks and eleven deaths.
The prosecution linked Juan Carlos to all six new incidents and José Alfredo to two of them, López Giraldo in Pereira and Loaiza Ríos in Santuario. El Universal and Vanguardia reported that Juan Carlos "aceptó la totalidad de los hechos imputados," accepted all of the charged acts. According to El Tiempo and Paragrafo.co, José Alfredo accepted that he had taken part in those two killings; neither El Universal nor Vanguardia reported his plea. Both brothers remained in custody. Semana reported that Juan Carlos was being held at a temporary detention center because the prisons had no room, and that by accepting the charges he was seeking a reduced sentence. Investigators said they were checking whether the brothers were responsible for other deaths in the department.
Around March 20, 2024, a trial judge (juez de conocimiento) sentenced Juan Carlos Villa Cardona to 545 months in prison, 45 years and 5 months, for aggravated homicide and torture, according to the Agencia de Periodismo Investigativo, which cited the Fiscalía. The agency said he had acknowledged responsibility for the deaths of at least ten older adults and one adolescent because of the weight of the physical evidence. Noticias RCN reported a fine of 1,400 times the monthly minimum wage.
Before the sentence was read, Noticias RCN reported, he gave the court a different name and tried to present himself as mentally ill, a claim that was disproved. Séptimo Día said prosecutors described it as an attempt to fake a disorder to escape criminal responsibility. "Una burla no solo a nosotros, sino a la justicia," Jesica Buendía told Noticias RCN: a mockery, not only of the family but of justice. She said he had admitted the crimes once the prosecutor laid out the evidence at a hearing.
He was sent to the prison at La Dorada, in the department of Caldas. In 2025 Vanguardia, El Colombiano and Séptimo Día gave his sentence as 43 years; the Fiscalía's own figure was 45 years and 5 months. No appeal has been reported.
On June 8, 2024, the Fiscalía reported that a prosecutor from the Collective Homicides Group had brought charges against a third brother, José David Villa Cardona, for aggravated homicide in the September 2023 killing of the 66-year-old man in Dosquebradas. The agency said José David had agreed with Juan Carlos to commit it and had watched the victim while Juan Carlos attacked him. José David was already serving a sentence of more than four years for criminal conspiracy, handed down in February 2024. The same release said José Alfredo had been charged with taking part in five homicides of older people and was in prison. It gave no verdict for either, and said both were presumed innocent.
No verdict or sentence for José Alfredo or José David has been reported. Both stand charged, not convicted.
On January 6, 2026, El Universal reported that Juan Carlos Villa Cardona was in prison serving a sentence of more than 45 years. In its release of June 8, 2024, the Fiscalía described José Alfredo Villa Cardona as in prison and charged in five deaths, with no verdict reported, and José David Villa Cardona as charged in one. No later report has said whether either has been convicted, or whether the investigators' review of other deaths in Risaralda produced further charges.
From prison, Juan Carlos gave interviews in 2025 to Séptimo Día and to the podcast Más allá del silencio, hosted by Rafael Poveda. Reports of those interviews in Vanguardia, El Colombiano, Noticias Caracol and El Universal quote him at length. He said he felt no remorse. He said he hated older people and connected that to being left with his grandparents as a child. He said he prayed before and after the killings and that some of the victims deserved to die. He said the note had let him get past many obstacles.
He also turned on his family. He said his brothers had covered for him ("me alcahueteaban"), that they were as guilty as he was "y hasta peores," and even worse, and that he wanted them to answer to justice too. He said a brother had handed him over for a reward, putting the figure at 15 million pesos, and called trusting his brothers the worst thing that ever happened to him. A forensic psychologist interviewed for the podcast, Belisario Valbuena, said he was in touch with reality and showed antisocial traits, not psychosis.
These statements were made years after the crimes by a man who had already tried to deceive the court about his identity and his mental state. They are not evidence of what happened in any particular case, and nothing he said in them has been tested in court.
Proven by conviction: Juan Carlos Villa Cardona was sentenced for aggravated homicide and torture after accepting responsibility. The sentencing report describes at least ten older adults and one adolescent. The Fiscalía's June 2024 release describes the sentence as covering the Dosquebradas killing "and nine other homicides," ten in all. Neither account explains the difference of one.
Charged, no verdict found: José Alfredo Villa Cardona, in the three La Paloma deaths and in the deaths of Henry López Giraldo and Gustavo Loaiza Ríos. El Tiempo reported that he accepted the La Paloma charges and his part in the other two; the Fiscalía's 2024 release still described him as charged. José David Villa Cardona, in the Dosquebradas killing.
Alleged and never tried: the participation of the brothers' father in the 2012 Marsella killings. He died before the case was solved.
Disputed: the motive. Prosecutors described theft. The La Paloma family told Noticias RCN that there was no money in the house and only groceries were taken. Juan Carlos, in 2025, spoke of hatred of older people. Each version comes from a different interested party.
Unconfirmed: Juan Carlos's claim that he stabbed a child at eleven; his account of his childhood; his claim that he killed young people as well as old; the claim, reported by Séptimo Día, that police suspected seven or eight more cases with similar features. No further charges have been reported.
March 2012 (March 24 per the Fiscalía; March 3 per Semana): Francisco Javier Gaviria Valencia, Fanny Ortiz Cruz and their grandson Juan David Aguirre Gaviria are stabbed to death in rural Marsella.
May 2013: José Israel Osorio, a cheese seller, is killed between Pereira and Dosquebradas.
Late October 2021: Holmes Giraldo Restrepo is found dead at Llano Grande Alto, Pereira.
May 7, 2023: Henry López Giraldo is killed in La Florida, Pereira.
August 7 to 10, 2023: Gustavo Loaiza Ríos is killed at his farm in Santuario.
August 18, 2023: María Isabel Giraldo arrives at La Paloma to visit her brother.
August 20 to 24, 2023: María Isabel Giraldo, Bernardo Giraldo and Mérida González are killed.
August 25 or 26, 2023: the bodies are found; a reward is announced.
September 21 or 23, 2023: Juan Bautista Restrepo is killed in Dosquebradas.
September 23, 2023: arrest warrants are requested for Juan Carlos and José Alfredo.
September 25 to 28, 2023: Juan Carlos is arrested in Pereira and charged over La Paloma; a judge orders him jailed.
October 1, 2023: José Alfredo surrenders in Santa Rosa de Cabal.
December 2023: six more incidents are added; Juan Carlos accepts all of them.
February 2024: José David Villa Cardona is sentenced to more than four years for criminal conspiracy.
About March 20, 2024: Juan Carlos is sentenced to 545 months.
June 8, 2024: the Fiscalía reports charges against José David and says José Alfredo is charged in five homicides.
2025: Juan Carlos gives prison interviews to Séptimo Día and Más allá del silencio.
January 6, 2026: El Universal reports him in prison.