At 3:27 a.m. on the early morning of Saturday, August 8, a resident of Tauste (Zaragoza, 6,800 inhabitants) got up to go to the bathroom. He heard screams coming from the house next door. “Javier! Javier!”. Half an hour earlier, at 2:54, that Javier had last connected to his WhatsApp. Everything points to the fact that death came to him and his wife Esther between that last connection and the scream their neighbor heard. Their bodies were found a few hours later, at dusk, stabbed to death. He was in the bedroom and she was on the stairs. Soon everyone knew that Javier Sánchez and Esther Latorre, a well-known couple of agricultural leaders, very socially committed and constantly active in pacifism, had been killed.
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Their eldest daughter, Carlota, and her boyfriend, Luis Carlos R., were arrested this Monday at noon by the Civil Guard, accused of the crime. The investigation suggests that the couple had gone to her parents’ house to talk about a personal matter and that this may have been the origin of the tragedy. The crime scene initially indicates that Javier was surprised while sleeping in his room and that Esther started to go down the stairs but could not reach the bottom. But many questions remain. Carlota and Luis Carlos did not have a car and the couple’s two vehicles were parked in front of the house, so it remains to be clarified how they arrived at the house, if they had seen each other before or were being waited for inside, and how they left afterwards.
Javier, 66, was a man of simple tastes. What pleased him most was taking a bath in the municipal pool and sitting, still dripping, in the bar to have a beer. “Yes, it’s the greatest pleasure in the world,” his wife Esther, 64, used to tell him, accustomed to hearing him repeat the same reflection. The couple had just returned to their town last week from a trip through northern Spain. There, Javier had been happy once again with a small pleasure: sleeping covered in summer. The last time they were seen in town was Friday night, when they had dinner with two friends and went home around one in the morning. This Saturday, August 8, they had arranged again with other friends to eat at that pool Javier liked so much. That is why, when the couple did not show up and did not answer the phone all day, their friends were very surprised.
At dusk, Javier’s sister, Marga, and her husband, José Miguel, went to the couple’s home to see if they were okay. When they saw the two cars at the door and a light on when it was not yet dark, they feared the worst. Marga did not even want to enter; it was her husband who found a scene he will “never forget,” as he himself said. Both had stab wounds in the upper part of their bodies, according to the autopsy performed this Sunday. After the discovery, José Miguel went with his son to give the news to Carlota, who lives in Zaragoza. There they saw some wounds and redness on her. The investigation focused on them and the positioning of the phones may have been key to placing them at the crime scene at the time of the events.
The arrest was announced a few minutes after the couple’s wake closed. Their relatives knew that outcome was a possibility, but they could not quite believe it. The shock of the crime gave way to the impact of knowing that those responsible for the tragedy were within the family.
Javier and Esther were not an ordinary couple. Javier had been secretary general of the Union of Farmers and Ranchers of Aragon (UAGA) for 12 years. He had dozens of union successes to his credit, the latest being improvements for farmers in the construction of a highway. Esther had led the fight of rural women and had also run for mayor of Tauste for United Left.
Bea Viñas, a union technician, shows one of the few photos they have of all the UAGA members from the area together. The couple is seen smiling in it. Javier, with his characteristic beret. “He was always forgetting it,” Viñas recalls. Esther, on one side of the banner. “She fought a lot for the shared ownership of farms, because men were the only owners of the businesses and women worked in them, but the pension they were left with afterwards was minimal,” explains José María Alcubierre, current secretary general of UAGA.
The Civil Guard opened several lines of investigation to rule out hypotheses. One was that of a violent robbery, but this was quickly ruled out because valuable objects were not missing from the house and the entrance had not been forced. The area where the couple lived is on the outskirts of town and their house belonged to a development of low houses with back gardens where several UAGA members lived. The area is very quiet and no robberies or other incidents had ever been reported. The agents also found no one in the couple’s activist and political trajectory with sufficient motives to do something like this.
The investigation focused on two paths. A tenant they had recently had in an apartment they rented in downtown Tauste, on one hand, and the family environment, on the other. That former tenant had tried to force the door of the house owned by Javier and Esther about two months ago and had confronted the man. The Civil Guard had had to go to the place of the dispute to make a report. However, that path did not bear fruit since there was no evidence placing him at the crime scene. Then everything focused on the eldest daughter, Carlota, and her partner Luis Carlos R., with whom she had been dating for only a few months.
According to various sources close to the family, the daughter, about 30 years old, who had been living for a time in Andalusia, suffered from mental problems and had had some arguments with her parents in the past. Recently, according to these same sources, Javier and Esther were happy with their daughter’s new relationship because they saw her as “more stable.” In fact, Javier had helped his son-in-law with legal matters and it was common for him to pick them up in Zaragoza so they could spend time in the town. The daughter and her boyfriend were arrested at their home. The couple leaves behind another daughter living in Ireland, who received the news of the arrest already in Tauste.
The analysis of the crime scene will last three days, according to sources close to the case. This Monday, the forensic agents had set up a tent with a table in front of the house. Civil guards in charge of the analysis were constantly coming out of it with objects they examined on a table. At the door there was also an umbrella stand with canes and other objects that the investigators had taken from the home. A reconstruction of the events with the two detainees is planned soon.
“They loved enjoying life, the little things, they really liked getting together to celebrate anything,” says Estrella Moraga, provincial secretary of UAGA Zaragoza and a personal friend of the couple. Javier had recently retired and Esther was close to it. “We have a pending date,” the man had told the union technician, Bea Viñas, a few days before dying. The date was a vermouth gathering for union members coinciding with the festivities of the nearby town of Ejea de los Caballeros. A meeting they will never be able to celebrate.
