The girl tries to find the keys in the snow.
She in the middle of the darkness she can only feel until she finds them while she listens to the breath of her rapist next to her.
15 years have passed, but the story has remained engraved in the memory of Mari Luz Carro —Maripi for her colleagues—, a police officer who has been listening to victims for 30 years and looking her aggressors in the face.
That woman was one of those attacked by the Rapist of the Owl, a serial sex offender who acted at night and attacked twenty women between 2001 and 2008 in municipalities of Madrid.
“I listened to her and thought: 'How brave.'
I had to be trembling next to a man who enjoyed doing damage”, recalls the agent.
It is not usual for an agent to remain in the same position for so long, but she has never wanted to move from the Family and Women's Care Unit (Ufam), where cases in which sexual freedom is violated are investigated. .
She is the oldest in the unit.
It is not easy to listen over and over again to the stories of children who have experienced the unimaginable, but in what is known as a chalet —because it is in a separate building within the Madrid National Police headquarters complex— they do nothing else.
Carro is the living story of the darkest face of the human being.
“The arrest of the Owl is one of the ones I remember the most.
An apparently normal guy, who after so long did not expect it.
A person who acted with extreme brutality…” he notes.
Those moments of capture, after hunts that sometimes lasted for years, bring a certain satisfaction, although the testimonies of her victims are repeated in the agent's head.
"I didn't feel hate when we caught them, rather I looked at them and wondered how they could have been able to do something like that, what was going through their heads," the police reflect.
As if, looking into their eyes, she felt that she was going to get closer to understanding the essence of evil.
The pedophile of Ciudad Lineal, Antonio Ángel Ortiz Martínez, during the trial.fjb
In the eyes of the Linear City pedophile he found nothing.
Just empty.
She, however, was moved when she testified at the trial, remembering the words of one of the girls abused by this sexual predator of minors.
“I took a statement from her at the hospital, with her parents, a girl with a very good memory who gave some very useful details.
She remembered the words that she had said to him, she defined the man's hair as yellow-brown…”, she recalls.
The criminal had deceived the little girl by assuring her that he was taking her to her parents, but it was her lie: “The phrase that she repeated several times will not be erased: 'But my mom was not there'.
When he started, he was embarrassed to read the night report to his superior in the morning and was shy about taking some statements.
All of that was left behind.
“Here you see everything.
I remember a child who didn't want to talk if we didn't take him to a bar to eat chips, so we went there with his father.
Another was silent and shaking his head and told me: 'Until you put the lamp on me I won't speak'.
Because he had seen interrogations with a spotlight pointing in the movies and he believed that it was that situation, ”he lists among the list of anecdotes about him.
She is an important part but she never tires of emphasizing that she is just that, a part, because these complex investigations are nourished by teamwork.
Experience is what allowed him on one occasion to detect a pattern in a series of complaints.
In many of them, the victims claimed to have been sexually assaulted by two individuals.
The thoroughness with which they were collected allowed him to relate these stories to those of other victims who claimed that only one man had attacked them.
“When they acted as a couple, they described that one was very neat and that the other was not, that he even had black nails,” he explains.
Soon after, complaints began to arrive in which there was talk of a single attacker.
"The description made my alarms go off, because it corresponded to one of those who acted as a couple."
The investigators collected in detail the characteristics and clothing of the perpetrators and carried out endless surveillance through the portals of Madrid.
Alongside them, the so-called Zetas, the patrollers, were also alert.
It was precisely one of the latter who saw a suspicious man because he was wearing the same clothes as in one of the descriptions.
And he was right, it was the thread they began to pull to get them off the street.
“They were two friends, one a security guard, the clean one, and the other a mechanic, the one with dirty hands.
At first they always went together, but the mechanic began to get brave and act only when his friend had a night shift”.
a long process
At the beginning there was no talk of gender violence.
"But there was the same, of course," he asserts.
And there was also a stigma that they continue to try to eradicate: “It makes me sad when women emphasize that they don't want anyone to find out, because in those cases they go through the experience without family support.
I remember one in whose file we had noted that the family could not find out about her, so when we called her house she had to pretend that she was a co-worker and at no time say that she was a police officer.”
The agent laments the doubt that sometimes hangs over these victims: “It is a long and complicated process.
The medical tests, the statement taking, the court… You have to help them to continue with the process many times, I explain everything to them from the beginning”.
In most of the cases she has worked on there are no witnesses, sometimes no physical evidence or recordings.
“That is why the declaration has to be very detailed, point out absolutely everything.
She is a woman who feels very vulnerable and if she has experienced something like this, her story must be collected and defended, ”she specifies.
In his memory remain three decades of persecution of criminals with less scruples in the streets of Madrid.
"It's an amazing feeling to stop them because you think they're not going to do it anymore," she reflects, looking back.
His classmates will continue with the task.
It is her turn to retire, but many others will come.
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