April 24, 2016. Around 1:30 a.m. In a private home in Valls (Tarragona). Iulian Odriste, a 41-year-old construction employee, picks up a kitchen knife with which he stabs a woman several times and slits her throat. The victim is Vasilica Cracana, a 47-year-old prostitute with whom he had fallen in unrequited love and with whom he had just had an argument because she had not let him look at the photographs on her mobile phone.
March 13, 2024. Around 4 p.m. In the Mas d’Enric prison in El Catllar (Tarragona). Iulian Odriste, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for murder, takes a knife from the kitchen where he works as a trusted prisoner, enters the cold room and stabs a woman several times, fatally. Later, with the same knife, he takes his own life. The victim is Nuria López, a 44-year-old kitchen manager with whom she worked to provide service to the prisoners.
The parallelism between the two scenes, eight years apart, is evident and raises questions regarding the first murder of a prison worker in Spain under democracy. Why was a prisoner convicted of stabbing a woman to death allowed to work in the kitchen, where she has access to potentially dangerous utensils, such as knives? Given his criminal history, was it enough that he had shown good behavior to grant him that privilege? Had there been any worrying signs in recent months or weeks that something was wrong or had they been overlooked?
After two years in preventive detention, Iulian was tried in 2018 by a popular jury. He acknowledged the crime, which he attributed to an “outburst,” and appeared “very remorseful.” As two mitigating circumstances were applied (drunkenness and confession) he achieved a reduction in the sentence, up to 11 years in prison. He was assigned to Mas d’Enric, the prison closest to his home, and there he showed good behavior that, four years ago, coinciding with the pandemic, helped him obtain one of the most coveted positions in prison: the kitchen. For that work he received a small salary (just over 200 euros per month) with which he paid, very little by little, compensation to his victim’s daughter.
“The inmate had been working in the kitchen for more than four years with normal behavior,” explains the secretary of penal measures, reintegration and care for the victim of the Generalitat, Amand Calderó, whose resignation the unions now demand as a condition to sit down to negotiate. with Justice and put a stop to the protests, which this Friday kept 1,200 prisoners confined to their cells. Justice is not aware (as some workers have reported) that Nuria, the cook, had complained in recent weeks regarding conflicts with Iulian. It is true, however, that the prisoner was punished a few months ago for having punched another inmate, as confirmed by prison sources. That stain on his record caused him to be temporarily removed from the kitchen, although he returned to it in January because, in addition, “he was a good cook.”
The internal investigation opened by the Government should clear up doubts regarding Iulian’s prison itinerary and the decisions made by the Mas d’Enric treatment team. In parallel, the ongoing judicial process will try to clarify the motive and circumstances of the murder. Other times that outcome was brushed once morest. In 2004, during a riot in Quatre Camins (La Roca del Vallès, Barcelona), inmates stuck a sharp object into the neck of the prison’s deputy director, Manuel Tallón, who nearly died. In October 2021, in the Cuenca prison, a prisoner with a long history of violent crimes stabbed the head of service with a glass, also in the neck, who had gone with five other officials to the cell to subdue him.
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Nuria’s death has unleashed a strong reaction from prison officials. For them, it is a death foretold; something that, sooner or later, had to happen given the growing climate of insecurity in Catalan prisons. Nuria was not a prison official, but the group feels her as “just another colleague” and has shown her pain and anger this week in a series of unprecedented protests that represent a challenge for the Government and have put the functioning of the prison in check. penitentiary centers.
A day following the event, the workers—dressed in black T-shirts and with their palms painted red—tried to occupy the Department of Justice and demanded the resignation of their advisor, Gemma Ubasart, whom they called a “murderer.” On Friday, they went one step further and blocked access to prisons in Catalonia, forcing some 5,000 prisoners in six of them to be confined to their cells for hours due to lack of staff. A situation that further strained the climate in the prisons.
Isaac González is the lawyer who defended Iulian in the trial for the murder of the prostitute. He is surprised by the tragedy of Mas d’Enric. “I thought he had made a very serious mistake, but he was on his way to rehabilitation,” he says by phone from Tarragona. Although in recent times she had hardly maintained contact with him, she had followed his prison development. “I know that he was very well regarded, that he had not had any part or incident and that he was a person of certain trust. That’s why they let him access the kitchen.”
Shy and withdrawn, he met Vasilica – a Romanian woman like him who was dedicated to prostitution – on a dating website and they had sexual encounters in exchange for money. But Iulian fell in love. She asked him to leave her job and go live with him in his apartment in Valls. She got her hopes up. She told him no. In April 2016, the man met her once more at her house: they shared some bottles of wine, they had sex and, following an argument over cell phone photos, he took her knife and reached for her neck. After the crime, he turned himself in at the local Valls police station and handed over the keys to his house so they might search everything.
González explains that his client had problems with alcohol, but he does not know what might have been going through his head to kill the cook. “The same pattern, twice, is difficult to explain. Maybe there was a mental pathology that no one has detected, maybe he lied very well… You never really get to know people. But I think it was something that might hardly have been foreseen,” he reflects. The Mossos d’Esquadra, who have taken charge of the investigation, rule out that there was a previous romantic relationship between the inmate and the head chef. And, although they have security cameras from the kitchen (not from the cold room where the crime occurred), with the murderer dead it will be even more difficult for them to determine the motivations for the crime.
Nuria López, the victim, was 44 years old and lived in Vilallonga del Camp. She worked as a prison cook hired by the Center for Reintegration Initiatives (CIRE), a public company of the Generalitat. She had passed through the Brians 2 prison and for eight years she had been the head chef at Mas d’Enric, a prison inaugurated in 2015 in Tarragona. She had settled in that town of barely 2,500 inhabitants due to its proximity (20 minutes by car) to the penitentiary center. The mayor, Gerard Gené (Junts) remembers her walking her dog, Fiona, “a big, sad beast had cancer.” Gené is outraged and feels angry. “That a guy convicted of murder can be held as a trusted prisoner is something that is not understood,” he says. And he warns: “Someone has to take responsibility.”
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