In mid-February 2015, the dismembered body of Javier R. El Bolas appeared inside a garbage bag in the trunk of his own car parked in the Los Arcos del Mar Menor hospital parking lot. He had two gunshot wounds to the head, and the National Police linked the crime to a drug trafficking settling of scores, but the search for culprits was stalled for almost a year, until at the end of December an anonymous call pointed to Jesús Ángel M.J. as the culprit, who had a debt with the victim. After 11 years, and following two provisional dismissals of the case, the Murcia Provincial Court began this Friday the hearing to determine whether it was Jesús Ángel who ended El Bolas’s life or if, as he has maintained all this time, he was framed for the crime by other drug traffickers.
The trial began with the selection of the nine jury members who will have to decide if it is proven, as the Prosecutor’s Office and the deceased’s family defend, that Jesús Ángel was the perpetrator of the crime. According to their provisional conclusions, the accused, who spent a year in pretrial detention and was currently awaiting trial free, had known the victim “all his life,” and had business with him related to drug trafficking. On the same day he disappeared, February 11, 2015, El Bolas had told a friend that someone had “done him very wrong” and had arranged to meet him to resolve it. However, it was not this friend, who has died and therefore cannot give his version during the trial, but an anonymous informant who put the police on Jesús Ángel’s trail, changing the course of the case.
Thus, investigators verified that the mobile phones of the accused and the deceased were in the same place on the day of the disappearance, near Jesús Ángel’s home. He barely used his phone that day, and three days later, at dawn, the phone places him on a property he owns, very close to the parking lot where the body was found.
Jesús Ángel also had a weapon registered at the Cartagena Shooting Club compatible with the one used for the two shots to the head that Javier received, and shell casings compatible with those shots were also found on the accused’s property.
The prosecution also considers several phone conversations Jesús Ángel had with his wife as key evidence, in which he admitted owing Javier 50,000 euros for the sale of two kilos of cocaine and described how the victim pressured him to repay that amount. In response to his wife warning him that this is not a reason to kill someone, Jesús Ángel even said phrases like: “One shot to the head and I clean it up.”
However, the accused has maintained throughout these years that those phrases are taken out of context and that he had no involvement in the crime. According to his lawyer, Jesús Ángel is “another victim” of this case against whom there is no objective evidence of guilt, only indications that have been misinterpreted against the accused, who was arrested, he recalled, a year and seven months after the crime, in November 2016.
The lawyer argued that Jesús Ángel had had no contact with the victim for more than 20 months, that he was involved in drug trafficking “on a large scale,” internationally, and not just small-time dealing. The crime, he said, was committed by international traffickers, who even left the body in a public place to be found, as a message, according to his theory.
According to his version, the mobile phones place victim and accused in the same place because Jesús Ángel regularly went to his property, near where the body appeared, to feed his animals, and he insisted that the murder must have been committed by more than one person.
The weapon the accused had deposited at the Shooting Club, he said, did not leave those facilities, and he highlighted an expert report on pollen residues on the accused’s clothing and footwear, which determined he was not at the property the day the crime was committed. He also criticized that total credibility was given to an anonymous call, leaving aside up to a dozen lines of investigation that were being considered at the time.
This procedure, he recalled, was already dismissed twice during the investigation phase, which shows the doubts about the murder, so he has requested Jesús Ángel’s acquittal. The Prosecutor’s Office asks for 15 years and 5 months in prison for the accused for a crime of homicide and another of corpse desecration, while the family raises the request to 25 years for a crime of murder. The trial will continue until next May 14, when the jury members must issue their verdict.
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