Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, however everybody remembers the woman. Her physique, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier city of Portbou, was seen to anybody wanting up from the seaside or throughout from the alternative hillside. She was barefoot, with grey-blue eyes and thick chestnut-brown hair. She wore blue dungarees over a turquoise inexperienced shirt.
Portbou, squeezed right into a cauldron-like Mediterranean cove, had solely 2,000 inhabitants however loads of law enforcement officials. In these years earlier than the Schengen settlement, guards have been stationed on the French border however these officers have been specialists in immigration and smuggling, not violent deaths. As a substitute, Enrique Gómez, a 35-year-old investigator from the Guardia Civil police power was referred to as in from the close by metropolis of Figueres to research. The cellphone name got here as he was having breakfast within the canteen.
Carles Cereijo, an 18-year-old reporter who had simply begun working with the native El Punt Avui newspaper, obtained to the scene earlier than him. Cereijo had been woken by a name from a waiter good friend working the breakfast shift at a restaurant. He hurriedly dressed and rushed out together with his digital camera. “I’d by no means seen a useless physique earlier than,” Cereijo recalled. “The police didn’t cordon off crime scenes again then. I managed to get half a metre away and thought, ‘She’s my age!’”
At 8.30am, Gómez arrived with colleagues. The scene was unchanged. A skinny white wire was slung over a low department and across the woman’s neck. Her ft dangled simply half a metre above the tough floor, which was sparsely coated by hardy, wood-stemmed herbs and the spiky leaves of prickly pears. Her black sandals have been shut by, set neatly facet by facet.
It seemed very very similar to a suicide, however there have been many questions. First, how had she managed to climb the tree, tie a knot and place herself, in the course of the evening, with out leaving marks on her ft or physique? Then, above all, who was she? No one on the town recognised her. However nor did any of the overseas backpackers passing by means of Portbou report a lacking good friend. She carried no ID, no passport, no cash, no pockets, no prepare ticket. Her pockets have been empty. It was as if her identification had been intentionally erased.
But there was one thing putting about the entire scene, beginning with the angelic look that some perceived on the face of this wholesome-looking, clean-cut woman. “The setting was so theatrical. It left a deep impression,” mentioned Cereijo. After an hour or so, somebody positioned a pink fabric over the woman’s head, which hung like a bride’s veil. Have been it not such a ghastly scene, the composition might have been deemed lovely – with the veiled woman looking in direction of the bay, framed by pine bushes.
Later that morning, the woman was taken down and transported by ambulance to the morgue at Figueres cemetery. Forensic physician Rogelio Lacaci acquired the physique. He noticed no cause to query the decision of a Justice of the Peace who deemed the demise a suicide. There was no signal of violence, aside from the welt left by the wire round her neck.
Lacaci carried out an post-mortem, which confirmed she had died by hanging. He didn’t take a look at her blood for sedatives or different medicine. The woman, who appeared to have been in her late teenagers or early 20s, appeared to have been in good well being previous to her demise. Aside from a slight suntan, her pores and skin was pale. “She was clearly from someplace north of Spain,” recalled Lacaci. He was meticulous about photographing her garments, which can present some clues. But the tags for manufacturers comparable to Rocky and Impuls revealed little: they might have been purchased wherever in Europe.
Two months handed, however the woman’s identification remained a thriller. The physique was nonetheless within the morgue’s fridge, which was susceptible to malfunctioning due to sudden electrical energy cuts, so Lacaci determined to maneuver her to the cemetery. First, he embalmed the corpse to make sure that it remained intact ought to somebody declare her. She was then positioned in a white physique bag and lifted into area of interest quantity 134, excessive in one of many serried rows of square-faced compartments 5 storeys excessive bearing names of the useless that run throughout the cemetery. This was an area owned by the city corridor and used for these whose households can not pay for their very own niches. On the entrance they scrawled “NN” for “no title”. Lacaci was positive that the woman was protected. If her household ever got here wanting, she could be simple to determine.
Over the next years, the Spanish media sometimes returned to the thriller. Later, the case featured on European web sites itemizing lacking individuals and unidentified our bodies, which determined family members turned to, trying to find data on their family members. Households got here from elsewhere in Spain, in addition to Germany and France, all in search of lacking daughters. Fingerprints and medical information dominated them out.
In 1999, the Spanish authorities arrange the Fénix programme, a brand new DNA database of lacking individuals. This could have made figuring out the Portbou woman a lot easier. However when Lacaci arrived on the graveyard in 2001 to take a DNA pattern, he discovered the area of interest empty. “They’ve stolen the woman!,” he protested to the native decide, however there was nothing he may do. The gravedigger had adopted municipal guidelines, reburying her within the cemetery’s communal grave after 10 years. Her physique was now blended up with dozens of others.
Few corpses stay unidentified in Figueres. In such instances, Lacaci mentioned, they’re normally from the margins of society – intercourse employees, addicts or indigents removed from residence. The Portbou woman didn’t match, he mentioned. Like most individuals concerned within the case – police, officers, townsfolk or journalists – he would always remember her. In 2017, the police officer turned creator Rafael Jiménez even wrote a novel, imagining her story. He referred to as it The Hanging Bride within the Land of Wind.
Carles Porta, a 61-year-old author and film-maker, is a TV phenomenon in Catalonia. Since 2020, Porta has made a real crime present for Catalonia’s TV3, Crims, which he presents and narrates with the theatrical gravitas of a Spanish Orson Welles. Catalans find it irresistible a lot that, once I final ate with Porta in a Barcelona restaurant, strangers stored coming as much as introduce themselves.
Porta sources his tales from a community of old-school crime reporters and, in 2022, Tura Soler – a veteran journalist in northern Catalonia for El Punt Avui – reminded him of the Portbou woman. Three many years after her demise, she remained unidentified. Soler had performed her finest to maintain the case alive, writing common items on the anniversary of the woman’s demise. “I’m fairly obstinate,” Soler instructed me. She additionally despatched me hyperlinks to her articles. “After I heard that they have been throwing out outdated recordsdata from the courthouse, I went working over to verify they saved the Portbou woman paperwork,” she mentioned in a single.
Porta was attracted by the thriller and hoped a Crims episode on the woman would possibly jog somebody’s reminiscence and assist determine her. As Porta’s staff labored, nevertheless, the story modified drastically. “No one had expressed any actual doubt in regards to the suicide till we interviewed Lacaci, after which all of it blew up,” recalled Porta. His staff confirmed the now retired physician the Guardia Civil’s closeup pictures of the hanging woman that had languished, unseen, within the case file. In truth, it was the primary time he had seen the scene intimately.
Lacaci was shocked. “After I noticed the pictures, I mentioned: ‘Properly now, that’s inconceivable,’” he instructed me. “You need to tie the wire across the department after which round your neck. How do you do this, whereas balancing on one other department at nighttime? Both she realized to fly, or somebody helped.” Lacaci grew to become so obsessed that he reconstructed the scene in his residence, utilizing items of wooden and his staircase. He determined it couldn’t be performed.
After I visited Portbou on a chilly December afternoon final 12 months, with the famously maddening tramuntana wind blowing leaves into heaps on road corners, local-born journalist Ramón Iglesias confirmed me round. Iglesias recalled how, when he labored in a foreign money alternate within the late Eighties, he generally met distraught backpackers who had been drugged and robbed on trains into Portbou from Italy and southern France. They would seem in his workplace, desperately in search of methods to obtain cash from their mother and father. Might one thing related, or worse, have occurred to the woman?
Lacaci had a special principle. What if she had been hanged by another person, however as a part of some macabre sport, or an initiation ceremony that had gone improper? The pine tree was inside a stone’s throw of the city’s white-walled, hilltop cemetery, which overlooks the ocean – an appropriate spot, he urged, for such a ritual. Extra importantly, there have been no indicators of a battle. Given the steep, tough terrain and the slim set of 20-odd concrete steps that needed to be climbed to get there, it will have been inconceivable to tug the woman there, until she was unconscious or semi-conscious. “Even then it will take 4 or 5 individuals,” in keeping with one other forensic physician, Narcis Bardalet, who used to alternate shifts with Lacaci and recollects seeing the woman within the morgue. Lacaci now additionally discovered it extremely suspicious that she displayed not one of the indicators of getting climbed a tree: “Nothing beneath her fingernails, or on her legs or ft or knees – no marks or scratches.”
When Gómez, the Guardia Civil officer, had arrived on the scene on that September morning in 1990, he discovered some younger Austrian campers curled up in sleeping baggage about 30 metres from the place the physique was discovered. He woke them, demanded their IDs and confirmed them the hanging woman. “Is she a good friend?” Gómez requested. The group protested they didn’t recognise her. It appeared extraordinarily unlikely {that a} assassin, or a bunch of them, would cling somebody from a tree after which fall asleep close by. After being quizzed on the native police station they have been let go. Deeply shaken, they squeezed into their crimson Volkswagen T3 van and headed south.
In his zeal to resolve the thriller, Porta requested his staff to seek out the Austrians – however three many years after the occasion, the one one they might observe down, Peter Treinbenreif, didn’t recall a lot past reaching Portbou very late at evening, and the trauma of their early morning encounter. Porta turned to the Austrian broadcaster ATV, which ran a brief phase on the thriller woman on 23 April 2022. Porta hoped that this may increasingly persuade the opposite Austrian campers to return ahead.
By likelihood, an Italian girl holidaying with family members in Austria noticed the present. The next day she despatched an e-mail to ATV, mentioning a younger Italian woman, Evi Rauter, who had disappeared 30 years earlier. “It was luck,” the Austrian present’s director, Benedikt Morak, instructed me.
The subsequent day, Morak contacted Cristina Rauter, the proprietor of a movie location firm in Florence, Italy. Rauter was driving a consumer into the Alps when her cellphone rang. Morak spoke to her in German, since most individuals in Italy’s South Tyrol, the place the Rauters are from, are bilingual. “Do you will have a sister named Evi?” he requested.
Rauter, shaken and considerably sceptical, stored driving. Within the 32 years since her sister Evi had disappeared, she had acquired many false ideas. If Morak despatched photos, she mentioned she would have a look at them later.
The final time Cristina Rauter noticed her sister Evi was on Monday 3 September 1990. Cristina, who was then a 23-year-old economics scholar, had breakfast with Evi, aged 19, in her Florence house earlier than heading to the college library. Evi had come to remain a number of days earlier as a part of her vacation between ending faculty and beginning an workplace job close to their residence city of Lana, within the mountainous Italian province of South Tyrol. Evi was unsure what she wished to check at college, so the job was a part of a spot 12 months whereas she labored it out. Earlier in the summertime, she had travelled to Eire for 10 days with two highschool mates.
In Cristina’s reminiscence, there was nothing unusual about Evi that morning, and the sisters joked round as they all the time did. “She was calm, with no indicators of disappointment or despair, simply desirous to get pleasure from the previous couple of days of summer season,” Cristina instructed me. Evi had lately noticed a cut-price purple swimsuit and spent most of her pocket cash on it. A number of days earlier, she and Cristina had argued about hitchhiking after Evi claimed it was a good way to journey. That was not one thing younger ladies did alone, Cristina instructed her. Aside from that, “every thing was regular”, Cristina mentioned once we met outdoors the identical house block final summer season. Earlier than leaving, Cristina handed her a 50,000 lira word – about €25 – so she had money for the day. Evi mentioned she would possibly clear the house or go to Siena, the medieval Tuscan city 45 miles south.
When Rauter returned at lunchtime, there was a yellow Publish-it word on the desk with a scribbled message. “I felt like going to Siena, so I’ll be again later,” it learn. The coach and rail stations have been a 15-minute bus journey away, safely by means of town centre. Rauter figured it will take her sister about two hours to achieve Siena by bus or prepare, and the identical to return. She anticipated Evi to stroll by means of the door that afternoon or night. Hours glided by, day turned to nighttime, however she didn’t seem.
Evi was cool-headed, organised and pleasant. “Very respectful,” mentioned her sister. “ individual.” She was not the sort to all of the sudden go wild and alter her plans, although her new enthusiasm for hitchhiking did concern Cristina. Each she and her sister have been fairly reserved, and so they have been very shut. “We have been finest mates,” Cristina instructed me. “If she had issues, she talked to me.”
By 8pm, Cristina started to fret. By 10pm she was panicking. She stayed by the cellphone, hoping Evi would name to elucidate that she had missed the final prepare, or had gone elsewhere. It by no means rang. That evening, she barely slept, observing her sister’s empty mattress. The subsequent morning, she reasoned that Evi could be on the primary prepare, or that the cellphone would ring. Then she referred to as her mother and father in Lana. Her father, Herman, spent till dawn on the railway station in close by Bolzano, hoping his daughter had determined to return residence. “Our horror movie started,” mentioned Cristina.
She rang hospitals in Siena and Florence. Evi had left her baggage and even her sun shades behind, however she had taken her home keys, Casio watch, scholar rail low cost card and ID card. If there had been an accident, Evi ought to have been simply recognized. Police instructed Cristina she needed to wait 48 hours earlier than reporting her sister as a lacking individual. Torn between going out to go looking and sitting by the cellphone (cell phones weren’t but frequent), she cycled in panic round Florence, hoping to run into Evi on the road.
At 9am the following morning, she was lastly in a position to report her sister lacking. She gave the police a full description – a teenage woman with thick chestnut hair, sporting jean dungarees, a inexperienced shirt and a Casio watch. It was precisely the outline that, two international locations and nearly 600 miles away by highway or rail, the Guardia Civil was writing into its stories on the thriller Portbou woman.
Evi’s household plastered Florence, Siena and railway stations throughout Italy with posters. Cristina and her mother and father, Herman and Karolina – an engineer and a secretary – gave interviews to newspapers and tv programmes. In TV interviews, Cristina got here throughout as a poised and wise younger girl from a middle-class household, earnestly explaining why her sister would by no means simply run away.
The household went again to the police regularly, asking for data. Newspapers and TV exhibits speculated wildly, and painfully, about whether or not Evi had run off with a secret boyfriend, maybe an immigrant. Cristina was offended on the implication: in her residence, there could be no cause for protecting such a relationship secret.
The search and the wait took their toll. Police appeared to suspect that Evi had disappeared willingly. Cristina was plunged right into a world of hypothesis and anguish. Had she missed one thing? Had Evi been kidnapped by individuals traffickers? Did she hitchhike on her personal? Might Cristina have performed one thing to stop her disappearance? Then there was the guilt. She puzzled whether or not she ought to have stayed at residence that fateful morning, somewhat than going to the college. “The primary two or three years have been very troublesome,” she mentioned. Even many years later, she or her mother and father would catch a glimpse of a woman who seemed like Evi on the street.
Over time, Cristina thought up elaborate fantasies that stored her hopes at what she calls “one per cent”: that Evi fell into the ocean, was rescued and ended up far-off; or suffered some form of blackout; or determined to start out a brand new life in a distant land. “Perhaps she’s in Brazil or someplace and can come again someday and all of the sudden the [door] bell is ringing.” However her thoughts instructed her a totally completely different story: “One thing had occurred someplace between Florence and Siena. She’s someplace in a forest and she or he’s useless.”
In 2011, 21 years after she went lacking, the household utilized to have Evi declared formally useless. In November 2012, the courtroom lastly posted the transient announcement in Italy’s Gazzetta Ufficiale. It supplied a partial type of closure that stopped the common circulate of letters – voting slips, reminders for medical check-ups, and so forth – touchdown in her mother and father’ postbox.
“You don’t overlook, in fact,” Cristina mentioned. “However it’s a must to be taught to stay with it, otherwise you go mad.”
As she continued driving into the mountains, Cristina tried to course of the data she had been given within the cellphone name. Was the caller enjoying a merciless joke? Later that day, excessive up within the snow-clad Alps, she downloaded the pictures, squinting on the small display screen on her cellphone and questioning if they’d been Photoshopped. “I recognised the garments,” she mentioned. “However it may nonetheless be pretend.”
It took her two days to check the images correctly on a pc. The photographs Lacaci had taken of Evi’s garments sealed it. Her mom recognised her underwear with the phrases “contact me now” printed on the elastic. “I purchased that in Lana,” she mentioned. That was a painful second for Cristina.
Trying nearer on the photographs, Cristina was struck by the expression, in demise, on her sister’s face. “It looks as if an angel is there. She is kind of joyful. It’s unusual, as if she’s on medicine or one thing.” (Spanish police didn’t take a look at for medicine in 1990. “Perhaps we must always have,” admitted Gómez, who nonetheless believes it was a suicide.) After which there was the dramatic setting. “I imply the tree, the panorama, the cemetery, the place, the symmetry,” mentioned Cristina. “That’s not potential to do until you understand the place and are serious about all these issues. For me it’s like a scene from a movie. It’s not regular.”
The unusual serenity of the scene did nothing to melt the emotional ache. “It’s a combination of shock and tragedy,” Cristina mentioned. However having some form of decision to the thriller that had haunted them “was essential, for me and in addition for my mother and father”.
The peace of realizing that Evi actually had died, and the place, was soured by an invasion of journalists, who drove her mother and father to depart their home in Lana. The case sparked Fb teams and speculative YouTube movies. Cristina stopped answering her cellphone.
The invention of the Portbou woman’s identification additionally threw up questions, chief of which was: was Evi murdered? “We now know the top, however nothing else,” mentioned Cristina, who believes there was foul play. “Between my entrance door and the tree, we have no idea something.”
Tright here have been many causes for suspecting homicide. How, as an alternative of travelling 45 miles south to Siena, did Evi journey 600 miles north after which west, crossing the borders of France and Spain – two international locations she had by no means visited? What occurred to her ID, cash and railcard? How, in the course of the evening, had she discovered the pine tree and climbed the slim, steep concrete steps main up in direction of it? Why would a woman who had simply purchased herself a brand new swimsuit, who was about to start out a brand new life, select to take her personal life, in such a public and dramatic style, so removed from residence?
Evi had been discovered after dawn, about 22 hours after saying goodbye to her sister. It takes 10 straight hours to drive from Florence to Portbou, which leaves little house for hitchhiking – although her sister considers it an inexpensive clarification. If she travelled by rail, Evi may have caught a 13.15 prepare from Florence and altered at Pisa to a Portbou-bound prepare attributable to arrive at 5.45am. But that may require her to be firmly set on leaving Italy with the equal of about €55 in her pocket.
Portbou is small: it takes simply 10 minutes to stroll from the railway station to the pine tree by the cemetery. Evi may have been there earlier than dawn. However then what occurred? A lady from an house block shut by claimed to have heard loud voices and a woman crying out within the evening. However it wasn’t uncommon to listen to shouting and unusual noises in the summertime, when the seaside was stuffed with partying backpackers. “Portbou was a fiesta each evening,” mentioned Bardalet, the forensic physician.
The Austrians tenting close to the tree bedded down at nighttime lengthy earlier than Evi may have reached the spot from the station. They didn’t see or hear anybody within the evening. No matter might have occurred, they slept by means of it. I managed to talk to 2 of them. Michael Fuhs is now a musician. “I recall this policeman waking me up after which he took possibly 10 steps and I used to be standing in entrance of this woman,” Fuhs instructed me. “I used to be very all of the sudden very awake.” The group have been principally childhood mates and members of a Vienna band, Emerald Past, which had a loyal following. They typically drove south to Spain or Portugal and already knew Portbou, which was why a few of them selected to sleep close to the cemetery and away from the bustle of the seaside. It felt like a non-public spot, Fuhs mentioned, and never one {that a} newcomer would have discovered simply at nighttime.
In June 2022, two months after Evi was recognized, Italian police – on the advice of a courtroom pathologist – opened a homicide investigation. However Spanish courts refused to reopen the case. A homicide in Spain, if that’s what it was, has a statute of limitations connected which means no one might be charged with the crime after 20 years. Even so, Cristina had not given up hope of discovering a minimum of a number of the solutions she sought.
Cristina flew to Spain on 11 Might 2022, lower than three weeks after she had acquired the cellphone name that solved, a minimum of partially, the thriller of Evi’s disappearance. Cristina was taken by Porta’s staff of journalists to Portbou to see what she quickly dubbed “the odious” pine tree, combating contradictory feelings of horror and curiosity. She met Lacaci, Gómez and others who had been concerned within the case. In video footage of the encounters, she appears perplexed and pained.
“If you noticed the physique hanging there like a sack, what impression did you will have? Did it appear pure?” she requested Gómez.
“There was no signal that she had been attacked,” he replied.
Virtually two years later, in January 2024, Cristina returned privately to Portbou. With out firm or cameras, she wished to “really feel the sentiments” that got here from being there. Wandering round city, she discovered it surprisingly suspended in time, stuffed with closed outlets with Nineties signage that had gone out of enterprise after the Schengen settlement got here into power and inside EU border controls disappeared. A high-speed rail line that bypassed the city had delivered the ultimate blow in 2010. The cavernous railway station was empty, there have been few individuals within the streets and the sensible mansions that when belonged to affluent customs brokers have been decaying. “It appears that evidently when Evi went there, the city additionally died,” she mentioned.
Cristina additionally determined to ask permission to dig up the frequent grave space at Figueres cemetery to hunt her sister’s stays. Since Evi had been embalmed, the corpse ought to be intact, making it simple to seek out – in the event that they knew roughly the place she had been positioned. Cristina wished, above all, to convey her sister residence for a correct burial, however she secretly hoped extra clues might emerge if Evi’s physique was disinterred.
It took her many months to grind a path by means of the Spanish forms. Dates have been repeatedly set, after which postponed. Within the meantime, the Italian police investigation didn’t give you something new and was closed. “They name it a criminal offense with no suspect,” Cristina mentioned.
Lastly, permission got here by means of to dig for Evi’s physique. In December final 12 months, I stood beside Cristina within the chilly cemetery as a light-weight drizzle fell and a small crimson mechanical digger scooped up mounds of soil. The Figueres city corridor had closed the cemetery for 2 days. Police guarded the gate. Lacaci was there. So, too, have been Gómez, the Guardia Civil officer, Bardalet, the opposite forensic physician and the journalists Tura Soler and Carles Porta, whose staff flew a drone overhead to movie the method. Bardalet, sporting a felt trilby, purple latex gloves and carrying an umbrella, was in cost, accompanied by a white-overalled archaeologist. A small cheroot cigar was clamped between his tooth.
The placement for the place to go looking had been recognized by the gravedigger, who inherited his position from his father. However Figueres doesn’t have a single communal grave. As a substitute, holes have been dug in a number of grass plots. “They’ll must dig the entire place up,” mentioned Lacaci.
An hour after digging started, there was a flurry of pleasure as the primary bones have been found. Once we broke for lunch in a restaurant for employees at a close-by industrial property, Bardalet instructed me they’d discovered bits from a number of our bodies – none of which have been Evi. An embalmed physique was very completely different from the fractured, decomposing skeletons being found. It ought to have remained complete, and nonetheless be in its white bag.
They dug once more that afternoon and the next day. Below the freezing rain, onlookers stamped their ft or wandered off to seek out someplace heat for espresso. Progressively, the digger turned a waist-high trench into a large gap. Shards of bone from about 200 corpses have been picked from the soil and positioned in packing containers, however the physique they sought by no means appeared. Evi’s thriller had not simply gone to the grave together with her: the grave itself now appeared to be lacking. “It’s all the time been as if this woman was simply past our attain,” mentioned Bardalet.
On the finish of the primary day, I sat with Cristina in a restaurant consuming scorching chocolate throughout an influence minimize. She was indignant at what number of errors had been made. On the day Evi was discovered, no forensic docs had gone to the scene. The images of the scene had by no means been proven to Lacaci. Evi’s watch and sneakers, which can have offered clues about the place she had been, had disappeared, together with the wire round her neck. No DNA had been taken. And now her sister’s physique was misplaced. “The whole lot appears unimaginable,” she instructed me.
Cristina had not instructed her mother and father she was again in Figueres. She didn’t wish to fear them additional. She had already requested me to not contact them, because the earlier press consideration had proved so nerve-racking. She ultimately instructed them at Christmas and mentioned this meant it was now a closed matter for the household. But she additionally nonetheless hoped that any individual, someplace might reveal the key of what had occurred – maybe somebody who had met Evi throughout her journey, whether or not by prepare or hitchhiking. “Perhaps, earlier than dying, they may assume they must say one thing,” she mentioned.
The youngest of the onlookers within the graveyard was the mayor of Portbou, Gael Rodriguez, a 20-year-old consultant of the socialist celebration. He had been elected in 2023, when he was learning legislation and dealing in his mother and father’ bar. After Evi’s story featured on Porta’s present, the city started attracting guests searching for the pine tree. “I used to be continually being requested the place it was,” Rodriguez mentioned. It was now an even bigger lure than the memorial to Walter Benjamin, the Jewish thinker who had fled Nazi Germany and died in Portbou. (His demise in 1940 was additionally first thought to have been a suicide. Lately, some have argued that he might have been killed.)
These new vacationers have been proof of a communal, morbid curiosity within the case, however they’d performed extra than simply gawk. They’d turned the place the place Evi was discovered right into a monument.
After I visited, there have been candles and flowers on the base of the pine tree. “It is a memorial to Evi Rauter,” learn a hand-painted plaque. “And to all these individuals with no title.”
Earlier than Cristina left for Florence, she and Rodriguez agreed to erect a correct sculpture in Portbou’s graveyard. It, too, will honour not simply Evi, however the anonymous useless.
Within the UK, and Eire Samaritans might be contacted on freephone 116 123, or e-mail jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. Within the US, the Nationwide Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for assist. You may as well textual content HOME to 741741 to attach with a disaster textual content line counselor. In Australia, the disaster assist service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Different worldwide helplines might be discovered at befrienders.org
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