2023-10-18 05:31:00
A postcard from January 1, 1986: Neus Soldevila together with his lawyer Emilio Rodríguez Menéndez in Barcelona leave the court. The woman was accused of murdering her husband Joan Carbonell
Joan Vila Carbonell (47) has just had two courses of food, dessert and coffee for lunch. With the drink he has also ingested, without knowing it, a Valium. He tells his wife to go upstairs and take a nap. He also wants to have sex with her. They go to the suite on the first floor and leave five of their six children (María de las Nieves, the oldest, is already 18 years old, she is not at home at the moment) in the living room with the maid, watching the bucolic Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie.
Siesta time, they often say in the towns, is the time when “things” happen. Yes, unholy things. And this story will not be the exception to any popular rule.
After a while, mom comes down the stairs, her husband is already satisfied and fast asleep. She enters the room and nods to her maid, Inés Carazo. She tells him to go for a walk with her youngest daughters María Dolores (11) and Ana María (9). Inés does not ask but she senses, because she has been listening for a long time, what is coming. It is the appointed hour.
Mom says quietly to her other three children present, the twins Juan and Luis (16) and Marisol (14): “Now that Dad is asleep, it’s time.”
Mom speaks softly, she never shouts, she is pure sweetness. Mom has everything ready and she has already looked for her husband’s gun, a Star 9 mm, and she hands it to Juan while she looks him straight in the eyes. But the teenager hesitates. Luis, the other twin, does not decide to help either. It is Marisol, who has already practiced shooting at some bales of straw, who says: “If you don’t dare, I’ll do it!”
Marisol takes the gun from her brother and goes up resolutely, trying not to make noise, to her parents’ room. Joan is in the fetal position and breathing heavily. She is naked, she is only wearing underwear. Fourteen-year-old Marisol kneels and holds the gun with both hands. She aims the barrel at the back of her neck, she knows that is precisely where the bullet must enter so as not to miss. It is not a bale of straw, it is the bundle of flesh and bones that life has given him. But she wants to hit the target and make that mass that inhales and exhales cease to exist.
Without hesitation he shoots him.
The other family witnesses breathe a sigh of relief. Ready. That’s it. They are free from Joan.
Mom smiles. Mom’s name is Nieves “Neus” Soldevila Bartrina and she is 37 years old.
The victim does not die immediately, his agony will last a few hours. But his family doesn’t think regarding him. He is busy with other tasks. Neus gets his children into the car and they leave for his usual home in Montmeló. While they are traveling on the highway, at kilometer 184 of the highway that goes from Zaragoza to Barcelona, they make a quick stop to bury the Star pistol and some bullet casings. But then they change their mind and decide to return to tell the authorities their version of what happened.
Neus told officers that two hooded far-left terrorists had rung the doorbell that Sunday at nap time at their country house and taken them hostage. The version fell under its own weight
That warm noon on June 28, 1981 ended with a dramatic shot and forever altered the family postcard. But the tragedy ruled by the patriarch’s apparently docile wife had been brewing for a long time.
The Vila Soldevila family lived in Montmeló, an industrial city in the province of Barcelona, but usually spent their holidays in another property, 110 hectares, that they had bought in Esplús, in the Spanish province of Huesca.
Joan Vila was a rustic guy, who came from nowhere itself. He had managed without any study (he had not even finished high school) to become a prosperous construction businessman and amass a fortune that today would be equivalent to more than two million euros. Joan had a terrible character and exercised tyranny as a way of existence over his wife and his six children. They had to bathe with cold water to temper his character and work hard rather than study. Just as he had done.
Skinny and nervous, Joan made her sons work as bricklayers from the age of 8 in the company. Sometimes working days of up to fourteen hours. She had control over Neus with money: she only gave him the minimum and necessary.
Mama Neus found, over time, that lining up her offspring once morest him might be productive. Submissive, with gentle manners, Neus also, as we will see later, hid darkness.
The truth is that any setback might unleash Joan’s fury and lead him to curse or shout expletives. His neighbors saw him as a rude and unpredictable person. He was also known for his far-right political sympathies, for his passion for hunting and for his fondness for weapons. On his farm, in fact, he had several. Among them, the one he would use to blow his own daughter’s head off.
At the time of the crime, the six children of the couple were María Nieves (18 years old), the twins Juan and Luis (17), Marisol, (14), María Dolores (11) and Ana María. Marisol was the author of the patricide
The version that Neus gave, during his three-hour testimony to the Huesca Civil Guard, was unusual: two hooded terrorists from the GRAPO (a far-left insurgent group) had rang the doorbell that Sunday at nap time in his country house and had taken them hostage. They had taken her husband to the master bedroom, located on the first floor of the property, where they had shot him and then fled.
At first, the authorities believed that it might be a political attack due to the far-right ideas of the industrialist, who was a well-known Fuerza Nueva militant. It might be an armed group like ETA, GRAPO or Terra Lliure. Nor did they rule out some type of personal revenge or some lethal financial problem. The builder’s fortune was important and everything had to be considered.
But the truth is that Neus’ version had gaps and gross inconsistencies. How come the terrorists had rung the doorbell? It seemed absurd. Once Joan Vila’s surroundings had been investigated, the police ruled out possible motives one by one.
In those months Neus collected insurance, bought a convertible, moved with his family to a huge apartment that he decorated with eight palm trees and a yucca, he gave his eldest daughter a Ford Fiesta and the twins two motorcycles, a Derbi C- 4 and a Vespa.
The police began to distrust the sweet Neus and her cross-eyed gaze, her gentle manners and her penchant for spending money, her way of pulling on family strings and manipulating. The plot once morest the “exploitative and violent” father would not take long to surface.
The expert evidence of the bullets led the inspectors to the conclusion that the aggressor or aggressors might belong to the family of the deceased. The police discovered several weaknesses in his statements and following investigating the bank accounts they managed to reconstruct debts and expenses.
Four months following the homicide, they called Inés Carazo once more to testify. But first they spoke with her son, a medical student, to whom they explained the delicate nature of her situation and that her mother had to declare what she knew if she did not want to be considered an accomplice in the crime. The employee, frightened, ended up opening her mouth. On October 9, she ended up telling everything she had heard inside the walls: that the mother lived in her children’s heads so that they would take a gun and end her husband’s life and that no one had dared to do it until Marisol decided. be the executor herself. Inés said that Marisol chose to take care of her and shouted: “Damn it! “I have to do it.” She went on to say that in that house “it seemed like everyone was haunted.” She pointed to Neus as the instigator, the one who had orchestrated the murder.
The sweet Neus was arrested without knowing regarding Inés’s confession. She was cold and calculating and denied everything. But following Inés spoke, Neus’s children had also confessed the facts that implicated her mother and themselves. They said her father refused a divorce and threatened to kill them all if they abandoned him. The twins took the police to the place where they had buried the weapon and Marisol, without shedding even a tear, told in detail what happened that midday vacation.
Neus, the sweet mother, had been caught in her own web.
They would go to trial.
The 1985 film that was inspired by the case of the “sweet” Neus and the “violent” father
Neus (that’s what Nieves is called in Catalan) had been orphaned as a child and had been raised by her uncles who gave her a very good education. In 1962 she met Joan Vila, an uneducated peasant who had a girlfriend. Ella Neus became obsessed and managed to conquer him, although there are those who say that it was all because of a bet.
The truth is that they married in September of that same year and in 1963 they had their first daughter. Neus was already playing her role as an obedient wife for everyone to see. But in reality she was an extremely manipulative and temperamental woman, who over the years, she had several lovers. At least three confessed to having been.
Since her husband did not give her enough money to spend on good clothes and jewelry, she began by selling cosmetics at home, but ended up finding a better financial vein: loans. She set up a network with her acquaintances that turned out to be a kind of pyramid scam. At the time of her murder, her debts totaled more than 110,000 euros. And it is believed that she was terrified that Joan would find out regarding her financial misdeeds. Furthermore, around that same time, she managed to get her husband to take out a life policy on her children for 150 thousand euros. For the researchers, the economic motive was the most important of all. They slipped that “perhaps the idea that her father was a tyrant had been instilled by her in the minds of her children” to get him murdered.
The truth is that, in the midst of his economic quagmire, in 1981, Neus gathered his children at the El Cisne bar in Montmeló, where he told them that the real family problem “was dad.” She had good reasons to argue: that same year Joan had forced her eldest daughter, María de las Nieves, to leave the Business School and, if the men resisted working, she threatened them with educational belts. If they took Dad out of the picture, life would be so much better.
The sweet Neus had thought of several possibilities to permanently liquidate Joan. One of them was to supply him with crushed match heads mixed with her coffee. Nothing happened. Another was to cut off the car’s brakes so that a fatal crash occurred. They didn’t know how to do it. Since she might not advance her ideas, she found it more useful to poison the minds of her children to materialize her desire. They would use a weapon of his, that would work. In the days before the crime, the family was planning what would be the best time to get rid of the patriarch. And three of the boys tried shooting some bales in their country house.
Nieves Soldevila Bartrina was sentenced to 28 years in prison for being the co-author and ringleader of her husband’s patricide.
During the trial, Neus stated that “I was afraid of my husband. He threatened to kill us all if we left home. He never called us by our name. He addressed us by calling us dirty, brute or bastards. Marisol did not corroborate her mother’s statements one hundred percent and assured that she had helped her pull the trigger that ominous noon.
A year later the family clan was condemned. On June 2, 1982, Neus Soldevila was sentenced to 28 years in prison for being the co-author and ringleader of the patricide (with treachery and premeditation). Her eldest daughter, María Nieves, was given 12 years for her complicity in the crime, and the twins, Juan and Luis, 10 years each. Marisol, the perpetrator of the shooting, became dependent on the Juvenile Guardianship Court. She spent four years in a boarding school and then some of her relatives took care of her. The employee Inés only received six months of arrest for failing to report them and a fine.
But nothing would end there. Neus brought them to him. On October 1, 1986, four years following falling prisoner and one year following her story ended on the big screen with the film Crimen de familia, starring Charo López, the convict took advantage of one of her temporary releases from prison to elope elegantly dressed. She fled by bus to Portugal with one of her daughters, María Dolores. Once in the neighboring country she gave three interviews for which she received good money. One was for Interviú magazine where she boldly posed topless. There he stated that in Spain he had “no hope or future” because “justice does not work and only unemployment and crime are generated” and “I have spent four and a half years in prison and I do not want to return, I am leaving to start a new life.” life”.
The report did not specify where he was and his lawyer maintained that Neus had fled to Brazil. Lie. Neus financed himself with the money collected and had a false passport made up with which he fled to Colombia and then continued his journey to Ecuador where he did not engage in anything lawful either. His new profession was trafficking in precious stones, more specifically emeralds, with the help of his daughter María Dolores.
In June 1988, the Ecuadorian police arrested Montserrat Ferrer, Neus’s new identity, in Quito. She was caught when she was trying to sell some fake emeralds. While she was detained she spoke to the media: “The reality has never been able to come to light, there are people for whom it was not convenient. “How is a girl going to shoot?… We had to keep quiet… They just tried us and put us in prison.”
Extradited from Ecuador, she arrived in Spain in May 1989. In 1993, in a letter sent to ABC, she complained of “being totally dejected and helpless” due to the “unjust situation” in prison.
“My father was not an ogre,” said one of the couple’s daughters. None of the six children still has fluid and healthy contact with their mother
Neus Soldevila was provisionally released in 1997 and her marriage to the Catalan businessman Tomás Busquets was announced in the press and in Hola magazine. She tried to start a new life, new businesses and tried to unite the dispersed family, but she did not succeed. Her new husband died of cancer in 2003. She wrote three autobiographical books (the first was called Under My Skin) without much success. In 2012, her sentence ended.
Her daughter Marisol detached herself from her at the age of 18 and began to defend her father’s figure. Years following the crime, in a television program, she revealed that her mother “held her hand” while she shot. Today the sweet Neus has no relationship with any of her six children. They all ended up, in one way and another, denying that her father was the great abuser they had painted. Her mother had had too much to do with that picture. The eldest of her got married, lives in the Canary Islands and doesn’t want to know anything regarding her. Of the other three daughters, two joined the North American military and the third married a landowner. The two men also turned their backs on her. Sweet mom Neus ruined everyone’s lives.
Today, at 79 years old, the sweet Neus resides in her old city: Montmeló. Nobody visits her anymore. They prefer to stay away from her manipulations while she continues to maintain that it is legal to kill the tyrant and that “my husband got the end he deserved.”
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