20 steps separate the doors of Pilar, the president of a neighborhood community, and the accused of her murder

Very early every morning, M., a neighbor from Carabanchel heard her neighbor heating the coffee milk in the microwave oven.

Her window faces that of the woman's house who, despite the fact that she was retired, kept waking up very early.

"For a few days, I haven't heard the noise of the microwave," says M. on the threshold of her house.

That small, early-rising woman was Pilar M., 68, who has been the president of the community since last October.

Methodical and organized as she was, Pilar had set to work to put the neighborhood accounts in order.

There was a debt with respect to central heating and some had to be urged to pay their fees, several residents say.

This management of payments could be the reason for the end of Pilar, who disappeared last Friday, the day on which, according to various testimonies,

Pilar, 68, had been president since October.

At the neighborhood meeting that month, she took the position in turn, since the rest of the owners who had been living in the property for the longest time had already passed through the position.

She had moved into that house, in which she lived alone, about three years ago.

“Shortly before the pandemic,” says Ana, a woman who has lived on the same floor as Pilar, the third, for four decades.

"Apparently she had many friends in the neighborhood, she was very active," she sums up.

Ana was precisely the one who began to collaborate with Pilar in January to review the accounts of the community and see where she could cut herself and how they ended up with the debt they had acquired.

On this farm there is central heating and the rise in gas prices has meant that many who still have this system are left without cash to assume the increase.

Many have chosen to approve spills to deal with it and others to reduce the hours that it is on.

"This winter we have not had heating for more than a month," slips another resident in the portal of the building flanked by a hairdresser's and a closed travel agency.

In January, Ana and Pilar had agreed to start tidying up.

Sometimes at the house of one and other times at the house of the other, they met surrounded by papers.

"I was even embarrassed that she came to mine because she was tremendously tidy, everything spotless, very clean," says Ana. This Carabanchel farm has four floors divided into landings with long corridors in which there are a dozen doors per floor. .

Neighbors are a mix of longtime residents with recent rental tenants.

At the bottom right door on that third floor lived a woman of about 30 of this second type.

She had moved to rent about ten months ago.

Her name is Marta and she was one of those who owed fees to the community account.

Pilar had claimed those transfers several times.

"She always supposedly showed him the receipts on her mobile, but her income never appeared in the common box," explains a resident.

In the end, Pilar chose to meet with Marta to go down together to the Ibercaja branch that is just a few steps from the portal to make sure that the payments had not been made.

It seems that both had made this appointment on Friday.

Pilar had left the sports clothes that she was going to wear after her and the keys and mobile phone at home ready on the bed.

She never made it to the branch.

The portal of the property in which Pilar, the president of the neighborhood community, was supposedly murdered. EL PAÍS

Last Saturday Pilar's family, concerned about the lack of news, filed a disappearance report at the Carabanchel police station.

Some of them went to her house on the weekend and found it empty.

All her documentation was in the house and the woman herself did not suffer from any type of dementia that could make her think that she had been lost.

On Monday, several of her relatives went back to the property to ask the neighbors door to door if anyone knew anything about the woman.

No one had seen her.

When they knocked on Marta's door, no one answered.

The telephone terminal was key to finding the alleged culprit in Pilar's disappearance.

On that motive, the investigators found the long history of disagreements with Marta on the occasion of Pilar's management as president of the community.

This Wednesday night, the investigations led to Las Ventas Con Peña Aguilera, a Toledo municipality of 1,200 inhabitants an hour and a half from Madrid.

There a charred and dismembered corpse has been found in a dump on the outskirts of town.

In the absence of definitive confirmation of the DNA, everything points to the fact that it is Pilar's body.

Las Ventas Con Peña Aguilera is the town of origin of Marta's family, according to sources close to the case.

The neighbor has been arrested as responsible for the death of the president of her community.

The doors of Pilar and Marta are at a distance of just 20 steps.

A group of neighbors look at them from the other side of the long corridor, unable to believe what has happened on their landing.

The alleged author's home is sealed and she has a forensic police poster attached.

That house is the place that the investigators of the V homicide group point to as the place where Pilar was murdered and that later the person responsible for her burned her remains in the Toledo municipality.

The autopsy will have to determine how the crime occurred.

On the Carabanchel portal, a sign indicates that this section of the street has video surveillance.

Those cameras may have recorded the escape of a suspected murderer.

"I just want to say that Pilar was a good woman and a good president who was organizing everything very well," says a neighbor as she leaves the portal.

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