Sadness or regret of the good of others. Emulation, desire for something that is not possessed.
Envy is the sixth of the seven deadly sins and the chosen case continues to this day burned into the hearts of the civil guards who searched for little Gabriel Cruz Ramírez for eleven days in Cabo de Gata. The boy was eight years old when he disappeared. Around half past three in the afternoon on February 27, 2018, the little boy left his grandmother’s house in Las Hortichuelas to play with some friends in a house just a hundred meters away in a straight line. He never came.
Las Hortichuelas is a small town with just over 80 registered residents who in winter do not reach twenty. It is not through anything and there is nothing to make you deviate from the road. Gabriel had walked that path plenty of times. As his mother, Patricia Ramírez, explained in one of her first public interventions during the search: “Gabriel has not been lost. He knows exactly where the house is. He has been many times. He is a smart and good boy. If something had happened to him, he would have screamed and no one heard a thing.”
Unintentionally, Patricia advanced what sadly happened that afternoon on that dirt road. Gabriel didn’t yell or get lost. The boy trusted the person who got him into the car.
Patricia and Ángel had been separated for some time. The relationship was good, after a few moments of tension. The father had lived in Las Hortichuelas for a year with Ana Julia Quezada, a Dominican he had met in a bar in Las Negras, where she had arrived four years earlier from Burgos.
Las Hortichuelas, Las Negras, both populations belong to the natural park of Cabo de Gata, in Almería. One of the few places in Spain that has managed to save itself from urban speculation and that preserves paradisiacal enclaves, with hardly any people in winter and the visitors that fill them in summer. Places where practically everyone knows each other and towns where nothing ever happens.
Ángel reported the disappearance of his son that same night at the Civil Guard post in Níjar. He alerted his ex-wife and a town-wide search was launched. The next day and with daylight, the search was extended to the surroundings fearing that the little boy had been confused. No hypothesis was ruled out, although the focus was on an individual who had a restraining order in force from his mother after several episodes of harassment.
The Civil Guard investigated the individual and verified that just at the time of the disappearance, the location device that had been placed on him had been disconnected. The man was arrested for breach of sentence, but no further indications 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 search came to mobilize up to five thousand people between volunteers and professionals. They say it has been the largest so far in Spain. The judicial police from the Almería Civil Guard headquarters were soon joined by specialists from the central operating unit (UCO). The parents wanted to share the search with the media, with frequent appearances and interviews that kept Spain on edge. Gabriel, known as the Little Fish because of his fascination with the sea, slipped into the hearts of those who followed his mysterious absence minute by minute.
In the midst of the search broadcast live by the media in all its formats, the investigators did not ignore Ana Julia’s attitude. Her role was excessive, monopolizing a role that did not touch her. If she had to cry, she was the one who cried the most. She did not separate for a second from Ángel, she vouched for him, answered his phone and, so that the father would be “calm”, she was in charge of giving him some pills that kept him half out of his mind.
One of the days, Ana Julia is interviewed on Radio Galega, where she cries and begs “the person who has our child to return it.” And she assures that the family will deliver a reward of 10,000 euros to whoever she gives a reliable clue to the whereabouts of Gabriel. No one up to that point had raised a bounty.
The researchers increasingly focus their gaze on the woman and a discreet parallel investigation begins on her. They are convinced, from what he is telling, that Gabriel is alive with the help of some accomplice, and that the motive is cheap. They review the statements of the first hours. Ana Julia assured that she loved Gabriel as her son; while Patricia explained how the child came home crying more than once, after an episode with his father’s girlfriend.
Something didn’t add up. The investigation takes them to Burgos, where they discover that a daughter of the woman, Ridelca, who was only four years old, died under strange circumstances when she fell out of a window into an inner courtyard, on a seventh floor.
They were missing a clue that she herself took it upon herself to give. On the sixth day, the woman convinced Ángel to go out and search in an area of ??Rodalquilar, near a treatment plant, where, by chance, Ana Julia’s ex-partner lived. At a time when she was alone and ahead of the rest, she began to yell that she had found Gabriel’s shirt.
That finding was a blow of hope. But the investigators soon learned that only she was able to place her garment and that it was not the one the little boy was wearing at the time of her disappearance. The shirt still smelled of fabric softener and was stretched out in a spot that had already been inspected.
From that moment on, Ana Julia was followed permanently 24 hours a day, hoping that she would lead the civil guards to the little boy, who were convinced that he was still alive. In her car they installed microphones that listened live and a beacon to geolocate her.
Investigators expected the misstep that occurred on March 11. Ana Julia drove Ángel to a hotel to meet Patricia and left them to run some errands. She went to the Rodalquilar farm, owned by her partner’s family and which she had visited daily since her disappearance. With the camera and the precision lens, one of the civil guards recorded how the woman removed some wood next to the pool and loaded a wrapped bundle that was certainly the body of the little boy, lifeless, and which she later loaded into the trunk .
They followed her while they listened to her through the microphones cursing the little boy and wondering what she would do with him. The civil guards stopped her at the gates of the house she shared with Ángel. She still cried out between sobs not knowing anything. When the investigators opened the trunk, not a single one was able to hold back the tears, pain and helplessness.
Ana Julia Quezada asked for forgiveness in her last turn to speak in the trial in which she assured that before killing him “inadvertently”, the boy yelled at her and insulted her. She did not clarify why she did it. Investigators have no doubt that she hated Gabriel, she was jealous of him, because she interfered in her relationship with her father. She was the first woman in Spain sentenced to a reviewable permanent prison.
