The house where Irene and Juan lived for the last twenty years occupies at least two plots that make a corner in the La Plana de les Torres urbanization, in the municipality of Torrelles de Foix. Around the one-story building, there is a large orchard and a garden that the Mossos d’Esquadra thoroughly examined for two whole days last week. They were looking for the remains of Irene Gelpí Lluch, the writer who has been missing since her partner, Juan Lozano Montoya, filed the complaint on September 12. The police ordered the septic tank to be emptied. But, for now, no sign of the body.
Despite the absence of a body, the central missing persons unit has no doubts that the woman was murdered and that the alleged perpetrator, her partner, hid her body and made those around her and her family believe that Irene had “voluntarily left” as “he had already done it another time”, he explained when asked about the issue.
Juan Lozano, 77 years old, of great physical stature, almost 120 kilos, and who recently used a cane to walk, is a painter with a certain name in the Penedès region. He had organized exhibitions and today part of the work can be purchased in some art galleries. At the moment, he used to visit street markets of antiques where he bought and sold pieces that he himself restored in his workshop.
During each month of absence, the man did not stop publishing information on Facebook or organizing raids in search of Irene. He explained to some that he had left after a big fight, and that he would be back. To others, that she might have committed suicide, because, he added: “You know that she has always been introverted.” In one of the posters, he spread an image of the woman with “the clothes she was wearing on the day of the disappearance”.
The police worked to prove that the writer was not alive and that only her partner could have murdered her. During the investigation, they found several women who, when they were small, went to Juan and Irene’s house to receive painting lessons taught by the man. Three of the students, who are of legal age, have already reported that they suffered sexual assaults. The police have identified two more and are waiting to see if they file a complaint for events that have not been prescribed.
The man refused to testify after being arrested and left his house while crying and denying the accusations to the neighbor to whom he handed over the keys to feed Ros, the cat that meowed alone yesterday. Despite the suspect’s silence, investigators are working with a hypothesis.
Irene Gelpí was a victim of sexual abuse that she explained in the first person in a blog she wrote under a pseudonym. Sexual abuse that he later verbalized in a TV3 documentary, Infància en risco, which was broadcast in 2011, in which he narrated some assaults that he also explained to La Vanguardia. The researchers do not rule out that the woman, particularly sensitive to child abuse, discovered the alleged abuse by her partner and threatened to report him.
