Paco C. was found dead for several days. They had smothered him and left the gagged corpse, bound hand and foot, between one of the rooms and the corridor of his home in Madrid. Watches, drugs, money, a pistol and ammunition were missing from the house. Moving the body, investigators found two rings under her back, one dated “5-21-65” and the other named “Marian.” Did that have a hidden meaning? Was it a simple robbery? Why did they leave the body like this? A popular jury has just ruled that the only culprit in the murder, committed in March 2018, was his girlfriend Verónica C., who was 32 at the time and remained on provisional custody throughout this time.
When the verdict was read, the victim’s brothers were in the room, as was his ex-partner Paloma. It was she who sounded the alarm when she hadn’t heard from the man, who died aged 47, for several days and came to his home twice when he didn’t respond to her calls or messages. He also contacted the family lawyer, Iván Montoto, when the judge released the detainee pending trial. Paloma and Paco were together for 15 years, and after the end of the sentimental relationship, another friendship and care for the man in very poor health followed. She had almost become her “mother,” as she defines herself, and was so much a part of her life that she offered to go on vacation with her and her new partner on a few occasions.
Paloma remembered one of the last sentences her ex-boyfriend said to her because the next day he was murdered. “Everyone thinks I’m going to die, but I’m still here,” he told her when she told him he looked very unkempt. After that, he stopped responding to her calls and messages. He asked one of his sisters if she knew anything about him, but the answer was no, and both women began to worry. Paloma made a first visit to the house, but the door was closed and nobody answered. A few days later, the lack of response set off an alarm and the two women and Paloma’s friend went to the house, this time with a locksmith. Paco had changed the lock a month earlier and neither of them had a copy. “I stayed outside and the one who came in and saw the body was my partner, something that cannot be forgotten. As he left he told me: Paco is inside. I thought he had had a heart attack and died in bed, but my partner said to me, Paloma, they killed him,” the woman recalls.
The body was bound hand and foot, wore blue espadrilles with white detailing, and the plastic of a remote control in its mouth. Several valuables such as watches and money were missing from the house, as well as drugs and a weapon belonging to the victim. Pacos was one of those crimes that goes unnoticed by the media. He was a man with drug problems, he had a criminal record, he died in Ciudad Lineal, a popular neighborhood in Madrid, and the house, neighbors reported, had had many visitors. Sometimes the lack of media focus is an advantage for investigators, who can work without the pressure of an immediate solution.
Minutes after the discovery of the body, the security telephone of the Madrid Homicide Unit V rang. Four years later, Sub-Inspector Alberto dusted off the documentation of his investigations in order to appear as a witness in the trial. The moment he and another inspector entered the house, several hypotheses were open. Was it a reckoning? A robbery gone haywire? What did the rings mean? The testimonies of Paco’s relatives opened several avenues: a Cuban girl, some acquaintances from a nearby bar, and also Verónica. This last line of research was the one that gained strength.
“We tried to locate it and on the first try it picked it up but it cut off or hung up. It was impossible to speak to her until we called her father and he got back to her, then she answered,” the sub-commissioner said at the oral hearing. When he finally appeared before investigators, he said the last time he saw Paco was the morning the police found the man dead. “She said that she left the house for churros that day, that when she returned there was a man in the house and that she went to McDonalds at a nearby mall and didn’t hear from him,” the agent said. But the testimony of the neighbor on the top floor, Ana, contradicted this supposedly idyllic Saturday morning. “There was a huge argument at night, I heard him telling her to drop the knife. When I left the house in the morning, everything was quiet,” he told the judge.
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Paco and Verónica, a few months before the murder for which she has just been convicted.
Analysis from Verónica’s phone arrived, and her version fell further apart. The monitoring of the antennas showed that she was in the house at the time of the crime. The cameras at the mall where she is said to have eaten never record her. And in her background, police found multiple reports from both her and Paco of assaulting each other, and even another note of involvement in another murder for which she has not been charged. With this accumulation of evidence, seven months later the perpetrator of this crime was arrested walking down the street with his new partner, who was also being investigated for a cover-up, although this was eventually ruled out. Sub-Inspector Alberto stated that while waiting to enter the cell and overwhelmed by the situation, she confessed to killing Paco with a pillow, although she never corroborated this confession in front of a judge.
The defendant listened to her guilty verdict with her hair on one side as she had tried to hide the teardrop tattoo on that side of her face throughout the trial. He asked not to go to jail immediately, which the judge refused due to the seriousness of the crime being convicted. The jury considered the particular vulnerability of the victim, who had colon cancer, was being treated with methadone, had multiple bypasses, had mobility impairments from a car accident and weighed barely 100 pounds at the time of his murder.
The date of one of the alliances was the date of his parents’ marriage and Marian is the name of Paco’s older sister. “Paco, Marian, and I had this alliance with our names, but he swapped it with his sister,” says Paloma. Investigators believe Veronica simply forgot to add them to the loot she stole from the house because they were left under the body. The verdict of the Provincial Court of Madrid sentenced her to 20 years in prison.
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