This article contains details that some readers may find disturbing. “I have a gift for you… about your question, write it down: Isabel Hinojosa and her son, Eduardo Páez.” The phrase is from Hugo Bustamante, psychopath and murderer. He said it to Chilean journalist Ivonne Toro, on August 4, 2023.
Ivonne Toro interviewed him in prison, while she was writing her book “La Niña Ámbar”, an investigation into the death of Chilean teenager Ámbar Cornejo, whom Bustamante abused, raped, murdered and dismembered.
The journalist took note of the names that the psychopath dictated to her. Of the “gift” he gave her. She didn’t know what it meant.
She only knew there was one question Bustamante had never answered: “Have you killed anyone else?”
Amber Case
The case of Ámbar Cornejo shocked Chile in August 2020.
After being missing for 8 days, the remains of the 16-year-old teenager appeared in the house of Hugo Bustamante – located in the city of Villa Alemana, in the Valparaíso region – who at that time was the partner of Ámbar’s mother, Denise Llanos.
The young woman, who since childhood had faced the vulnerability and lack of protection of a dysfunctional family, had gone to that house to collect the alimony that her father sent her every month.
But he never left there again.
When it became known that Ámbar had been the victim of a horrible murder committed by Bustamante – and in which her mother also participated – all of Chile was outraged.
Bustamante had a terrifying record: in 2005 he had been convicted of the murder of his ex-partner, Verónica Vásquez, and her son, “Quenito,” aged 9. He suffocated her, hit him in the skull, and hid their bodies inside a huge metal drum, with lime, water and plaster.
That’s why he was known as the “drum killer.”
Although he was sentenced to a total of 27 years in prison for these crimes, only 11 years later – in 2016 – he was released from prison on parole and returned to live with his family in Villa Alemana.
Shortly after, Ámbar’s crime occurred.
An institutional problem
Journalist Ivonne Toro followed the case of Ámbar Cornejo closely.
“It really shocked me. The girl had been a victim of sexual abuse, she had asked for help all her life, and she was in a program run by the National Service for Minors (Sename). Meanwhile, her killer was a man who should have been serving a sentence. So my big question was: What happened here? Why was the girl unprotected and Bustamante free?” she told BBC Mundo.
“At that moment I came to the conclusion that this case reflected a deep institutional problem. The Chilean State did not do its job. And that is the story that I set out to reconstruct,” he adds.
The journalist dedicated 4 years to that purpose.
She reviewed almost 8,000 pages of court records that, as she says in her book “La niña Ámbar”, “dragged her into absolute darkness.”
She also conducted more than 100 interviews, some of which immersed her in horrors she had never known about.
Among those interviewed was Hugo Bustamante himself, who received her on 6 occasions – between June 2023 and January 2024 – in the Rancagua prison, where she is serving her sentence, and for which she prepared exhaustively in order to gain his trust.
“With the murderer in front of you”
And he succeeded… although not immediately.
At first he was evasive and confrontational. When he agreed to be interviewed, he asked the journalist to bring him toiletries and a psychology book to the prison.
Ivonne Toro chose “Con el asesino frente” (With the killer in front of you), by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
“I didn’t think it was necessary to be subtle,” he says in his book.
Bustamante gave it back to her, calling her ignorant and disrespectful.
She, somewhat repentant, rectified her statement and later sent him a psychology manual and a sudoku.
At their third meeting, in August 2023, Bustamante was moved.
Before she turned on the recorder, he told her he appreciated her treating him “like he was a person.” From the psychopath’s perspective, she had made many “gestures” with him (including sharing her snack, some nuts, during one of the interviews).
“My position was to treat him with respect,” Toro says.
In their conversations, the journalist wanted to understand what had led him to commit the crime of Ámbar and also that of Verónica Vásquez and her son Quenito.
But he found much more.
“Have you killed anyone else?”
It was during this third meeting that Bustamante decided to give the journalist a “gift.”
“I have a gift for you… regarding your question, write down: Isabel Hinojosa and her son, Eduardo Páez.”
The phrase turned his investigation on its head.
What did those names mean? Who were they? Where were they? Did they have anything to do with the Ámbar case?
Ivonne Toro left prison asking herself all these questions.
She clearly remembered that during their second meeting they had had a conversation that she described as “disturbing.”
-Have you killed anyone else? the journalist asked him.
-That doesn’t say anything about it anywhere. I’m not accused of any more murders.
-I’m not asking you about an accusation.
– Oh, right! Rabbits, cows. People, no… and if he had killed, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s not part of the deal to tell that part of the truth. I’m going to tell you some things, yes. Now you say: “He left me with the doubt, maybe he did it.”
With that dialogue in mind, Ivonne Toro began to investigate.
“I had to find out if these people existed or not. I started looking in the civil registry, names, coincidences, places… until at some point I managed to find a relative of these people and I asked him if they were okay. And the answer was no, they had been missing for 30 years,” he says.
Covadonga 641
Ivonne Toro visited Bustamante in prison for the fifth time.
“I told him: tell me where these people are. But he closed up, refused and even regretted having given me those names,” says the journalist.
What came next were months of searching without answers.
The families of the missing people had little recollection of what had happened 30 years ago. There was also no information online as it was a case that had been forgotten in the Chilean judicial system.
In January of this year, the journalist finally found the cause of the alleged misfortune of Isabel Hinojosa and her son, Eduardo Páez.
It included a statement from Hugo Bustamante from 1996 in which he said that both people had been in his house – located at 641 Covadonga Street, in Villa Alemana – before disappearing.
Páez and Bustamante had met in the 1990s in prison and continued seeing each other until he and his mother disappeared.
According to Toro in his book “La Niña Ámbar”, a daughter of Isabel Hinojosa stated that Bustamante had been the last person to see them alive after taking them to her home.
“I began to analyze Bustamante’s behavior. He killed Ámbar in his house and left her there, next to him. He took the bodies of Verónica and Quenito with him when he moved house. I concluded that Bustamante could not be far from the people he killed, that it was part of his signature, his way of acting and killing,” says Toro.
“I was convinced that 30 years ago these people went to Covadonga 641 and never left there,” the journalist added.
“You leave the people you kill near you”
With this conviction, he visited Hugo Bustamante in prison for the last time, in January of this year.
“I told him: ‘You leave the people you kill near you. You killed them and left them there.’ He tried to evade the answer, it was a very tense conversation.”
Some time later, in June of this year, Bustamante admitted to a gendarmerie officer his conversation with the journalist and his participation in the murder of Isabel Hinojosa and Eduardo Páez in 1996.
He also gave him the exact location of the missing bodies: Covadonga 641.
Chilean investigators carried out the relevant investigations and found two bodies at the scene.
On September 3, the prosecutor’s office confirmed that the remains belonged to Hinojosa and Páez.
Hugo Bustamante, the murderer of Ámbar, her ex-partner Verónica Vásquez and her son Quenito, added two more victims.
“Amber was a survivor”
For journalist Ivonne Toro, it was very complex to investigate this story, partly due to the difficulty of interviewing a psychopath.
“It is absurd to have someone in front of you who does not feel. He is a person incapable of feeling empathy or seeing others. He is aware of what he is, but he cannot measure the damage he causes,” explains Toro.
“He never regretted causing pain. He never made excuses or tried to trick me. He told me, ‘When I stand in front of a mirror and I’m shaving, I see a psychopath and I ask myself: what happened to me? And I don’t like the answer.’”
The journalist says that she also had a hard time processing the life full of misfortune and abandonment that the teenager Ámbar, the central character of her book, had to endure.
“I was devastated by the idea that someone had not been loved in their entire life. His death was terrible, but his life was even more so,” she says.
“Ambar was a survivor. She was capable of loving and caring despite everything.”
For his investigation, Toro interviewed Ámbar’s mother, Denise Llanos, who, like Bustamante, is serving a prison sentence for her role in her daughter’s murder.
According to the Chilean Public Prosecutor’s Office, Llanos urged her daughter to enter Bustamante’s house so that he could kill her and collaborated in the “restraint” and “subduing” of her daughter.
“She is a woman who does not recognize her guilt and that is very hard; she has no empathy. She always used Ámbar, she never protected her,” says Toro.
“One assumes, out of prejudice, that there is a maternal instinct, but Denise does not have it. And not only does she not have it, but it causes her harm. The level of her sadism with Ámbar is very impressive,” he adds.
Today, Ivonne Toro says that with her investigation – and Bustamante’s subsequent confession regarding the murders of Isabel Hinojosa and her son – they managed to “bring peace to a family after 30 years.”
“This shows that journalism is necessary, that sometimes it reaches truths that the judicial system does not reach,” he said.
But his work has brought consequences.
“I can’t sleep. I’ve become an expert in sleep remedies. I have ‘sweet dreams’ tea, melatonin cream, magnesium, a zoom lens… things I never needed before,” she says.
Still, she admits that she continues to suffer from “horrible and recurring” nightmares.
