March against gender-based violence in Quito, Ecuador.
Letty Cando’s crime has provoked the outrage of Ecuadorians. The woman killer confessed to raping her in the early hours of September 3, stabbing her three times in the heart, cutting her body into seven pieces and burying her in a swampy area of Guangüiltagua Park, north of Quito. It is the latest case of gender-based violence in Ecuador, a country where there have been 362 crimes against women so far in 2023. The young nurse, 33 years old, worked in a hospital south of Quito. Last Wednesday, the institution’s social worker reported her disappearance because she had not gone to work for three days, and Letty “was a very responsible professional and they had no communication with her,” she described in the complaint in which she left Name of a friend of the victim who he went out with that night.
Letty met Jhonny Caiza through other friends at a bar that Saturday, according to versions compiled by police investigators. Around midnight, her friend felt bad and left the place, but the party continued at the perpetrator’s house in the Bellavista sector, which borders Guangüiltagua Park, a modest house in a ravine. “There are surveillance camera videos of Caiza carrying Letty to his house. The results of the tests will tell us whether he drugged the young woman,” explains Galo Muñoz Robalino, deputy director of the Investigation of Crimes Against Life. Dinased.
While Letty lay unconscious in the confessed murderer’s room, the other men continued to drink on the street for a few minutes. At around 2 a.m. Caiza went to his house and an hour later he made four trips to Guangüiltagua Park. “On each trip he carried a bag on his back, the round trip took 22 minutes, except for the last trip, where he also carried a shovel and took an hour and a half to return home,” says Muñoz. This evidence was crucial in obtaining a confession from the man, who after his arrest by police “was cornered and accepted that what he was carrying were parts of Cando’s body,” the investigator adds added. The inmate said he raped her and then stabbed her three times in the heart and cut her into seven pieces.
The killer gave the exact location where he buried the body of the young nurse, originally from Loja, a province in southern Ecuador, where her eight-year-old son lives with his grandmother. Investigators found the dismembered body, which the 30-year-old locksmith had precisely cut up. “I have never seen a crime like this, the criminal profile is not common, but it exists. “We were amazed at how he wanted to hide the body and how orderly he buried it,” says Muñoz.
Ecuador’s public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into Johnny Caiza, who is imprisoned for involuntary disappearance resulting in death. However, the crime can be reformulated as femicide, punishable by 34 years in prison, while more evidence is collected about the killer, such as testimony from one of his nieces who said he had been raping her since she was nine years old. The investigators found further evidence such as Letty’s wallet in the house, remnants of her burned clothing, but also other women’s clothing from which genetic material should be taken to find out whether there are other victims.
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