An off-duty policeman who was walking his dog in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona discovered a bag of garbage that the animal had marked in some garden beds in front of the entrance to a housing block The policeman approached it and when he broke the plastic he discovered a corpse with signs of violence. And something else. The head was missing.
In the absence of the results of the DNA tests and the forensics study, the researchers suspect, and are practically convinced, that these are the remains that were missing from the man who disappeared on January 29 in Badalona and the head of the which was located by an asparagus seeker in a stream next to the Germans Trias i Pujol hospital.
Precisely, the police from the central missing persons unit informed Joan Pere's family two days ago that the head found in Can Ruti, at the foot of a pine tree, was that of this 44-year-old Vic resident whom they were looking for desperately since he said goodbye to his girlfriend in Santa Coloma de Gramenet to go to work.
Almost a month later a man with a garden at the foot of Can Ruti found the boss looking for asparagus. The family, which practically alone, especially in the first few weeks, had moved to Santa Coloma following the trail of Joan Pere in Santa Coloma and in a couple of bars in Badalona, immediately thought that it could be their relative.
During the last few days, several forensic experts from the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Catalonia have worked in coordination with the remains of the corpse, focusing on the teeth. Among the forensics, some of whom also have a career as a dentist, they have carried out a comparative study by means of images until they have evidenced the existence of several identifying coincidences, among which a very significant fracture in one of the central incisors presented by the missing in the photographs of his social networks.
Researchers have their work cut out for them. The last person who was allegedly with Joan Pere was a resident of Santa Coloma who told both the family of the young man from Vic and several journalists different versions of what happened that night. But the unknown now is another. Who left the rest of the corpse in that Carrer de Gràcia? It is practically impossible that he was there for a month and that no one noticed his presence.
