It happened 34 years ago, on January 6, 1991, and until this year the Guardia Civil had failed to identify the body of the victim of a murder that everyone called the Reyes murder. The recognition of the body was possible thanks to new scientific techniques and today it is known that it was a 24-year-old girl from Avilés, whose disappearance was notified to the authorities only five years later.
Civil Guard officers reopened the unfinished investigation into a missing woman in May 2024 and soon linked the case with an article in a regional newspaper reporting a murder in the town of Barros where, by pure coincidence, the body had not been identified. That victim had been stabbed and buried in quicklime on Epiphany night in 1991, according to a press release issued by the Guardia Civil.
The Langreo State Police, then in charge of the investigation, had managed to arrest a person for the crime thanks to the fact that his partner, after an argument, had decided to cheat on him. The alleged killer then confessed to officers that that night he had picked up the victim, who was hitchhiking on a highway in Oviedo. According to his story, the woman tried to rob him and in the struggle he stabbed her. The man put the injured woman in the trunk and went to Barros, where he told his partner what had happened. However, when they opened the trunk, they discovered that the woman had bled to death, so the couple decided to bury the body in quicklime.
The facts were not known until the killer was reported by his partner in October 1995, when the victim’s remains were found in too poor a condition to identify. However, it was possible to create a robotic portrait of the deceased woman, which was disseminated through the media.
The events remained unfinished until the Guardia Civil began to connect this crime and the complaint filed by a mother in 1995 regarding the disappearance of her daughter. The woman had been caring for her granddaughter for five years and had not had any news of her daughter’s whereabouts since then. Officers registered the case, but it remained in the missing persons police files due to lack of clues.
The similarities between the robot’s portrait and a photograph provided by the alleged victim’s family gave hope to the case. The comparison of the DNA sample of the missing woman’s daughter (her grandmother was already dead) with one of the remains of the body from the Reyes crime, carried out at the Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences in Madrid with a different and more advanced technique than that used in 1995, confirmed the hypothesis that in both cases it was the same person.
“The advancement of technologies, new methods of investigation, with the use of technological means, new police bases, as well as coordination with other police forces, are fundamental to clarifying this type of events, making it possible to clarify facts that were impossible at the time,” the Guardia Civil states in its press release.
The officers managed to provide the victim’s name and surname and inform the family of the whereabouts of the 24-year-old girl who had not been known about for 34 years.
