How did a USB stick help solve a heinous crime of three women in the Magdalena swamp?

On January 17, 2017, fishermen from the Chilloa swamp in the municipality of El Banco, Magdalena, found the bodies of Mercedes Victoria and Gloria Amparo Leal Valetta, 48 and 49 years old, in a state of decomposition, and that of Andrea Carolina Castellanos. Leal, 20.

The massacre shocked the country and even the investigators who unraveled the crime, which was solved thanks to a USB memory found by those in charge of lifting the three bodies.

Time collected the testimony of Mayor Jairo Cadavid, who was part of the investigation that resolved the case and led to the sentence of the engineer Róbinson Castellanos Plata to 60 years in prison.

The mayor says that on January 16 a group of fishermen arrived at his office to report the appearance of the three corpses in the murky waters of the Chilloa swamp, in the village of Garzón, which appeared floating when they were about to start their activity. within the sea.

“I thought it was a drowning, because in that area people die of old age, never from something violent,” said the uniformed man.

Upon arriving at the area and beginning to extract the body, he noticed, according to his account to the newspaper, that the bodies had stones tied to their limbs, a deep cut in the abdomen and stab wounds.

He knew it was not a possible drowning. At that time, he thought of retaliations by illegal groups that are fighting for control of drug trafficking. When he was inspecting Andrea Carolina’s body, he found a blue USB memory stick in his right pocket.

The following day, the Magdalena Police Commander, Colonel John Rodríguez Andrade, arrived in the area and formed a team with members of the Criminal Investigation Directorate and Interpol and the Magdalena Criminal Investigation Section, in coordination with the Prosecutor’s Office. Sectional.

Within the investigation team was Roger Correa, from the computer forensic laboratory, whose task was to unravel the secrets of the USB. Correa recalls that in order to access the files of the electronic device, he had to use specialized equipment that processed the card, and that he had to go through a careful process to prevent the valuable information from being lost.

“It was a 1 Giga capacity Kingston USB that looked good on the outside, but had been under the swamp for several hours. The drying procedure was carried out and, later, it was examined to see what type of data this storage device contained, ”Correa recalled.

Correa managed to rescue 192 PDF documents, 14 Word, one Excel, two PowerPoint, and more than 200 videos from the card. He noted that in most files there were many photographs of properties located in the interior of the country and a photo of a woman who was studying at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana de Medellín. Which served to reinforce the theory that the three women were not natives of the area.

One night, Cadavid noticed that the social media profile of the woman in the photos was activated. It was a college student who was a friend of Andrea Carolina.

“I told Higuita to talk to him. That he didn’t say anything about a homicide, but that it was an apparent theft. So this person, Carmen, who happened to be a university friend of Andrea Carolina, said that this USB card was hers and could only be had by a friend who she only knew was on the Caribbean coast. She also told us that she was with her stepfather, an aunt and her mother, which made us think of a perpetrator, that fourth person who did not appear ”.

This young woman gave details of the young woman’s stepfather, Róbinson Castellanos Plata, and the relationship he had with the two victims.

“The USB was vital and so we began to search, without luck, if these women had relatives on the coast, but no one appeared. Until the rumor reached us that a person from the area had participated in the triple homicide.

According to the investigator’s account, on January 23, 2017, the Police received the testimony of a man known as ‘El canoero’, who decided to speak knowing that his home was going to be searched.

Upon arrival, the forensic team was received by the fisherman who told them: “Don’t wear yourself out, I’m going to tell you everything.”

‘El canoero’ assured that he was forced by his brother, Jhony López Castro, a subject dedicated to witchcraft; who helped Róbinson Castellanos Plata to commit the murders. He further maintained that he only carried the bodies in a canoe to the most remote part of the swamp.

In addition to the information obtained on the USB card, the trace that the family left along the road in the security cameras was vital.

With these images, on January 30, 2017, Dijín managed to capture Castellanos Plata, who according to the investigations had committed the murders due to financial problems with his wife and to claim a lot that she had received as an inheritance. Until July 23, 2020, the court managed to convict Castellanos of the triple femicide.