It happened 34 years ago, on January 6, 1991, but until this year the Civil Guard was unable to identify the body of the victim of the assassination that everyone blamed on Reyes. Thanks to new technology, the body can now be identified and is now known to be that of a 24-year-old young woman from Avilés, although her disappearance was not notified to authorities until five years ago.
In May 2024, the Civil Guard reopened an inconclusive investigation into the missing woman and quickly linked the case to a news story in a local newspaper reporting an assassination in the town of Baros, but coincidentally her body had not been identified. According to a press release issued by Guardia Civil, the victim was stabbed and buried in a grave on the same night as Reyes in 1991.
The Langreo National Police, which was in charge of the investigation at the time, was able to arrest the culprit after the couple discussed it and decided to press charges against him. Assino only admitted to investigators that he rescued the victim from a voluntary stop on a highway in Oviedo that night. According to her report, the woman attempted to steal and reached this by force. The man put his inheritance in a suitcase and headed to Baros, where he asked what had happened. However, when they open the suitcase they find the woman bleeding to death, and the couple decide to bury her body in quicklime.
The Hechos didn’t know about it until October 1995, when the couple accused their attackers. At that time, the victim’s body was found in too poor a condition to be identified. However, they were only able to create a portrait of the deceased woman using a robot, which was then disseminated through the media.
Hechos was inconclusive until the Civil Guard began to connect the telegrams between this crime and the 1995 charges against the mother for her daughter’s disappearance. The woman has been caring for her daughter for five years, but has not heard anything about her fate since then. Investigators registered a case, but as there were no clues, the person was placed in the police’s missing persons register.
Similarities between the robot’s portrait and a photo posted by an alleged family member of the victim in the case, dressed in hopeful clothing. Comparison of the DNA sample of the missing wife (the deceased) and one of the bodies from the Reyes case, carried out at the Madrid Institute of Toxicology using a different and more advanced technique than that used in 1995, confirmed the hypothesis that it was the same person in both cases.
“Advances in technology, new investigation methods using technical means, new police bases and cooperation with other police agencies are the keys to successes of this kind, making it possible to solve cases that were impossible at the time,” Guardia Civil said in a press release.
Investigators were able to identify the victim and alert her family to the whereabouts of a 24-year-old young woman they had not heard of since 1934.
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