A kilo of potatoes, half of lemons, a small package of dairy bread and a bottle of mineral water. Fabián Gutiérrez enters the supermarket at 7:28 p.m. He covers his nose and mouth with a black mask. He has a dark green jacket with a hood, black jeans, and brown trekking shoes, essential to avoid skating on the icy streets of El Calafate, in Santa Cruz.
Only three minutes pass and you are already in line to pay. She does it in cash, with bills that she keeps loose in her left front pants pocket. Three more minutes and he's already crossing the street toward his truck. It's July 2, 2020. Any given Thursday. It's cold.
He doesn't even imagine that the supermarket cameras that film him with the purchase will have
his last images alive
; that in less than 48 hours his body will be found
half-hidden in the frozen ground of a remote neighborhood
and much less that the young man who is waiting for him right now, sitting in his truck, will be the one who drives him to
a ferocious death
.
Gutiérrez has only spent one night in the house where he will be attacked a while later. On Wednesday, July 1, he had moved to that place after he vacated after renting. He was
looking forward
to the move.
He lived with his sister, his brother-in-law and his nephews in a house in the
Aeropuerto Viejo
neighborhood but now he wanted
more privacy
, according to what he told Matías Lescano, one of the three friends who had helped him move.
On Wednesday night, once settled, he had dinner with those friends (Matías, Wilson and Kevin) and they were together until dawn. That same night he spoke by phone in Buenos Aires with the last stable partner he had had. According to Matías told the Police, they argued.
His partner was Mauro Francisco, an actor who months before had begun to be invited to gossip shows because he had broken off his previous relationship with radio and TV host Oscar González Oro.
He reappeared two years after the crime, to say that the then First Lady, Fabiola Yáñez,
"studied theater with me in a musty-smelling room
. "
The plan to assault Fabián Gutiérrez may have begun eight months before that Thursday in July, just when Cristina Kirchner's former secretary was prosecuted for
money laundering in the case of the corruption notebooks
, where he had declared repentance in 2018. .
There he made the news due to suspicions of
lending his name
to manage part of the Kirchner fortune.
The place where they found the body of Fabián Gutierrez, in El Calafate.
Facundo Zaeta - who had met Gutiérrez in Buenos Aires and on the night of the crime was the one waiting for him outside the supermarket - said that they began to correspond on Telegram and that he sent him photos to encourage future sexual encounters. However, Zaeta (who was 19 at the time) postponed those meetings.
Like the fisherman's bait.
A notebook found in his house has what appears to be a basic outline of the plan for the attack and handwritten notes from a printed page of the digital version of the newspaper
Ámbito Financiero
where it says that Gutiérrez had been prosecuted for
laundering corruption money
.
The publication is from November 4, 2019. When Facundo Zaeta made those notes in that notebook - a soft-cover piece with a mountainous, spiral landscape, brand of
America
- someone had just thought of a sinister idea:
Gutiérrez became a target mobile
.
Was it that 19-year-old kid who came up with it all?
Matías, the friend with whom Gutiérrez shared all kinds of secrets, testified during the investigation of the case.
“Last year (2019), in September or October, I stayed three days in Fabián's apartment in Buenos Aires. One night he tells me that he has to tell me a secret. He began to show me on his cell phone that he wrote and spoke with Facundo Zaeta, who sent him photos. I don't know if in the sense of extorting, but Facundo told him that if anyone else found out that they were writing to each other, they wouldn't see each other
. "
A few days after that, Zaeta keeps the journalistic note about her new friend in her notebook. The one that talked about money laundering. There he also writes down some addresses and the names of
other people prosecuted in the same case as Gutiérrez.
From that moment, the private messages increased in number and sexual tension, according to another friend of the victim, Daniel Quiroz, in the file:
“In January or February of this year (2020) Fabián began to tell me the conversations he had. with this boy and he starts sending me very private photos. I told him that I thought he was a cute kid and he stayed there. Later, in other audios he tells me that he was anxious to have the house delivered to him, because this boy
wanted them to get together for three or four days
to have fun. I guess to have sex. Fabián was very excited…”
When he began to seduce Gutiérrez, Zaeta was dating Fiona Wyss, a celebrity in El Calafate since she danced at the Teatro Colón before former president Macri, Angela Merkel and other world leaders in 2018, during the last G20 meeting in Buenos Aires. Aires. It was the night when Macri cried with emotion.
Fiona and Facundo continued their relationship until the night of the crime: Facundo's main concern after the murder was to call his girlfriend in the early morning to tell her that everything was fine and that he had not gone to sleep with her because he had stayed late with her. his friends.
What she had been doing, according to the indictment of Judge Carlos Narvarte and now the ruling of the oral court of Río Gallegos, was
to beat, torture and kill the man she had been seducing since the end of the previous year
.
Zaeta, son of a “notable” family from El Calafate and grandson of a notary who
deeded several of the properties of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner
, said that the plan to assault Gutiérrez had been proposed to him two months earlier at a car wash by his friend Facundo Gómez, with whom he used to ride a motorcycle around the tourist town. They had known each other since they were children: they had gone to high school together.
Fabián Gutiérrez's cell phone arrived in Buenos Aires in an open envelope. They were never able to access its content.
The plan was simple but at the same time implausible: Zaeta would be invited by Gutiérrez for a sexual encounter, he would enter, overpower the victim and cover his eyes and then Gómez would enter with another accomplice to steal the
“black money of corruption”
( This is what they wrote in the notebook) that she would be hidden in the house or
in another place that Gutiérrez would tell them
.
Then, everyone would leave as cheerfully as possible.
According to Zaeta, Gómez convinced him with a definitive phrase:
"After the robbery you are going to have to fill the mattress of the bed with dollars
. "
And why wouldn't Gutiérrez denounce them? Because since it was
“corruption money”
he could not do it because he would have been more exposed than he was, say the young detainees who were reasoning among themselves.
Would it really be like that?
From the outset, it seems clear that the only way to assault Gutiérrez in this way and avoid being reported was
to kill the victim
.
With the fait accompli, this is what Zaeta declares, arguing that he had been deceived in the naivety of his initial intentions:
“Gómez went straight in to kill him
,” he accused.
And he added that this young man, after the crime, told him and the other person involved - Pedro Monzón, Gómez's employee at a car agency - to take a television, a music system and a box of cigars.
Why did Gómez need to “simulate” a robbery by taking appliances that were irrelevant to them - neither Zaeta nor Gómez are marginal children and lived with all the comforts - once Gutiérrez was dead?
That question hangs over the case even after the sentencing, in addition to
a phantom loot
, a jean that appears and disappears and
a strange chest stained with blood
.
The jean was seen by Matías and Wilson when they went to Gutiérrez's house to see why their friend was not answering the phone, on Friday at noon, about 12 hours after the murder.
There they say that they surrounded the house trying to look inside, that they threw stones at the roof to see if Fabián was listening to them and that they saw the truck dirty with mud and with the left rearview mirror broken.
In the cabin they saw a black jean with
“one leg normal and the other turned inside out
,” as if they had
gotten it out of trouble.
From there they went to a gym and returned a while later with a third friend. They look in the truck again, open the passenger door, which was unlocked, and see that
the black jeans were no longer there
. Gutiérrez's family and the police arrived only
40 minutes after that
.
Facundo Zaeta, one of those sentenced to life.
Monzón declared that he had taken the jeans and that he then went to remove them from the crime scene because they would have his fingerprints.
Just a few hours before, he and the other defendants had left there
dressed in Fabián Gutiérrez's clothes
to look different from how they had arrived, in case there were cameras or someone had seen them.
If Monzón really took his pants out of the truck again, it is
a strange return to the crime scene while everyone was already looking for the victim
.
Matías declares something else: that in the back of the truck there was a rug and a chest
"as an ornament"
, next to Gutiérrez's jacket - the same one he had used in the supermarket - stained with blood, the same as the chest. and “boxes”.
It is still an enigma what that chest contained and whether the murderers carried it next to the victim's body or it was already there.
Was there cash kept, the famous “dark money” that the thieves were looking for?
The other mysteries are those of the body and the loot.
When they break down before the Police, two of the young people say that they left the body in a cabin and, along with it, the
90,000 pesos (or dollars, depending on who tells it)
that Zaeta had stolen from Gutiérrez as soon as he entered the house where the victim had just moved.
But the body
was not where the murderers said
, but rather half-buried several meters away. And the money
was nowhere to be found
.
It is based on all these clues - and an unidentified footprint at the crime scene - that some investigators believe there could be
at least a fourth person involved
who returned to the key sites after Zaeta, Gómez and Monzón left, or even that he participated with them in some of the previous instances.
Was he the one who buried the body and took the loot? Did he have help, in turn, from
more still unidentified people
, as the first investigators of the case suspected from the beginning?
In this Friday's ruling that sentenced
the three young people to
life imprisonment,
the investigation is ordered to continue to detect the "cover-ups
. "
That is to say, justice assumes that
more people participated
in the crime of Cristina Kirchner's former secretary .
The presence of a RAM truck in a vacant lot next to the house where the crime occurred, which mysteriously disappeared
when the mechanics of torture and murder ended,
always remained in the nebula .
Was anyone monitoring what was happening at Gutiérrez's house from there?
Nor was it ever possible to access the victim's cell phone, which arrived at the Gendarmerie headquarters in Buenos Aires
in a torn envelope with its contents erased.
Now it was learned in the oral trial that a friend of Gutiérrez passed the cell phone password to the Police and they
kept it hidden for four years.
The Santa Cruz Police depended at that time on Governor Alicia Kirchner, Cristina's sister-in-law and mother of Natalia Mercado, the first prosecutor who participated in the investigation of the crime.
There is another circumstance in the criminal sequence of that night that remains
obscure
and almost eliminates the idea that what was planned was an assault without the intention to kill.
After being subdued by Zaeta and when Gómez and Monzón had already entered the house to look for the
“hidden treasure
,” Gutiérrez manages to escape, stands up and runs to a bathroom on the ground floor, where
he manages to lock himself in
.
At that point
everything could have ended
and the thieves could have escaped convinced that Gutiérrez would not report them because they had already stolen “black” money, as they called it.
However, they go after the victim, break down the bathroom door and attack Gutiérrez, torturing him, choking him with a cable and a sports bandage - although at the trial it was not possible to determine exactly what they ended up suffocating him with - and finally
attacking him with a dagger. and crushing his head with a stone.
They were
a pack on a wounded and defenseless lamb
.
Everything seems to indicate that the only thing they wanted was to torture him to extract information from him and finally kill him, as they did without hesitation. And at the same time it is difficult to think that only the three convicted this Friday participated in such a scene, all
under 20 years of age at the time of the crime
.
Too much
coordination and cold blood
for three wild young people.
If this was the case, and Gómez really was the leading voice, it is not clear if the assault turned into the inexplicable rage of boys blinded by drugs or if the plan to kill him had
other motivations
and the assault was just an excuse.
The Police are conducting investigations on the case of Fabián Gutiérrez.
It is inexplicable that, when Zaeta was already in the house with Gutiérrez dominated -
"as soon as I entered I hit him twice in the jaw because I practice boxing and I fainted him
," he himself said -, then he called Gómez and Monzón and, instead of opening the door, the door, made them enter through
a screened window that he himself had cut with a knife
.
It is only explained whether they were
staging a robbery scene
with the idea of killing him or, as two of the accused declared, with the victim already dead. In that case, the murderer
could not have been only Zaeta.
It also fits into this hypothesis that a television, an audio system and a box of cigars were taken after the murder, of
little appeal to young people from families without deprivation
like them.
A disturbing fact
appears from the side in the file
.
Reviewing all the statements, it is seen that the three young people who are in Fabián Gutiérrez's house talk on the phone and send text and audio messages
to people who are outside
.
They are communicating with the outside while they torture Gutiérrez.
Zaeta even forces the victim to give him the password to his red-cased iPhone, and
also uses this phone while he is at the crime scene
.
One of his accomplices says that, while he was doing it, he shouted at Gutiérrez, who was dying:
"You didn't want it the right way... and this happens to you the hard way."
What Zaeta said is that it was all Gómez's fault. The lawyers also tried to link Gómez with Fabián Gutiérrez in this way: Gómez's father had a car agency and the hypothesis is that Gutiérrez
also laundered money through that operation.
“Gómez had four Renault 12s and now he has 11 RAM trucks worth $40,000 each
,” said one of Zaeta's lawyers.
Justice began to investigate this clue based on other information in the file: when one of Gutiérrez's friends was asked if he knew what Fabián was currently doing, he answered:
"He deals with the purchase and sale of vehicles
. "
In this clue, the hypothesis of a “fourth murderer” was opened that could never be confirmed in the process, although the oral trial court
ended up taking it for granted
.
The truth is that the two young men who took the body to the cabin where they found it (a property that Gómez rented verbally to a friend from Buenos Aires) said that the body was left
“in the bathroom”
and that
they left the stolen money there.
.
But the body was not there but buried under a tree,
several meters away.
What would be the point, once they confessed to having taken the body there, to say that they left it in one place instead of another?
Did someone go behind them to bury the body and take the money that was next to the body?
Another point is whether Facundo Zaeta was ever really interested in a homosexual relationship or whether he faked his sexual choice from the first time he contacted Gutiérrez only to seduce him and agree to the alone meeting that he had been carefully cultivating for months. If so, could such planning really have occurred only to him?
Fabián Gutiérrez began working with the Kirchners as the owner of an old car and without a home. When he ended his relationship with them he had
36 properties, 35 cars and three boats.
The number of cars is an indication that part of the money laundering for which Justice prosecuted him would have been through the purchase of vehicles.
Did he keep even more
“dark money from corruption”
to launder even after having declared his repentance? If so, where was he hiding the cash?
His mother, his sister and other relatives are still
being prosecuted and awaiting an oral trial
for having several houses, land and hotels in their name that the federal justice system attributed to Gutiérrez.
The time in which he was tortured before dying - it could have been hours - is a clear indication that his murderers were looking for
specific and specific information about something that went far beyond
a television, a stereo and a box of cigars.
Fabián Gutiérrez
was not a protected witness at that time
because he did not request it.
How was I going to do it, if the person directing that program in the Government was a man who responded
directly to Cristina Kirchner, the former boss whom Gutiérrez declared against?
After that, Gutiérrez was
a man adrift, with a fortune seized but at the same time impossible to hide
. And with the hypothesis of a cash treasure that continued to awaken all kinds of fantasies in El Calafate, the elegant tourist town that Cristina Kirchner once defined as her place in the world.
Cristina's house there was raided precisely to look for the places where the bags that were traveling from Buenos Aires could have been hidden and that
Fabián Gutiérrez himself said he had moved to that place,
when he declared that he was sorry for the corruption notebooks.
Gutiérrez - who was 46 years old when he was killed - worked there many times. After being tortured and murdered, the criminals - known or unknown -
wrapped his body in a rug, loaded it into the bed of their own truck and undertook the final journey to get rid of him
.
Why would a group of common thieves take the body from the victim's house?
On the way, said one of those now convicted,
“we turned by the President's house.”
On that final trip to the cabin where he would be found less than 48 hours later, the body of Cristina's secretary passed through the door of his former boss's house.
Since the day the news broke, almost four years ago, she has spoken, tweeted and recorded messages dozens of times on various topics.
He never said
a word
about the heinous crime of the man who had learned to be his shadow.
See also
See also
The crime of Cristina Kirchner's secretary: the three accused were sentenced to life imprisonment
See also
See also
Scandal over the cell phone of Cristina Kirchner's murdered secretary