Murder of Helena Jubany: anonymous people point out that it was not a women’s thing

Jiménez has entered the radar of justice in discount time, when there were only a few hours left before the prescription would make him untouchable. A new Sabadell judge has reopened the case, after fifteen years in the lethargy in which ‘Don Horacio’ plunged her, and will question him on April 22 about two anonymous letters that Helena received weeks before she died, in the fall of 2001 . The National Police now believes that Jiménez is the author of both messages. To date, justice had accused Montse Careta of writing those texts. Careta was arrested in early 2002 and ended up taking her own life in Wad-Ras prison in April of that year. The Careta family has not stopped fighting, along with Jubany’s, for the truth to come out.

To the same conclusion as the National Police, that Montse Careta had not written those anonymous letters, Dr. Sheila Queralt, specialist in Forensic Linguistics. Queralt together with another English specialist in the same discipline, Professor Krzysztof Kredenssupervised the work of a student, Roser Gimenez, who wanted to compare the anonymous letters received by Jubany with texts by Montse Careta. “80% of the variables that were analyzed did not coincide”, recalls Queralt. In other words, for the experts in forensic linguistics, who were based on the way of expressing themselves of the author of the anonymous letters instead of doing it on the stroke of their writing –as graphology does–, Montse Careta did not write those messages that now corner to Jimenez. Time has given them reason.

In his book, ‘Trapped in language’ (Larousse), Queralt explains that they looked at expressions like “et farem un truc” (Catalan colloquial form of calling on the phone) and realized that Careta did not use it. “In none of the texts did that expression appear, but “telephone” (17 times) and “make a call” (2 times) did. Or they paid attention to another clue: “while the second anonymous said that Helena was going to hit a good belly to laugh (“Es força segur que et facis un bon tip de riure”), in Montserrat’s writings that expression was never used, but others with the same meaning (“m’he fet un bon patxoc de riure”, “ens ha fet riure de valent” or “rient pels descosits”). Queralt, Kredens, and Giménez compared “expressions and other linguistic characteristics (use of punctuation, morphological resources, and communicative strategies)” and found that “they showed very notable differences.”

Helena Jubany died in the early hours of Sunday, December 2, 2001, when several people threw her body, sedated with sleeping pills, from the roof of a block of flats on Calle de Calvet d’Estrella from Sabadell. She was naked. Only she was wearing the bra and panties that the murderers had burned after spraying both pieces with flammable liquid, perhaps to erase clues of sexual abuse. The toxicology report of the samples obtained during the autopsy found a high concentration of benzodiazepine.

Weeks before his murder, Jubany had received two anonymous letters – two plastic bags – that someone left hanging from the door of his home in Sabadell. The first bag was delivered on September 17, 2001 and contained a horchata, a chocolate croissant and a writing with the following message: “Helena “surprise” we were passing by and we said let’s see what Helena explains. Are we??? (we’ll call you, “to eat it all”).

The second arrived on October 9, 2001 and contained a juice in a glass bottle and a longer note, apparently written by two different authors, expressing the desire of the unknown emissaries to meet her again on another excursion from the UES (Unió Excursionista de Sabadell) and reporting that, after leaving the bag, they were going to look for a place to learn English in Sabadell.

Drinking that second juice, Helena felt drugged. And she suspected that the juice might contain some kind of toxic substance. As she had left over juice, she went to a laboratory in Barcelona to analyze it. The lab found traces of benzodiazepine in the juice. Helena kept the result of that report, which showed that the author of the anonymous slab had tried to drug her. That report, which was found at her home after her death, allowed anonymous people to connect with her murder through benzodiazepine. In other words, whoever sent the anonymous letters was also behind her death.

Handwriting experts compared weeks after the homicide those anonymous letters with the handwriting of two women who coincided with Helena in the Sabadell Excursionist Union (UES). They concluded that both had been written by Montse Careta –the entire first anonymous and most of the second– and by Ana Echaguibel –the remaining part of the second–. The judge put the two women in jail. Montse committed suicide in April 2002, four months after Helena’s murder. Echaguibel was released from jail shortly after. The case was filed in 2005.

Both the Jubany and Careta families have tried throughout this time for justice to compare these anonymous letters with the handwriting of Xavi Jiménez – a former classmate of Helena at the UES who was in love with Helena, who tried to seduce her and failed – and with that of Santi Laiglesia, the partner of Montse Careta, the main suspect in the murder, according to the main investigator of the National Police in this case in the Crims series.

Justice, however, refused to make such comparisons. To the despair of both families. When the case was about to prescribe, it was going to be 20 years since the murder, Jubany’s family provided Xavi Jiménez’s emails found in the HDD from Helena Jubany’s computer. Both emails spoke of the same thing that the anonymous ones said: the desire to meet soon in another tour of the UES and of the intention of to study English. With those emails, the judge decided investigate to Xavi Jiménez, one day before the prescription shielded him.

The judge then asked him to provide handwritings 20 years ago to compare them with the anonymous ones, which were written then. But Jiménez refused to provide any handwritten document from that time. Despite this refusal, graphological experts from the National Police proceeded to examine his current handwriting and compared it with the anonymous ones that Jubany received. His conclusion, announced a few weeks ago, is that Xavi Jiménez is the author of those anonymous letters and, consequently, he is also allegedly related to the death of Helena.