Working as filmmaker at King TV in Portland Oregon, Charles created the short documentary "Napalm", which won a Grand Prize at the Cracow Film Festival in 1967.

Upon returning to New York City, Charles wrote articles as an investigative journalist for magazines in the United States such as Commentary and The Nation, and newspapers, including The Christian Science Monitor.

[4] On September 16, 1973, six days after the military coup, Horman was detained by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been converted into an ad hoc prison camp.

[4] Joyce and Edmund Horman donated their extensive files related to their pursuit of justice to the Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas - Austin.

[16] The judge also considered extradition proceedings against former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after receiving no cooperation from him nor from Nathaniel Davis in the wake of requests from the Supreme Court of Chile.

His view was that Department II (Intelligence) of the General Staff of the National Defense (Spanish: Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional, or EMDN) would have been the organization responsible for Horman's death.

[25] Researchers, including Patricia Verdugo (Interferencia secreta), Ignacio González Camus (El día que murió Allende), Mónica González (La conjura: los mil y un días del golpe), and Ascanio Cavallo, Manuel Salazar, and Óscar Sepúlveda (La historia oculta del régimen militar), who have examined the coup d'état conspiracy, argue that General Lutz was not assigned any role in it.

[34] Even Punto Final, a newspaper linked to the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario, MIR), regretted that in his ruling, Zepeda did not reveal the exact role that Espinoza played in the murders of Horman and Frank Teruggi or what his functions had been at the time.

[35] The weekly newspaper El Siglo, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Chilean Communist Party, called the judgment a disaster and implied that Pedro Espinoza's imputation was a smoke screen designed to cover up the search for the truth.

[37] From 1954 until the coup d'état of September 11, 1973, González worked as an agent in Department II (Intelligence) at the General Staff of the National Defense (Spanish: Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional, or EMDN).

[38] Due to the accuracy of González's reports, the head of the EMDN's intelligence service scheduled an appointment with the Undersecretary of the Interior, Daniel Vergara, in December 1972, where he pointed out that if certain key changes were not made to improve the country's economic situation, such as removing Pedro Vuskovic from Corfo and replacing him with José Cademartori, there would be a coup d'état in September 1973”.

As one newspaper noted, “After the coup, he saved dozens of Unidad Popular supporters from being unjustly dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned or from certain death, including journalist Carlos Jorquera, who was saved on 11 September from suffering the fate of his comrades at Peldehue”,[38] all of whom were assassinated on September 12 in the Regimiento Tacna on the orders of Gen. Herman Brady, Head of the Army's Second Division in Santiago, Commanding officer of the capital's garrison and military judge of Santiago, making him the sole decider of the fate of all detainees.

"[39] On September 11, at Moneda Palace, Gen. Javier Palacios gave Rafael González a direct order to execute Allende's press secretary, journalist Carlos Jorquera.

We gave each other a big embrace and until today he remains one of my best friends: this man is the former member of the General Staff of the National Defence, Rafael González, who was later dismissed from his institution and had to go into exile".

[42] In April 1974, Vice-Admiral Patricio Carvajal dismissed Rafael González from the EMDN, accusing him of having informed the Interior Minister, Gen. Óscar Bonilla, about the serious human rights violations taking place in Regimiento Tejas Verdes, San Antonio, under commanding officer Col. Manuel Contreras, chief of the newly created DINA.

[38] From September 3, 1975, to May 13, 1978, Gonzalez remained in the Italian Chancery in Santiago under the protection of Father Baldo Santi, then President of CARITAS Chile, who acted on express instructions from Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez.

On March 21, 1974, Carvajal ordered Rafael González to assist the U.S. Vice-consul in Chile, James Anderson, in the search for Charles Horman's remains for repatriation to the United States.

Following Spain's return to democracy, Carvajal served for two consecutive terms (1988-1989 and 1989–1993) as a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the right-wing party Independent Democratic Union (Spanish: UDI).

[53] Researcher Jonathan Haslam notes that according to the son-in-law of Gen. William Westmoreland (commanding officer of American forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968), Vernon Walters (Deputy Director of CIA between 1972 and 1976) operated in Chile through Ariel González.

Critics have said this is a particularly striking omission in the case of Ariel González, since Zepeda himself ruled that Department II (Intelligence) of EMDN, of which Gonzalez was the head, was the unit responsible for planning and carrying out Charles Horman's death.

This prompted criticism from Joyce Horman, who called it an "extraordinarily frustrating" turn of events, while Peter Kornbluh pointed out how unbelievable it was that Zepeda was “working to get Davis extradited and he was literally less than a couple of miles down the road".

[26] The inconsistencies of Zepeda's line of reasoning with regard to the crime have also attracted attention: firstly, despite concluding that "the decision to execute Charles Horman [...] was taken by Department II of the General Staff of the National Defense", headed by Navy Captain Ariel González Cornejo, the judge chose not to prosecute Gonzalez as either an accomplice or an accessory after the fact.

"[67] Following a campaign organized by Londres 38 and other human rights groups, and pressure from representatives of the Chilean Congress, Zepeda finally released 407 files to the relatives of executed and disappeared detainees in 2014.

[69] Zepeda had also denied a request by the National Human Rights Institute (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, or INDH) to obtain a copy of a report on the files the judge had himself ordered the Police Intelligence (Jipol) to conduct in 2005.

Once the police had begun to make progress on the report, they were ordered to stop; all parties in the various Colonia Dignidad trials taking place at the time, including their lawyers, were denied access to it.

In the chapter "The files of Colonia Dignidad: difficulties of access, quality of sources of information and future projections", journalist Luis Narváez presents a detailed account of Zepeda's interventions in the Colonia Dignidad cases, describing his modus operandi as "secretive", always with the same court clerk and the same pair of Jipol staff members: Inspectors Jaime Carbone and Alberto Torres, both of them retired police officers.

When Supreme Court President Sergio Muñoz proposed the creation of a software system that would allow all judges to look up the dossiers, thereby optimizing resources, saving time and avoiding unnecessary duplication, Zepeda vehemently opposed the plan, arguing that it "threatened each tribunal's independence.

The participants also released a petition: We propose that a request be made to the Supreme Court President to open an investigation into Judge Jorge Zepeda's role in the concealing of the files archive for nine years and of the report written by Police Intelligence on the documents seized.

In March 2016, he absolved all those accused of the death and enforced disappearance in 1985 of American mathematician Boris Weisfeiler in Colonia Dignidad and applied the statute of limitation on the grounds that it was not a human rights crime.

[76] This was in reference to Zepeda having stated initially that he had received and read a Spanish translation of the documents the U.S. Embassy in Chile and Olga Weisfeiler had submitted as part of the proceeding.