Perfect crime in Vigo: a shot in the neck without culprit and a family under suspicion

There is a motive, there are suspects, but everything indicates that there will never be a culprit. On April 2, 2004, businessman and adviser Manuel Salgado Fernández, 56, was found dead with a shot to the back of the head in his garage on Rosalía de Castro street, in the center of Vigo (Pontevedra). What seemed like an easy case to solve has gone down in the annals of the perfect crime due to a lack of evidence and perhaps also due to a “deficient” police investigation, according to the investigating judge. On the verge of the statute of limitations, which will arrive 20 years after the event in 2024, and without having cleared up the main unknowns, magistrate Juan Carlos Carballal has filed the case with the conviction that Salgado was murdered for economic reasons and placing suspicion direct relatives of the victim. “The police hypothesis continues to consider that the perpetrators of the homicide are, directly or indirectly, in the closest family circle to the victim,” the order states.

The “turbulent family relations” that the investigations uncovered marked the last decade of Salgado’s life, following their separation in 1996. The children and the ex-wife were at odds over the division of businesses and assets after the divorce. The summary indicates that the man “felt being watched” and “feared for his life”, which is why he lived with her sister, her husband and her two nephews, a private prosecution in this case full of “inconsistencies”. , as admitted by the instructor.

The police investigation was “particularly deficient, incomplete and lacking logical criteria”, criticizes the judge, “perhaps for having displaced some of the most competent officials attached to the Vigo police station to be replaced by others from central units with total ignorance of the area. Judge Juan Carlos Carballal reopened the case in November 2021, which had been archived in 2006, but now acknowledges that “the passage of time has prevented solving” the “many loose ends” of the investigations, deprived of “much police information” due to changes in staff. The new witnesses called to testify have offered versions “that have not helped to resolve such uncertainties at all,” he adds.

The forensic report placed the time of death between 8:15 and 8:50, when an individual alone or in the company of others fired an accurate shot at the businessman with a 22-caliber weapon when he had just parked his car. There are no witnesses, no one saw or heard anything suspicious. Next to the body were found three cigarette butts and scattered papers that the victim was carrying with fragments of footprints that gave no clues. However, a robbery was ruled out, since Salgado had his watch, a chain with a gold medal around his neck and his wallet, with 65 euros and coins. The most surprising thing for the investigators was that neither the vehicle keys nor his mobile phone appeared.

The hypothesis that the crime had been planned arose when a user of the garage delivered a cartridge that he had found days before in the parking lot. He had kept it until he heard the news of the murder. The ballistic analysis revealed that it was of the same caliber as the one that ended the life of the businessman and shot with the same weapon: “The question arises as to whether or not this crime was committed by a commissioned professional, since such a carelessness to leave abandoned a percussion cartridge and then using the same weapon to commit the crime and the same ammunition does not seem to fit the profile of a hit man”, writes the judge.

In addition, from the position of the body and the location of the cartridges, the police were convinced that the victim had seen her killer and that she knew him. This conclusion is deduced from the fact that Salgado did not try to flee, but to get inside his vehicle, trying to avoid a discussion “similar to how he had behaved in previous situations that he had suffered,” the magistrate states.

As the investigations progressed, the testimonies accumulated that pointed out that the victim feared for his life and that the family past was key. The judge links the homicide “with people close to his family environment.” Hours after the crime, the only two arrests that have been made in this case took place: Salgado’s ex-wife and her partner. She was the director of a private school in the neighboring municipality of Mos, which she co-owned with her husband, and he had a carpet store near the center. However, several witnesses confirmed their alibis and both were released. In 2006, two years later, the then investigating judge provisionally closed the case due to lack of evidence.

The victim’s two nephews managed to reactivate the investigations and now they have also appealed against the filing order. They requested judicial advice from the Madrid Balfagón y Chippirrás criminologists office, which after analyzing the case presented a report requesting the conduct of up to 60 proceedings, such as some evidence that was not collated, and the witness statement of the victim’s son, who was never interrogated. Both criminologists and family spokespersons regret the gaps left by the summary. “The policemen lost confidence, they thought they were going to solve it right away, but we are the same and without progress, with enormous frustration, both for the relatives and for the lawyers”, affirm Carmen Balfagón and Ramón Chippirrás. “The alleged murderers have rights, but so do the victims, and with a sword of Damocles as is the prescription in this country it is even more complicated,” they stress.

The file order defines as “curious, and without a logical explanation” the fact that the victim’s son, a lawyer by profession and who is now the manager of the family-owned school, had intervened in this case as a defense attorney for the his mother’s partner. This movement exonerated him from declaring, despite being under scrutiny, as an alleged connoisseur of the facts.

Debts, surveillance and death threats

The ex-spouses came to cross complaints for alleged death threats and altercations between the two with injuries. Manuel Salgado came to request police protection. At the origin of these disagreements is a sentence of the Court of Pontevedra in 2001, confirmed by the Supreme Court, in which the wife of the deceased was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for wiretapping her husband by an agency of detectives. She claimed that her intention was to find out if the businessman was unfaithful to her. She requested pardon, but it was denied because her ex refused to forgive him. Ultimately, she avoided prison by getting her sentence commuted.

Another subsequent event that has been interpreted by the police as a trigger for the homicide is the civil lawsuit that was resolved with a final judgment a month and a half before the homicide. The woman was sentenced to return to her ex-husband some large assets that she had received through a notarial deed for the sale of the school of which she was director, which was declared void. The victim had transferred that estate in 1996 under the condition that they both resume married life, but she filed a separation claim, for which she had to pay him 50,000 euros. The man died without the sentence having been carried out and without collecting that sum.

The defense of Salgado’s ex-wife has tried to discredit the police evidence that points to the patrimony to be returned as a solid motive. She has stressed that the victim had disinherited her children two years before she died and had named her sister universal heir. However, after Salgado’s death, her offspring challenged her will and left the minority, with 33%, who she was the beneficiary at the beginning.