“Today has been hard for me.” With these six words, María Dolores Sánchez Moya -Mary- began a letter that she never delivered. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, the first, the only one, the boy she met when she was 17 years old and who had stolen her joy, calm and heart. Four years later, at 21, after various comings and goings, their relationship broke up: “I know that I have never meant anything to you, anyone was better than me.”
The young woman, pen in hand, continues: “I won’t be pretty or anything but I think I’m a good person.” And she continues: “I’ll still be a slut for you, right? That if I hang out with one or the other (…) that I’m nice to everyone (…) If I’ve left your side it’s because you were continually throwing me out (…) Then one day came and you hit me. I can’t write to you anymore, I love you too much, but it hurts me a lot”. Mary signs the letter with “I love you”. Five days later she disappeared.
On July 24, 1990, the young woman, from Medina del Campo (Valladolid), did not come to work. Her sisters found the letter a few days after it disappeared. They went to ask him, “I don’t know where he is,” he replied. “you hit him“, they accused him. “He replied that when he deserved it”, recalls Jesusa, Mary’s sister. 32 years later, her family is still looking for her.
He did not go to work
Summer 1990. Mary is 21 years old, in a toxic relationship, but she struggles to be happy. She is the seventh of nine siblings. At home they have come badly given and you have to work. Everybody does. She, as a domestic worker in a house in Valladolid. Every day she walks through the upper part of the Barrio de la Mota in Medina del Campo to go to the meeting point with other friends who also work abroad. “They took the train around 8:45 a.m.,” says his sister Jesusa. “That Tuesday, Mary didn’t show up.” Her friends thought she would have fallen asleep, they gave her normality.
“He didn’t come home to sleep either, but my mother didn’t worry because sometimes he stayed where he worked.” There was no telephone at home, so she didn’t call when they asked her to stay the night to look after the children. “She will have stayed to work today.”
The alarm goes off the next day. The friends return to the starting point, the station. That day they don’t see her either. No sign of her on the return train. It was the neighborhood festival and they had agreed to go to the festival, so when they got off the train, they went to her house to ask. Jesusa (that’s also her mother’s name) greeted them, “she hasn’t arrived yet, she won’t be long.” They warned: “no, no, Jesusa, we haven’t seen her yesterday or today….” “That’s when my mother got scared,” recalls her sister.
“We called work and they told us he hadn’t been in two days. We went to the police to file a complaint. Being 21 years old, they told my mother that she had to wait 48 hours, that maybe it had been a fight. My mother, the woman, waited and waited. They did not take the complaint until On October 3rd, three months later“.
“Sometimes he deserved it”
The family mobilized immediately. Friends, acquaintances, nobody knew anything. There was a knock on her boyfriend’s door. “I don’t know. We left it a week ago, you don’t need to come here,” he told Mary’s mother. She had been part of the family, attended weddings and celebrations, now she didn’t want to help.
A few days later, they found the letter in the girl’s room and called him: “He told us that he couldn’t attend to us until the card game was over,” laments Jesusa. “They had been together for four years, is a departure more important? I asked her if she knew something, if she had told her that she wanted to leave & mldr; she replied that my sister I had fantasies, silly things in my head…”. The woman, letter in hand, launched the question: “Here it says that you hit him, is it true? He replied: ‘sometimes he deserved it’. As it is, that’s what he told me,” says Jesusa.Mary’s friends also told the young woman’s family that her boyfriend assaulted her: “He has never hit him in the face, from the neck down, yes. We saw bruises on him… he was an abuser.”
“Her boyfriend assured the police that Mary called him after disappearing and told him that she had gone to Barcelona with her brother,” says Mary’s family.
When, three months later, the police activated the alert, they repeated the same calls that the family initiated. “To her friends, to the house where she worked, to our brothers and Mary’s boyfriend.” Then he assured that, shortly after she disappeared, the young He called him and told him that he was in Barcelona with his brother who lives there”. Mary’s brother denied it: “I haven’t seen her, she hasn’t been here, she hasn’t called me.”
“When my mother found out about it, she went to his house and asked her mother for the phone bill to know where Mary had called her son from”, recalls the sister of the missing girl. His wife was blunt, according to Mary’s family: “told him that he had nothing to do there and close the door”.
Mary’s mother died five years after her daughter disappeared. “During those five years she went to the police station to ask about her daughter every day”
Jesusa, her mother, died five years after the disappearance. “During those five years he went to the police station to ask about his daughter every day”. The relief, when he dies, is taken by his children, led by Jesusa and Teresa. They appeared before the agents and begged for answers: “Have they investigated if Mary made that supposed call from Barcelona? Is it known where he was when she disappeared?”
By then, the commissioner who initiated the case had already retired. The new one, at the family’s insistence, wanted to give them an answer: “When we saw his face he told us everything. The summary It was made up of one page: my mother’s complaint stuffed in an envelope. Nothing more. When I say nothing, it’s nothing. Nothing more,” they say.
Three moves: is she alive?
After eleven years with the case stalled, in 2002 there were three movements that gave the young woman’s family hope: “The first was a letter from Social Security announcing that Mary had started a process. We were happy.” An acquaintance of hers who works at Social Security confirmed the worst: “no one had processed anything in her name, it was an administrative error.”
The second came shortly after. The commissioner called and told us that a girl from Murcia named María Dolores Sánchez Moya had registered with my parents. My sister was 69 and this girl was 70, but it could be. We spoke with that woman and she told us: ‘Look, I found out that I am registered in Medina because they have denied me municipal aid. I am not… but my name is the same.'” This was another mistake.
The same year, “the police call us and say that they have found my sister. ‘We cannot say anything, give any information’…”. They got to know that, supposedly, they had located her in a brothel. “She missed me, but… so many years, life takes many turns, I don’t know,” her sister recalls. “I wrote them a letter so they could give it to her. She gave her my address, my phone number, that we miss her… After three days they apologized, they were wrong: it wasn’t her.” The sisters, just in case, went from brothel to brothel, they papered the area: no one ever saw it.
Intelligent, with character, creative, she loved to write, “she was the only one who liked to study”, describes her sister. They imagine her successes: she “she would have gone far”. The family does not forget. Although they have been searching for 32 years, she is with them. Mari is always there.