Shirley, 33, and Guillermo, 35, arrived in Brea de Tajo, 70 kilometers east of Madrid, shortly before summer. They were a couple, they came from the capital and settled in a farm that the boy had 2 kilometers from the town. It had belonged to his grandfather ―known among the neighbors as “Señor Prieto” ―, who died years ago, and who was now maintained by him. The plot, located on top of a hill, is part of the La Alameda urbanization, one of two in the area. The other, on the opposite side of the road, is El Quejigal. But no one calls them that, everyone talks about them as “the parcels”. About 400, where forty years ago small stone houses were built, with tile roofs and surrounded by trees. One of them is Guillermo’s.
The couple did not go unnoticed in the small town of just over 530 inhabitants that made headlines six years ago, when 300 tenths of the first lottery jackpot prize were distributed: 120 million for a population dedicated to agriculture, especially olive groves, and construction. Then, the square of the Madrid municipality was filled with families, champagne and tears of illusion.
This Friday was also full. But there were no jumping, shouting or applause. Some 60 residents gathered at noon in front of the City Hall to observe a minute of silence. Barely 24 hours before they had found out that the Civil Guard had found two corpses in “the parcels”. One was that of Shirley – whose family had denounced that they had not heard from her since last November 15 – and the other that of an 18-year-old boy from whom they had not heard from for a month and a half.
His name was Sergio and the neighbors say that he met Shirley and Guillermo shortly after the couple arrived in Brea de Tajo. He was also new in town. In June, he left the Teresa De Calcutta detention center for minors, four kilometers away, and where he had been interned for at least a year. He lived for a time with his father, in a ground floor that they rented in May, near the Church. But in the fall, after several comings and goings, and some coexistence problems, he moved to Guillermo’s farm.
In town they remember the three of them almost always together, sitting on one of the brown benches in the City Hall arcades. They spent hours there, while their dogs ran around the square. The reason was always the same: to charge mobiles in a USB port enabled for it. “They had to go without light, that’s why they were there all day,” recalls a neighbor.
In “the plots” there is no drinking water, nor electricity. It is a piece of land that is not urbanized, explains Rafael Barcala, mayor of the municipality: “In their day the plots were sold very cheap, with the promise that the land was developable, but the promoter of the project died in an accident before completing it. Now some are self-sufficient with water from wells and solar energy”. In fact, Shirley and Sergio did not live in the stone house on the farm, but in an old van that Guillermo had left her and that was located on the lot. The neighbors do not know if he also slept with them, but they say that the relationship with Shirley had ended and that Sergio was the woman’s new partner. Other sources from the Civil Guard of Madrid, cited by Europa Press, point to the hypothesis of the bad coexistence between Guillermo, Sergio and Shirley and assure that there was never a sentimental relationship between the woman and the alleged murderer.
Little or nothing is known of Guillermo in Brea de Tagus. “The one with the bicycle”, most of the neighbors call him. They used to see him in town with her, or come and go on the road through town. The same bicycle with which he was pedaling on November 24 on the R-3, near Mejorada del Campo, when a high-speed vehicle ran over him. Everything indicated that it was an accident, but after the event became known, a relative appeared at the Civil Guard barracks. Guillermo had made a statement to him hours before: “I have cooked them inside the van.” He was referring to Sergio and Shirley. The alleged murderer confessed, before committing suicide, that he had killed her ex-partner and her boyfriend. If the facts are confirmed, it would be a new case of sexist violence with two victims.
The relatives had denounced that they did not know anything about them and SOS Desaparecidos launched a search alert with Shirley’s face in mid-December. In the town they were surprised that neither she nor Sergio went through the square. The mayor remembers that, days before he stopped seeing them, they happily commented that they were going to move to Santander. “Shirley sold beaded bracelets and every once in a while she would clean a house from ‘the parcels,’” he recounts.
Among the neighbors, the descriptions of the two deceased are similar: that they spoke little and that they moved just enough through the town, to buy bread and little else. Sometimes they were short of money and in the El Campanario bar, one of the three in the municipality, they used to leave drinks a little cheaper. The owner remembers the last time she saw Shirley, shortly before November 15: “She came, she changed her clothes and told me that she had to take one of her dogs to the vet.” He never heard from her again, until this Thursday he found out what happened through the media. “I wanted to talk, to tell things,” adds the woman. One of those things, which she discussed with some neighbors in the square, is that she had a daughter who lived with her mother in Madrid. They don’t know anything else about her, except that she was little. Nor from Shirley: she was from Marchamalo, a municipality in the province of Guadalajara with about 8,000 inhabitants, and that she was pleasant to deal with.
“They were not very rooted in the town and they constantly fought among themselves. The fights and the shouts were habitual”, says Barcala. Many neighbors remember that the Civil Guard appeared at Guillermo’s farm on more than one occasion and that they were afraid that something would happen to Shirley.
“Calcined” van
From the outside, except for the seal where it says “do not enter”, it seems that the farm has been abandoned for a long time. The white gate at the entrance is rusty. A battered orange foosball table, half wrapped in a flowered sheet, rests on the also corroded chain-link fence that surrounds the grounds. And a car license plate, divided in three, welcomes: “532R”, it is possible to read. The state of the house, on one floor, is similar. Bags, a dark blue backpack, a green towel, a couple of buckets, and a dirty sink are piled up in front of the door. There are also several glass bottles scattered around the area. Once night falls, it is not easy to find the farm. The road is unpaved and there are no streetlights. Nor is Guillermo’s van visible from the outside, or what is left of it.
When the agents of the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard went to the place, they found the burnt-out vehicle. “As if they had put a fire inside, in the part of the cabin, and then they had barred the doors so that they could not get out,” sources from the investigation report. Supposedly, the double crime would have been perpetrated at night, while the victims slept. The human remains have been transferred to the Forensic Anatomical Institute of Madrid to verify if they correspond to the two disappeared.
After the minute of silence, Brea de Tajo has been emptying little by little and without making a sound. At half past two in the afternoon there was hardly anyone on the street. The Christmas lights of the houses, the premises and the Town Hall, wait to be turned on, and a crochet Christmas tree guards the left flank of the town hall. Next to the USB port where Shirley and Sergio charged their phones, there are two stickers. One that invites neighbors to recharge their devices. Another that says: “We stop sexist violence together.” And below, on one of the benches, a date and two S’s written with a white marker.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
