On May 30, 2002, Déborah Ferández-Cervera, a 21-year-old girl from Vigo, left her home and her body appeared ten days later in a ditch 40 kilometers from her home. The police investigation, very patchy, did not shed light on the circumstances of her death. Last June, 22 years later, the judge filed a complaint due to the weakness of the evidence against her ex-boyfriend Pablo P., the only one under investigation. So, Her ex’s defense team tried to have Deborah’s death recorded as “undetermined,” but the judge rejected it: The young woman was murdered, even though no one is going to sit on the bench.
Neither the exhumation of Deborah’s body, nor the statements of witnesses, nor the analysis of a freezer belonging to the ex-partner, nor that of a mobile phone of the victim found in the police stations – twenty years after the crime – were of any use to the magistrate of the Court of Instruction number 2 of Tui (Pontevedra) to gather “conclusive and irrefutable” evidence against the only person being investigated for the death. It did not even help to solve the crime. the summons to appear, twenty years later, from Paul.
All that could be extracted from all this material is “mere suspicions” against her ex-boyfriend, But no evidence was found that the person under investigation and the victim saw each other that night, nor of the crime scene, and no trace of the ex-boyfriend’s DNA appeared on the young woman’s body or at the place on the C-550 highway – in Or Rosal (Pontevedra) – where the body appeared. And since “mere suspicions are not enough” to put someone in the dock, the judge agreed on June 14 to provisionally close the case without further action.
A homicide has been committed
The judge then closed the case by referring to Article 641.2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Lecrim). It is appropriate to transcribe this article in order to understand the defendant’s subsequent maneuver: it determines that the provisional referral must be pronounced “when it results from the interim relief”. a crime has been committed”, but “there are insufficient grounds to accuse certain persons of being the perpetrators, accomplices or accessories.
But the only person charged with the crime, Pablo P., was not entirely satisfied with the judge’s decision, which concluded that Deborah had been the victim of a homicide, although there was no solid evidence against him. It is for this reason that, four days after the order was issued, on June 18, Pablo P.’s defense presented a brief requesting that the death of young Vigo be declared “undetermined.”
The judge, however, destroyed this claim. In a car that ABC had access to, The presiding judge rejected the request of the defence of Deborah’s ex-boyfriend. The judge reminded her that she had decided to file a complaint “on the basis of the provisions” of article 641.2 of the aforementioned Lecrim “due to the absence of a known perpetrator, the lack of multiple and convincing evidence to bring a credible accusation of a specific criminal act against the person being investigated. The judge therefore concluded: “it is not appropriate” to supplement the said order with the request of the defense that Deborah’s death be recorded as undetermined, because “this would not change in any way the conclusions reached in the aforementioned resolution.” In other words: it was a homicide, a violent death, even if there was no way to bring him or others to justice.
For Deborah’s family, this maneuver of the defense of the sole indictment is explained by an attempt to “cleanse” the ex-boyfriend’s image and “whitewash” the crime: “The one who has always said that the whole truth should be known is now saying that we should suppress the homicide and say that the death was undetermined? What this shows is that he is not so calm,” Deborah’s family told the newspaper.
