Sadness or sorrow for someone else’s good. Emulation, desire for something you don’t have.
Envy is the sixth of the seven deadly sins and the chosen case remains etched in the hearts of the civil guards who searched for Gabriel Cruz Ramírez in Cap de Gata for eleven days. The boy was eight years old when he disappeared. At around half past four in the afternoon on February 27, 2018, he left his grandmother’s house in Las Hortichuelas to play with some friends in a house a few hundred meters away in a straight line. He never got there.
Las Hortichuelas is a small town with just over 80 residents, who in winter do not reach their twenties. It is not in the way of anything and there is nothing to divert it. Gabriel had walked that road plenty of times. As his mother Patricia Ramírez explained in one of her first public interventions: “Gabriel is not lost. He knows perfectly well where the house is. He has been there many times. He is a smart and good boy. If anything had happened to him, he would have screamed and no one heard anything.”
Unwittingly, Patricia brought forward what sadly happened that afternoon on this dirt road. Gabriel didn’t scream, and he didn’t get lost. The boy trusted the person who gave him a lift.
Patricia and Ángel had been separated for some time. The relationship was good, after some initial moments of tension. The father had been living in Las Hortichuelas for a year with Ana Julia Quezada, a Dominican woman he had met in a bar in Las Negras, where he arrived four years ago from Burgos.
Las Hortichuelas and Las Negras, both towns, belong to the Natural Park of Cap de Gata, in Almeria. One of the few places that has managed to save itself from urban speculation and that preserves paradisiacal enclaves, with only people in the winter and the visitors who fill them in the summer. Places where practically everyone knows each other and towns where nothing ever happens.
Ángel reported the disappearance of his son that same night to the Civil Guard of Níjar. He alerted his ex-wife and a search was launched in which the whole village participated. The next day and already in daylight, the search was extended to the surrounding area for fear that the boy had lost his way. No hypothesis was ruled out, although the focus was on an individual who had a valid restraining order against his mother after several episodes of harassment.
The Civil Guard investigated the individual and found that, right during the time slot of the disappearance, the tracking device that had been placed on him had been disconnected. The man was arrested for breach of sentence, but no further signs or evidence related to Gabriel’s absence were found.
The days passed and those hundred meters of dirt road were made and undone with anguish. The research ended up mobilizing up to five thousand people between volunteers and professionals. They say it has been the biggest so far in Spain. The judicial police of the command of the Civil Guard of Almeria were soon joined by the specialists of the central operational unit (UCO). The parents wanted to share the research with the media, with frequent appearances and interviews that kept Spain in awe. Gabriel, known as Pescadito for his fascination with the sea, crept into the hearts of those who followed minute by minute his mysterious absence.
In the midst of the research broadcast live by the media in all its formats, Ana Julia’s attitude was not overlooked by the researchers. His role was excessive, hogging a role that did not belong to him. If it was necessary to cry, she was the one who cried the most. She was never separated from Ángel for a second, she answered for him, answered his phone and so that his father was calm, she was in charge of supplying him with pills that kept him out of the game.
One of the days, Ana Julia was interviewed on Radio Galega, in which she cried and begged “the person who has our child to return him”. And he assured that the family would give a reward of 10,000 euros to anyone who gave a reliable clue about Gabriel’s whereabouts. Until then, no one had proposed a financial bonus.
The researchers focused more and more on the woman and a discreet parallel investigation began on her. They were convinced, from what they explained, that Gabriel was alive with the help of an accomplice, and that the motive was economic. They reviewed the statements of the first hours. Ana Julia assured that she loved Gabriel as if he were her son; while Patricia explained how the boy came home more than once, crying, after some unpleasant episode with his father’s partner.
Something wasn’t right. The investigation took them to Burgos, where they discovered that a daughter of the woman, Ridelca, aged just four, died in strange circumstances after falling from a window in an interior courtyard, from a seventh floor.
They were missing a clue that she took it upon herself to provide. On the sixth day, the woman convinced Ángel to go out and look in an area of ??Rodalquilar, near a sewage treatment plant where, coincidentally, Ana Julia’s ex-partner lived. At a time when she was alone, she started shouting that she had found Gabriel’s shirt.
This finding was a stroke of hope for the family. But investigators soon learned that only she was able to place the garment and that it was not the one the boy was wearing at the time of the disappearance. The shirt still smelled of fabric softener and was in a spot that had already been inspected.
From that moment on, Ana Julia was followed permanently 24 hours a day, waiting for her to lead the civil guards to the boy, who were convinced that he was still alive. They installed microphones in her car that listened live and a beacon to geolocate her.
Investigators were waiting for the misstep that took place on March 11. Ana Julia drove Ángel to a hotel to meet Patricia and left them to run some errands. He went to the Rodalquilar farm, owned by his partner’s family and which she visited every day since the disappearance.
Using the camera and the precision lens, one of the civil guards recorded the woman removing some wood by the pool and loading a wrapped lump that was certain to be the child’s lifeless body, which she then loaded in the trunk
They followed her as they heard her cursing the boy and wondering what she was going to do with him through the microphones. The civil guards arrested her at the doors of the house she shared with Ángel. He still cried out through sobs that he knew nothing. When the investigators opened the trunk, not one was able to hold back the tears, pain and helplessness.
Ana Julia Quezada apologized in the last turn of the court in which she assured that, before killing him “unintentionally”, the boy called her and insulted her. He did not clarify why he did it. The researchers have no doubt that she hated Gabriel, she was jealous of him, because it disturbed her relationship with her father. She was the first woman in Spain to be sentenced to permanent, reviewable prison terms.
