This happened 34 years ago, on January 6, 1991, and until this year the Civil Guard was unable to identify the body of the victim of an assassination that everyone called the Reyes crime. The identification of the body was made possible by new scientific techniques, and today it is known that it was that of a 24-year-old woman from Aviles, whose disappearance was not reported to the authorities until five years ago.
In May 2024, Civil Guard agents reopened an inconclusive investigation into a missing woman and quickly linked the case to news of a regional newspaper that reported an assassination in the town of Paros, where by chance her body had not been identified. That victim was stabbed and buried in the grave on the same night as Reyes in 1991, according to a press release published by the Civil Guard.
The National Police of Langreo, which was in charge of the investigation at the time, was able to arrest a person for the crime thanks to which the couple decided, after discussion, to denounce him. The alleged killer only admitted to agents that that night he picked up the victim, who was self-parking on a highway in Oviedo. According to her report, the woman attempted to steal, and by force she reached that point. The man took the heirloom into the bag and headed to Paros, where he heard what had happened. However, upon opening the bag they found themselves with the woman bleeding to death, so the couple decided to bury her body in quicklime.
The hiko were unaware until the couple’s conviction of the killer in October 1995, when the victim’s remains were revealed to be in too poor a condition to be identified. However, it was only possible to create a robotic image of the dead woman, which was disseminated through the media.
The statements remained inconclusive until the Civil Guard began to connect cables between this crime and the mother’s conviction in 1995 for her daughter’s disappearance. The woman was responsible for her daughter for five years, and since then she has had no news of her daughter’s whereabouts. Agents registered the case, but it ended up in police missing persons files due to lack of evidence.
Similarities between the robot’s photo and the photo contributed to the case by the family of the alleged victim Wearing Hope. Comparison of the DNA sample from the missing wife (her dead wife) with one of the remains of the body of the Reyes crime, carried out at the Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences in Madrid using a different and more advanced technique than that used in 1995, confirmed the hypothesis that in both cases it was the same person.
“Technological advances, new investigative methods, with the use of technological means, new police rules, as well as coordination with other police bodies, are the key to demonstrating this kind of success, making it possible to clarify events that were impossible at the time,” says the Civil Guard in its press release.
Agents were able to give the victim a name and surname and inform the family of the whereabouts of the 24-year-old woman, who had known nothing since 1934.
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