At the beginning of October, the president of the community of residents of building number 70 on Calle Zamora, in Vigo, received a handwritten letter from one of the oldest tenants of the building, Pablo P., 63, an electrician who retired early due to his chronic hypertension, in which she made clear the disagreements with her next door neighbor, María Jesús Cruz, 56, an employee of a cleaning company.
"He couldn't take it anymore, the noises make me nervous," she said in the letter.
Two weeks later, the woman was found dead on the landing of her apartment, with several stab wounds to the chest, and he, her inconvenienced neighbor, confessed to the crime.
The alleged attacker has entered prison for an alleged crime of murder with treachery, after giving a statement before the duty judge who was in charge of instructing the preliminary proceedings.
The first hypotheses that the police are considering regarding the motive for the attack is that the detainee had become obsessed with the victim, whom in the last four months he harassed with insistent notes and notices in which he reproached him for the noises he made inside from home made him nervous.
The victim, a native of a small town in Ourense and mother of a daughter, had been busy practically all day with a job as a cleaning operator and recently worked at the Alcampo supermarket in the city.
She had lost sight in one eye, so she had asked the Eleven for help.
Her alleged aggressor had lived alone for years after separating from his wife, with whom he had two children.
She had been on sick leave for a long time and was about to retire, according to what she told in the bars where they have commented on him that he was "something strange and lonely."
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A woman was stabbed to death in Vigo by a neighbor who left notes on her door
In a building with an office floor and where a majority of the tenants are passing through (many are immigrants), few knew the true relationship between Pablo and María Jesús since she changed flats about a year and a half ago and settled in on the floor where her potential assailant lived.
The victim had told a neighbor that he constantly left notes under her door in which she warned him that the noises she made when she was cooking or listening to music bothered her.
The police continue to investigate the motive for the crime and have questioned the neighborhood, where there are all kinds of opinions about what could have been the real trigger.
Even some witnesses point out that there was not always a bad relationship between the two and that Pablo could feel rejected by María Jesús, because they had been seen together on the street and in a cafeteria for a long time.
I was obsessed with her
Almost a week has passed since the sirens of several police cars disturbed a calm and rainy Sunday afternoon-night.
In the building on this central street in Vigo, apparently, life is still the same, although in the neighborhood the neighbors are still dismayed by the crime of María Jesús.
“We still don't believe it,” says María del Carmen as she waits for the bus in the company of two other women.
"I knew both of them and he didn't seem like a murderer to me, but you see, the violence comes out suddenly and it hit this poor woman who didn't expect it either, if she hadn't already left there," she says.
“He was waiting for María Jesús to return;
It was after nine at night, and surely she had just left the garbage in the container.
He then attacked her with a kitchen knife, ”says another neighbor.
"They saw him when he left the poor girl's apartment as if nothing had happened."
"What a cold blood you have to have!", She adds.
Pablo visited several neighborhood cafes before returning home the night he committed the crime, although he was not known as a drinker in the neighborhood.
It would be 8:30 when he went upstairs and waited for his neighbor María Jesús to enter his apartment.
An hour later, approximately, cries for help were heard that alerted the closest neighbors.
One of them, the first to reach the hallway landing, saw the woman on the floor and the alleged murderer as he walked through the door of her house with blood on his hands.
"She sucked her finger and said she was dead," he told the agents.
At the crime scene, police found the victim's sneaker near the door where the keys were still in it.
Inside, the body of María Jesús lay face down, with several incisions on the body, mainly on her chest.
Investigators believe that the attack occurred from behind her, at the moment the victim opened the door, so she did not have time to react or had any chance to defend herself.
Next, Pablo P. was arrested without resisting or denying responsibility for the crime.
The next day he returned handcuffed to the apartment where he lived with the judicial procession and agents of the Scientific Police to search his belongings and collect evidence, such as the clothes that the accused was wearing at the time of the attack.
For the crime of murder with the aggravating circumstance of treachery, the detainee faces a sentence of 20 years in prison.
The investigators try to determine if the harassment to which the alleged murderer had subjected the victim could have sexist connotations, since it does not have to mediate a sexual assault to consider it a case of gender violence, according to the sources consulted.