Visualize a large cork attached to a wall. One of those used by cops in movies, and in real life too, to sort out the pieces of the puzzle in complex murders. The first of the photographs that opened this, our panel, was that of Helena Jubany. The Sentmenat librarian was 27 years old when she was murdered and thrown off the roof of a building on Carrer Calvet d’Estrella in Sabadell. The investigators did not take long to place the photographs of the suspects on the corkboard: Montse Careta, Santi Laiglesia, Xavi Jiménez; and in a second circle, a little further away, the images of those who might have been somehow aware of the events: Francesc Macià and Jaume Sanllehí. 21 years later, and with the investigation of the crime of Helena Jubany reopened once more at the last second before the statute of limitations, once more due to the push of the family, the focus of suspicion continues to illuminate the same first group of names related to the victim through the nature section of the Excursionist Union of Sabadell.
On Friday, Xavi Jiménez will testify once more. It’s not the first time he’s done it. This time it will be in court number 2 of Sabadell and before the magistrate Juan Díaz Villar, who on December 1 informed him of his status as an investigator just a few hours before the statute of limitations expired, at the age of 20. And it was the Jubany family once once more, and this time under the baton of lawyer Benet Salellas, who found the element that allowed what was previously known as imputation. Despite repeated requests from the family to check the hard drive of the victim’s computer, they were the ones who commissioned an expert report from the forensic computer scientist Bruno Pérez Juncà, who managed to uncover all the content, recovering the emails, documents or files that Helena might have eliminated, also creating a search engine that made it possible to locate an email that Xavi Jiménez sent to the young woman. The always suspicious refers to studying for an English test and a field trip. Terms that coincide with the content of the second of the anonymous letters that the victim received at her house before being murdered. Two bags that someone hung on her door on different days. In the first there was horchata, a chocolate croissant and this handwritten message: “Helena surprise We were passing by and we said let’s see what Helena can explain. Are??? (we will call you) (‘To eat it all’)”. A few weeks later she received the second. Another bag, this time with a peach juice and a longer note with references to meeting once more in another outing of the Unió Excursionista de Sabadell and studying English.
On Friday, Xavi Jiménez, author of one of the anonymous letters received by the librarian, declares in court
The rescued mail linked Xavi Jiménez with the anonymous, who in turn were always linked to the crime because both the horchata and, as confirmed by a laboratory, the peach juice were up to benzodiazepine. Same chemical that forensics found on the victim’s body at autopsy. As if Helena’s common sense had made her suspect that something was up, the day she received the peach juice she took it to the library and, following drinking, she began to feel bad. Several times his boss told him to go rest and he ended up doing so, but first she gave a sample of the juice to a pharmaceutical laboratory for her analysis.
Xavi Jiménez was always on the investigators’ radar. Contradictory in his first statements, suspicions regarding him were overshadowed by the figure of Santi Laiglesia. The lawyer was the partner of the then teacher Montse Careta at the time of the crime. The woman lived on the third floor of the block from whose roof Helena was thrown. Two and a half months later, Montse Careta and Ana Echaguibel were arrested following a report from the National Police’s scientific police that identified them as the authors of the anonymous reports. Other later expert witnesses exonerated them and other subsequent ones accused them once more. In the midst of such an entanglement, on May 7, 2002, Montse Careta committed suicide in her cell in Wad-Ras and left a note reiterating her innocence and warning that she was leaving with a “clear conscience.”
Careta, on the left, Laiglesia, Sanllehí, Jubany and Xavi Jiménez
But let’s go back to Laiglesia, an emerging figure following the broadcast of the two episodes of the series Crimes of TV3 in which one of the National Police inspectors blamed him for the crime without half measures. The journalistic work evidenced the blunders of the police and judicial investigation; and all the things that were left undone and that allowed both Laiglesia and Jiménez and the rest of the group to continue with their lives normally, linked, all except Ana Echaguibel, to the Unió Excursionista de Sabadell.
To the respite of the Jubany family, the clock that ticks what is missing until the prescription has gained time to restart a serious investigation once more. As the journalist Yago García Zamora, author of the book Who killed Helena Jubany? (Ara llibres), it was far from a crime designed with the expertise of those responsible. The authors simply had, he assures, the luck of having had a first judge Manuel Horacio who “had no interest in resolving the case” and a terrible instruction that continues to count, to this day, on the tenacious push of the family and his lawyer.
The defense of the family trusts that the new judicial push will interpret the crime as a femicide
The book reconstructs the investigation with a new look away from the gender clichés that strung it together in its day, as the lawyer Carla Vall points out in a revealing epilogue. The journalist dares with a mobile. García Zamora does not hesitate to ensure that behind her crime there was a sexual intention, which was therefore a femicide, her victim was chemically subjected, stripped naked and tortured before being thrown into the void. The coroner ruled out her rape, but with the only argument that the victim was wearing her underwear. Yes, but no one interpreted that her clothes were burned with matches, as part of her hair. Xavi Jiménez tried to approach Helena on several occasions, who had no interest in the character. What’s more, as the author of it reveals, she separated from her following he admonished her the followingnoon that during an excursion along Camí de Ronda, Helena and Ana Echaguibel took off their bra normally to put on their swimsuit.
Yago García Zamora studied Journalism at the same university as Helena Jubany and with her fourth-year classmate Ana Prats they chose the case for their final degree project (TFG). That work was the embryo of a book that discovers the relationship that existed between the now investigated and the victim, whom the writer interviewed for the TFG in March 2017, in the Vapor Badia library bar in Sabadell. Even then, the suspect denied any connection to the crime. He criticized, like others, that the investigation focused on the Unió Excursionista de Sabadell and ignored other environments of the victim and pointed out a fact that years later has been key to her accusation: “I from the police would review the e-mails of Helen”
