This text belongs to 'Dossier Negro', a newsletter inspired by the podcast of the same name, which Enrique Figueredo will send on Wednesdays on a biweekly basis. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
The vast majority of murderers want to prevent justice from reaching them. Therefore, erasing his criminal trail is one of his obsessions. Only those who kill without knowing that they are committing the most terrible crime, such as certain schizophrenics, or those driven by the need to flee, neglect the crime scene. They do not clean up the signs of their fatal misdeed. Beyond avoiding leaving fingerprints or, more importantly today, the trail of DNA, the murderer knows that the victim's body can be a storehouse of evidence for investigators.
That is the reason why, if it cannot be physically made to disappear, at least an attempt is made to damage, disfigure, submerge or burn the victim's body. That's what happened to Anne Strande's body. Her murderer wanted, as we explained in Dossier Negro, to burn her body by setting it on fire in the same apartment in Madrid that the young Danish woman had rented and where he attacked her and put an end to her life.
It is a case very similar to that of Pedro Jiménez. A compulsive rapist and murderer who ended the lives of two trainee policewomen in the city of l'Hospitalet de Llobregat in 2004. He had the terrible idea of setting fire to the apartment where he martyred and murdered the two agents, who shared the apartment. . The smoke was so intense that it alerted the neighbors and their intention to destroy the bodies was prevented by the arrival of the firefighters.
Predilection for fire. The appearance of lifeless bodies inside abandoned cars and, most of the time, deliberately burned is a constant in the local and international criminal chronicle. It is very typical of criminal organizations, but in Spain what is known as the Urban Police crime showed that the most unexpected people can resort to this method of hindering the police investigation.
Sandwiches. The method of walling as a punishment – the prisoner was normally locked in a narrow hole whose access was walled off – was already born in ancient times. However, this mechanism of embedding a body has also been used by murderers when trying to hide a body. A very revealing case was one discovered in Mallorca. The remains of a woman believed missing appeared during renovation works at a hotel.
Don't take anything for granted. That old axiom that if there is no body there is no conclusive proof of a murder or homicide and the criminal is safe has been completely overcome by new investigation techniques. The case of Ramón Laso serves as a model for conviction without the bodies of his victims appearing.
In the garden. Clandestine burial, of course, is one of the most common methods of attempting to conceal the body of a person killed by a homicidal action. The British couple Fred and Rosemary West, two sadistic and incestuous murderers, buried their collection of mortal victims in the garden of their house. The documentary Fred
