The images shocked everyone: a truck loaded with acid, crashed on the N-1. They certified the death of a couple, Andrés and Carmen, the alarm went off when the investigators found no trace of their son, who was traveling with them
June 25, 1986. First thing in the morning. In the town bar, Los Cánovas, a hamlet in the Murcian town of Fuente Álamo, the coffees rush. A call breaks the calm. There is no other telephone in the village. It’s the Civil Guard.
The news shocks everyone. Andrés and Carmen, a more than well-known couple, dear, have had a accident in the port of Somosierra (Madrid). Their bodies lie lifeless next to their truck. From the bar, they tell María, her mother, his mother-in-law: “The boy, my grandson, Juan Pedro, how is he? Where is he?” Nobody knew how to answer.
No this. She searched for herself in the vicinity of the accident. Nobody sees it. There was no trace of the boy, who was 9 years old, and was about to turn 10. Search posters were printed with a photo that became an emblem: Juan Pedro, dressed as a sailor, on his communion day. “We had a more recent one, but it was smaller, it had no quality,” Uncle Juan recalls him today. “We needed it to be big, so we thought that one, from a year earlier, was the best.“.
Juan has been the voice of the search for decades: “the child was not in the truck.” The spokesman for a family that has not stopped investigating. OPEN CASE, Prensa Ibérica investigation portal, goes back, together with him, to that fateful day. “Everything happens in 22 seconds. Although 37 years have passed, I remember everything as if it were yesterday.”
June 24, 1986: The Journey
Juan Pedro, together with his parents -Carmen and Andrés-, start the trip in the truck. On June 24 they leave Cartagena, they have to deliver a deposit of 23,000 kilos of fuming acid in Bilbao. “The boy did not normally travel with his father,” tells his uncle. “But it was the end of the course, I had gotten good grades, and they wanted me to see the north, as a prize“. Juan Pedro was happy. His parents were too.
The road runs normally. “Andrés makes the usual stops”. Three. “Compared to a previous trip, it was almost identical, everything normal.” The last stop they make, before six in the morning, is at Mesón Aragón, also known as El Maño restaurant. The three get off. “The waiter sees them. They have breakfast and leave,” says Juan. They are about 40 kilometers from the Port of Somosierra. At 6:30 a.m. they crown it. On the descent, at the gates of the same town of Somosierra (KM 95, NI) the truck crashed.
they got fired
“The Civil Guard calls the bar. When they go to tell the grandmother, it is the first thing she does, ask for her grandson. They talk to the Civil Guard again. Agents say they are unaware of the existence of a child. That’s when the search began.”
Juan retains in his memory every minute of that June 25, 1986. “We were in Murcia and we went there,” he relives. “When we arrived at the accident site, in the early afternoon, they had already raised the bodies of Andrés and Carmenwho were thrown from the truck.” And the child? “We started from the wrong premise. We assumed that he was inside the cabin, that was crushed. Something could be seen inside, like a bulge. The next day, when it was opened, they saw that it was a bundle of clothes, it wasn’t him.”
The first hypothesis: that the acid had dissolved the child’s body. “It’s false and, furthermore, impossible,” says his uncle emphatically, “the acid fell on his father’s body, and he didn’t disappear, he was there”
They beat the area for days, weeks. Agents of the Civil Guard, volunteers, relatives, “we combed the surroundings in case he had been fired. Well, much more, I walked to Pinilla, 12 kilometers from there. Even we went with a backhoe. We excavated a depth of 50 centimeters in the entire area of the accident in case the body had been buried by the dragging of the vehicle… and there was nothing.”
The first hypothesis arose: that the acid had dissolved the little boy’s body. “It’s false and, furthermore, impossible,” says Juan emphatically. “The tank of the truck is divided into three tanks. The mouth of the cistern that breaks is the last, the third, the one at the back. The body of Andrés (father) was thrown just below the tank, which broke. All the acid from that tank fell on him. Not even a piece of meat was missing from him”. With pain, a lot of pain, he verified it: “I saw it with my own eyes. I looked at him carefully. He was black from the waist up because all the acid got on himbut it was there.”
someone took it
“We started to get suspicious.” Searches, excavations… Where was the boy? “The explanation for the accident was that the truck ran out of brakes. It is false, because there were brake marks on the road,” Juan describes. His doubt, his fight, his insistence, favored the legal request to Germany to analyze the tachograph of the truck. They received it a month with the breakdown of distance, speed and type of circulation of the last kilometers until the truck crashed.
“In 18 kilometers, the last, Andrés makes 12 stops. They start past what was Buitrago de Lozoya (Madrid), on the first slope, the truck stops for a second.” The next ten will be similar, one second, zero, two… “We believe that they were getting in the way. Nobody stops a truck for no reason, with that load, on a climb like the one in the port. It runs out of strength to continue.” The last stop, perhaps key, “was entering Somosierra, the town. The truck was stopped for 22 seconds. It is where we assume that the child was taken from him in exchange for something“.
They took something from the truck
“We asked the agents to take new statements, to make a second report, to see if anyone contributed anything about my nephew. The first was done without knowing that Juan Pedro was also traveling in the truck. They said they would, but they didn’t. I myself located all the truckers who came in front of them on that stretch that day. I was talking to them. Nobody called them.”
As a result of these conversations, a disturbing fact appeared. Seconds after the accident, they say, a Nissan Vanette van stopped there. “It was white, driven in a crazy way. They tell me that two people get off, a man and a woman. She says she’s a nurse, let her in. A man went straight to the truck. They assure that he registers it, calls the woman, and they leave. They didn’t see what he was holding, but they ran away. So fast, that they almost ran over an injured person from the truck with which Andrés hits, which was on the asphalt. They fled north. No further explanation”
Juan transferred the information to the Civil Guard, “there was no movement of the agents.” That van had been on the market for a few months in Spain. “I called Motor Ibérica and explained who I was, that I needed to locate the drivers of La Vanette. They gave me a list with the license plates and IDs of all the ones there were.” Witnesses said that if they saw their faces, they would recognize them. “Sorted by age, by nationality, they handed it over to the Civil Guard so that they could take the photos, the faces. Nobody checked any documentation.”
“The boy was inside”
Drug trafficking: second hypothesis. “In those years the drug mafias worked like that.” Some carriers denounced that drugs had been placed in rest areas. It was a fast track to bring heroin to Bilbao. “The speed that Andrés was going down the port was greater than 110 kilometers per hour. After stopping those 22 seconds, he drives madly, at a beastly speed, with a truck full of acid, and starts overtaking in a curve. Perhaps the boy was ahead, taken hostage and wanted to catch up with him.”
Juan appeared before the media affirming that they believed that Juan Pedro was not with his parents. “I got a call, which is what makes us think we’re right, saying it was a trucker’s wife, who just before she crashed, saw the kid in the truck.”
“I recorded the conversation and the voice that had called me was nothing like the real women of the truckers who came across him”
“First, it is impossible that at dawn Could someone see the child inside coming from the front. Second, I contact the truckers who were able to come from the front, I talk to them. I talk to his wives. I record the conversation and it turns out that the voice that had called me does not look like real women at all of the trucks that passed him”.
It was not the only thing. “On the posters we put a number so that they could contact us if they had any information. Suddenly they were calling 24 hours a day, for a long time. You answered, they said nothing, over and over again. The goal was for us to keep the phone busy and no real calls would come in.”
drug in the truck
The investigation stalled. “The strangest disappearance in Europe,” Interpol dictated. A year later, the media of the time published that, in the back of the truck they had found traces of heroin in a blanket that was in the tank of the vehicle.
“Impossible. If there is acid there is no blanket, if there is a blanket there can be no acid. A blanket cannot be kept there, it would fall apart. They missed the very important part that It was a trucker’s blanket that the Civil Guard put up when the tank overturned, in the form of a stop, so that no more acid would spill. When the tank was turned over, when the truck was withdrawn, that blanket fell inside.” It was wrapped in plastic, they said, “it was a yellow firefighter’s jacket, which was also used.”
the old iranian woman
For years, there were several calls that claimed to see Juan Pedro, but one stood out, that of a driving school teacher who claimed to see an elderly blind Iranian woman with a guide, a boy, with a southern accent. The teacher asked him why the boy spoke Spanish so well. She says that she got nervous and left. Later, she saw the photo of Juan Pedro, she assured that the boy was him. “That information never reached us,” says Juan.
37 years have passed. At Juan’s house, time heals nothing. “We only have two paths left: that one of those who was a part, who was involved, wants to tell what happened, for whatever, because he’s sorry, he’s going to die… or that Juan Pedro himself, through a DNA test, discovers who he is.
Juan Pedro, the boy from Somosierra, was a happy boy. He got good grades, enjoyed his family, adored his grandmother and still wasn’t sure what he wanted to be when he grew up, “at least he didn’t tell us,” smiles Juan. There is no end: “We are no longer looking for a child. He is an adult who has his own life & mldr; but we need to clarify what happened.”