Jubany case: DNA points to the first suspect 23 years later

The family already had the report of a geneticist from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​Gemma Marfany, who tested it a year ago, but needed a forensic test that corroborated it. And this is what the analysis unit of the National Police has now certified, using FBI techniques. A report that also rules out that Helena’s clothes contained genetic material from the other person investigated for the crime: Xavier Jimenez.

It was shortly before the murder was prescribed, in December 2021, when a judge charged Jiménez, after a handwriting report determined that he was the author, at least in part, of the murders. anonymous letters sent to the victimaccompanied by drinks adulterated with sleeping pills, weeks before his death. Also to verify that, at that time, he had sent him emails that presented a “clear connection” with the unsigned texts that were left for the young woman at the doors of her apartment.

Getting here has been an obstacle course, which only the tenacity of jubany family and from his lawyer, Benet Sallelas, he has managed to get around. The case was dismissed for the first time in 2005, after a terrible investigation and four years have passed since Helena’s body appeared in the light well of a flat on Calvet d’Estrella street in Sabadell. She was naked and had several burns. It was first treated as a suicide, but that possibility was soon ruled out.. The evidence pointed to a crime with several people involved. All of them were members of one of the sections of the Sabadell Hiking Union (UES), which the victim had joined after moving to the city. Helena was 27 years old at the time and worked as a librarian.

In an apartment in that block where his body was located, Laiglesia resided with her partner at the time, Montserrat Careta. Although he, who was also investigated for his alleged participation in the crime, always tried to disassociate himself from his stay in the house, where a box of medication -Noctamid- was also found, which, as the autopsy revealed, was in Helena’s system when they threw her into the void. In addition, the Police found two boxes of matches, like the ones that appeared on the roof, and with which parts of the young woman’s body would have been burned.

Careta, who was also investigated, took her own life when she was in provisional prison, after leaving a note in which she defended her innocence. And, given the lack of progress in the investigations – when the instructor of the time, Manuel Horacio, considered that “the solidity of the evidence” was not “sufficient” – the case also declined for Laiglesia.

After a failed attempt in 2020, the following year the family finally obtained the reopening of the case. To the accusation of Jiménez and, once the case expired for all those who had never been investigated – not so for those who at some point were suspected of killing Helena – the efforts of the Jubanys, who provided new evidence and testimonies, They managed, two decades after the crime, to The judge ordered to search for traces of DNA on the young woman’s clothingconsidering that there were sufficient indications of Jiménez’s “active” participation in the murder.

That comparison was negative for the person investigated but it allowed the person who had been the first suspect in the crime to be charged again: Laiglesia.

It should be remembered that until May 2022, when Judge Juan Díaz Villar, then in charge of the Court of First Instance 2 of Sabadell, ordered it, The samples of genetic material collected after the crime had not been analyzed. To do so, the instructor maintained that the new testing methods – not existing at that time – had made it possible to locate “genetic material of male origin” in the victim’s clothing, “susceptible to analysis and comparison.” He thus pointed out that said remains, both in the clothes that Jubany was wearing when he disappeared, and in the “instants immediately prior to his death”, “would decisively link their owner to the crime.” That is to say, they would be decisive in locating their murderers. «Obtaining this evidentiary element and the subsequent comparison with the genetic material of Santiago L. could advance the investigation decisively and support an eventual and hypothetical guilty verdictof an intensity greater than the already existing indications.

The Jubany family has had to wait almost another two years for the DNA to clearly point to Laiglesia.

«Joint authorship»

But he is not the only one under the investigators’ suspicions. Already then, Díaz Villar – now assigned to another court – pointed to “possible joint authorship” of the crime, and to the “distribution of roles” among those involved. It was also what the forensic experts maintained at the time, that at least two people would have participated in Helena’s murder. And in addition to Careta and Laiglesia, there was a third defendant, also a member of the UES, Ana Echaguibel, who was released shortly after being arrested, in 2005, due to lack of evidence.

More than 23 years have passed, and the Jubanys are still fighting to find out what happened. Now the DNA finally provides solid evidence to bring the crime to trial.