On June 22, 1902, at number 45 on Fuencarral Street in Madrid, a murder took place at 5 a.m.: a maid killed the owner of the house on the second floor, the eccentric Pascual Manuel Pastor Pérez, aged 12, with 2 blows to the head with an iron. The motive? Perhaps her patience with the sexual practices to which Pastor subjected her had run out, or perhaps she wanted to get her hands on the case in which she had seen her boss put 48 pesetas the day before.
The murderer was a young woman of just 23 years old, Cecilia Aznar. The young woman had been widowed shortly after getting married and had a small son whom she had left in the care of her parents. After returning to live with her parents for a while in Dénia, she tried to build a future for herself in Madrid. A future that ended in crime and escape.
This event would make her the target of all the newspapers, especially White and BlackTorcuato Luca de Tena, director of the publication, sent the editor and photographer Manuel Asenjo Pérez to Dénia, the city where she grew up, with the intention of getting a picture of the young woman, since there was none available in Madrid to capture her.
Thus began a race against time to get hold of the portrait before anyone else and, on the part of the authorities, to arrest the fugitive.
First clues
Manuel Asenjo arrives in Dénia by train a few days after the murder. He stays at the Hotel Fornos, owned by Constancio Felipo, to whom he confesses the reason for his trip. The latter offers to help him and takes him to the place where he thinks he can obtain more information: the Diana spa, which had opened in San Juan and was the meeting and leisure point for society at the time.
That night at the bar, after asking several people, they find a group that remembers her. They claim that she was known for her sexual debauchery, for not thinking things through too much and that the only photos they have of her were without clothes, so they could not be published. In addition, they claim that she used to frequent the cabarets of La Anxova and La Bombilla in order to make easy money.
This group also mentions that her father married her, when she was 20, to Lluís Gomar, from Gandia, a town to which they moved. The couple had a son, but shortly afterwards her husband died due to illness and Cecilia returned to Dénia with her parents. This is the last news they have on the matter. However, they are certain that the young woman had been photographed on two occasions in the municipality.
The unattainable face
Asenjo then begins his interrogations of the photographers of Dénia: first Antoni Belda (with his studio on Pare Pere Street) and then the Marsal brothers (whose business was on Mar Street). None of them have negatives of the fugitive.
At this point, the journalist asks Felipo for help again. He orders the boys who work for him to spread the information given by Asenjo: any Dianense who brings a photograph of Cecilia will be rewarded. Josep Cardona, director of the local newspaper The clarin, also spreads the news.
Meanwhile, in Madrid, the investigating judge José María Ortega Morejón issued an arrest warrant on July 3, given the authorities' failure to find the fugitive. The description given was that she was a beautiful woman of medium height, with light brown hair, with a relaxed demeanor and wearing a mantilla. Several arrests were made by mistake, including a nun who had escaped from the convent, since none of them was Cecilia.
In Dénia there is more luck. A sailor by the name of Antoni Bisquert shows up at the Fornos hotel looking for the journalist. When they are together, he tells him that he was Cecilia's partner after her husband's death and until the young woman's parents moved to Pasaia for work. After this, he takes him to the house where the family lived and had his furtive encounters with her. Finally, he offers him the photograph, and acquaintances of the young woman verify that it is her.
Asenjo informs his boss and leaves for Madrid. There, Luca de Tena takes the photograph to Fuencarral 45 to confirm once again that the neighbours recognise the person in the photograph, and indeed they do. The editor becomes one of the beneficiaries of the reward offered by Pastor's family.
Capture of Cecilia Aznar
White and Black He then brought out a special edition that sold out in a few hours. The image spread like wildfire and reached, among other places in Spain, Puigcerdà (a town in Girona). There, a young woman called Pepeta Sánchez had become popular. She was staying at the Pascuala house. She claimed to be from Valencia and seemed to have unlimited funds.
On the evening of July 9, someone knocks on Pepeta's door asking for Cecilia Aznar. After denying her presence in the room, she opens the door and, seeing Sergeant Piernas Muñoz with two Civil Guards, decides to confess.
The authorities had discovered her whereabouts because the day before they had arrested two swindlers trying to escape in the port of Le Havre, Francesc Garreta and Jaume Iglesias, who had tricked Cecilia into giving them 3.000 pesetas in exchange for helping her escape. However, they sent her to Puigcerdà, claiming that from there she could escape to France.
Cecilia is transferred to Madrid and this process is followed with anticipation by the inhabitants of the towns she passes through on her way to the capital.
On February 13, 1903, she was sentenced to death for the crime of robbery with homicide. This sentence would not last long. A few weeks later, the judges in charge of the case unanimously requested a pardon and her sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in the women's prison of Alcalá de Henares, where she was allowed to raise her son. There she was photographed by Asenjo, who eventually became the artistic director of White and Black.
Thanks to her good behaviour - despite an escape attempt in 1916 - after 24 years in prison, she was released on 10 October 1925. At the age of 45, Cecilia Aznar left Spain, to Ceuta, where she lived with her son, who was stationed in the area as a professional soldier.
Source
This true story is collected in the book Històries of crimes and criminals of the Marina Alta written by the journalist from Dianense Antoni Reig Pérez. Published by Edicions 96 SL, it contains a complete study by Reig of some of the most notable crimes committed or carried out by people from the region between 1844 and 1932.
The writer received the 1st Antoni Lluis Carrió Prize for research and essay awarded by the Institut d`Estudis Comarcals de la Marina Alta with this work.
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