Mauricio Leal, the stylist who restyled Tilda Swinton before his murder became a Netflix film

Mauricio Leal

Born	November 24, 1974 Cartago, Valle del Cauca, Colombia
Died	November 22, 2021 (46)
Occupation	Researcher

For most of his life Mauricio Leal told the same story about himself, and he told it with pleasure. He had started at the bottom of a salon in Cali, washing hair, sweeping the floor and serving coffee for less than the minimum wage, and he had ended up as the man Colombia’s television presenters, beauty queens and actresses trusted with their faces before the cameras rolled. His motto was a plain one, “sí se puede”, yes, it can be done, and his clients repeated it back to him.

That story stopped overnight at the end of a November weekend, in the house he had built in La Calera, in the hills outside Bogotá. Leal and his mother, Marleny Hernández, were found dead there. What followed turned a celebrity hairdresser into the subject of one of the most followed criminal cases in recent Colombian history, a Netflix film, a documentary series, an asset-forfeiture case over his fortune and an inheritance dispute that is still running almost five years later.

Cartago, Cali and a salon floor

Mauricio Leal Hernández was born on 24 November 1974 in Cartago, in the Valle del Cauca department, and spent most of his childhood in Colombia’s coffee region. He grew up close to his mother, who would live with him until the end, and to his brothers, Jhonier and Carlos Andrés.

He did not come to hairdressing through a school. He came through the back of a salon in Cali, where he was the assistant to every stylist on the floor. In interviews he described the job without embarrassment: washing hair outside, mopping, bringing the tinto, the small black coffee Colombian salons serve their clients. The turning point, as he told it, came when he went to the owner and announced that he was a hairdresser, though nobody had trained him to cut. He got his chance, and within about six months he was the most requested stylist in the salon.

After passing through several salons he opened his own in Cali, when he was around 22. It became, in his words and in the local press, the most talked-about salon in the city, doing hair for events, fashion shoots and magazine covers. He added makeup to his work and began to build the name that would later go on his company papers.

The Miami gamble and the Clinton List

Success in Cali gave him a bigger ambition. Leal sold up to try his luck in Miami, where he opened a salon in partnership with a client who had become a friend. The partnership turned into the worst episode of his career. His partner was connected to the son of a drug trafficker, and her father had served time in a United States prison. Through that association, Leal himself ended up on the Clinton List, the U.S. Treasury’s register of people and companies linked to drug money.

The consequences were immediate. His bank accounts, credit cards and insurance were cancelled. “I lost the money I had invested in the salon, I lost everything I had,” he later told the Colombian press. After what he described as a long legal defence, in which he had to show U.S. authorities that he had nothing to do with illicit funds, his name was removed from the list. Reports published after his death placed that episode in the late 2000s and tied the scrutiny to companies linked to the Cali cartel.

Bogotá and the celebrity chair

Leal started over in Bogotá. His salon, Mauricio Leal Peluquería, settled on Calle 81 in Chapinero, in the north of the city, and it became one of the addresses of Colombian show business. His client list read like a guide to national television: presenters Andrea Serna, Carolina Cruz, Laura Acuña and Jessica Cediel, actresses Lina Tejeiro, Carolina Guerra and Cristina Umaña, the singer Fanny Lu. He worked with beauty-pageant contestants for years and styled Valeria Ayos, who was crowned Miss Universe Colombia in 2021.

He was also, increasingly, a public figure himself. He appeared on entertainment programmes, shared his work and his life on social media and spoke often about where he had come from. In late 2019 he opened a second business, Maitoleal Coffee Lounge Bar, which served molecular cocktails, and he had registered a company for music projects, Mauricio Leal Music. By his final years he spent more time running the business than cutting hair.

The job he was proudest of in that period came from outside Colombia’s celebrity circuit. When the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul shot Memoria in Colombia, Leal was chosen from among several of the country’s best-known stylists to change Tilda Swinton’s look for the film. He shared the process on social media. Memoria went on to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in July 2021, four months before his death.

La Calera, November 2021

On Monday 22 November 2021, police found Leal and his mother dead in the family house in the Arboretto residential complex, about six kilometres along the road to La Calera. Both had wounds from a bladed weapon. It was two days before his 47th birthday. A note was found at the scene, and the first hypothesis made public was a murder followed by a suicide. The Attorney General’s Office discarded it, and investigators concluded that Leal had been forced to write the note before he died.

The investigation turned to his brother Jhonier Leal, who lived in the house. He was arrested on 16 January 2022. At his first hearing he rejected the charges. Two days later, at a second hearing, he accepted them and asked for forgiveness from his family and from the country. Within weeks he withdrew that acceptance, saying he had been pressured into it, and the case went to a full trial.

On 27 February 2024 a Bogotá judge found Jhonier Leal guilty. According to the ruling, the killings were premeditated: the court heard that he had given his brother sedatives, and the prosecution relied on towels, genetic material, telephone data and the pills themselves. On 14 June 2024 the 55th Criminal Circuit Court of Bogotá sentenced him to 55 years and three months in prison for aggravated homicide and for concealing and altering evidence, together with a fine of about 325 million pesos and a 20-year ban from public office. He was later moved to the maximum-security prison in Valledupar. He has continued to claim innocence and, according to reports in March 2025, has been writing a book from prison to argue his case. His appeal went to the Superior Court of Bogotá; the most recent reports describe it as still pending.

A fortune under investigation

While the murder case moved forward, a second one opened around the money. On 14 January 2022, prosecutors seized Leal’s assets under an asset-forfeiture action: the La Calera house, an apartment, vehicles and his two companies, Mauricio Leal Peluquería and Mauricio Leal Music. In July 2022 the Attorney General’s Office said that the salon company’s gross equity had grown by 863% between 2015 and 2021 and described cash movements it considered unusual for a hair business, as part of an investigation into possible money laundering and illicit enrichment.

Leal was never charged with any of this; he was already dead when the inquiry began, and the claims remain allegations. In November 2025 the Special Assets Society (SAE), which administers seized property in Colombia, said that all of his assets remain under its control while the judicial process continues, including the La Calera house, valued at more than 1.37 billion pesos, and that it has no authority to hand them to relatives. In April 2026 his brother Carlos Andrés García was pursuing a lawsuit to have Jhonier declared unworthy to inherit; that case was suspended until the appeal against the murder conviction is decided.

On screen

The case moved quickly into fiction and documentary. On 22 November 2023, the second anniversary of the deaths, Netflix released Historia de un crimen: Mauricio Leal, a feature produced by Dynamo and written and directed by Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, who had co-written El abrazo de la serpiente and Pájaros de verano. The film reconstructs the investigation, from the suicide theory to the case against the brother. Noticias RCN had also produced a five-part documentary series on the crime.

What remains

The result is an uncomfortable legacy. For the clients who sat in his chair, Mauricio Leal was the self-made stylist from Cartago who never hid his humble start and liked to give away extra services to make sure people left happy. For the courts, he is still two open files: a murder conviction under appeal and a fortune the state is trying to confiscate. His salon story, the one he told so often, is now inseparable from how it ended, and from the question the Colombian public keeps asking about the house in La Calera.

Tags: Colombia, Tilda Swinton, Mauricio Leal, Andrea Serna, hairstylists, Historia de un crimen: Mauricio Leal