After police failed to solve his son’s murder, Francisco Holgado infiltrated the local criminal underworld in pursuit of those responsible. He became a national hero. But at what cost? - Matthew Bremner narrates.
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| Francisco Holdago with a memorial to his son Juan at the petrol station where Juan was murdered. /Photo Credit-Aitor Alcade. |
At 4.30am on 22 November 1995, taxi number 69 pulled into the Campsa Red petrol station in La Constancia, a scruffy neighbourhood in the centre of Jerez. The driver stopped at pump 1, got out of his car and dragged the nozzle to its fuel inlet, but the pump wouldn’t turn on.
When he went to look for the attendant, he saw that the door to the station’s shop had been smashed. Magazines and papers were strewn across the floor. Then the driver noticed blood on the shop’s walls, and ran to a payphone to call the emergency services.
Within minutes, municipal police arrived. One of them found a trail of blood, which led to an office behind the cash register. When the door to the room wouldn’t open, they forced it open. Barricaded inside, behind a photocopier, a young man lay slumped on the floor, inert and bleeding heavily. He was still breathing.
Five minutes later, a team of paramedics crammed into the cluttered office. Covered in blood and surrounded by medical equipment, they tried to staunch the young man’s wounds. But by 4.45am, Juan Holgado was dead.
Just after 5am, Manuel Buitrago, the acting magistrate who would oversee the criminal investigation, arrived at the petrol station. Buitrago, who was 41 and had never handled a murder case before, immediately ordered a thorough inspection of the premises.
Investigators found a large juice carton stained with blood, a button ripped from a raincoat and a pendant engraved with the sign of Virgo. They collected 23 fingerprints from the scene, though at this stage it was impossible to know whether any of them belonged to the perpetrators or to the customers who had entered the petrol station that day.
The shop floor and office had not been cordoned off, and as word of the murder spread, the crime scene became increasingly chaotic.
By 5.30am Buitrago found himself surrounded by paramedics, consultant criminologists, police officers and local journalists. While they trampled over one another, and sometimes the evidence, investigators were picking up crime-scene debris without using protective gloves.
The initial inspection of Juan’s body by a forensic scientist took place at 5.50am. There were 30 stab wounds in total – some relatively superficial slices across his face and hands, others deep gashes to his chest and the backs of his legs. The coroner later determined that they had been inflicted by an 18cm blade, like the ones used for carving Spanish ham.
To Buitrago, the violence of the attack suggested two or more male assailants. Records from the petrol station’s cash register showed that someone had bought the juice carton and a pack of cigarettes at 4.02am, but there was no CCTV footage and no witnesses.
Prosecutors would later conjecture that Juan’s killers had encircled him, slashing the backs of his legs so that he couldn’t run away, and then knocked him to the ground. Juan somehow managed to scramble to the small office at the back of the shop, but the attackers forced their way in and continued to stab him. There was no obvious motive.
It seemed that Juan, who was 26 years old and had never been in trouble with the law, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had even swapped shifts with a colleague that night.
Buitrago soon came to suspect that Juan’s attackers were drug addicts. By the beginning of the 1990s, Spain had become the primary entry point for the cocaine trade in Europe, and Jerez, 30 minutes north-east of the Bay of Cadiz on Spain’s southern coast, had begun to suffer from drug-related crime.
There had been a series of recent robberies carried out in and around Jerez by the “Harpoon gang”, a criminal group that specialised in attacks on petrol stations.
But the work of this gang had been efficient and professional, while the robbers who killed Juan seemed desperate and careless. They had ransacked the shop and failed to break open the station’s safe, making off with just 70,000 pesetas (480 euros) from the till.
It took Buitrago six weeks to detain the first suspects. The three accused were known criminals with a history of robbery and drug-dealing. (A fourth suspect was detained several months later.)
Three of the four men had criminal records, and all four were known to the police as consumers of hard drugs. They all vehemently denied the charges against them.
News of the arrests soon made its way into the local press, and on 15 February 1996, they said the case was close to being solved. But for the victim’s father, Francisco, and his family, it was the beginning of a nightmare that has never ended.
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