A death 30 years ago turns a small village into Spain’s true crime capital, attracting fans of the style and upsetting its residents.

“That’s where I found him,” she said, pointing out the cold rain to another stone house a few meters away.

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The unsolved murder of 70-year-old Josep Montane, known here as Sansa, is Tor’s third in 15 years. The 1995 crime and its details – the electric wire around its neck, the decomposing body and the inside story involving smugglers and shady dealings with a nearby ski resort – attracted a young television reporter who aired an investigative report on a Catalan broadcaster in 1997.

He is dedicated to history, writing a book in 2005, launching a highly successful podcast in 2018, and airing a hugely popular true crime documentary series last year.

All of this media attention fueled the imaginations of unsolved mystery enthusiasts and turned Thor into Spain’s true crime capital. In the summer, they flock to the city to stay at Sansa’s former home, the Tor Experience, which has become a tourist attraction, or to take over a cabin for a slightly spooky romantic getaway. Local residents said some visitors reenacted the murder and walked around with electrical cords around their necks.

The few residents of Tor, an idyllic Catalan town where brown cows stroll along streams in the shadow of the mountains, become passive figures in the case, and their stone home becomes the eerie setting for the Spanish film “The Murder in the Village”.

The neighbors got along well. In 1896, the heads of 13 families declared joint ownership of Mount Toll. Mount Tor is one of the highest peaks in the Pyrenees and is the last strategic stop on the Spanish border before the small principality and tax haven of Andorra. They stipulated that only residents who lived there all year round and kept the fireplaces in their homes burning could claim ownership.

In the 1980s, Sansa and other descendants who remained in the area began hiring security guards and charging fees in cash and sometimes whiskey to smugglers transporting cheap goods from Andorra along mountain passes. Vagrants, known by locals as “hippies,” were also quickly hired to threaten the unpaid smugglers by rolling huge stones onto the roads.

However, the biggest source of tension in the mountain village remained the mountain itself.

Sansa envisions building a profitable ski resort on the slopes and has already begun negotiations with representatives of Andorra’s ski sector. His main rival, known locally as El Palanca, wanted to maintain the mountain as an idyllic paradise where cattle and horses could graze.

A decade of hostility and litigation culminated in a judge’s decision in 1995 to declare Sansa the sole owner of the mountain. Five months later, he was beaten or strangled, after which he was almost certainly dragged into the kitchen. Investigators complained that the area was too dirty to find any clues.

— The problem is, everyone tried to kill Sansa. “Anyone can be a murderer,” said Carles Porta, a journalist who supports the Tor project. As a young reporter, he became obsessed with Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” and said he found Holcomb, Kansas, “in the middle of nowhere” in Catalonia. Initially, he spent his summer holidays with his wife and children, but during his research he was not very happy with the idea, saying, “I probably started the true crime genre in Spain with Tor.”

Porta’s face and letter now decorate the walls of the Hostal Montaña in Arins, the municipality of Thor at the foot of the mountain. A quote from Porta’s book Thor, the Cursed Mountain appears on a bottle of Ratafia, his favorite local spirit. There is a saying: “All fires are small when they start.”

Mars Turalols, 38, who works at his family’s Hotel Montaña in Tor, was eight years old when Sansa’s body was discovered. She recalled that police seemed more interested in the food provided by her aunt Tomas, known as Piri to Thor’s regulars, than in solving the crime.

Ms Tularols acknowledged that “true crime tourism” had helped the family-run hotel, but said village residents could no longer tolerate it. At the height of last summer’s full-on crime season, she said, there was no place to park and some weirdos took over the place. “One of them arrived with a rope around his neck,” she said.

Now that summer is over, at least there are no more tourists.

“Welcome to Thor,” local tour guide Antonio Zamorano, 38, said recently as his jeep gave way to a suspicious car with a flat tire and a foreign license plate on a narrow mountain road. He said the unprotected border road, surrounded by pine and beech trees that are starting to turn yellow and red, is a smuggling route. He also pointed out herbs that locals believe can end unwanted pregnancies, horses slaughtered for food, and tragic landmarks.

“This is where they dragged the body,” he said in what was once Sansa’s backyard. — In this house, a hippie committed suicide — further down the street, he said, the death toll in the city increased. The fifth death due to a mysterious fall is “over here on the left.”

Further above the city, he pointed to a blue Citroën Saxo that the smugglers had left in the middle of a field. Standing near a rock inscribed with “Thor’s Private Mountain,” he describes the frigid hillside as a training ground for Spanish terrorists, offers several theories about Sansa’s murder, and gazes with deep admiration at the cows and mud fields around him.

“Magic mushrooms,” he said.

Back in the city, Tomas prepared local soups and meat for a packed house at his restaurant. A table of Andorran businessmen dusted off bottles of wine and ratafia next to a roaring fireplace.

Joan Clotet, 60, a ski resort executive who worked with Sansa, said Thor missed a huge opportunity because locals were unable to reach an agreement. Any hope left for the resort had disappeared “because of the murders,” he said.

But the murders have generated at least a little business for Porta, who is in Barcelona to film another Disney investigation into a true crime involving abandoned children.

After years of being questioned by supermarket cashiers and taxi drivers about Sansa’s killer, he said new clues pointed to the killer “living in Miami.” He intended to do more reporting trips, which he imagined would be turned into a fiction series or a movie.

“It’s endless,” Porta said. When asked if his wife enjoys summer trips to Florida more than Thor, he said they separated more than 10 years ago. — She was tired of me.

In Toa, the residents are also a little fed up with Porta’s plans. Mr. Thomas wondered if he could donate a portion of the profits to the city to help build a cell phone base station.

She said she was willing to give up the sudden increase in customers and even the profits she made from her Tor products to get everything back to normal. But that won’t happen until Porta finds the culprit, she says, because “people need closure.”

But as she walked from Sansa’s stone home, passing her soaking wet dog, she said the crime would never be solved. She said she was sure of one thing about Sansa’s killer.