Listening in the courtroom of the Provincial Court of Guadalajara to Fernando Peña, 26 years old and the main accused in the Chiloeches triple crime, and his alleged accomplices and “partying” friends, his cousins David Moreno Álvarez and Cristian Borja Moreno, aged 27 and 25, is like watching an updated version of The Peakthe iconic film so Spanish from the 1980s.
The three friends belong to the so-called “Pioz mafia”, a municipality in Guadalajara with 5,200 inhabitants, 14 kilometers from Chiloeches. It is a sort of crowd of young people agitated since adolescence by the frenetic consumption of drugs and the love of martial arts. Peña, nicknamed The Red and nephew of a former mayor of the city, he was the leader of the group with a long history of robberies, scams, driving without a license, disobedience, resistance… David, who lived with his grandparents, without work or benefits and who had been treated for his drug addiction, was one of his regular companions in his misdeeds and in altercations in exchange for drugs. And Cristian, despite in theory not taking drugs and having a recognized 61% disability, was a “thorn in the neck” with his cousin Davide, as well as being the boyfriend of Laura, one of the three victims. The image of the three, with their heads lowered, sitting formally next to their lawyers in the courtroom, and the stories of their lives show the two sides of a truth that must be revealed now, and until Wednesday 19 November, when the oral trial will end, by a popular jury.
– I need 30 euros because I owe 400 a disgusting one.
– It’s been six hours without coke, you wouldn’t have lasted that long.
– I need a shot and a drink
– I have to sell the rollers for two euros.
– I have to pay at least 300, I’m going to sell some blowtorches.
– I don’t know who to ask for 25 fucking euros. Trust.
– How much do you get? keta and the glass?
– If you see Yasin you will go crazy, we almost died with Tusi
– I wish there was a drug bizum.
– Today I only received a tip. I urgently need 50.
These are some of the hundreds of WhatsApp messages exchanged by the defendants in the days before the crime of 13 April 2024, when the couple made up of Ángel Villar and Elvira Fernández, aged 52 and 53, and their daughter Laura Villar, aged 22 and Cristian’s partner, were murdered, tried on charges of having provided information on a collection of watches and money that the father kept in the house, the main object of a planned attack. robbery.
“I didn’t report anything, it was in a conversation at the bar where Fernando was present, that Laura talked about her father’s watch collection instead of one that they had given me for my birthday”, defended Cristian, who on several occasions expressed difficulty in understanding the jury’s questions. However, from the messages exchanged between him and Fernando it appears that they had thought of doing a search at his girlfriend’s parents’ house while he was inviting her to dinner. But it all came together early that Saturday morning.
Fernando, who exonerated the two cousins and took responsibility for the deaths for which the Prosecutor’s Office and the prosecution are asking him to be sent to permanent and reviewable prison, assured that he would only steal and leave quickly. He said he believed there was no one in the house (although Cristian did not confirm this) and that he carried a bayonet (with which he killed the victims) out of habit. He stabbed the three family members he encountered. He stabbed his father 29 times, with whom he argued in the master bedroom; 14 to the mother, who was in bed. And seven to his daughter, when she tried to escape down the stairs.
-I started hitting everything that moved and screamed.–he justified himself.
The couple’s youngest son, Yeray Villar, then 21, managed to escape from the house that night through the window of his ground-floor room after hearing his father’s bangs and screams upstairs and seeing his sister lying on the stairs of the family chalet in the private, gated development of Medina Azahara.
-It can’t happen–you can hear him say, incredulous and in a low voice, in the 112 emergency services recording, when he called in a state of shock to ask for help, as he fled the house in terror.
-I left Fernando there at dawn, about 100 meters from the entrance gate of the complex, and left in his mother’s car, even though I don’t have a license… I imagined that he would explore the area to steal later.–For his part, David Moreno declared, for the public prosecutor, “the accomplice”, and for the prosecution, “a necessary collaborator”.
everything at once
During their statements and those of the experts and witnesses in the trial hearings, the squalid reality in which the defendants lived emerged. Their stories took those in the room into a tremendously toxic underworld where ecstasy pills are transported by the hundreds in plastic bags and eaten like peppermint candies, much like tranquimacine or transilium. They immersed listeners in a parallel daily life in which everything consists in obtaining more drugs at all costs, more cocaine, more tusi (“Two Cs” or pink cocaine), more crystals (MDMA), more ketamine, more whatever. A sort of absolute present of excess, day or night, in which the narcotic is not snorted with an inhaler, but rather “puts its nose in the bag”, directly. “To get into it as much as possible” is the only objective of those who have left their studies, family, work, the lives of others, freedom on the street… To get into it “everything, until it’s finished”, “immediately”, and go looking for more. There is no more or greater vital meaning in that tunnel of anguish. But the most controversial thing about this case is that this wild life is now also the main alibi of the accused.
-I did it because I was hysterical, crazy, I wanted to get to the top, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.–Fernando declared last Friday that he had left the gun and his cell phone at home and that he had lost part of the loot in the escape; but he also set fire to the chalet to cover his tracks before leaving; and then he ran away with his girlfriend and hid in a hostel in Daganzo, where the Guardia Civil detained him.
In his account of the sequence of events, both that given before forensic experts on 16 April 2024 after he was arrested, and those made subsequently, Fernando describes in detail all his movements and thoughts before engaging in stabbing attacks against the residents of the house. And he also describes in detail what he did next, but claims to remember almost nothing (“only flashes”) of the moments when he killed Ángel, Elvira and Laura. He only remembers that Ángel pounced on him while he was rummaging in a drawer and hit him hard. The court medical examiner described this selective memory as “instrumental amnesia”, while the defense psychiatrist concluded that this erratic behavior evidences a clear drug addiction.
Plans, line by line
Fernando and David had taken “large quantities” of drugs in the days preceding the events, together and separately. Fernando remembers perfectly calling David around 11pm. that Friday, like many other times, to accompany him in his plans to get more drugs or more money for drugs.
They both recalled that, while they were drinking and doing drugs that night, in the car driven by Fernando, aimlessly, line by line, gram by gram, they thought about the idea of making a overturn (steal drugs) from a drug dealer in a nearby municipality, but they excluded him as dangerous. Later, Fernando proposed to steal a ladder in the El Bosque urbanization, since they stopped there to break into other strips. Their idea was to climb the stairs to an apartment booked in Pioz for people with money. They also rejected it because they weren’t sure how to take the ladder. On that narcotic route, passing an ATM in La Caixa, they stopped, took “more hits” (snorted more lines of cocaine) and Fernando had the idea of waiting for someone to come and “remove the pin from the card with a knife” to plunder the account. The idea was also unsuccessful. They thus resumed the plan, discussed and postponed several times, to attack Laura’s parents’ house, and headed towards the urbanization of Medina Azahara. But David left Fernando there and left, as confirmed by the positioning of his cell phone. The same way they placed one of Cristian’s phones in the urbanization around 2 in the morning, when he, who did not answer Fernando’s calls, could suspect that he could “make a mess” and went to check.
“This is clearly not the robbery of the century,” concluded the lead defense lawyer, who, while accepting responsibility for his client’s death, understands that it was the result of an “outburst” due to his drug addiction. The jury now has the difficult task of deciding whether this frenetic drug use can explain three deaths and 50 stabbings and mitigate the defendants’ sentences.
