The house in which Irene and Juan lived for the last twenty years occupies at least two corner plots in the La Plana de les Torres urbanization, in the municipality of Torrelles de Foix (Barcelona). Bordering the one-story building, there is a large orchard and a garden that the Mossos d'Esquadra exhaustively examined for two full days last week. They were looking for the remains of Irene Gelpí Lluch, the writer who has been missing since her partner, Juan Lozano Montoya, filed a complaint on September 12. The police ordered the aseptic tank to be emptied. But at the moment, no sign of her body.
Despite the absence of a body, the central unit for missing persons has no doubt that the woman was murdered and that the alleged perpetrator, her partner, hid her body, making her entourage and family believe that Irene had “left voluntarily.” how “he had already done it again,” he said when asked.
Juan Lozano, 77 years old, of great physical size, almost 120 kilos, and who in recent times used a cane to walk, is a painter and with a certain name in the Penedès region. He had organized exhibitions and today part of his work can be purchased in various art galleries. Currently he visited antique markets buying and selling pieces that he himself restored in his workshop.
During all these months of absence, the man did not stop publishing information on Facebook or organizing raids in search of Irene. He told some that she had left after a big fight, and that he would be back. To others, that perhaps she had committed suicide, because he, he added: “You already know that she has always been introverted.” In one of his posters he posted an image of the woman with “the clothes she was wearing on the day she disappeared.”
The police worked to prove that the writer was not alive and that she could only have been murdered by her partner. During that investigation they found several women, who when they were girls went to Juan and Irene's house to receive painting classes taught by the man. Three of the victims, who are now of legal age, have already reported that they suffered sexual assault. The police have identified two others and are waiting to see if they file a complaint for facts that have not expired.
The man refused to testify after being arrested and left his house crying and denying the accusations to the neighbor to whom he gave the keys so she could feed Ros, the cat that meowed alone yesterday. Despite the suspect's silence, investigators are working with a hypothesis.
Irene Gelpí was a victim of sexual abuse that she described in the first person in a book that she wrote under a pseudonym. Some sexual abuse that she later verbalized in a TV3 documentary, Infància en risc, which was broadcast in 2011 and where she narrated some attacks that she also told La Vanguardia. The investigators do not rule out that the woman, especially sensitive to the abuse of minors, discovered the alleged abuse carried out by her partner and threatened to report it.
