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Less than a month after the birth of Camilo Salazar’s second daughter, the Miami businessman met a tragic fate, driven by jealousy and a shocking act of retribution.
“This case contained all the elements of a bad Hollywood film,” commented Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle regarding Salazar’s murder on Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
After the orchestrator of the vicious crime fled the nation, it took years and the relentless efforts of a dedicated team of prosecutors and detectives to finally bring the perpetrators to justice, as explored in the episode titled “The End of the Affair.”
Who was Camilo Salazar?
Salazar, who had emigrated from Colombia with his family when he was younger, was seemingly living the American dream just before he was killed. He’d been married for less than a year to his beautiful wife Daisy Holcombe, had a home in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, and was a successful entrepreneur with a business selling window treatments.
“He was surrounded by friends all the time, always smiling, always had something funny to say or, you know, kind of made things light,” his sister Carolina remembered.
Life got even sweeter for Salazar in May of 2011, when he and Holcombe welcomed a baby girl, Skyler. Salazar was already dad to another daughter.
The day Camilo Salazar was killed
Just three weeks after his daughter Skyler was born, Salazar was killed on June 1, 2011 in a shocking act of brutality.
That day, his wife Holcombe was already back at work as an event planner and had asked her husband to bring the baby to her office for a visit so that she could nurse her.
Salazar dropped the infant off just after 10 a.m. and then mysteriously disappeared.
When he didn’t return home that night, Salazar’s friends and family fanned out looking for him. His mother Maria Ines set out on foot, walking the streets near his home for hours.
“We spent the whole night looking in every place in Miami, walking, checking in dumpsters, asking around in hospitals, checking inside cars that were unlocked,” Maria Ines told Dateline correspondent Dennis Murphy.
Camilo Salazar’s car found still parked near wife’s office
Then, some of the search party returned to Holcombe’s office and found Salazar’s car still parked nearby. The driver’s side windows were down, but the keys to the vehicle were missing and there was no sign of Salazar.
What the family didn’t know was that about an hour away in a remote part of the county, just on the outskirts of the Everglades, someone from the Miami-Dade Police Department had already made a grisly discovery.
Lt. Angelo Andrade was out looking for drug smugglers when he noticed a plume of smoke and stopped to find that someone had lit a body on fire just inside the wetlands. Andrade quickly secured the scene and called for homicide detectives.
Burned body identified as Camilo Salazar
“It was an unidentified white male who had his hands bound behind his back,” Miami-Dade Police Detective Christopher Villano said. “He was laying on his stomach. We could see that he had a slit throat. Um, at that time, somebody had made a comment that it resembles that of a Colombian necktie.”
According to Villano, the victim had also suffered blunt force trauma to the head and face and someone had set the body on fire at his genital region.
The next day, during an autopsy, authorities were able to positively identify the body as that of 43-year-old Salazar.
Secret affair is revealed
By all accounts, Salazar and Holcombe seemed to have a happy marriage, but just as the investigation into his death was beginning, detectives learned that Salazar had been keeping a secret.
Just days into the investigation, Jenny Marin came into the police station to reveal that not only was she having an affair with Salazar, but her own husband Manuel “Manny” Marin, the owner of a popular Hispanic supermarket chain, was missing, along with his passport.
During their marriage, Manny made sure Jenny had an expensive waterfront mansion, yachts, and designer clothes. But the marriage was plagued with infidelity, jealousy, and constant fighting.
“Jenny is restless,” said reporter David Ovalle, who covered the case at the time for the Miami Herald. “She’s not feeling any warmth, she’s feeling very lonely and isolated.”
Jenny turned to Salazar, a man who had been in her social circle for years, and the two eventually began an affair. Although the pair had tried to keep their relationship under the radar, Manny eventually found out about the affair and was furious.
It all reached a boiling point during an argument on their yacht shortly before Salazar disappeared. Manny ordered his wife to end the affair, but she decided to walk away from him instead.
Manny Marin goes on the run
Detectives believed that Manny likely had something to do with Salazar’s murder, but by then, he had fled the United States on a plane to Paris and vanished.
An analysis of Manny’s phone records would reveal that on the day Salazar was murdered, Manny had been communicating with three men, all affiliated with the mixed martial arts fighting scene: Roberto Isaac, Ariel Gandulla, and Alexis Vila Perdomo.
But none of the men were talking. Cell phone data also showed that on the day of the murder, Manny’s phone had been pinging in the area where the body was discovered.
Four years into the investigation, detectives caught a break when a fingerprint left on Salazar’s car matched to Gandulla.
There was only one problem: Gandulla had also gone on the run.
Charges brought in connection with Camilo Salazar’s death
In 2018, the State Attorney’s Office charged all four men, even though Gandulla and Manny were still in the wind.
When authorities learned that Manny’s son was allegedly providing him money to aid his escape, they charged the son with aiding and abetting. Manny was eventually arrested in Spain, where he’d been hiding out.
Authorities also tracked Gandulla to Vancouver, Canada. He agreed to testify against Manny in exchange for a deal. He told prosecutors that he, Perdomo and Issac had abducted Salazar outside Holcombe’s office, then drove him to an abandoned industrial park where they met up with Manny.
When Gandulla realized the abduction was not about collecting a debt and was about seeking revenge, he left the scene, while the others drove Salazar into the Everglades, he said.
“It was machismo,” Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Justin Funck said. “Manny had been wronged. His wife was cheating on him and this was the man who did it and we’re gonna deal with it.”
Manny went on trial in the spring of 2023 and was found guilty of manslaughter. He was sentenced to life in prison.
In separate trials, Perdomo was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and Isaac was found guilty of murder.
