Francisco Javier leaves the house with his black dog that barks timidly at strangers. His house in the Extremaduran town of Monesterio (4,200 inhabitants) is between those of Eugenio Delgado and Manuela Chavero, murderer and victim respectively. On the right, his, eaten away by weeds and with the paint peeling off the facade. On the left, hers, still neat and with cheerful orange tones. It seems that the homes reflect the personality of their owners. “Look, with this we realized that no one from outside has to come to kill,” comments the neighbor as he looks towards Eugenio’s house. Two days after this reflection, Eugenio will be found guilty of raping, killing and hiding the body of his neighbor for four years on one of his farms on the outskirts of the municipality.
Those four years weigh heavily in the memory of this small municipality of Badajoz, which lives off the ham industry and its gastronomic offer. The most obvious sign that it is a place marked by a tragedy is the enormous banner hanging from one of the walls of the town church with the image of Manuela Chavero supported by two bouquets of white and pink flowers. Manuela was a 42-year-old woman. In her youth she had moved to Seville to work and when she got married she returned to her town. There she lived with her husband, the couple was dedicated to real estate businesses, until they separated. They had two children, ages 14 and six.
When she disappeared, in the early hours of July 4 to 5, 2016, everyone agrees that she was in a good moment, enjoying her single life and focused on her family. She was very close to her four brothers and lived with her children in an urbanization in her town in which each chalet is built to the taste of its owner and in which the crowing of some rooster can still be heard. from a corral. The day she disappeared she had been having something with her friend María Cintado and, around midnight, she left Manuela at the door of her house and they agreed to meet the next day. That fortnight, the children were with her father. That day, one of Manuela’s sisters had sent her a message about some clothes she had bought for her children, to ask her about her size.
Manuela went into her house, chatted with a boy she was fooling around with at the time, and prepared a nightgown on her bed to go to sleep. After one in the morning, Manuela stopped answering the messages. That was the moment in which the Civil Guard considers that her neighbor Eugenio de ella knocked on her door and she, who knew him from the town, agreed to approach her house under some pretext. They both entered his house, two numbers from hers, and she left there shortly after dead in the arms of his murderer.
From the first moment, the family knew that Manuela had not disappeared of her own free will and her case was not only that of the Chavero Valiente, but that of an entire municipality that dedicated itself to supporting that family, but that also became involved in four years of rumors, suspicions, sadness and indignation. They tried to protect her mother by all means, the elderly Virtues began a duel before knowing what had happened to her daughter that made her stay at home for four years. “My friends ran errands for me,” she said this week at the trial for the crime. Emilia, one of her sisters, began a fight to not let her sister’s case die, which included constant appearances in the press and periodic rallies to ask for justice.
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These rumors directly affected some of the neighbors. The investigation focused on her first steps in Manuela’s closest environment. This included her ex-husband and also the last man the woman she spoke to on WhatsApp that night. They called him The Chuches because his family has a business where they sell candy and worms. He moved away from Monesterio a while ago – for work reasons – but his parents, Manuela and Manuel, are experiencing the trial as the end to all the gossip that persecuted his son.
“You can imagine, it was on TV how the UCO (Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard) took our cars to analyze them. He had a very clear conscience, but of course, the doubt now remains in the town, although everyone told us that they were sure that it had not been him, but of course, you never know who is really saying it,” he laments, still agitated by the case, the young man’s mother, framed in her business by bags of sweets and chocolates. “Later I found out that Eugenio was saying in the bars that let’s see if they would arrest and lock up my son, my stomach was churning,” she says.
Shops, restaurants and houses have posters with Manuela’s face on their doors. It is impossible not to notice them. There were four years of investigation and another four until the oral hearing was held to judge Eugenio. In a hair salon near the town hall, Manoli, Antonia and Josefa, three clients, comment on what this crime has meant for the town. Each one has their opinion about what could have happened in Eugenio’s house, from which Manuela did not leave alive.
![A moment of the reconstruction of the death and burial of Manuela Chavero in which the accused, Eugenio D. participated.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/YYHHAQBB5RCDVMKYMRH2TXJ4JI.png?auth=bc3ada9ae687fd542f5f307107bc2212cf88e4e47f0bc221298e1564f1551d16&width=414)
One of them, who has known the accused since she was a child because he lived on the same street, refuses to believe that this shy boy who always went with his father has become a rapist and murderer. Another defends Manuela’s freedom tooth and nail: “People comment that if she was with one or the other and you know what I’m telling you, that she could do whatever she wanted, any other way of thinking is very old.” What they all agree on is the cruelty of hiding the body and prolonging the suffering for so long. “Not even one mijina of regret,” Josefa laments. “It’s a bastard,” she says, a few steps away from the hairdresser while she turns off the dryer so that her conclusion can be heard clearly. This small debate is a good example of the back-and-forth that the case has entailed in a place where everyone knows each other and where they knew that there was a culprit among them.
a sexual sadist
The case has also represented a new milestone when it comes to sentencing for sexual assault even when there are no biological remains. The four years that Manuela spent buried on the defendant’s farm erased any biological trace resulting from the rape, which is why the prosecution and the prosecution have found other ways to convince the jury of guilt. Everything has revolved around a premise: “Eugenio had no other reason to kill Manuela other than to hide a sexual crime.”
The popular jury, more sensitive to emotional issues than one made up of magistrates, shuddered when listening to the conclusions of the civil guard from the criminal behavior analysis section. Those who read the minds of criminals, in more media terms. The commander who signed the report stated bluntly that he had never observed someone who more clearly met the diagnostic criteria of a sexual sadist.
Not only that, but the researchers also located women who had had traumatic contacts with Eugenio and they, with their voices, put words to the submission that Manuela may have experienced in her last minutes of life. Vanesa, who was the girlfriend of Eugenio’s friend, had to interrupt her statement because of her nerves when she told how the accused showed up at her house one morning to tell her that she was going to be his or no one’s. . Another woman also spoke, or rather, I remember her. The accusations did not forget that Enrique Abuín, The gumthey also convicted him of rape even though his biological remains were not found on the body of Diana Quer, murdered just a month and a half after Manuela Chavero.
The content of Eugenio’s cell phone, full of hardcore porn and humiliating conversations towards prostitutes, helped to outline the picture of a man whom everyone defined as withdrawn, subject to a sexist father and who “only talked about horses and the countryside,” like said an acquaintance of his at the oral hearing.
With these elements, the accusations managed to make the nine members of the popular jury see that Eugenio, who was 23 years old, became obsessed with his neighbor and that night he drew up an imperfect plan to attack her. “Afterwards she saw no other way to hide it than to kill her,” said the jury spokesman in the reading of a verdict reached unanimously in just seven hours. “Not convicting this man of sexual assault would be rewarding him for having hidden his body for four years,” said Patricia Catalina, the lawyer for the Clara Campoamor association, appearing as a popular accusation in this process.
In the town there is also the perplexity of many of its neighbors, who remember perfectly the times they have found him in different places during the time in which Manuela was missing. Francisco Javier, the man whose house is in the middle of theirs, recalls that, shortly before his arrest, she spent long hours talking to him while she painted the facade of his house white. “He sat in his entryway and from there he told me that he didn’t plan to work as much as his father, that if he wanted to go to Rocío or the beach he was going to do it… When he started talking, he wouldn’t shut up,” he says. he. Shortly after, he would re-enter that house accompanied by the Civil Guard to reconstruct the day he killed Manuela Chavero.
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