The same thing that happened with the Lugo Prosecutor's Office, the Provincial Court has not been able to see the indications that the last investigating judge did see and with which the families of the cashier Elena López and the stockman Esteban Carballedo managed to sit on the bench in February of the defendants to the hotelier Juan Vilariño.
The second section of the highest court in Lugo has acquitted the only suspect in the double crime of the Cash Record wholesale supermarket, which occurred on April 30, 1994 in the O Ceao business park (on the outskirts of Lugo).
"No evidence, not even evidence, places the defendant" in that place "the night the events occurred," defends the sentence.
The families of the victims, whom the robber(s) liquidated with two point-blank shots to eliminate witnesses,
They had been fighting alone for almost 29 years against successive dismissals of the case and a police investigation that leaked from the beginning.
Elena López's sister came to chain herself before the Court and endure two hunger strikes to reactivate the archived investigations and managed to get the court in which the event ended up from the beginning, the First Instance 1, to revive the proceedings a decade ago.
But now, after a trial that lasted a week and to which a good handful of summoned witnesses no longer attended because they died, the oldest open case in Spain is closed without being resolved.
Elena López's sister came to chain herself before the Court and endure two hunger strikes to reactivate the archived investigations and managed to get the court in which the event ended up from the beginning, the First Instance 1, to revive the proceedings a decade ago.
But now, after a trial that lasted a week and to which a good handful of summoned witnesses no longer attended because they died, the oldest open case in Spain is closed without being resolved.
Elena López's sister came to chain herself before the Court and endure two hunger strikes to reactivate the archived investigations and managed to get the court in which the event ended up from the beginning, the First Instance 1, to revive the proceedings a decade ago.
But now, after a trial that lasted a week and to which a good handful of summoned witnesses no longer attended because they died, the oldest open case in Spain is closed without being resolved.
In its ruling, the court emphasizes that "the defendant is not being judged, nor the type of life he led, not even if he was a man who turned his back on the law, but if that day he entered Cash Record, killed the two people and seized the large collection, close to 3,777,026 pesetas [22,700.38 euros, a much larger amount for that time]”.
The magistrates cite the Supreme Court, which previously indicated that the suspicions about the possible authorship of a defendant "do not reach the condition of evidence" because many of them "have another explanation different from the one that is intended to be given."
In addition, they affirm that "not even as a whole" can they point "indubitably, as required by a criminal resolution", to the defendant "as the author of the facts for which he is tried".
The lawyers for the families of Elena López, who died at the age of 32 and left two young orphans, and Esteban Carballedo, only 26 years old, have already announced that they will appeal the Court's acquittal decision.
Vilariño Casanova, who left Galicia in 1997 after being released from prison for another of the causes for which he was convicted in that decade (drugs and weapons), was not imprisoned for the Cash Record case.
The accusation, directed by the lawyer Gerardo Pardo de Vera, demanded -in addition to compensation for the families- a sentence of 28 years according to the Criminal Code of the time and taking into account the highly qualified mitigation of undue delays.
On dates close to this double crime, in Lugo two other cases remained unresolved that the national police, in 2013,
He suspected that they could be related to the massacre in which the cashier and the stock boy lost their lives.
Shortly before the assault on Cash Record, the robbery of another wholesale establishment, Cash Miño, went unpunished, and shortly after, the half-buried corpse of a drug addict was found in a neighboring municipality.
The court made up of magistrates Edgar Amando Cloos, María Luisa Sandar and José Manuel Varela highlights the "singularity of the process", in which "events that occurred almost 30 years ago are judged, where the private prosecution [the relatives of the victims and the Cash Record business group], with a commendable effort, has tried to complete a clearly deficient instruction”.
"This fact adds a difficulty to the complexity that is always involved in breaking down the evidence in an aseptic manner, as required by a criminal resolution," acknowledges the Court, referring to the dedication of the families, who have lived ever since to solve the crime. and alleviate what a command of the UDEV (Specialized and Violent Crime Unit) came to define as "botches" of the official investigation.
For the Lugo Court, most of the alleged evidence against Vilariño "does nothing more than cloud what happened."
The magistrates refer to a series of testimonies on which they tried to shore up the case, such as that of a man, already deceased, who at one time declared that the defendant had taken him by car to the door of the store, had put a pistol in his hands and had invited him to participate in the coup.
But that same witness had also said that on Saturday, April 30, 1994, at around half past seven in the evening, he was in the bar of the innkeeper on trial and saw him arrive.
The crime occurred around eight o'clock, when Cash Record had already closed the door and the list of customers for the day had been sent to the A Coruña headquarters.
parabellum
, Santa Bárbara brand, which killed Elena and Esteban with two shots to the head.
The defendant, who was involved in those years in cases of illegal possession of weapons and drug trafficking, had pistols and similar ammunition seized, but not that of the murder.
The sentence makes "special mention" of the testimony of a resident of Lugo "to whom the Chamber gave total credibility", who recounted in the trial how he wanted to "notify the police of the presence of some people who had caught his attention the day he that the double crime occurred."
The man even gave "the registration number of a vehicle that he found suspicious," but "they did not collect the information because they told him that [the murder] had already been solved."
For the judges, this is an "obvious sign of the ineffectiveness that often guided the temporal transit of this investigation."
In 2010, this witness “approached the sister of one of the victims, when in front of the Court she carried out one of her many actions to prevent the cause from falling into oblivion,
and he told him about the suspicions that he had harbored on the day of the double murder, in which he saw three people and a vehicle”, the ruling now includes.
"An unsuccessful investigation was carried out on that car and a photographic recognition test was carried out that lacks the necessary forcefulness to point to the defendant," the sentence continues, "because initially the witness reports that it is the one that most resembles him. to later recognize a different person”.
When the national police tried to get the witness to recognize the alleged perpetrator before a sample of photos, more than a decade and a half had passed since the man had seen the suspicious car pass by.
"An unsuccessful investigation was carried out on that car and a photographic recognition test was carried out that lacks the necessary forcefulness to point to the defendant," the sentence continues, "because initially the witness reports that it is the one that most resembles him. to later recognize a different person”.
When the national police tried to get the witness to recognize the alleged perpetrator before a sample of photos, more than a decade and a half had passed since the man had seen the suspicious car pass by.
"An unsuccessful investigation was carried out on that car and a photographic recognition test was carried out that lacks the necessary forcefulness to point to the defendant," the sentence continues, "because initially the witness reports that it is the one that most resembles him. to later recognize a different person”.
When the national police tried to get the witness to recognize the alleged perpetrator before a sample of photos, more than a decade and a half had passed since the man had seen the suspicious car pass by.
