When 15 years have passed since the death of Marta del Castillo, who lost her life at the hands of her former friend Miguel Carcaño, the confessed author of the crime, her body still has not appeared and the case continues to be full of unknowns. What really happened on the night of January 24, 2009 on León later?
The Lazarus Technology forensic laboratory, specialized in cybersecurity and data recovery, has tried to respond, at the request of the Investigative Court number 4 of Seville, to some of these questions after a detailed analysis of the data from Carcaño's mobile phone (terminal, SIM and external memory card) and, in his report, he offers some details that could shed light on the case.
Among the new information, delivered to Judge Álvaro Martín on December 5 and already in the possession of the Homicide Group of the National Police, three issues stand out, as confirmed to La Vanguardia by Manuel Huerta, CEO of Lazarus: the telephone owned by Miguel, a Motorola U9 that he delivered to the Sevilla II prison in February 2009, was factory restored after the night of the crime and, therefore, there is data that has been lost; Only one SIM could be analyzed, although there was a change of card in the same mobile; and, finally, new locations extracted from the terminal that do not appear in the case files are provided.
According to what has been leaked to the press, there are up to six geopositions of the phone that were unknown until now, although some of them mark such urban areas that, a priori, they could be ruled out. Images and text messages have also been extracted that could provide new clues to investigators.
Lazarus, who makes a clone of Carcaño's cell phone to obtain all possible data, runs into a wall: Miguel's terminal, from the pre-smarthpohne era, has limitations in terms of memory and storage and, so much time has passed, that some information has been deleted. This type of terminal did not store data as extensively (dates, times and places) as smartphones do today, which complicates the analysis to find out where it was and, therefore, the results are also more limited.
“It is impossible to determine the date” of the positions, Manuel Huerta, CEO of the company in charge of the expert opinion, tells this newspaper, “what can be confirmed is that a deletion is carried out on the phone that affects the number of records. When rewriting the factory phone, many of the locations that would have been obtained are lost,” he points out. “The mobile phone is reset and has activity recorded a few days after the event, which does not mean that the locations are from the date on which it has activity again” but rather “they can be from the day of the events, immediately after or more or less close in time,” says Huerta, while detailing that the records “cannot be very old” because the terminal did not have much storage time.
Added to this is that the company, when it began the expert work, requested the theoretical raw information from the operators to try to get something more than what was recorded in the records regarding the traffic of the antennas, but, despite the fact that the The data had already been delivered to the court, the Police and the parties, the information “does not appear anywhere and the operators have already deleted it,” as Huerta informs us, who believes that the records should have been broader than those contained in the documentation to which they have had access.
With this route closed, they only had the information they could get from the terminal and, according to this latest search carried out, Carcaño would have been in Dos Hermanas and the northern area of the city of Seville, in San Jerónimo, next to the San Fernando Cemetery and near the shanty settlement of El Vacie. The day, the hour, and the duration cannot be determined, but these are points that were not known until now and that could give rise to a new raid. It is just what Marta's father, Antonio del Castillo, asks for the Police to go to these areas to search for the body of his daughter.
All the hopes of Marta del Castillo's family were placed on Lazarus' expert opinion, since, a priori, he was going to be able to 'fill in' and complete the blank spaces in the investigation into the disappearance and death of the young woman. fateful January 24, 15 years ago. To do this, the company had access, by decision of the judge, to all the records that could provide information on the locations of this terminal, not only to the positions given by the antennas, but it has also been possible to trace the internal memory, the card SIM and the external card to find other evidence, such as photos and messages, that could provide information.
In fact, images and SMS have been included that refer to locations and that were available on the phone, although they were not included in the cars. Among them, as has appeared in some media, there are conversations between Miguel and his partner at the time, Rocío, the 14-year-old minor with whom he lived and who was interrogated on several occasions by the Police. It was this same girl who admitted in the trial for Marta's murder, held in 2011, that Carcaño had confessed to her on January 25 that he had hit the young woman with an ashtray and that, between him and his brother, Francisco Javier Delgado , they had continued hitting her once she fell to the ground and then disposed of the body.
On the other hand, it is confirmed that there is a change of SIM in the terminal, which means that Carcaño would have been operating with two different cards (one prepaid and one contract) on the same phone and that the second of them, which perhaps could have provided more data, it has not been possible to analyze it.
The forensic dossier, of more than 1,000 pages including the main report (138 pages), 9 annexes and complementary documentation, provides information that must be interpreted by the State security forces, who must decide if the report constitutes a new starting point. to continue the investigation, if it is viable to track the new locations and if there are new threads to pull to solve this crime, an event that is an open wound within a family that has been fighting for more than three decades to know the truth. about what happened to his daughter, a 17-year-old girl who went out to enjoy an afternoon with her friends and who never returned home. But, “if it is shelved, if that were the case, I would take care of it,” commented Antonio del Castillo.
For her part, the lawyer for the victim's family, Inmaculada Torres, has already commented that, if this route did not prosper, it would be necessary to start over again, although, and until now, those from Castillo have been clashing consistently with justice, to such an extent that in this case there are two different sentences on the same crime, one handed down by the Juvenile Court that affects 'El Cuco' (then convicted of concealment), and another by the Provincial Court where The adults involved were tried (Francisco Javier Delgado – Miguel's stepbrother – his girlfriend, María García Mendaro, and Samuel Benítez, a friend of the young people) and were exonerated of all charges except Miguel Carcaño, the only one sentenced to 21 years in prison. who is serving his sentence in the Herrera de la Mancha prison and who will keep him behind bars until 2023.
There have been seven times that Marta's confessed murderer has changed his version, the last in 2020, when he pointed out his brother as the author of the crime. It was then that he made his telephone number available to the Justice Department to be analyzed, as he explained in a letter sent to lawyer Torres. Then, the defense of Marta's family asked the court to carry out a study of the telephone numbers of all those involved in the case, but, although at first they had obtained an affirmative answer, finally the judge only authorized the expert opinion of the telephone terminal. Carcaño and that of Marta herself, whose mobile phone never appeared.
Today marks 15 years since that day. Since then, the young woman's family has never stopped looking for her and fighting for justice. For yet another anniversary, a rally is called at 11:00 at the doors of the Prosecutor's Office so that Marta's case does not fall into oblivion.
