The Death of Viviana Haeger

The Victim: Viviana Haeger

Viviana Haeger Massé was a 42-year-old accountant living with her family in the Parque Stocker condominium on the edge of Puerto Varas, a lakeside town in Chile's southern Los Lagos region. She was married to Jaime Anguita and was a mother. Her disappearance in mid-2010 became one of the most closely followed criminal cases in Chile, partly because of how long it took to find her and partly because of the errors made along the way.

A Disappearance and 42 Days of Searching

Haeger vanished from her home on 29 June 2010. That same day, according to a chronology published by the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio's news site Emol, her husband received a phone call warning that she had been kidnapped. Family and friends launched public appeals, and local prosecutors opened a kidnapping investigation, tracing her bank activity and mobile phone and seeking court authorisation for wiretaps.

On 10 August 2010, 42 days after she disappeared, her husband found her body in the attic space of the family's own house, even though detectives had been posted at the property for more than three weeks. The discovery inside the home, after weeks of searching elsewhere, drew intense public scrutiny of the police investigation.

A Flawed Investigation

The first official conclusions did not hold up. An initial autopsy found no sign of involvement by another person, a later forensic report pointed to herbicide ingestion, and by the end of 2010 the regional prosecutor was saying the case might be closed as a suicide. In December 2011, a new regional prosecutor assigned the file to prosecutor Naín Lamas and brought in a homicide team from Santiago to start over. Her remains were exhumed in 2012, and that May the national investigative police (PDI) sanctioned six of its officers over their handling of the case. A forensic report that November listed the cause of death as undetermined, and in June 2015 a criminalistics laboratory report pointed to asphyxia involving another person.

Arrests and Trial

In December 2015, police arrested Anguita and a carpenter, José Pérez Mancilla. Pérez confessed to killing Haeger and claimed her husband had paid him to do it. Both were held in pretrial detention, and in January 2017 prosecutors formally charged Anguita with parricide and sought a life sentence. The trial before the Puerto Montt criminal court opened in August 2017.

On 28 September 2017, the court unanimously acquitted Anguita, finding the evidence against him insufficient. They convicted Pérez of robbery with homicide, rejecting his account that he had been hired to commit the crime and concluding that he had entered the house, killed Haeger by asphyxiation and taken jewellery and a video camera. In October 2017 he was sentenced to ten years, a term Meganoticias later reported as ten years and one day; prosecutors had asked for 17. In December 2017, the Puerto Montt Court of Appeals rejected nullity appeals from prosecutors, the victim's family and Pérez's defence, upholding the verdict. Anguita is legally innocent of any role in his wife's death.

Parole and a Rejected Damages Claim

Pérez was released on parole in April 2023. Meganoticias reported that his prison file described good conduct, carpentry work in prison and acceptance of responsibility for the crime. He remains under supervision until his sentence ends.

Anguita later sued the Chilean state, seeking close to two billion pesos for harm they attributed to mistakes by the police, prosecutors and the national forensic service, including the time he spent in pretrial detention. In December 2025, Chilevisión reported that a civil court in Puerto Montt had rejected the claim. The judges acknowledged shortcomings in the investigation but found no causal link between the agencies' conduct and the damage claimed, and called the sums demanded exorbitant. The report did not say whether an appeal had been filed.

Why the Case Matters

The Haeger case became a reference point in Chile for how early investigative failures can shape everything that follows. A body missed inside the home, shifting forensic conclusions and disciplinary action against detectives fed years of uncertainty for her relatives and public suspicion of her husband, which a court ultimately found was not supported by the evidence. The case also shows the limits of state liability under Chilean law: a court can accept that an investigation was flawed and still decide that the state owes no compensation.