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Left: Jose Eduardo Dominguez-Garcia (Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office). Right: Rosaly Cindy Chavarria Rodriguez (Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office).
The Wisconsin man who killed his pregnant girlfriend and stuffed her remains into a suitcase will spend decades behind bars.
As Law&Crime has previously reported, Jose Eduardo Dominguez-Garcia, 27, has long been suspected in the death of Rosaly Cindy Chavarria Rodriguez, 25. Her remains were discovered in October 2020, months after she had last been seen — inside a suitcase in an abandoned farmhouse in Wisconsin Dells, a city some 55 miles northwest of Madison.
On Jan. 8, Dominguez-Garcia pleaded no contest to first-degree reckless homicide. As part of his plea agreement, the charges of homicide of an unborn child and hiding a corpse were dismissed.
Court records show that on Friday, Chippewa County Circuit Judge James M. Isaacson issued a sentence of 40 years, with 25 years as “initial confinement” and then 15 years of “extended supervision.” The judge also issued a time-served credit of 525 days.
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The defendant was also ordered to stay away from all “victims, their residence or places of employment.”
The quarter-century sentence is significantly lower than what Chavarria Rodriguez’s family had hoped for. According to Eau Claire ABC affiliate WQOW, her parents wanted the maximum possible penalty — 60 years.
“It was two lives that he took away, one was my daughter and the other was the baby my daughter had,” her father, Jorge Chavarria, told the station. “I would like to see the Chippewa authorities give him the maximum penalty. I don’t want them to have flexibility towards him.”
He hoped that the court wouldn’t show compassion, since Dominguez-Garcia did not show compassion to his daughter, the station reported.
Dominguez-Garcia was charged with murder in December 2021, despite his whereabouts being unknown at the time. He was eventually arrested in November 2023 when police in Gladstone, Missouri, spotted a vehicle with a stolen plate traveling through the city. Officers later discovered the sedan, a red Ford Fusion, in a parking lot on the 400 block of NW Englewood Road.
The murder charge was later amended to first-degree reckless homicide.
Chavarria Rodriguez had last been seen alive on July 2, 2020, working at Sprecher’s restaurant in Lake Delton, Wisconsin. Dominguez-Garcia picked up the victim’s final paycheck from Sprecher’s on July 23, 2020, the day after his own last day working there, according to authorities in a Leader-Telegraph report. He allegedly told investigators at the time that he and Rodriguez had broken up on the 4th of July after he discovered she had cheated on him; another man had apparently fathered the child she was carrying when she died.
After police found Chavarria Rodriguez’s red 2003 Volkswagen Jetta in August of that year, investigators suggested they found fluids indicating that someone had stuffed a newly decaying body in the trunk. Yet there was no sign of the victim until an informant in a drug case directed authorities toward a vacant farm in the city of Wheaton between 20th and 30th Avenue along the Highway T corridor. There, in October of 2020, they found Chavarria Rodriguez’s body, stuffed into a purple suitcase at the farmhouse.
It took almost a year to confirm that the remains were Chavarria Rodriguez.
A doctor’s appointment on June 18, 2020, had reportedly determined Chavarria Rodriguez to be seven weeks and five days pregnant.
Chavarria Rodriguez leaves behind a 9-year-old daughter, who now lives with the victim’s mother in their native Peru, Milwaukee ABC affiliate WISN reported. Family members have reportedly been unable to give their daughter a proper burial; perhaps in response to these concerns, Isaacson ordered that Chavarria Rodriguez’s body be released to the family on Friday.
“She was a family girl, she was always responsible. She liked to study,” Jorge Chavarria told WQOW. “That’s how we would like her to be remembered.”
More from Law&Crime: ‘I forgive myself for falling in love with a monster’: Suitcase killer goes on bizarre rant claiming she is the victim, not her boyfriend she left to die in zipped-up luggage
