The 'Caso Cerrado' Case About the 6-Year-Old Twins Still Has People Asking Questions

If you've ever seen an episode of Judge Judy, which ran for 25 seasons and featured the snarky Honorable Judy Sheindlin, then you can understand the premise behind the Telemundo series Caso Cerrado. In one episode from 2017, from which clips have circulated on social media, there is a case about 6-year-old twins who are missing, and now, people still want to know what happened to them.

Caso Cerrado, which when translated means "case closed," stars Dr. Ana Maria Polo, a Cuban-American lawyer who isn't afraid to literally get in the faces of the people who appear in her televised courtroom. In the episode from 2017, a mom admits to essentially selling her 6-year-old twin daughters while their father was incarcerated. Following the episode, there were lots of questions about what happened to the Caso Cerrado twins.

In a clip from Caso Cerrado that was shared on TikTok, Ana listens to the parents explain their past and what led them to this point. According to the dad, he was in jail for five years for a crime that the twins' mother committed. When he was released, he wanted to not only see his daughters, but also fight for custody of them.

He explains that his ex refused to allow him to see the twins. As Ana gets all of the facts, she leaves her bench to shout at the mother and demand answers. Finally, the mom admits that she gave the twins to unnamed people in Brazil for $500, but that it was supposed to be a two-week arrangement. She tells Ana that she handed off her daughters to "work at birthday parties."

In the Caso Cerrado clips, Ana believes that the twins may have been sold into trafficking and that something much more sinister happened to them. There is no update in the episode about what happened to the girls, but there have been some theories after the episode aired, with nothing concrete to go on.

According to the outlet Home Hearted, the twins were found and placed into protective custody as authorities tried to find suitable relatives for them to live with. That has not been confirmed, but it is one hopeful version of what happened to the twins. In a Reddit thread about the case, one user shared that they heard one of the twins died due to injuries sustained during their time in Brazil, while the other one has not been located. Again, there is no confirmation of that.

It's possible that there are no twins, but that the case was dramatized for Caso Cerrado and based on a similar real-life story. There is one confirmed story of a mother selling her child for 500 pesos in Guanajuato, Mexico, per a news story that was shared on YouTube.

Like Judge Judy, the cases on Caso Cerrado were challenged over the years by those who claim the show is fake or features actors. In 2023, Ana appeared on the En Defensa Propia podcast and answered some questions about how real or fake the series was in its original run before it entered syndication and showed up on Apple TV.

"Many of them were recreations about real cases that had actually happened," Ana said, of the cases featured on the show. "The stories were real, and for me, that's the most incredible value of Caso Cerrado. Because we're telling a story that happened to someone."