The killer who pretended to be someone else for money

Inordinate desire to have and acquire riches in order to treasure them.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
07 August 2023 Monday 11:03
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The killer who pretended to be someone else for money

Inordinate desire to have and acquire riches in order to treasure them.

Greed is the second of the seven deadly sins. It is on the list of motivations of many criminals. The rough summary of his action would be something like "killing for money". Neus Sala, one of the best event journalists and with a privileged head capable of storing data on almost all the crimes of recent years in Spain, told me a few days ago: "No one in these years has been more greedy than the "Angie".

This chapter is dedicated to her, María Ángeles Molina Fernández, the Angi, sentenced by the Supreme Court to 18 years in prison for the murder of Ana María Páez Capitán, 36, in February 2008.

Despite the torrent of evidence against the accused, her presence at the scene of the crime, her relationship with the victim and an infinite number of clues and elements that we will review in this chronicle, the woman has never confessed the facts. Nor did he do it during the investigation, nor during the days of the trial, to the despair of the victim's parents and brother, who were hoping, delusional and good people, for a few words from the author of the death of their daughter But not only did she not articulate a single sentence of consolation, but Angi showed herself at the Audiencia de Barcelona cold, distant, unperturbed and still allowed herself the luxury of joking about the dulce de leche she secured which she needed to take every night before she was arrested by the homicide squad of the Mossos d'Esquadra de Barcelona.

Angi killed Ana out of greed, for money. There is no other motive other than to go over everything and everyone to get the only thing he longed for: to keep his train of life at any cost. The only thing that interested the 40-year-old woman at the time, who had been HR manager at the same textile company where the victim worked, was her identity, which she used fraudulently for almost two years to getting first loans and then life policies which, like the first financial products, were also unregulated.

The sadness of Ana's relatives will always remain the anguish of thinking that, if only one of the bank managers who in those years authorized the loans in her daughter's name, with her daughter's ID, in front of a woman who physically did not resemble his daughter at all, had he made a single check on the veracity of the documentation, perhaps the plot would have fallen apart.

On the morning of February 21, 2008, the person in charge of the cleaning service of some apartments that were rented by the day at number 36 of Carrer Camprodon in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona found the lifeless body of a woman. The young woman was completely naked on a purple velvet couch and had a plastic bag tied around her head with several turns of insulating tape. Next to the corpse, the Mossos only found a black wig and a pair of high-heeled boots of the same color. There was no documentation, no clothes, no handbag.

The researchers went so far as to consider death by asphyxiation during a sexual game, but the thesis collapsed, so they linked the corpse to the report of disappearance in l'Hospitalet of Ana María Páez Capitán and accessed the images of the security cameras of a bank where a woman, pretending to be the victim, was withdrawing money from his account. Despite the multitude of evidence that the killer, María Ángeles Molina Fernández, left on the rough and rough road that she traveled those days, the investigators had work to do until they closed the circle on the suspect. The woman, who had met the victim that night and who knew her because she had previously been his employee, appeared before the Mossos safely and provided a solid alibi: on the same day of the crime she had traveled to Zaragoza to collect the ashes of his mother. In addition, the people in charge of the funeral home corroborated his version.

Over the days, the investigators found that it was possible to drive to Zaragoza and back, kill Ana and recreate a scenario where the killer wanted to make believe that the victim had a double life and that that night she had had sex with two men

The investigation confirmed that days before the woman hired the services of two gigolos whom she visited and that she paid to get his semen, which they deposited in pharmacy bottles. With Ana unconscious from some drug that the autopsy never determined, the killer put the prostitutes' semen in the woman's mouth and vagina.

The investigation determined that, for almost two years, the killer impersonated the victim and, with her ID, which she must have stolen from him when they were work colleagues, she walked around almost all the banking institutions in Barcelona alone requesting credits that no bank manager had any impediments to grant. Credits that later became insurance policies.

Angi killed Ana in order to collect on the life policies she signed in her name. He had placed a second woman, Susana Bascuñana, as the beneficiary, who she would certainly have pretended to be in order to enjoy the money.

The killer fooled everyone for a long time. She tried to confuse the investigators who questioned her the first few times and make them believe that she knew nothing about the death of Ana, with whom she admitted that she had stayed that night for dinner, but she assured that she did not had presented At that time, the woman had a partner and had no qualms, when she already felt watched by the Mossos, to hide the victim's documentation behind the cistern of a bathroom in her boyfriend's house. An envelope that incriminated him, although the investigation later ruled out any relationship between the man and the crime.

The killer's coldness was demonstrated at the trial and during the first hours at the Corts police station, where she arrived worried about how she should dress and wear shoes to spend her first hours in the dungeon. She was outraged when a woman searched her home questioned the authenticity of her collection of luxury handbags and refused, only until she knew she would end up barefoot, to put on some beach flip flops when she was forced to remove her wooden and platform clogs from the dungeons.

María Ángeles Molina is serving her sentence in the penitentiary center of Ponent, where she was transferred a few years ago after settling in the city of Lleida, where she maintains a stable relationship with a man, with whom she has enjoyed her first parole .