The murder of Carmen Fraile, wanted for 36 years by her sister, goes unpunished

Josefa Fraile, on the left, with her sister Carmen, in a family image from the 1970s.

The murder of Carmen Fraile Muñoz, who disappeared in 1981 and who today would be 64 years old, has gone unpunished by prescription of the crime.

This was just dictated by the Barcelona Court in a car to which this newspaper has had access.

Carmen is a woman from Madrid that her younger sister, Josefa, now 62, was looking for half her life.

Until in 2017, she learned, thanks to a DNA test, that she had been killed by a shot in the head and then buried in the garden of a country house in the small Barcelona municipality of Sant Salvador de Guardiola.

A bulldozer accidentally unearthed his body in 1999 during garden work.

Carmen and Josefa, abandoned by their parents when they were six and four years old, respectively, promised that if one day they were separated, they would look for each other.

Josefa did not tire of searching for her, but when she finally learned of her whereabouts, in the framework of a judicial investigation into her father's will, Carmen had been dead for many years.

For almost 20 years she was buried in the aforementioned garden, and then, at the request of the Civil Guard, in an unnamed niche, until 2017 when she could be identified thanks to the DNA of her sister Josefa.

What also precipitated the arrest of the alleged murderer, Manuel Macarro Thierbach, a writer of German origin and now resident in Tarragona who in 1981 was Carmen's lover.

Both left Madrid for Barcelona without saying goodbye to anyone.

Josefa did not hear from her again.

A Manresa judge processed him in 2019 for murder and abortion, since there was a six-month-old fetus inside Carmen's body.

The judge asked Macarro for DNA after he was arrested and compared it with that of the fetus: it was the father.

The Barcelona Court has shelved the crime because the crime has prescribed, and exonerates the suspect from responsibility.

Josefa and Carmen belonged to an unstructured family.

Josefa tells that the father abandoned them and went abroad to return several years later with another woman.

The mother also left with a man who made being with her conditional on getting rid of the girls.

Both minors had to separate for the first time: Josefa ended up in an orphanage and Carmen grew up with her paternal grandmother.

They met again when they were young.

But fate separated them again when the writer Manuel Macarro appeared on the scene, the man with whom Carmen left Madrid one day in November 1981. No one knew that they had gone to Barcelona.

Josefa has engraved in her mind the day, at the end of 1981, when, while she was working, Carmen showed up at her company, “very nervous”, and told her that she had to tell her something important.

Josefa asked him to wait for her after work to talk, but when she left she was not there and never heard from her again.

He sensed that she had gone with her lover.

Josefa did not despair.

He looked for her relentlessly, asked his father, who then had another family and who ignored him, he also went to the police, but no trace.

He never stopped looking for her.

Until many years later he saw the name of Carmen Fraile Muñoz on the Internet.

And it is that, in 2017, the father of both wanted to make a will and a court in Madrid demanded to know the whereabouts of one of his daughters, Carmen, if she was alive or dead, to process the distribution of the inheritance.

Josefa appeared in that court and, like her father, gave her DNA, which was sent to all police stations in Spain.

DNA testing

The alert went off in 2017 in Manresa, where the police kept the DNA of an undocumented body found in 1999, when it was unearthed by an excavator.

It was Carmen.

After 36 years of searching, her sister finally knew what had become of her.

This discovery also allowed the Civil Guard to speak with his family in Madrid and resume the investigation until they found the alleged murderer.

Macarro, now retired and resident in Catalonia, was located by the agents in this community and arrested.

The alleged murderer denied the facts when he was arrested.

He admitted that both traveled from Madrid to Barcelona, ​​but said that they only lived for several days in the aforementioned chalet, and that he left the house, without hearing from her again.

The judge asked for his DNA and checked it against the remains of the fetus.

It was the father.

And he decided to prosecute him for murder and abortion.

Macarro appealed to the Court for prosecution, and it has now decided to archive the case because the crimes (homicide and illegal abortion) occurred many years ago; and, when the writer was arrested for these events in 2018, they had already prescribed. The homicide prescribes as more than 20 years have passed since the crime (Article 130.1 of the Penal Code), the court reasons. And he justifies it: homicide, says the court, is punishable by between 15 and 20 years in prison and murder, between 15 and 25 years. "Crimes assigned a penalty of 15 or more years prescribe 20 years after the crime," the judges decide when declaring the penalty prescribed. “There is no doubt,” they underline, “that between February 1994 (probably the latest date of the death of Mrs. María del Carmen Fraile Muñoz, according to the forensic report) and December 18, 2018 (date on which the procedure is directed against the guilty) the prescription of the crime occurred, since more than 20 years passed. And this even taking as the initial date of the prescription February 1994, and not February 1984, which would be the most favorable date for the defendant, and also the most probable date given that the disappearance occurred in 1981 ”.