Large-scale investigation – The Day

The telephone conversations between Tomás Gimeno and Beatriz Zimmermann, both on land and at sea, and the farewell messages sent by Olivia and Anna’s father allowed the Civil Guard technicians to narrow down the search space.

The event that triggered Tomás Gimeno a year ago was given the same police rank as those previously starred by José Bretón (2011, Córdoba) and José Enrique Ubuín Gey, alias el Chicle (2016, La Coruña). In fact, members of the team that tracked the mobile phone signal of Diana Quer (1998-2016) in Puebla del Caramiñal had an active participation in the braiding of the conversations that the parents of Olivia and Anna had on the afternoon-night of the 27th of April and the early hours of the morning of the 28th.

rebuild the scenarios

The fact that some of the communications made by Beatriz’s ex-husband were made from the high seas [llamadas o mensajes] made it difficult to locate the exact point where he was when, for example, he told the mother of his daughters that he would never see them alive again. Without fixed references, the members of the Civil Guard’s Operational Technical Support Group sought a starting point from which to reconstruct the scenes of the double crime. In this sense, the first thing that was done was to request a judicial authorization to clone the telephone card of Tomás Gimeno. For that reason, seeing that his WhatsApp was online [unas 72 horas después de que Beatriz denunciara el secuestro de las menores], many of his contacts believed that he was alive. An important part of this reconstruction was carried out from the central offices in Madrid and another part following the hypothetical route that Tomás Gimeno could complete after picking up his daughters at Beatriz’s house: the interrogations of relatives and the review of the security cameras. the Marina de Santa Cruz, in which the suspect can be clearly seen carrying some bags, served to draw up a first script to which the house that Tomás lived in Candelaria was immediately incorporated.

While the most technological pieces of the case were being assembled, other units of the armed institute – rural patrols, Geas, Seprona, Montaña and helicopters – combed the island from north to south and from east to west. An international arrest warrant had already been issued, but the marine grid had yet to be delimited, which weeks later was the space in which oceanographic researcher Ángeles Alvariño, who had not yet received the order to join the emergency operation, concentrated all his maneuvers: the The marine strip to be investigated was positioned below the Hoya Fría Military Base (Infantry 49) and initially it was set about 10 miles from the coast. [con posterioridad se rebajó a menos de cinco].

With a perimeter already delimited in the sea, the raids followed one another to see if any signal was located that would certify the success when choosing the area, but with no luck. The possibility of renting a submarine based in the south of Tenerife to carry out inspections was even considered, but that did not come to fruition: the enormous depth of the Santa Cruz seafront, with a fall that in some points reaches the 3,000 meters, turned that wish into an impossible mission.

The Civil Guard carried the weight of the proceedings – members of the National Police Corps, Canarian Police, Local Police, Civil Protection or Maritime Rescue were also mobilized – when the scenes of the disappearance became clear: the house of Tomás de Igueste de Candelaria, the car with which he moved the girls, the boat on which he supposedly got the lifeless bodies of the girls and a marine strip located to the east of the capital of Tenerife in which the three disappeared [se usaron lastres de buceo para hundir los cuerpos] and in which, finally, the crew of the Ángeles Alvariño found the remains of little Olivia 44 days after the beginning of this barbarism.

House

Igueste de Candelaria

First stage

Half a dozen records

• The first search of the house that Tomás Gimeno had rented in Igueste de Candelaria occurred mid-morning on May 3. This point is marked on the communications map drawn up by the components of the Civil Guard’s Operational Technical Support Group. Footprints, traces of blood and recent earthworks were searched for. Before recovering Olivia’s corpse, he returned to this building at least six other times, on several occasions with a dog specialized in tracking corpses that arrived from peninsular territory: this decision was made to have a neutral scenario – the canine agents who there are in the Islands are conditioned by odors that can mislead them and overlook a clue- in which an exhaustive inventory of belongings and medicines was drawn up. In the lands attached to the main house, tastings were carried out to analyze the texture of different types of soil. This property was under close surveillance for weeks. There is evidence that Beatriz Zimmerman went to look for her daughters at this farm the afternoon-night of their disappearance, but she did not find them and called her ex-husband on the phone. This stage was not clean [apareció basura acumulada] and that fact served to rule out the hypothesis that evidence was eliminated after committing the double crime.

Car

Santa Cruz Port

second stage

The transfer of the corpses

• The white Audi A3 that Tomás Gimeno was driving the day this tragedy broke out appeared parked in a perimeter controlled by a closed-circuit television surveillance system. In fact, the main suspect in the death of the minors was recorded around 9:50 p.m. when he was transporting some bags between tourism and a boat. Long before, Olivia and Anna’s father had picked them up at Beatriz’s home and headed to her paternal grandparents’ residence. This meeting did not last longer than 7:30 p.m. In the following 90 minutes there are gaps that do not allow to accurately close the moment in which the fatal outcome occurred. The vehicle was located hours after the mother of the girls presented, at eight in the morning on April 28, a written complaint to the Civil Guard for an alleged parental kidnapping. The agents already mobilized break a rear window to try to access the interior and check if the trunk is empty. There is no trace of them. Experts collect biological samples in a car that was subjected to inspections [algunas de ellas con perros entrenados] more rigorous in which a marker associated with Olivia and Anna always ended up emerging, although that was not a definitive test because they used the same one frequently.

boat

Santa Cruz Port

third stage

Skipping curfew

• Tomás Gimeno’s family boat provided definitive evidence of its role in Olivia and Anna’s disappearance. The teams of the judicial police of the Civil Guard found decisive elements when it came to positioning this scenario as key in clarifying the facts. The images in which the father of the girls can be seen leaving the Tenerife Marina testify that he presumably disposed of his bodies between 10:15 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., which he did in the eastern part of the port capital [a unas dos o tres millas de la costa] and that he returned to land alone: ​​that was the moment in which he received a warning from the Maritime Service of the Armed Institute for having broken the curfew that was still in force a year ago. Gimeno is recognized at a service station near the docking point when he goes to buy a mobile charger and cigarettes, also by the security guard who asks permission to charge his phone. With the battery replenished he heads back out to sea and exchanges several calls and messages with a goodbye tone. One of those conversations, as recorded in the judicial proceedings, puts him in contact with Beatriz Zimmerman already in the early hours of the morning of April 28. The content and tone of it is unequivocal: “You will not see the girls again,” she warns.