Fernando González de Castejón y Jordán de Urríes, Grandee of Spain (as he was in charge of repeating), is already resting in the cemetery. Buried with no other witnesses than the gravediggers and without prior wake, at the express wish of his relatives. He was broke and for a few months his already problematic character had soured more.
Despite everything, he drove a Mercedes and a Ducati. The same motorcycle on which he was riding around the Chamartín neighborhood (Madrid) with a tunic and a shotgun hanging from it. He defined himself as an investor and businessman, but he was not known to have any real professional activity. Renter only. And in 2015 he explained to everyone who wanted to hear him that he had 740,000 euros paralyzed in “ultraconservative” funds from Banco Madrid.
The victims of that bankruptcy could only recover a maximum of 100,000.
“He closed the bars in the neighborhood,” said one of the neighbors to whom he gave so many headaches. He especially frequented one that is right in front of his portal, he only had to cross the sidewalk. Sometimes leaving generous tips; others, moody or sputtering, hastily, eccentricities.
But his fixation was, above all, women. Those of the close environment of him and practically all those who crossed with him. Also on the street. Or those of his own block, 205 Serrano Street, where early Monday morning he signed the deaths of his wife, Gema Jiménez, 44, and a friend of hers, Julia Cuevas, of 70. And her own, as the culmination of a life of excess and violence against women. The Marquis of Perijá and Count of Atarés was 53 years old and since at least 40 he had lost his temper. Although they say that since he was quite a child he was problematic.
No one in his family was spoken to. To the point that he had inherited the noble titles in 2012, but he could not get rid of the fact that his great-uncle, José Miguel López y Díaz de Tuesta, single and childless, disinherited him and did not take a penny when he died, in 2010 All his assets, including the three-story hotel and two of the family home on Calle de Alcalá Galiano, in Madrid, went into the hands of his blood family. And, of course, nothing to mention about the numerous works of art by the previous count, which are exhibited in the province of Soria in a museum. The aristocrat left everything to the hotel manager, Vicente Marín. The foundation that bears his name, in Bretún, has pieces by Murillo, Sorolla, Francisco Rizi, Craddock, Teniers El Joven, Bayeu, Bartolomé de Cárdenas, Leonardo Alenza, Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre…
His aggressiveness came from afar. She has already attacked and tried to stab her brother-in-law, who did not report him, and on another occasion he beat her own mother in the family hotel, the Galiano, in 2009. A younger sister went to defend her and she also took some hit. The police had to be called and there was a complaint in that case. The judge issued a three-year restraining order from the nobleman on the two women. To the point that, when his great-uncle died the following year, he was unable to attend the funeral when his two victims were found there.
In 2018, being on a terrace in Serrano under his house, witnesses to the shouts and insults that Fernando gave Gema notified the Police, who ex officio denounced and arrested the aristocrat. But she didn’t even want to show up for the speedy trial. She said that she was not a victim of anything. She stayed with her abuser and there was no protection or precautionary measure of any other kind.
The National Police took from his house last Monday, after the crime, seven firearms, between long and short. There were collections, also hammers, although they lacked any type of license for their possession and/or use.
The pistols were exhibited in the living room, in a showcase, from which he took out a German Luger, from World War II, when Gema showed up with Julia to pick up some clothes, food and toiletries in two bags and, supposedly, abandon it once and for all. On Sunday they had had their umpteenth row over the phone and she, who was in Paris with a couple of friends who reside there, excused that she was returning to Madrid for a health problem, leaving the 9-year-old girl with them. She said that she had gone to the emergency room of a hospital. That prevented the woman-hating marquis from possibly ending the life of his own daughter as well.
The discussion, already in the 1ºC of Serrano, 205, began at eleven o’clock at night. No one knows what they said, only they, and they are all dead, sources in the case tell ABC. Of course, Gema’s last movements suggest that she was going to leave him and Julia’s presence on the floor was not something out of the ordinary, since she spent time with her marriage.
No relative of the septuagenarian knew that she was there that night, hence it took several hours to confirm her identity. Julia accompanied her to Serrano only those times when the aristocrat’s wife was in Madrid, which were fewer and fewer. She was fed up with him and was going back and forth to France to get out of the way. Everything indicates that she had become afraid of him and she needed the help of her friend.
«It seems that he wanted to leave it once and for all. We put the time of death at approximately one o’clock, which is when the neighbors say they heard the shots. But he mediated a discussion before, in which he could attack the women », police sources specify. “First, he went to her wife, in the kitchen, and shot her in the temple. He then returned to the living room and shot Julia only once, too, in the head. Right there, he put the Luger to his jaw and killed himself. The gun was next to him. In the absence of confirmation of the ballistic test, it is the one he used in the massacre », they add.
The ‘modus operandi’ leads homicide experts to think that this was not a planned affair. He did not even leave a letter, something that usually happens in these cases. A case of book gender violence.
The truth, on the other hand, is that it is not understood that he had practically set up a shooting gallery in the inner courtyard of the block and nobody had denounced him. Hardly had a meeting of the neighborhood community been called to deal with the count’s problem. He hung posters with insults and LGTBI emblems or left-wing ideologies to shoot them. He had armor at home. Posters of Hitler and Franco, whom he revered. He hated the current Prime Minister. He kept jackets in his closet. “Bitch”, “faggots” and “reds” were some of his favorite expletives, the ones that were heard on the farm with increasing frequency.
Carbines, shotguns, pistols, machetes, even bows with arrows and silencers… He got it into his head that a neighbor who watered the plants was damaging a picasso that hung on the wall of his house. And she also became the owner of a dalí. He was threatening to shoot the dog of another resident on the farm. He owed receipts from the community. He insulted in person but also on WhatsApp, with his extensive catalog of expletives: “Lameculons, fagots, imbeciles…”. He appeared at the protests against the central government during the state of alarm ‘presuming’ his Francoist ideology…
But no complaint emerged in the more than seven years that Fernando had been residing there. Nor when the screaming began on Saturday night. Not even when noises were heard, “as if furniture were moving or falling,” at one in the morning. Like three shots, very close together, assured others. Only when a neighbor, the next morning, looked out into the patio and saw what appeared to be the body of a woman lying inert in the kitchen, did she raise the alarm to the doorman. The clerk went upstairs and observed the same thing. They called the marquis’s house and phone, still with a battery, without success.
The next thing they did was dial 091, which commissioned the National Police at the scene of the triple death. It was 10:20 in the morning. Agents from the Prevention and Reaction Unit (UPR), specialized in crowd control and altercations, attended in case the murderer or murderers, still unknown, were still in the house. They wore shields and bulletproof vests. They didn’t know what they might find. After slamming the door, with the doctors from the Samur arriving, they watched the scene in the room in horror. Then, Gema dead in the kitchen, with her few belongings right there, in the two bags.
The following hours were heart-stopping, for the Police, for those close to the victims and even for the journalists. Disparate information arrived about the identities: first, that they were a father and his two daughters; then, that they were the man’s mother and his wife; that in reality the septuagenarian was the internal assistant… The investigators had the affiliations but, especially in the case of Julia, they had to tie everything very well because her family did not know that she was in the apartment.
But the neighbors talk: his name was Fernando. He was a marquis. She could be his wife … That the suspect was a regular in the neighborhood bars, who drank too much, who used cocaine, who “was always crazy.”
Soon, the suspicion that a fourth person had executed them and fled dissipated. The author was the man, who had blown his head off with the pistol that was lying next to his body on the ground. ABC was the first medium that confirmed the true identity of the aristocrat and, when his ancestry was known, the already double crime of Serrano street took on an even greater dimension.
His media profile was also known, as a result of appearing on numerous television programs during the Banco Madrid crisis, in 2015. In them, he did not hesitate to use expletives against the then head of the National Securities Market Commission, Elvira Rodríguez, and the Minister of Economy, Luis de Guindos. He also charged against Cristóbal Montoro and, in general, all political parties, both left and right.
The Homicide Group V of the Superior Police Headquarters of Madrid and the Provincial Scientific Brigade have taken charge of the investigation. The suspicions that the nobleman lacked a weapons license were confirmed by the Civil Guard, on whom that registration depends. «He did not have permission to use it, but neither did he have it, even if they were collections, inherited and he only exhibited them. It was all an illegality, ”explain police sources.
Now, the origin of each and every one of the seized pieces is being investigated. And why didn’t he report his possession? Of the causes of death, little remains to be elucidated. Gema’s closest circle was unaware of the mistreatment she suffered, which was especially psychological. As for the daughter of the marriage, she meets her maternal grandmother.
They are shattered. Maribel, Gema’s cousin, spoke this week on the ‘Cuatro al día’ program, and did not hold her tongue when describing the alleged murderer: “He was a bastard, son of the great whore, who has taken advantage of the kindness of my cousin Gema, who was a loving person, smiling, happy, always cheerful. And that he has cut short the happiness of his daughter, a 10-year-old girl, and that she will always have the burden and trauma that her father has killed her mother. Life is unfair, I don’t understand it and I will never understand it, because she never told anyone this.
Gema and Julia did have a veil, in San Isidro. His premature absences leave two broken families and one of the most lurid chapters of recent crime news in Madrid.
