This text belongs to ‘Dossier Negro’, a newsletter inspired by the podcast of the same name, which Enrique Figueredo will send biweekly on Wednesdays. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
Statistics confirm that the perpetrators of blood crimes come, so to speak, from the victim’s inner circle in a very high percentage. This confirms the terrifying reality that danger is always closer than anyone can imagine. The new installment of Dossier Negro, which deals with the so-called triple crime of the Sagrada Família, is a good example of this and at the same time that a victim can be a victim twice if they discover that the cause of their pain is someone they loved or loved. What does he want. Mónica Claveguera found her family—her parents and her niece—hammered to death. The arrested suspect turned out to be the one who had been her partner for 10 years and who did not accept the breakup.
They are cases in which a strange mixture of overflowing carnality and unhealthy jealousy is distilled with the worst result: a criminal act. Also known as the Urban Police crime, whose victim and protagonists were members of this Barcelona police force, was the result of the cocktail of feelings and impulses already described. The wife of the deceased and her lover are serving time for the murder of her husband: a deadly labyrinth of passions.
Transfer damage. In cases such as the triple crime of the Holy Family and other similar ones, the aggressor harms his partner’s relatives to cause them as much pain as possible with the intention of revenge. When it is the case that there are descendants in the family nucleus, macho violence preys on the little ones. The data indicates that machismo is on the rise and is becoming more and more cruel.
Parents who don’t love The death of the little Asunta Basterra, assassinated in the surroundings of Santiago de Compostela in 2013, is another chilling example of intimate violence for sick purposes. Her adoptive parents – Asunta was brought from China – killed her because somehow, according to the prosecutor, her damaged marriage wanted to return to the life before her parenthood, especially her father, Alfonso Basterra.
A hellish home. It so happens that within these cases of violence in which the perpetrator is in the closest environment of the victims, a significant number of them occur when the parents are recently separated or in the process of doing so. An inexplicable episode of violence against his family is the one carried out by the German citizen Thomas Handrick when he killed his wife and one of his two children in Tenerife. The second managed to escape in extremis from the massacre.
Damn jealousy. The fear of losing someone or something can cause a breakdown of emotional balance. Jealousy, in extreme and pathological cases, can lead to criminal responses. It was precisely because of this way of perceiving reality that Winnie Judd killed two of her roommates in Arizona in the 1930s with whom she suspected her lover was having a secret relationship. She cut them up and tried to move them in separate trunks.
