+ infoCésar Cervera@C_Cervera_MUpdated: 24/01/2023 00:16 a.m.
Marta del Castillo was murdered on January 24, 2009 in a case that has never been fully clarified. Only a few hours after the crime, the young woman's father went to the Nervión National Police station to report that his daughter had not returned home that night. Thus began not only the endless anguish of a family that fourteen years later still has not found Marta's body, but also a police investigation that would fill the country's news and front pages for months.
"They are looking for a missing minor on Saturday night when she returned home," editor Fernando Carrasco published on January 26 in a first ABC approach to the crime.
This first piece of news recounted how the desolation began to take over the family of this 17-year-old young man as the hours passed and he still did not appear. The parents were alerted when his daughter, a very punctual young woman, did not return at the agreed time after meeting some friends.
“Antonio, Marta's father, related to ABC de Sevilla the hours of anguish they have lived since they found out that their daughter had returned with a friend but that she did not come home. 'Her friend of hers - the father specifies - has told us that he left her next to her house, around half past nine at night, but she never arrived here' ”, the information collected.
The false rumor in Huelva
On January 27, ABC added a profile of the girl asking friends, neighbors and family to put a face on the event. “She likes what all the boys her age do,” the father assured her. she is involved in the internet, in the messenger and in tuenti, like all her friends, that is something that is now in fashion ». She liked going out, “going to the movies” and also reading. She “At that time she was reading the book “Twilight””, Stephenie Meyer's saga about teenage vampires and werewolves. For the rest, her family specified that the taste of going out on weekends depends: “Yes, she is a very responsible girl since she always tells us where she is, the places she goes and who she goes with. ”.
+ info Information from ABC Sevilla on January 27, 2009.
That same day, ABC Sevilla took the photo of the teenager with the information "Mobilization to find Marta" and the latest news from a central police investigation at that time in the friend who accompanied her home. The National Police pulled a thread that went directly to Miguel Carcaño, her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had pending conversations that she hoped to resolve that day.
"Javier Casanueva, who said that the family was hopeful after hearing the information from the Government delegate that 'with a certain certainty they placed Marta in a province bordering Seville'"
"The boy, 19 years old and with the number Miguel, gave a statement, without the information provided to the agents of the Minors' Group having been disclosed, who are that they have taken charge of a case that continues to have too many loose ends," he wrote to ABC on January 27 in its Seville edition with an image of Marta's maternal grandmother along with several photographs of her granddaughter.
Miguel claimed to have taken a walk with the missing young woman and that he had then dropped her off at her home around 21.00:21.15 p.m. The testimony of a neighbor gave Carcaño an alibi by maintaining in his statements to the Police that he saw Marta del Castillo in the portal at around XNUMX:XNUMX p.m. while she was taking some bags out of the car. However, as reported by ABC, another neighbor of the missing young woman heard a scream at the same time in the portal.
+ infoMarta del Castillo's grandmother with some photos of her missing granddaughter. –ABC
Due to these contradictory testimonies, about three weeks passed until Carcaño was arrested, during which time he was able to agree with his friends El Cuco and Samuel Benítez on a possible alibi and where the press, including ABC, reported sightings of the young woman in Huelva and other points of Spain. "Javier Casanueva [spokesman for the family] said that the family was hopeful after hearing the information from the Government delegate that 'with a certain certainty' placed Marta in a province bordering Seville." To say that if they had seen her in Huelva 'is that the girl is coerced'”.
It was not until the investigators found traces of blood in the pocket of Carcaño's jacket that he was wearing the night of the disappearance that he was arrested. She now she did confess to the crime, the first of her many confessions that go by number seven. "Young Marta's ex-boyfriend confesses that he killed her and threw her into the Guadalquivir," titled ABC in its national edition.
The coldness of murder
The ex-boyfriend confessed to having argued with Marta del Castillo in her stepbrother's house, after which he hit her with a glass ashtray on the side of the head with fatal sequences. According to him, his friends, Samuel Benítez and El Cuco, who was 15 years old at the time, helped him throw Marta's body into the Guadalquivir River. “The coldness of the 20-year-old young man has surprised the Police, since since the day of the disappearance he has been interrogated on several occasions. But in the last interrogation, on Friday afternoon, he made several contradictions, an issue that caused him to be detained and then confessed ”, María Dolores Alvarado and Fernando Carrasco told ABC. This version has been confirmed by Benítez and El Cuco, in separation statements, and they have begun the search for the body along the Guadalquivir in which they have invested millions of euros without obtaining any results.
+ info Information from ABC Sevilla with an interview with the family of Carcaño's girlfriend. –ABC
Months later, Carcaño offered a different version, according to which he and El Cuco beat Marta and then raped her. This is due to a procedural strategy because by introducing the crime of sexual assault to avoid being tried by a popular jury, one of many ploys used in these fourteen years. Since then he has not stopped changing other details about the crime, from the perpetrator to the burial place, including the way to kill Marta.
“Miguel told many things that we now question. He said that he was 19 years old and that he had studied up to 3rd year of ESO, as well as that his father was Italian. He had a brother that he didn't get along with very well. Our told that his mother was called Felisa and that she died. His father abandoned his children and went to Italy. He wanted to live alone and told us that he bought his brother half of the apartment that his father had left them in León XIII", ABC collected in an interview with Rocío's mother, Carcaño's girlfriend when the murder took place, as a way of personality profile of a genuine compulsive liar.
In fourteen years the body has not appeared, nor have any more clues to find it. Last year the case was filed, despite the opposition of his family. At the judicial level, 'El Cuco' was sentenced by a juvenile court to two years and once months of internment in 2011 for cover-up, while Miguel Carcaño received a twenty-year prison sentence for murder by the Seville court. .
