Diana Quer (18) disappeared on August 22, 2016, while on vacation with her mother and sister in A Pobra do Caramiñal, a town in Spain they usually spent their summers in. It’s become one of the most publicized missing person cases in the country, and a year later the truth of what happened to her doesn’t seem to be any closer.
Diana had gone partying with her friends and around 2:30 am decided to go back home. She had two last known communications. One was around 2:40, with a classmate back in Madrid via text messages. She told her friend she was getting scared because a “gitano” (the spanish word for a Romani man) was calling her over. Although police eventually dismissed this clue, they focused on her last text to him: “I’m running out of battery. When I get home I’ll charge and we’ll continue.” This is relevant because it suggests that, at least at that point of the night, Diana had no intention to disappear willingly.
The other was a voice message she sent to another friend a 3 am, telling her she loved her. This same friend later told police that Diana had told her she’d hooked up with a guy she didn’t know that day. The battery in Diana’s cell phone lasted until 4 am, which was around the time it stopped emitting a signal. But the device wasn’t found until October 27, over a month after her disappearance. A fisherman found it buried in the mud in the town of Taragoña, about 12 miles away from where Diana was staying.
Because of the short time that passed between Diana’s phone pinged in A Pobra do Caramiñal and then Teragoña, police determined that she must have been in a car. The timing discarded an early theory that Diana had stopped by her house to change clothes and then went out again. It also gave more credit to witness accounts that they’d seen a young woman with Diana’s description arrive in a car with several other people to Taragoña and then getting in the car of another man that had been waiting there for an hour. The man was described as rough looking.
Diana’s phone was eventually unlocked with the assistance of an israeli company, but it didn’t contain any useful information to move the case forward. In the long year since she went missing, the investigation has focused on a possible bad relationship with her divorced parents (who, as often happens in these cases, blame each other through the press) and bad “friends” she had that are suspected drug dealers. There have been unnamed persons of interest in the case but it’s led nowhere so far. To make matters worse, in April 2017, a judge decided to archive the case until new evidence surfaces, which means only a few investigators are left doing actual work to solve Diana’s disappearance.
UPDATE
Almost 500 days after she went missing, Diana Quer’s remains were found on December 31, 2017. They’d been hidden in a well in an abandoned factory in Rianxo, a municipality about 20 kilometers away from where Diana disappeared from.
She was found because her killer led the authorities to it. The man is called José Enrique Abuín Gey, a drug dealer who was once accused of sexual assault by his sister in law, although that case never went anyone because she dropped the charges. Abuín, known as El Chicle (The Gum), had been in the eye of police since the start of the investigation, since he lived in the area where Diana went missing and was well known as a danger to women. El Chicle had provided an alibi, that he’d been with his wife all night away from the area Diana disappeared, stealing fuel from trucks. His wife, Rosario Rodriguez, had confirmed the statement. But police kept looking into him and recently they were able to find two important clues. One was tracking the movements of El Chicle’s cell phone that fateful night, and it showed the same trajectory as Diana’s phone. The second was that they were able to place El Chicle’s car in the area where Diana disappeared at around the time she was last seen.
But what really nailed this guy was his inability to stop targeting women. On December 25, 2017, he tried to kidnap a girl who managed to escape and accuse him to police. Then, Rosario Rodriguez admitted she had lied about being with El Chicle on the night Diana disappeared. El Chicle was arrested on December 29, and ended up confessing to killing Diana. At first he said he had accidentally hit her with his car, but when shown all the inconsistencies in his testimony, he revealed that he’d seen her walking alone on the road and tried to rape her. She resisted with such ferocity, he strangled her.
It seems now that although initially dismissed as a clue, when Diana texted his friend that she was getting scared because a “gitano” was calling her, she actually meant El Chicle. It’s a terrible end to this story but at least it will give some resolution to her grieving family.
