Charles Horman - Biography

Biography

Horman was born and raised in New York City, where he attended the Allen-Stevenson School, from which he graduated in 1957. He then graduated cum laude (top 15%) from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1960 and Harvard University in 1964 and worked for a number of years in the U.S. media. In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer.

On September 17, 1973, six days after the military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc prison camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. The whereabouts of Horman's body were presumably undetermined, at least according to the Americans, for about a month following his death, although it was later determined that, after his execution, Horman's body was buried inside a wall in the national stadium. It later turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital. However, a later DNA test determined that the corpse returned to his wife was not Horman's. His wife continues the search for his remains. A second American journalist, Frank Teruggi, met with a similar fate. At the time of the military coup, Horman was in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaíso, which was a key base for the American and Chilean coup plotters. US officials speculated at the time that Horman was a victim of "Chilean paranoia," but did nothing to intervene. It is unlikely that Horman would have been killed without a green light from the CIA, according to papers released in 1999 under the Freedom of Information Act. Efforts to determine his fate were initially met with resistance and duplicity by US embassy officials in Santiago.