Father goes underground to seek son's killers

[January 15, 2011]  JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA, Spain (AP) -- Francisco Holgado sits in his white van at a gas station, staring at a white wall bearing some of his angry graffiti: "14 years. Justice for Juan Holgado."

"Let's fix that," he says, and jumps out. He shakes a can of spray paint and starts writing. The black paint dribbles down in the driving rain but eventually the words stick. "15 years."

That's how long it has been since robbers stabbed Holgado's son up to 30 times and left him dying in a pool of blood. And it's how long Holgado, now 66, has waged a lonely quest for justice -- one that sent him on an undercover mission, cost him his marriage and his career and estranged him from his three surviving children.

How far does a father go to find his son's killers when police blunders let them walk out in the open? For Holgado the answer is extreme.

The mild-mannered bank teller disguised himself in a salt-and-pepper wig, put on a tough-guy voice and plunged into the criminal underworld of this southern Spanish city -- a world away from his quiet middle-class life on the other side of town.

It was a universe of drug dealers and prostitutes, police raids and filthy heroin dens. Holgado infiltrated the gang suspected in the slaying -- four heroin addicts with a history of petty crime -- and recorded their conversations with a clunky, hidden tape recorder.

"What is a father supposed to do?" he asks with a sad smile. "A father whose son is murdered cannot just sit back at home. He has to give his life if necessary."

After 15 years, that risk has yielded no peace. Holgado keeps running into walls on his obsessive mission to crack the case. Just last week, despite a judge's orders, forensic police said there is no need to carry out new DNA tests on blood samples or fingerprints from the crime scene. Holgado's lawyer will appeal, but says his hopes are slim.

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He sees it in his dreams: His son gushing jets of blood as the knives come raining down. He replays the scene in his waking hours, over and over in his head. Describing it, he raises an arm up to his head, as if to fend off the blows.

The facts of the case are simple enough: In the small hours of Nov. 22, 1995, Juan Holgado, 26, who dabbled in modeling and dreamt of playing pro soccer, was working the graveyard shift at a gas station, filling in for a colleague as a favor, when robbers burst in.

The hold-up degenerated into a storm of knife thrusts. The young Holgado bled to death in a back office where he had tried to barricade himself in by pushing a photocopy machine up against the door. Forensics reports show the final blow from a knife cut his lung so deep that it came out the other side of his body. The attackers made off with a few hundred dollars worth of cash, cigarette cartons and some bottles of booze.

By all accounts the initial probe was a mess.

The first police to arrive neglected to cordon off the gas station, where broken glass and blood stains lay everywhere. Police allowed reporters and photographers to walk around inside, contaminating the crime scene. The company that owned the service station brought cleaners in the next day and reopened.

A bloodstained 500-peseta coin recovered as evidence was lost, although it later turned up again at police headquarters, and an orange juice carton stained with bloody fingerprints vanished for good.

"It was like a bull in a china shop," then-Jerez police chief Jose Luis Fernandez Monterrubio later testified. "Evidence was destroyed."

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Holgado's double life started three years later with a bogus story about a runaway dog.

He'd watched in horror as the investigation foundered. The four suspects were repeatedly picked up and released. Anonymous tips led to arrests, but the case didn't gel.

For Holgado, it was time to take matters into his own hands.

He called himself Pepe, donned wig, tinted glasses, dark coat and jeans, and ventured into the night in La Asuncion, the seedy, drug-infested neighborhood where the tips had emerged.

He told people he was offering a small reward for a lost dog -- an excuse to keep going back while discreetly gathering information about Juan's death.

He won people over by offering cigarettes or buying beers in dive bars. He started to share powerful tranquilizers he was taking to help endure his tragedy. He claimed to be a nurse with access to drugs, and said he wanted to become a dealer.

Before long he'd become friendly with the four gang members who often hung out in squalid squatter houses, where they smoked a mix of heroin and cocaine.

One night, Holgado's cover was almost blown in a police raid. In the chaos, Holgado found himself outside on the street standing next to one of the gang as police yanked down the young man's pants and searched for drugs. Fearing he'd be unmasked, Holgado pulled an officer aside and spilled his secret.

"I'm Paco Holgado," he said.

"Man, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.

"What would you do?" Holgado replied.

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Holgado's main target was a young man named Pedro Asencio, who was easy to track because he couldn't drive.

Holgado first met Asencio as he sat on steps outside a clinic where heroin-users got methadone treatment. He won Asencio's trust, driving him around to buy drugs or visit people, or to a nearby town to see the young daughter who lived with his ex-wife.

As Holgado played Pepe by night, he was still Holgado by day, waging a high-profile campaign to press authorities to solve his son's murder.

The crusade enraged Asencio because his name kept cropping up. One day -- as the two sat in a car about 100 yards from Holgado's home -- he told "Pepe" he was going to kill Francisco Holgado.

Holgado told Asencio not to get into trouble, and that he'd get rid of the guy himself.

"I took it upon myself to kill myself," Holgado recalled.

Ironically, when he had a chance to see his son's suspected killer die, he chose to save him instead.

During a nighttime drive, a big gray rabbit got caught in the headlights of Holgado's car as they rode along a river. Asencio, high on drugs or booze, insisted they stop so he could catch the animal. Chasing after the rabbit, Asencio fell into the water and screamed for help. He was drowning.

"What should I do?" Holgado thought in the dark of the night. "If he drowns, no one will know the difference."

But Holgado waded into the water and saved him.

"I wanted to see this through to the end," Holgado said. "I did not want to leave it half-done."

Asencio's lawyer said he can't be sure the four men ever believed Holgado's cover story. In the world of drugs, where most people have something to hide, his client "probably realized the person he was talking to was not who he said he was," said Manuel Hortas, who represented Asencio and another suspect.

Seven months after "Pepe" appeared so abruptly in La Asuncion, he disappeared just as quickly. Holgado's day in court had arrived.

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Holgado's undercover life had yielded more than a dozen 60-minute cassette tapes. But the most he had gotten out of Asencio was an admission he'd been with the other three suspects the night of the crime -- and the young man vehemently denied taking part in the hold-up.

In one session, Asencio says one of the four, Domingo Gomez Franco, gave another suspect a bag of bloody clothes to burn after the robbery. In others, people who knew the four recount they'd overheard them talking about divvying up loot from the heist.

The strongest piece of the prosecution case was a sworn statement by Gomez Franco's girlfriend that he had told her in vivid detail about taking part, said Holgado's lawyer, Jose Miguel Ayllon.

It was all suggestive material, but fell short of conclusive evidence.

In the first trial in 1999, Holgado's tapes were not admitted as evidence, on the grounds that his attorney unveiled their existence only after the proceedings got under way. The four were acquitted: none of the blood samples or fingerprints found at the crime scene could be traced to them.

In 2000, the Spanish Supreme Court ordered a retrial in which the tapes could be heard. In a retrial in 2003 the suspects were again acquitted -- again due to lack of physical evidence.

In August 2010 a judge accepted a petition from Holgado's attorney for DNA samples and fingerprints to be re-examined by the National Police. But forensic experts said last week there was no need to redo the tests because they were done right the first time round, and Ayllon said the judge is unlikely to reissue the order.

None of the suspects could be reached for this story; defense lawyers said they didn't know how to reach them.

Even as Holgado's quest to nab the killers went nowhere, his own life unraveled.

He took early retirement so he could focus on his mission. His three surviving children -- two sons and a daughter -- stopped speaking to him. "He's all about the publicity," said son Francisco, 37. Holgado and his wife Antonia separated about eight years ago; their marriage had long been troubled and Juan's death was the last straw.

He visits the cemetery every day, and still wears mourning black all the time.

Holgado has gone to great lengths to keep his mission in the public eye, throwing himself on rail tracks to block Madrid-bound trains, plastering the city with posters and graffiti, and twice interrupting football games, dodging security guards on the field with a banner and a bouquet of white carnations, winning standing ovations.

While some locals urge him to get on with his life, they can't help but admire his perseverance. "He is a born fighter," said Pablo Berrera, 33, a bartender at a cafe where Holgado often goes to sip nonalcoholic beer.

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These days, Holgado spends hours riding a gray mountain bike through the streets of Jerez, saying it helps clear his head. Before turning in, he takes one last bike ride: back to La Asuncion, to the grimy streets where he once mingled with his son's alleged killers, hoping to stumble on a lead.

On one recent evening, he crossed paths with one of the men he blames for his son's murder. They recognized each other -- Holgado on his bike, the other on foot -- but did not speak.

Holgado, dressed in black as always, circled back and followed the man for a while.

Then he headed home.

[Associated Press; By DANIEL WOOLLS]

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